The tenth installment of Curriculum of Grace, a series of articles chronicling God’s pursuit of a young man impervious to the teaching of elders.
As a freshman at Harvard, I loved learning Russian. I loved studying history. I loved reading Bulgakov. Every week, I looked forward to the hour I spent with my tutor, Tom Gleason, a doctoral student who went on to a distinguished career at Brown University. I even enjoyed freshman biology, not because I liked early-morning lectures on neurotransmitters by Nobel Prize winner George Wald, or because I got a charge out of euthanizing white rats for our lab project, but because of my lab partner, the lovely, thoughtful Sonia, whom I pursued in vain all freshman year and intermittently thereafter.
Sonia, Gleason, Wald, and Bulgakov—these were the cornerstones of the secular education that seduced me at age 18. I loved everything about college that year, and no wonder. I got the best Harvard had to offer. But a humanist education, however rigorous and engrossing, is doomed to fail because it contrives never to mention one simple truth: God is in charge of the universe. The delights of that year were an exercise in futility: an 18-year-old trying to find his place in a world without God.
The centerpiece of my studies was Russia—the language, the history, the novels. With Gleason, I read Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, a stirring portrayal of the great sweep of human history, 4 tumultuous years in a thousand close-printed pages. To my dawning consciousness of the world, it reflected the magnificence of a dramatic human upheaval, a testament to the power and glory of the humanist vision.
Crane Brinton’s Anatomy of Revolution, a comparative study of four revolutions, offered a different sort of delusion of grandeur. Brinton proposed a five-part model of how all revolutions work, allowing one to stand back from the fray, group events into stages, and predict where they would lead. Heady stuff for an 18-year-old who’d never seen a shot fired in anger. I remember irritating my father immensely by trying to explain to him how all this worked.
Bulgakov’s satirical novel, The Master and Margarita, touches lightly on spiritual matters—Satan seduces the cultured elites of Soviet Moscow—but only allegorically. God is not God, but purely an artistic device, a chess piece in an imaginary game the author constructs for his characters.
Learning to speak Russian offered a different sort of secular pleasure. Our instructor Sergei, a former Olympic fencing champion and refugee from Soviet Armenia, spoke not a word of English. I remember his patient refrain: “Ya zhivu na ulitse Garvardye” (I live on Harvard Street), repeated hundreds of times as he modeled, corrected, and modeled again. To my trusting ears, the strange sweet rhythm of this new language was tinged with lament for his homeland. What passion seethed beneath his languid exterior? I got a glimpse of it when he took us down to the basem*nt of the classroom building. Behold, a ping pong table with paddles and balls! In the dim midmorning light, we each took turns with a paddle. His wiry body twisted this way and that as he gave each a thrashing. When the last was dispatched, he put down his paddle with grim satisfaction, the living embodiment of the fantastical historical drama I had constructed from the tidbits of knowledge Gleason fed me.
I wasn’t unique, of course, in being wrapped up in my own head at age 18. Others were too. Not knowing God didn’t make this kind of self-absorption inevitable, but it made it more likely and more difficult to escape. My kindred spirit, Miguel Marichal, son of a Spanish expatriate and Harvard professor, was as wrapped up in his own fantastical dream as I was in mine. I lost touch with him after I left Harvard sophom*ore year. He committed suicide in 1975.
The one experience that pushed me outside myself took place off campus. In high school, at a local mental health center, I’d tutored a boy who lost his father. He enjoyed having me there, and it was a relief from the pressure of school. That fall I thought of those tranquil hours when I discovered the Cambridge Guidance Center, just a few blocks north of Harvard Yard. I went in and presented myself to the presiding psychologist, volunteering my services as a big brother.
Reggie, the child assigned to me, was younger and wilder than the boy I worked with in high school. It took all of my strength to hold on to him as we crossed busy Cambridge Street. He lived in the projects, and there once a week I climbed a dark stairwell to fetch him and brought him back after our visits. The projects scared me, but I either intuited or had been told how to navigate there: face blank, eyes forward, walk briskly, never look lost.
What I hadn’t prepared for was Reggie’s mother, who one afternoon insisted that I come in and sit down at her tiny kitchen table while she made instant coffee. Reggie’s father, she said, lived just a few blocks away. With his new girl. She didn’t see them. But she’d heard.
She was crying. I’d never seen a grown woman cry. What to do? Just sit still and look sympathetic. When the tears stopped, say something encouraging about Reggie. It seemed to work. She brightened and asked if I wanted more coffee. I escaped—barely.
I barely remember Trotsky and Bulgakov—just the names and the titles and the ethereal feeling of being able to talk confidently about them with my tutor Tom. But Reggie’s mother and her formica table I recall vividly. Inman Square—that was where the father lived with his new girl. Education without God is no education at all—a mirage and a fraud. It is God’s curriculum that teaches something important. That year I learned how to sit with someone who is grieving. I learned how to keep myself safe in a dangerous world. I learned how not to look lost, even though I was lost, and would remain lost until I opened my eyes and saw God watching me all these years later.
#CurriculumOfGrace
Thanks for reading Encounters with God! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
