As I type this I am watching the live commencement exercises from Hillsdale College in Michigan live on Youtube. The college president Larry Arnn is giving the opening address.
Two years ago, I hadn't even heard of Hillsdale College. Now it is the only place I would consider going, if I were a high school student. It is, to my mind, perhaps the last legitimate institution of higher education in the country. Among other things, Hillsdale does not accept any federal funds, and is thus exempt from the various myriad regulations laden on both public and private institutions, many of which enforce and encourage the social policies that have a created the current network of uber-woke academia.
It is an explicitly Christian institution. Students must take a curriculum that is classical in foundation, and also learn about the U.S. Constitution.
The college is Michigan, which is one of the most restrictive tyrannical states in the Union right now. The last I heard, one could not even buy paint in the hardware stores. Entire aisles of stores are still blocked off, while the governor takes trips with her husband, proving the maxim that Lefties never believe they have to live the rules they force others to do.
President Arnn is a personal friend of Donald Trump, not surprisingly. At the baccalaureate sservice this morning he mentioned that he was not sure that the ceremony was even legal. But he didn't care. "We would sue," he said, just now in the commencement address. He is openly mocking the governor.
The baccalaureate was held in the chapel and was essentially a traditional Anglican ceremony, even though it is not an Anglican institution. It proves the maxim that all traditional religions are converging towards a common creed and liturgy. God is rallying his people. Divisions are ceasing, as the old Christmas hymn says.
I almost wish Hillsdale has a degree exchange program. I could send my own undergraduate B.S. degree from Willamette to them and they could retroactively make me an alumnus, and I could have my old Alma Mater purge me from their records. But I remind myself, amor fati.
Now the commencement speaker has begun his address. It is Tim Allen, the famous actor, who is a well-known conservative, whose television show was set in Michigan, who is loathed by liberals. The host of Wheel of Fortune, Pat Sajak, another conservative, is also on stage. The number of celebrities who are openly on our side is so small, they can be gathered in one room.
"I regret not going to Hillsdale,' says the famous actor, in the midst of his humor anecdotes. "I would rate this school top of the heap."
The actor talks about the weird experience as a child when he family moved from to Denver to Detroit, right during the race riots that were unfolding in the last 1960s.
He talks about his time as an undergraduate at the party school in Michigan he attended. His life was changed by a classic film class. He goes on to speak at length about the bad decisions he made in life, as well as his time in federal prison, and the insights he had while incarcerated.
"I started reading biographies of people unlike me. It was a moment of clarity."
He speaks about the day he could proudly call his mother and tell he had got his own cell in prison, "graduating" from the group cells.
He is making me laugh talking about free will and God's will.
He finished his address by talking about a recent incident being in the hospital in California and being told by his doctor that "things are going to get much worse." He had looked out the window, as humiliated as he could feel, and begged God for help. One could sense he had made great connection with the crowd. It was a splendid commencement address.
After he concludes his speech, President Arnn confers an honorary doctorate of fine arts on the beloved actor.
Now the college choir is singing America the Beautiful, which I once had the chance to perform years ago with my high school choir, right in the shadow of Pike's Peak, which partially inspired the lyrics. Singing the bass line of that tune, like any song, is a feeling unaccessible to the other voices of a choir.
As a bass, one almost never carries the melody. One does not get to soar in solos like tenors. One is usually providing the rock foundation for the rest of the choir. Usually one's voice is supposed to blend into the rest of the voices unheard.
As such, a bass is often singing the root of the chord, and because of it, at some peak moments of the song, such as when a minor-scale line suddenly bursts forth into a bright major chord, you can feel the entire harmony resonant out your body as if radiating from your own chest. It can feel like being part of a thunderclap from heaven.
Every time I hear that beautiful patriotic song I am carried back to a day I spent walking around downtown Los Angeles. It was the end of the first week of July 2007, almost fourteen years ago.
I was out in Los Angeles to help my friends Heather and Randy move their belongings from California back to Colorado. They had two young sons and they did not want to raise them in Los Angeles.
That summer of 2007, three years after leaving New York, was a moment of a particular crisis in my life about the world and this nation and its history. I had felt as if the three years since 2004 had been one descent downwards into a form of enlightenment that was also a form of madness.
I felt like I had been waking up from a dream about what I had thought the nation was about all my life. I had begun to doubt so much of what I had believed at that point. Among other things, I had begun to doubt all politics I had once believed in.
It was a crisis of belief that made me obsessed with the lyrics of America the Beautiful and what they really meant. I came out of it with completely different view of the nation, its history and my place within in. It would be the most radical change of secular worldview in my life. It would take a few more years to unfold, but it would be big before and after moment that would reorient my trajectory through life and lead me to where I am now (although I would still face a spiritual crisis and transformation to get where I am now).
My grandmother had just passed away. She had spent the war years in Los Angeles partially working as. telephone operator, a common job for young women in those years. She had later given birth to my mother while my grandfather was away in Europe with the Army.
That day in 2007, I had gone downtown with Randy to his office. During a break, on my own, remembering my grandparents lives, I had walked to the cathedral in downtown to see its modernist design. I went inside and looked at the religious ornamentations I remember muttering lines from America the Beautiful that had come to puzzle me:
"thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears."
How absurd, I thought. Undimmed by human tears? Hadn't there been so many tears in these cities? Somehow I wanted to believe there was meaning in those words. But all I could feel was the irony and the sorrow. I stumbled in the sun over to the Angel's Flight and took it downward, counting the arches as I went. I felt plagued by numerical symbolism. I felt weak in spirit and body.
It took me years to understand what those words asserted. I finally figured it out. It was not the cities of America had not seen those tears. It had seen trillions of tears, enough to fill oceans.
But the assertion of the hymn is that the reflected light of those cities, despite all those tears, was yet undimmed. This was because of the Grace of God upon us, and this was because we have asked for this Grace, even begged for it.
Our cities remain undimmed inasmuch as they submit themselves to God's Grace.
In the meantime, that crisis of faith in the nation left me fortified and impervious to so much of what is happening lately, and has happened. I see others going through that same crisis now, that I went through years ago. I know what they are going through. I have compassion for them. I feel very strong now, at least in spirit if not in body. My health is sufficient for me now, but as 56, I begin to feel the truth that our earthly bodies are not meant to last forever. I understand this in a way that I could not have done so even ten years ago.
It is strength way that lets me be strong for others, I feel. I am not afraid of the present or the future. I fear only God.
As it happens Heather and Randy's oldest boy is graduating high school next year. A couple days Heather messaged me about possible college suggestions for him. I mentioned Hillsdale specifically. She loved she loved the institution, but her son had gone to a charter school and encountered Christian students who turned him off to the idea of a place like Hillsdale.
Fair enough. Perhaps St. John's College in New Mexico, she asked? I mentioned that had almost transferred there after Georgetown instead of going to Willamette. I hadn't brought it up because I thought maybe it had gone woke. Every school is Evergreen State now. Every place except Hillsdale, perhaps.
Does St. John's mandate the arm jab? That's an important point for Heather. It's not easy to figure these things out these days. It was so easy back then
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