Dreaming Spires

Posted by J. Mark Bertrand
on Thursday, June 23, 2005
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The first thing you do at Wheaton is find a bench shaded by maples on green, rolling ground and read aloud from Wise Blood while your wife gazes down the lawn, across the road to where a train rumbles past. You try to read with a Southern accent, which should be easy enough considering where you're from, but it isn't. Some lines you read over again to hear the words, to sense the witty intelligence behind them. You read from some of Flannery's letters, too, where she protests that she isn't a pessimist (how can she be, and believe in redemption?), that she hasn't gotten her ideas from Kafka (they come from St. Thomas Aquinas), and she can't even spell Kierkegaard or Niebuhr. What a lady she was.

Maples leaves sound different in the wind than oak or birch. They flap and roll. They make you want to lie down in the grass and watch the sky framed by branches. These are the dreaming spires, and not the bell towers and campaniles of the surrounding campus. Most of the buildings around the park appear to have been built along the same lines as the old Southern Baptist churches you remember from childhood: plenty of white columns and red brick, signifying nothing. There are a few exceptions -- the public spaces, the trees and walkways, are finely made -- but for the most part it is not a beautiful campus.

If the spires do not dream or conjure dreams, though, the same cannot be said for the names. In the bookstore, you find them crowded into a back corner under the heading Faculty Publications. Leland Ryken is there, and so are Alan Jacobs and Roger Lundin. Names to conjure with in the Christian academy. Christina Bieber Lake teaches here, too, author of a book on Flannery O'Connor's incarnational art. And there is the Wade Center with its collections of Lewis and Tolkein paraphernalia, including the fabled wardrobe. (No sign of the lion or the witch, however.) Wheaton isn't such a bad place to be reading Wise Blood aloud to the woman you love.

You lecture, of course. You tell a hundred high school students that among the gifts God has given them is creativity, and this creativity is a way to communicate with the world they find themselves in. A way to make it better. We make because we were made in the image of a Maker, as Dorothy Sayers (also represented at the Wade Center) suggests. We do it, too, as part of the larger cultural mandate, the call to cultivate God's creation and bring it to fullness, as Calvin Seerveld says. Also, our creativity is part of the larger redemptive work of Christ, who is making all things (even our stories) new -- something you've only just begun to suspect thanks to reading Jeremy Begbie's theology of art. Afterward, a staffer who has taken a course with Ryken says that you're stuff sounds like his. You have to smile, think of the dog-earred books back home on your shelves.

You've done a lot of reading on the road (out loud and to yourself), and your friends have shared a lot of their reading with you. Most recently, there were the quotes from Chesterton's book on Robert Louis Stevenson, a defense of the Victorian novel against the modern, painstakingly read aloud and discussed in the fourth floor hallway after midnight in a blizzard of half empty microwave popcorn bags. What makes the great conversation great is that you're never too late to join it. There are dead men at the table still talking.

And at the end of the week you find yourself hunched over a laptop in a clean, modern coffee shop, sharing it all with the friends you've never met, the friends who live in the ether, garretted in the spires of the invisible, shared dream that unites us all. Disce quod ignoras...