The Paris Project

Two Sad Things

First off, James has a new job. It's in Buffalo (MN, not NY). I felt so bad for his long commute that I made his lunch last night when he asked me to. Am I a good wife, or what? That's probably the third or fourth lunch I've made him in the last six years.

Second, it was my 10-year college reunion last weekend. I could have attended, seeing as I work at the college and live 5 minutes away, but I didn't. I'm not comfortable seeing relative strangers and talking about my life- I'd just sweat and cry and leave early. Yesterday I received the 'memory book', about 100 pages of people writing about their lives on a form that asks for name/address/are you married/do you have kids/where do you work/what do you remember from college. It was so frustrating that I ranted to my night class (freshmen) about it.

There is a powerful cultural norm at Bethel that is unspoken by professors or administrators, yet it is carried on year by year by the student culture and the broader evangelical culture. The ideal life path, judging by these entries, is to graduate from college, marry a person of the same race before you are 24, man works in ministry or a corporation, woman works in nursing, education or music ministry, have kids before age 27, woman works part-time or stay-at-home, be church members, live in Minnesota or Colorado, and have the woman fill out forms that need to be mailed in. Women seem to feel ambivalent about the stay-at-home part, though. One wrote "I'm a teacher, but I'm on a five year 'leave of absence' while my kids are young." Another wrote "Job: Mommy", Workplace: "The Harris Household."

Notably, only 100 out of about 500 class members sent the form in. Only three single women contributed, and one wrote a long message about how she has become Gods' bride, so really, she is sort of married. One single man wrote in. A few divorced people wrote in, but obscured that fact on their form (I knew it from other lines of gossip). I received the form in June or July, and wrote on it, "My Bethel education and my Christian faith have not made my life work out great. My three babies died this year, and my life is really hard right now. I hope God is present with you, too, in your struggles." It comes across like I'm angry or crazy or both.

Two other people have dead offspring. One woman was eating in a restaurant with her family (husband and three kids, I think). A man drove through the restaurant window and killed her daughter, critically wounded her husband and other kids, and harmed her as well. The other dead baby belongs to a guy I saw at Lake Beauty Bible Camp two years ago. He was playing dorky M.C. for group games, and I falsely assessed him as a dorky Christian M.C. His baby had died just months before that retreat - maybe he was angry and crazy, too, and shouldn't be held responsible for acting like a dork for awhile. If he's still a dork now, however, several years later, then he's on his own and I withdraw my admission of prejudice.

This is what I said to my class last night. "Class, this is my memory book from 1994. The only people I remember from college are my friends, men I dated, and men I hoped to date. I don't remember any of these other people in the slightest. What that means for you is that you need to get a good education while you're here and be assertive about asking questions and learning in class. Don't be pressured into stupidity by your classmates, and don't care what anyone thinks of you. Just live your life and do what you want to do, keeping in mind that all these people who seem so important to you right now won't be in a few years."

I also said that they should feel free to live however they want, even if they don't end up with a minister-pianist power-marriage for Jesus, or with three kids named Dacotah, Madison, and Cody. There's not much point in even saying that, tho, because my voice is just a cry in the wilderness compared to the pressure toward getting married and having three conventionally-named children. There's such pressure for women to be passive and silent in class, and apparently there's pressure for men to sit in the back row, wear baseball caps, and tell jokes to each other. It's wrong to pay $25,000 a year to experience anti-educational peer pressure. It's wrong to pay a Christian college $100,000 just to reinforce Christian cultural norms that you could have learned for free at church. Demand more!

The cage isn't real, and as we become ourselves, we're sometimes surprised to find that the freedom was there all along.

The Churches disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by refusing to think and following along like a lemming. Let the churches tremble at a student revolution. The students have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Students of all Christian colleges, unite!