for me he wrote and inquired about the possibility of my admission into Chapman College, his own alma mater, a Disciples of Christ college in southern California. To my great relief Chapman admitted me with two years’ worth of credit for the academic work I had done in India.
A door of opportunity had suddenly swung wide open. Though those were kinder days, I moved through dense clouds of anxiety at Tioga Pass. I was young, alone, in a foreign land, and on the road to anywhere. I shudder to think what might have happened had the Reverend Woodruff not been there for me. To this day I remain grateful to that caring man, a pastor who helped open for me the door to America, the land of the Shenandoah and its smiling valley and rolling river. I learned early that a pastor’s job is to find a way across the wide Missouri. The way to yonder shore is just what Takeuchi calls the bridge of transcendence.
In my spiritual life the religion of the past continued to glance apprehensively at the theological ideas that would guide my future. I was equipped now with words like existential and historicity and such primal and radical information that it was as if I possessed a secret neo-orthodox crypt granted only to initiates at the San Anselmo seminary to decode. But this knowledge still coexisted in my soul with the pictures on the wall and the mantelpiece in my aunt’s home in Ferozepore.
No, Pilgrim, my new learning did not overrule Jesus in Gethsemane, Jesus reaching over the cliff for the lamb caught in the bramble bush, the tearful Jesus with crown of thorns knocking on the massive door of the human heart, the aureate face of Jesus at twelve in a shining robe, the Bible verses and the Gospel songs, the preaching and singing voices of the Bible-carrying missionaries up in Landour, the koinonia and charisma in the ashram of E. Stanley Jones, my grandfather’s unending prayers at Christmas, with the large family sitting on beds and chairs and wicker stools and arrived on famous trains from Lahore and the northwest frontier, the land of the Pathans, and from the ancient cities of Amritsar and Delhi. At those prayers I confess to peeping at times.
That family exists no more. It grew apart, like families do, as the older generation died and the new generation adapted to the circumstances and pressures of the twentieth century. Those sounds and images, however, continued to anchor, guard, and confine my thinking. The women at Tuolumne saw me as different. They went to other men or to no men at all. That they did this left me, I admit, slowly burning inside, a condition I would have to learn to live with. But they had their own lives to live, why should they bother with my tug of war interiority? It was not that I was brown and spoke with an accent. I was myself detached and insecure and afraid. I used my angular kind of religiousness to serve my instincts and keep me apart. I covered up my hungers well.
The days at Tuolumne Meadows grew short. Dragonflies, tiny helicopters, flew up and down the stream cascading down the gently sloping but muscular mountainside. Come, Pilgrim, we will go and sit among the boulders and shrubs, above the Lodge where the ranger presents at the campfire weekly and they sing Amazing Grace and Let Me Call You Sweetheart. Let us sit and watch the inexhaustible energy of the water, listen to the scolding of the blue-jays, and brood upon the sermons of the season.
And I can take you, Pilgrim, further upstream to more pools of unruly waters with swirling twigs and petals and bark and wings and mottled leaves and vestiges of the same, transient beings making their way to the sea. They move and are free and we are glad for them. They have had their high mountain summer in the sun, in the rain, in the cold wind. They became bold in the presence of their enemies, steadfast against the gates of hell, intelligent in temptation. They were delicate in love, and they shone brightly in their day, staying the assault of the darkness. Where then is your sting, O death? Where your victory, O grave? Let them seek out their sea, or their new soil, in a softer place where the sun sets, far below Tioga Pass. We can go to the quiet waters too, the still waters, the softly flowing dreamy and bright waters further downstream, near where the meadows begin, across the winding blue highway.
7 | The Scream
Niebuhr cast his net far and wide over human experience
I first saw Ruth, as I recall, in the cafeteria line. She stood tall and was classically pretty. Her face was fair and soft and uncluttered, pale at times. She smiled, laughed, and giggled easily with her friends. I saw a man paying attention to her. They talked often, and I grew jealous. Much later there was another man. I do not remember actually talking to her in the first few weeks, but my infatuation already knew no bounds.
The old town atmosphere of Orange, Chapman College, and the orange groves next to the new dorms with no fence between them felt like I wouldn’t mind being here forever. It felt summery and settled compared to the jagged emotions of New Delhi and St. Stephens, the cool foggy green of Mt. Tamalpais, the blue winds and scary currents of the Bay Area waters, the saturated clouds of unknowing at Tioga Pass. The only problem was Ruth.
A relaxed down-home camaraderie and friendship prevailed among the students and professors. Carroll Cotton, the men’s dorm supervisor, beat me easily in ping-pong, but he let me watch The Streets of Laredo again in his suite. Mike, a classmate, liked to talk about politics, and he became a good friend. My vociferous suite mate kept me posted on what he knew about Ruth. He darted around in his green MG, in which I myself was an occasional passenger. What an uncaged sort of guy, I thought, nothing bothers him. He always has something to say and is never at a loss for words. He goes where he pleases, and the MG was made just for him. He is friends with everyone and mad about no one.
A congenial space seemed to open up in which I could wander and muse. There was less pressure in Orange than there had been at St. Stephens. I lived in the dorms, I did not have to be part of an elite, and I went to the movies with other foreign students. I started working as a part-time youth assistant under the Reverend Green, who was the associate pastor at the First Presbyterian Church close by.
Dr. Bert C. Williams was my venerable philosophy teacher at the college, a kind and gray Boston humanist with thick glasses and a mustache. He did not hesitate to admit that he embraced the humanist philosophy of Edgar Sheffield Brightman, whose coherence-based argument for the existence of God we had to read. A lean figure with pointed features, Dr. Williams would huddle over the text on the table to explicate the material quite literalistically, exactly the way he wanted us to reproduce it on a test.
Edward Munch’s The Scream was one of the works of art pictured in black and white on the frontispiece of our history of philosophy text by W. T. Jones. I looked at it and heard the scream every time I opened the big book. The existentialistic readings in San Anselmo and my exposure to No Exit had prepared me well for a philosophy major, though sitting in class I could sense that a marriage between theology and philosophy might quickly become problematic.
I grew to recognize The Scream as an iconic image of modernity. The dark secrets of existence, heretofore told only in whispers, could now be shouted on bridges, told in bazaars, wept out loudly in railway junctions. Clandestine shames will find ears, suppressed stories will find a voice. Such was the promise of the times. Existence before essence, asseverated Sartre as existentialism’s manifesto. For better or worse we are thrown into an alienated, ambiguous, and deracinated world to make our own way, secure our own life, create our own meaning, learn from our own mistakes, find our own love. There is no metaphysical template against which to measure, no a priori norm to be a lamp to our feet and a light for our path, no plan laid before the foundation of the world for the fullness of our days.
This attitude of mind, however, was already setting me on a collision course with the mainstream of Western philosophy. I admit I was impressed by existentialism’s unyielding gaze into the cavernous depths of absurdity, angst, authenticity, nothingness, and freedom. Furthermore, had not theology found in existentialism a new language fertile for its own explorations of the subterranean recesses of the human soul? Had it not found a perch from which to critique the spiritually bankrupt culture of Babylon? I still note with interest the frequency with which the word existential is used nowadays with a somewhat different,
