The Book of the Wounded Healers (A Study in Perception) – Chapter 2 “How Do We Choose? How Are We Chosen?”

 
I turn up Beekman.

The creatures follow.

The tall blue one, Jenreel, stands beside me. “Experience can guide our understanding. It should not lead our understanding.”

“Huh?” and I realize I’m remembering something from my Baltic College days, an intrusive thought, something I worked on understanding from my time at Happy House.

There was a Ted Crowder – he pronounced it Crow-der. I’ll explain in a bit – a Dean of Christian Life at Baltic College, a small evangelical college I attended in Michigan. I came to him with some questions, he told me to kneel and pray.

He smiled and nodded, his head bobbing like a plastic cat’s in the rear window of a car, as I tried to articulate what I wanted to ask.

The only problem was I had trouble articulating the questions I wanted to ask and he had trouble giving answers other than those he’d learned from a book. I went into his office, I remember, because it was at the end of the hall and either I turned into his office or I went up the stairs to the cafeteria. The food wasn’t that good and there were some things I wanted to know.

Simple, no?

Ted Crowder was an fundamental evangelical Anglican. From New Zealand. He was the first man I’d ever seen who had a single eyebrow running over his left eye straight to his right, a single bush so thick that if he was from Australia I would have expected to see a joey in it. It was also my first experience with a New Zealand accent (hence Crow-der, not Crowd-er). I didn’t know until then that a New Zealand accent sounds exactly like patronizing.

This is why we go to college, to learn things.

When not kneeling and praying he saw to the spiritual needs of the campus. This meant making sure the bookstore didn’t stock any Rolling Stones, Beatles, Frampton, CSN&Y, Joni Mitchell, Harrison, Yes, ELP, The Who, Procul Harem, Harry Chapin, Billy Joel, Elton John, Wings, and is this cross-stylistic enough so you get the idea? Gospels and Christian Rock were okay.

Have you ever listened to Christian Rock? As Ted defined it?

I’ll make it easy for you: there is none. Pat Boone, Nat King Cole, Andy Williams, and a small number of sister college choirs do not any kind of rock make..

The only magazines allowed, aside from spiritual publications, were the likes of Good Housekeeping and Modern Bride. All the spiritual publications were evangelical fundamentalist in nature and scope.

This should not be a surprise. Remember this. People went to Baltic for this.

Dean Ted believed his role was to monitor the Christian life of each student, regardless if that student wanted said monitoring or not. I know this and will explain how in a moment.

I went to Dean Ted because I was confused about who I was and who was god and what was happening in my life.

I wasn’t a “Christian” back then. Evidently Baltic admitted a select number of non-Christian students each year so the students could practice their evangelism.

Imagine being invited to go somewhere and discovering the only reason you’re invited is to be someone else’s experiment? Tuskegee still exists and airmen abound.

Ah, the joys of being Black in America.

I explained things to Dean Ted the best I could. He smiled and nodded and checked his watch and picked up a well worn Bible and opened it for me and told me what to read.

“The only thing which will save you, Ben” he said in that interesting New Zealand twang, “is accepting Christ Into Your Heart As Your Personal God And Savior.” He emphasized each personal word with a personal index finger jab into my personal chest. He personally pointed into a gospel. “See, right there. You shall know the truth and truth shall set you free.”

He rolled his “r”‘s so nice.

“Satan and God are fighting for your soul and you must help God to win, Ben.” He checked his watch again. “There is no choice other than Heaven or Hell. Central Valley and that Jewish girl you see there, Ben, that’s Hell. Your friends here are Heaven, Ben. Now you must decide.”

I remember thinking Either-or. Never both-and. Black or white is only available in the quantum infinitesimal slices of a moment, if even then.

Or the racial prejudices of majority America.

Which you choose is based on what you study. Take your pick.

But I was raised in the post Civil Rights pre Obama America. You didn’t say such things to White America – or White New Zealand – if you were alone.

What I wondered was, if God is so strong, why does he need help? Second, I’d never mentioned going to Central Valley or dating anyone there. How did he know?

God I must be important for them to keep an eye on me like that. I wanted to do a Clevon Little/Blazing Saddles riff: Where da white women at?

“Kneel down here with me, Ben, and we’ll pray together for your soul.” He checked his watch.

Which I did because I had learned the lessons of the playground well; young black men do what patronizing white men say.

Besides, God seemed to be on a clock. Either that, or Dean Ted had a quota to fulfill.

But the real question?

The real question arising from all this is “How did Jenreel know?”

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