Katie Goes to College
(Excerpt
from A Cookbook for Katie pg 145)
As you prepare to go to college I
think about what I need to say to you as you head out the door. I know you heard me about being leery of
bald-headed men who drive convertibles and don’t have enough sense to wear a
hat, and I know you heard me when I pointed out that man jogging around the
neighborhood in his underwear and the implications of both his self-possession
and our response to his comfort level of exposed vulnerability in front of
strangers (us). We decided he posed one of those questions that we don’t need
to answer.
He is, Katie. That man jogging in his underwear is
emblematic of many oddities in life that do not require you to make sense of
them.
Let the memory of him remind you to
turn your attention to the questions relevant right now for you on a college
campus.
For the most part I have left the
questions about romance and religion to your mother, except for those occasions
when you have asked me a direct question about my own faith. I have told you the truth about Jesus. What
you need to remember always is that Jesus is real and the Bible tells the truth
about Him. Although you will be going to college where they teach you questions
and offer you often pat answers about the creation of life and its meaning, I
can tell you that while the experience of college will be exhilarating in its
open-ended exploration of the best ideas that men and women can come up with,
there are many paths that lead nowhere in particular. Some ideas require no more serious cogitation
than that man jogging by us in his underwear did.
You’ve heard of wilderness
experiences from the Old Testament.
Sometimes the freedom to explore tantalizing questions doesn’t turn out
to be discovery at all—sometimes, those experiences are mainly circuitous
meanderings-- wilderness experiences where the explorer wanders around looking
at various strange trees, believing that by knowing the number of trees, time
spent in wandering, and the amount of money spent on text books and tuition
that you are going somewhere that will ultimately be validated as meaningful or
a destination called progress.
Sometimes, the only real measure of that experience is that you survived
it, but you don’t always learn something distinctively true and life or faith
enhancing.
A big subject in college that often
leads to a wilderness experience is the blanket assertion by scientific
thinkers and logic advocates that evolution disproves the supremacy of God as
the creator of you and this planet.
Evolution is a wonderful dynamic to explore. It’s true in many aspects, by the way, but
its implications are not. The theory of
evolution does not disprove that God made everything. He made the dynamic of evolution. To me, evolution’s most tantalizing feature
is the creative dynamic of natural selection upon which an understanding of
evolution is based. You can look at the scientific evidence and agree with what
you see, but it does not disprove that God made everything. You will need a different faculty in
yourself to know this, and it won’t be reason alone, although, ideally, reason
can take you there eventually, my dear. You will need to trust that part of
your curiosity that is fused with imagination and which explores what reason
alone cannot—you will need to let your soul keep company with the Holy Spirit
of God and allow Him to lead you into all truth. Jesus says that he will, and He will, because
Jesus does not and cannot lie. You will
follow the history of dates and changes in human kind and animal life, and
depending upon how far you pursue the investigation, you will find interesting
data about the intersection of viruses on human life and the small big bangs of
jumping genes as they inform our understanding of the human genome. You will encounter many big words,
beautifully constructed paradigms of science and also philosophy and poetry,
but you will never get to the root of an explanation for why we humans are here
that is more tantalizing or true than God created us for himself so that he
could have someone to love. And then He
waits for us to love Him, and He asks us in excruciatingly tender ways to love
one another.
Because we are paradoxically
attracted to and terrified of being loved intimately and completely, we tend to
leave or try to hide from God, so He sent Jesus to first find us and then
explain Love to us again—to live and die Love.
Jesus didn’t leave us orphans when he finished his work here. The Holy Spirit uses the intellectual
advances of humankind to hint at aspects of God-Is-Love’s nature, but never
mistake the ideas of men for the absolute truth about God or Jesus or the Holy
Spirit.
Even the very best preachers only come close
occasionally to getting this right. By
this, I mean, the characterization of the nature of eternal love that is
possible right now in communion with God which happens only because the Great
Lover of Mankind (and Creator of it, too) has made this communion
possible. Your soul intersects with the
Holy Spirit. In the Bible, this is referred to as tabernacling. That gift fits inside what we call grace, and
it means that God makes everything that is good that can happen between us
possible.
To begin to experience grace, we
simply have to believe God and put Him first.
Anything that comes before our love for Him is what He calls an idol.
I
suspect that because I have always called you Beloved and you have rightly
signed your cards to me that way, you believe that I have made you into an idol
of sorts. There have been times when I
felt you resisting my love because it was oppressive to you; I know it has
been. Unconditional love can feel like
that to others, but it is not intended that way. I have loved you
unconditionally, and you have never been an idol to me. You have always been only a gift from God.
But do you see how big that is—you, Katie Ellen, a gift from God?
I greatly admire you, Katie, my
Beloved. Most of the times I only tell
you this in ways that you are used to hearing—pretty hair, pretty face. But I see you much more deeply than that, and
I know you are an authentic human being who is only temporarily seventeen and
works at a pet store where you do not find the task of cleaning up pet poop
beneath you. I admire that—as I enjoy how often you come home wanting to buy
one of the dogs that you are responsible for showing to others. It must be difficult to function something
like a person in an adoption agency who must try and find needy animals homes
and to make judgments (and how can we help it?) in that moment about whether
the prospective parents—your store’s customers-- are good enough to raise the
animals you already love.
As you weigh and assess the dangers
of your customers becoming the parents of the dogs you love, think of how I
must consider trusting you to strangers to raise—people like college teachers
who are bound by their own pressures, driven by their own egos, and biased by
questions that have haunted them all their lives and for which they are still
looking for answers and may try to justify their inclinations and their answers
by telling you information that isn’t always true. They don’t usually know they’re lying. They don’t usually know they have denied the
truth of God because they are afraid of being completely and deeply loved by
God. They can’t believe that. I know this is true mainly because I am a
college teacher and some of my friends are people who are afraid of
unconditional love. Sometimes I am, too, still.
I am as capable of being fearful and wrong as anyone, and I regularly
monitor myself to make sure that I am not trying to justify my faith at the
expense of people who don’t believe as I do and don’t want to. They have that right. It’s called free will, and I respect it
without reservation.
Ultimately, as you begin your
studies in college and soon declare yourself in a field of study, be happy and
enjoy that pursuit, but the most open-ended intellectual and spiritual pursuit
of yours or anyone’s life is the continued worship of and longing for Jesus and
more of Him. Listen carefully at
college, and as you hear invitations to think about all kinds of ways that
people organize meaning out of human experience, remember that all of them have
an end. All of them have a conclusion.
You are about to go and see more of
the world than I can control, and I don’t want to. The adventure is thrilling. But there is
far more to being alive than learning the pieces of puzzles that fit inside a
cerebral paradigm. There is life itself,
and that happens inside the living love of the Resurrected Savior whose ongoing
mission is to keep talking to the Father about us, and all the while he is
calling to us, whispering, beckoning, waiting.
He is there, is my point. He
lives. Live with him and the puzzles of
cerebral enterprises find a different place in what you value, and when you do,
you are more alive, more thrilled, more free than in any other kind of simple
thinking. You are going off to college,
and it is quite an adventure; but you will never find a greater adventure than
following the Shepherd who will not lead you astray or unto any kind of death
that you need ever fear. Let every day
begin with his name on your lips as you ask him to keep you company, and let
every day end with gratitude for what he has given you, for he gives you your
very life. As he has given me mine.
I cannot give you life or much more
than words of encouragement like these as you go off to college. In this world I have mainly been a college
teacher, and I can only speak of what it is like on campus and what I have seen
and what I can remember from my own days of venturing out.
I can imagine much. But I know
this: God loves you, Jesus is real, the
Bible tells the truth, and if you would work on your penmanship and take care
to use it when you are writing those essay exams in your college classes, your
grades will shoot up.