My First Jeremiad

The following is a transcript of my first sermon, which I preached yesterday, August 15th, at St. George's Anglican in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania.  Numbers in brackets refer to footnotes at the bottom, asterisks to comments I excised in the editing process because of excess erudition.  The readings for this week were as follows:  Psalm 82; Jeremiah 23:23-29; Hebrews 12:1-14; Luke 12:49-56.  This sermon is built around the Old Testament reading.

Where is God? Can anyone here tell me? Or show me? We might simply say, “everywhere,” right? As Christians we believe that God is omnipresent: he is “maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen” (that’s from the creed) and he is “before all things, and in him all things hold together”[1] (that’s from Paul). In our Old Testament reading this morning, God put it this way through the prophet Jeremiah: “Am I a God near by, says Yahweh, and not a God far off? Who can hide in secret places so that I cannot see them? says Yahweh. Do I not fill heaven and earth?”[2] He is in all places at all times, and we can go nowhere where he cannot find us.

We know this is true, as doctrine. But, on a daily basis, how aware are we of God? Do we not often imagine him to be “a God far off”? I will speak for myself and admit that in my weakness I do not always believe and act as though God is present with me, as though he is acquainted with all my ways.[3] When we believe God to be absent, we sin with even less restraint. Those are not the moments in my life that I am proud of, or that I would be very happy to share with a group of strangers on a Sunday morning. Yet I made those decisions, I suppressed what I knew to be true about God, and so did you. All of us here today have at one point or another acted on the tacit assumption that God is not watching.

Please permit me, then, to tell a story about an ancient group of people who did the same. Israel, though the very ones chosen by God to bear his promises to the world, famously failed to live up to their high calling. In Israel’s long and winding road of a history, we find both grace and judgment at work in hundreds of messy stories involving ordinary people interacting with an extraordinary God. Grace because God chose them and stayed faithful to them regardless of their faithlessness, judgment because God did not forever tolerate their disobedience.

In the year five-hundred eighty-six, before Christ, an army of Babylon attacked Jerusalem, destroyed Solomon’s temple and carted off millions of Hebrews to be slaves in another land. It has been called “The Babylonian Captivity” and “The Exile,” and it was one of the most devastating moments in Jewish history. God’s chosen people lost the land God had promised to their forefathers and given to them through the Exodus and the conquest of Canaan. God’s chosen people lost the building where Yahweh himself dwelled—Solomon’s temple, the holy of holies, heaven on earth.

Israel assumed Yahweh to be “a God far off” in the starkest way: by worshiping the fertility god Baal. Honoring and sacrificing to another god implies Yahweh is not who he says he is, that his covenants cannot be trusted, that his faithfulness amounts to nil. So God sent Babylon, called God’s army[4] by the prophet Joel, and they destroyed the keystone markers of Israel’s identity:  land and temple.  They were left with only confusion and despair. They suffered the sharp end of God’s ancient promise to them from the book of Deuteronomy: “If your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, I declare to you today that you shall perish; you shall not live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess.”[5]

In the year six-hundred twenty-seven, before Christ, some forty years before the invasion, nothing could have been further from Israel’s mind. The people of God lived in the land which God had given them, and all was right with the world. But then the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah. “Jeremiah!” God says (I’m paraphrasing). “You’re a prophet!” Jeremiah says back, “But I’m only a boy.” “Don’t say that! You’ll speak my words to nations, and they’ll succeed or fail because of them.” Not so bad, right? Jeremiah was certainly handed a big task, and he was inexperienced. But he had God’s reassurance: “I am with you to deliver you.”[6] The turn of the screw, however, comes with the content of Jeremiah’s first assignment. God’s message to Israel? “Out of the north disaster shall break out on all the inhabitants of the land.”[7] What a task that was. First day on the job and already preaching doom and gloom. I can’t imagine (pause).

We can imagine, however, that bringing a message of destruction to a confident kingdom* would not have been easy. From Jeremiah’s story, we see that it wasn’t. His family opposed his work. He enraged the religious leaders and ended up beaten, imprisoned and alone. Even rival prophets went about contradicting his message: “How long?” Jeremiah asks in today’s reading, “Will the hearts of the prophets ever turn back—those who prophesy lies, and prophesy the deceit of their own heart?”[8] They recounted dreams and captivated Israel’s imagination with “a God far off,” leading the nation to accept a way of life marked by the absence of God.

It was Jeremiah’s job to call Israel to repentance, to recognize that, in fact, God was not far off but very near. Many of his oracles come as bittersweet supplication, such as God’s plea for his “faithless children” to return in chapter three—he says “I won’t be angry with you! Return to me, for I am merciful.” We see that the God who judges with armies is the God who loves and pleads with his chosen people to return to the sole worship of him. This was God’s message to faithless Israel, and they refused to hear it.

But how could they know? Why believe a naysaying loner when there are plenty of other prophets who say every thing will be alright? God asserts, “Is not my word like fire… like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?”[9] It certainly proved to be so. Jeremiah prophesied it and God’s word eventually came to pass, with Babylon’s invasion breaking Israel in pieces. But this became clear to Israel only too late. At the time Jeremiah’s words may have only seemed a crude power-play, playing the proverbial God card in order to legitimize his message. I believe, however, that another message from Jeremiah helps clarify the choice they made as well as the choices we are making today.

Jeremiah, chapter six, verse sixteen: “Thus says Yahweh: Stand at the crossroads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way lies; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls. But they said, ‘We will not walk in it.’”[10] Beginning with story of Abraham, through the life of Jacob, the trials of Joseph, the exodus of Moses, and so on, ancient Israel had an even more ancient path laid out in example for them. The people God chose for his purposes always had the measuring rod of covenant, promise and command by which they could judge their lives. They could look to the stories of those who had gone before in order to know who God was, what he was like and what he had to do with their lives. Had they remembered Jacob, they would have known that God is not only near, but close enough to wrestle with. Had they remembered Moses, they would have known both of God’s love for Israel in the Exodus and his anger with them in decades of wandering in the Sinai wilderness.

The false prophets enticed the people, saying, “I have dreamed, I have dreamed!”[11] Something new, unusual, mystical. A feel-good spirituality affirming both the supernatural and the uncomplicated goodness of human life. Baal was a fertility god represented by a cow or calf, itself an ancient symbol of domestic security and stability. Our God certainly loves and blesses safe and happy homes—his original promise to Abraham was to bless all the families of the earth![12] But Baal-worship meant something of an attempt at short-circuiting God’s good intention, seeking prosperous homesteads without reference or devotion to the one true God. Jeremiah’s oracle retorts, “Let the prophet who has a dream tell the dream, but let the one who has my word speak my word faithfully.”[13] The test of a prophet? Of a spiritual message? Agreement with the story of God so far, a faithful representation and reiteration of God’s relationship with and purpose for humanity. All spiritual messages must sink or swim by this standard.

We may not live in ancient Israel, constantly feeling the hot breath of pagan empires ready to storm through our little strip of land near the Mediterranean Sea. But we do live in a time and place, however, where time-tested securities and inherited values no longer seem as certain as they once were. Our nation is at war in two countries, swinging wildly between political extremes, deeply in debt and struggling to pick up the pieces of a massive economic failure. The confidence and resilience of post-War America have dissipated. Rather than cheer our sure footing as a world leader, we now wonder and doubt whether the king’s men can put Humpty Dumpty back together.

Our national religious life is similarly in tatters. Whereas fifty years ago mainline churches constituted the primary shapers of American religion, today a melting pot of spiritualities and philosophies attempts to eliminate religion from public life altogether. Whether saint or sinner, probably most Americans would have at one time recognized Christianity as basic American religion. As Johnny Cash once sung, “And there's nothing short a' dying / That's half as lonesome as the sound / Of the sleeping city sidewalk / And Sunday morning coming down.”[14] Even rogues and rebels like Cash knew they should be in church, even if they kept away. Today, however, the gospel seems to many as merely one truth claim among many. Our culture suffers a plurality of spiritual options, each seemingly as good as the other. As President Obama has said, we are no longer a Christian nation.

Here, in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, today, August the fifteenth of two-thousand ten, a question presses upon us: “Who ought we to listen to?” How do we tell the Jeremiahs from the false prophets? Like ancient Israel, America, nay, the world stands at a crossroads and God calls us to look to those ancient paths. ** In some sense each day for each individual is a crossroads, a new moment in which we must choose whether we will live as though the Father is “a God near by” or as though he is “a God far off.”

I know from experience that knowing the “God near by” does not happen by a sheer act of will. We cannot force ourselves to live every moment conscious of our Lord any more than we can think about every breath we take, or every time we blink. What then shall we do? We must commit ourselves to constant exposure to the bible’s big story, recalling each and every day the faithfulness of God to his people and the moral and ethical standards he calls them to live by. Through scripture, through prayer, through liturgy and eucharist, we remind ourselves of the nearness of God, we learn how intimately he is involved in our everyday lives.

Let us remember this week those ancient paths tread by God’s people, lives lived in the real world with all its problems, but nevertheless living testimonies to our Father in heaven, and our Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen.

* - orig. "a secure and content ethnic theocracy"
** - orig. "I am not here advocating some aggressive theocratic political agenda, but rather echoing the Bible’s ancient call to 'all people everywhere to repent.'[15]"

[1] Colossians 1:17.
[2] Jeremiah 23:23-24.
[3] Psalm 139:3.
[4] Joel 2:11.
[5] Deuteronomy 30:17-18.
[6] Jeremiah 1:8.
[7] Jeremiah 1:14.
[8] Jeremiah 23:26.
[9] Jeremiah 23:29.
[10] Jeremiah 6:16.
[11] Jeremiah 23:25.
[12] Genesis 12:3.
[13] Jeremiah 23:28.
[14] Johnny Cash, “Sunday Morning Coming Down.”
[15] Acts 17:30.

C.S. Lewis on Old Books

"Now this seems to me topsy-turvy.  Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books.  But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old.  And I would give him this advice precisely because he is an amateur and therefore much less protected than the expert against the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet.  A new book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it.  It has to be tested against the great body of Christian thought down the ages, and all its hidden implications (often unsuspected by the author himself) have to be brought to light.  Often it cannot be fully understood without the knowledge of a good many other modern books.  If you join at eleven o'clock a conversation which began at eight you will often not see the real bearing of what is said.  Remarks which seem to you very ordinary will produce laughter or irritation and you will not see why--the reason, of course, being that the earlier stages of the conversation have given them a special point.  In the same way sentences in a modern book which look quite ordinary may be directed 'at' some other book; in this way you may be led to accept what you would have indignantly rejected if you knew its real significance.  The only safety is to have a standard of plain, central Christianity ('mere Christianity' as Baxter called it) which puts the controversies of the moment in their proper perspective.  Such a standard can be acquired only from the old books.  It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.  If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones."

~C.S. Lewis, from the introduction to St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation (Crestwood, NY:  St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1977), 4.

Inception, reviewed.

Inception, like many action movies, layers one kinetic combat set piece on top of the last. Instead of coming one after the other, however, they come one within the other. A collapsing city within a snow fortress assault within a zero-gravity hotel hallway brawl within a gunfire-peppered street chase in the rain within an otherwise calm flight from Sydney to Los Angeles (thankfully not Oceanic Flight 815). Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his team use an unspecified technology to infiltrate "shared dreams" within which they are able to infiltrate dreams within dreams. The bulk of the film spells their attempt to use this ability in order to plant an idea in a tycoon's brain (Cillian Murphy) as an act of corporate espionage on a competitor's (Ken Watanabe) dollar. That's the gist.

Technically, the first hour is pure exposition, setting the stage for the intricate brain heist to follow. Like The Matrix, the world and its rules are introduced along with the characters and their respective skill sets and motivations before the big bangs can go off. Cobb used to work for dream-walking academic Miles (Michael Caine) before he was forced to flee the country and use his dream powers for money to try and get back to the children from whom he is now estranged. He connects with young Ariadne (Ellen Page) an "architect" student of Caine's skilled at constructing dream worlds that can be used to entrap unsuspecting dreamers.

One of director Christopher Nolan's acknowledged influences is Michael Mann, whose concrete sense of place is evident here. The action scenes have a pragmatic, rather than stylized, feel, as well as the concussively tangible crunch of cement, steel and glass lacking from so many synthetic cinematic conflicts. Thrilling and tense, the Russian doll action structure showcases a fantastic editing feat where the events in each layer of consciousness (within each of which time moves exponentially faster) have a kind of doppler/ripple effect on all the successive layers. So when the van in the street chase goes into freefall, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) must defend his sleeping comrades on the next layer down in zero gravity. The result is exciting and new, as if Dave and HAL9000 had a shootout and fistfight aboard the Discovery. Confused? Don't feel bad, the architect--ahem, director--Nolan has constructed an elaborate but self-consistent artifice meant to incept bewildering thrills in the audience's mind.

But Nolan is too interested in murky psychological rabbit holes to leave it at that (hah). Cobb's former wife keeps violently interrupting his subconscious and jeopardizing his missions, perhaps begging the question of whether dream worlds overlap with one another. Nolan thankfully avoids ending with a cliche it's-all-in-his-mind twist and instead wrings a tantalizingly ambiguous conclusion from his interlocking action scenes. It stays with you and is sure to prove fanboy fodder for many message board arguments to come. Never before has the question of how long a top can spin been of such consequence.

Cinephiles be warned, however, don't go to Inception expecting a masterpiece. It's an exercise in cleverness, and an exciting one at that. But it lacks the existential and emotional heft of its cinematic cousins, whether Heat's languid cynicism, The Matrix's trippy liminality or even Memento's sympathy for an afflicted man trying to keep himself together. Like any action movie, the actors are stock figures in a calculated entertainment. But with Nolan as the ringmaster, the sights and sounds crackle and pop spectacularly while the plot twists and twists and twists. It's a thinking man's shootout, one that sticks in your mind after the dream is over.

10 Unlikely Favorites

In the spirit of Ebert's Overlooked DVD column, here are ten movies I love that you might not have seen or heard of, or that simply deserve a second viewing.  They're not in any kind of order.

1) The Limey (1999), Steven Soderbergh

Ocean's 11 director Soderbergh infused this revenge genre piece with style and poignancy.  By casting two aging sixties icons--Terrence Stamp and Peter Fonda--and lacing the soundtrack with the songs of their times, he connects their wistfulness for their own past to something broader in American consciousness.  The Who's The Seeker plays like a theme song to the film, suggesting something more existential about Stamp's quest to avenge his daughter's death, and sounding pretty cool when Soderbergh has Stamp walk in slow motion to its cadences Reservoir Dogs-style.

2) Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988), Frank Oz

Scoundrels spins two con-men's bet into a farce of dueling, manic wits.  Steve Martin puts on perhaps his best uptight-unhinged performance (it's up there with Planes, Trains and Automobiles), and Michael Caine provides the unctuous-outrageous counterpoint.  It wrings many laughs from these men's absurd commitment to their cons, which includes a great moment where Martin--pretending to be a crippled navy veteran--drags himself across a beach in a staged attempted suicide.  Dirty and rotten, indeed.

3) Collateral (2004), Michael Mann

Boistered by a dark, off-type bad guy performance by Tom Cruise, Mann's Collateral may be the best of the semi-Hitchcockian thrillers of the last decade.  Jamie Foxx, pre-Ray, shines as the Jimmy Stewart everyman who finds himself trapped by a dark and morally twisting conundrum:  drive a hit man from hit to hit in your cab for good money, or you'll be shot.  Mann applies the gritty, on-the-street feel he developed in his epic crime melodrama Heat and yields a neo-noirish, ultimately small film about an average man who has to rise to the occasion of unusually critical circumstances.

4) Porco Rosso (1992), Hayao Miyazaki

This seems to be the Miyazaki no one has seen or heard of, but it ranks near the top of his filmography above less satisfying pieces like Castle in the Sky and Howl's Moving Castle.  It follows a lost generation type World War I flying ace who has turned to bounty hunting to cash in on his unrivaled aeronautic prowess.  Michael Keaton provides a great world-weary, rugged man spin to the character in the English dub, who is an idealist who has more or less given up on a happy life and settled into success and isolation--the internal component of the curse he carries which made him into an anthropomorphized pig.  The movie lyrically combines quietly observed stillness and frenetic aerial excitement, and Porco has to come to terms with himself and the women he won't allow to love him.

5) Zodiac (2007), David Fincher

Rather than the aestheticized ritual murders of se7en or the aestheticized ritual brawls of Fight Club, Fincher here aestheticizes the police procedural.  Fact by fact from the real-life case of San Francisco's 1970's serial killer, he lays out the story of the murders and the men who tried to apprehend their perpetrator.  It's full of mood, eerie cinematography and strong performances from Downey Jr., Gyllenhal and the rest of the cast.  It shows a quest for justice that has none of the satisfaction of a typical revenge thriller (note the pointed references to Dirty Harry) and that proves a long self-destructive process for those who stick with it.  For a film about a serial killer, there is hardly any gore although the two or three murder scenes do manage to jangle the nerves.

6) Intolerable Cruelty (2003), Joel Coen

What if a divorce attorney pursued a scheming man-eater of a divorcee?  This premise drives the Coens' imperfect but often hilarious genre riff on old school screwball comedies.  Granted, Clooney and Zeta-Jones do not zip in their scenes together, but strong supporting performances from Cedric the Entertainer, Billy Bob Thornton and Geoffrey Rush crackle with comic absurdity.  Also, Clooney's banter with his right hand man provides some quotable fast-talking comic bits.  It's uneven, but when the effeminate Eurotrash Heinz, the baron, Kraus-von-Espy comes on stage--well, it's worth the price of admission.

7) The Color of Money (1986), Martin Scorsese

Possibly the best movie about pool hustling you could hope for.  I remember being disappointed with Rounders, the Ed Norton/Matt Damon movie about card sharks, and I think Color supersedes its successor by playing to its actors strengths and having a whiz-bang visual stylist like Marty behind the camera.  Paul Newman, reprising his role from The Hustler (1961), plays an old pro tired of the sport and rich from selling booze.  He takes young hotshot Tom Cruise under his wing; the movie wisely takes the annoying edge off Cruise's trademark intensity by making it a liability needing to be trained rather than simply unleashed.  He is a stallion that needs to be broken, Newman his grizzled ranch-hand.  The performances are believable, un-pretentious; the drama stays meaningful by ultimately having to do with Newman's choices at the end of his career rather than a simple help-the-hotshot-to-win father-son narrative.

8) The Life Aquatic (with Steve Zissou) (2004), Wes Anderson

Anderson's films combine storybook artificiality with melancholy to affect wistfulness for lost childhoods and unrealized dreams.  If you dig this shtick you'll tend to like his work, otherwise you probably "don't get it."  Aquatic's narrative may be the most self-consciously artificial of Anderson's creations, but it has it both ways by being about a man whose real life and on screen life have bled together so that he lives vicariously through his celebrity self-image.  Bill Murray has enough big-hearted melancholy--as bastardly as it may make him in this film--to carry the story; Owen Wilson comes in as the (maybe) son-figure who becomes instrumental in Zissou's grasp of his inner child and eventual coming-to-terms with his "real" self.  All this is set against the backdrop of a cartoonish oceanic expedition with twee fluorishes like acoustic David Bowie covers sung in Portuguese in character by Seu Jorge.  To me, the Sigur Ros scored climax still rings transcendent, though those without a taste for the films sad childishness probably won't find it emotionally resonant.

9) The Hunt for Red October (1989), John McTiernan

In some ways this is the perfect film.  A world on the brink of nuclear disaster.  A rogue Russian captain commanding a first-strike capable silent submarine.  A gutsy and snarky CIA analyst played by Alec Baldwin.  It's eminently watchable genre material, a political-military thriller with Sean Connery's brogue standing in for the otherwise Russian-twinged English among his crew.  It's corny-good, Saturday afternoon fare, one of the movies I watched in awe as a child that still entertains today.  I'm always up for the threat of nuclear holocaust (in movies) and am ready for an Ocotober/Strangelove double-feature.

10) In Bruges (2008), Martin McDonagh

Two Irish hit men sight see in Bruges, "the most well-preserved medieval city in Europe."  This black comic thriller contrasts the centuries old serenity of the setting with the violent lifestyles of its visitors.  Brendan Gleeson plays an older gunman responsible for Colin Farrell's newbie who has been sent away from London after botching his first assignment.  Gleeson enjoys the sights with serenity of having accepted his life, while Farrell is all nervous guilt and manic energy and can't stand the boredom of the town.  Ralph Fiennes comes in, third act, as boss and bad guy, announcing the climax over the fourth wall, "This is the shootout."  He plays his gangster alpha male with unhinged intensity that will have you laughing in disbelief.  The film is ironic, clever, violent and very, very profane.  It's an acquired taste, but, like good whiskey, it's oh-so-good going down once you've dealt with the unpleasant sensation you get at first.

Nostalgia / Vertigo

I have just spent my late morning wandering the UNF campus. My alma mater, my academic crucible, my spiritual community. I have no car to call my own on this trip and so my mom dropped me off at the library, ostensibly to do work while she went to the west-side. Granted, I stepped in the library first, but the pull of memory dragged me out. I walked, nay, sauntered across campus, each nook and space charged with some moment from a time when I had yet to look the hard-nosed economy of the working world eye to eye. A time when I coasted on my cerebral coattails, reluctantly meeting deadlines and soaking up all the communal affirmation I could wring from our little para-church InterVarsity group. Not to say that I didn't have legitimate spiritual interest in the group or the various small group bible studies I co-led, but fundamentally, in my heart of hearts, my wounded inner child needed them more than they needed me.

I walked slowly, with laptop and manpurse slung over shoulders with straps crossing sternum in a black x, from the library to my freshman dormitory, the path I would have walked to class nearly 8 years ago. I walked across the campus green, past where our IV large groups used to be--the space is used for classrooms now--remembering countless weeks of inductive bible study and acoustic guitar worship. Past the renovated cafeteria, lakes, the oldest and smallest of all the dorm buildings. The sun bright and weather a balmy 83, the smell of pine and palmetto Florida wetlands all around, geese with matured young all waddling in disorderly columns. I walk past the second oldest dorms and past the fountain my friend Karissa complained about when we were 18 because didn't Florida have enough water shortage without this thing. Across the street and beside another stagnant retention pond to my first home away from home, a three story concrete and brick triangle with a covered and air-conditioned inner courtyard where they used to play Epic Duels and the second floor walkway where Andrew Roberts slept by stacks of historiography. I slipped in, illegally maybe, walked around, went up to third floor where I lived along with Matt Hartley and David Trautman. 8 years. The Navigators are now using the building for a summer internship program. I looked in the common rooms where we had bible studies, where I met close friends and was filled with young folly.

I left, walked back to campus, past the senior, apartment style dorms where Matt and Taylor used to watch the Return of the King trailer before they went to sleep. Where I made a teary-eyed phone call to my IV staffworker in the immediate wake of a heartbreak. The smells, the Florida smells and little lizards that scurry which I never took notice of until I lived in the north where the reptiles fear to tread. Through the Arts building that was new when I started, passe now. I head back across the green towards the history department, my haunt my last semester at the school. I don't run into any of my old professors except the English prof who went to Spain with Andrea & I in 2005; her husband died the summer after and I ask her how she is doing, but this is a surface reconnect and I don't expect her to open up to me. She is fine. We exchange pleasantries and I stumble with explaining the ACNA to her, an (former?) Episcopalian who doesn't seem to understand what it means that my seminary is Anglican but not Episcopal.

I walk past the classroom in building 10 that I took a disproportionate amount of classes in. It's now office space.

I take a walkway to the Philosophy department but Julie Ingersoll isn't in. Then past the Honors department where they still have that corner room with beanbags and computers that I never spent any time in as an honors student. Too bad I didn't choose history as a freshman instead of as a sophomore. Then I step outside, having eaten the roastbeef-swiss-horseradish sandwich I made before I left this morning, and the vertigo sets in.

Four towering new buildings greet me, Wackadoo's* and the parking lots gone. The two-tiered Student Union, the Health School extension and the Education building line a new horizon and elicit anonymously-directed interjections of incredulity from me. I wandered the union, mostly, taking in its large interior spaces and dramatic, metal-and-glass angles. In the intercultural gallery a tall black man with an African accent asks me what I am looking for and I think of the short Swiss doctoral student who was my boss when I worked at FSU. I tell him I'm wandering, and he says okay, but I felt like he wasn't all happy that I was just walking in and out of places. I spend several minutes perusing new hallways like they were some art gallery, smelling of fresh synthetics and occasionally marked with flat screen televisions in the style typical to sports bars and gaudy restaurant chains. The new construction spins my head, but at least I don't find out the dead woman I'm obsessed with double-crossed me.

I cross the street to the fitness center, and peer in to see the interior I remember. Finally, something apparently unchanged.

Next to the fitness center stands the arena, also relatively unchanged, the last place I was on campus for official undergraduate business (graduation, August 2006). Reaching it was cathartic. Like I had made a pilgrimage, taking account of all the years I walked those grounds, looking at my college self through my seminary lens wandering what I would have done differently then and what I should do differently now. I couldn't help but think about my fledgling desires to do church work near a campus, reaching out to students with the support of working adults and families in a congregation nearby. Bishop Alden Hathaway exhorted us on our quiet day early last semester to look at universities as mission field and to be the church where new Augustines and Augustinas might be discipled to proclaim the gospel to a brilliant yet decaying culture. His words ring in my head as I take in this campus with a different mind than I once had, detached enough from the pressure of school to think purely in gospel terms.

*Wackadoo's was the strangely named campus restaurant that served burgers & beer and a regular part of my undergraduate life.