Chapter 31 The Mirror

Flying west was a dream. California had always been a magical place in my mind. Grandma Whitney's tiny house sat on the edge of an orange grove in Loma Linda. Hundred-foot-tall royal palms lined the next street over. On vacations our family had toured Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks and spent a week at Uncle Romayne's hobby ranch in the foothills near Mt. Lassen.
As I walked into the crowd at Oakland Airport, I heard my name. “Johnny?” It was Uncle Ellsworth, Mom's favorite brother. Tall. Snow-white hair. A gentle voice. Warm, open face. Not that I would have recognized him. I had seen him only once before. He shook my hand and we headed to baggage claim. After retrieving my two suitcases, we found Aunt Bernice waiting in the car at the curb.
“I would have come in to meet you,” she said. “But I thought you probably had enough to worry with without having to carry me, too.” She laughed as she waved her crutches at me. I stayed the night with them in Napa, then in the morning they drove me up the hill to the college.
I signed up for physics, a couple of religion classes and cat lab—a course that consisted of dissecting a cat. One of the religion classes, Systematic Theology from Gordon Hyde was fascinating. I delighted in the exploration of the language and ideas of ancient thinkers. It was fascinating to see how far back in antiquity you could trace all the major arguments not just of theology but of humanity. The nature of existence, questions of freedom and constraint for both God and humanity, the meaning of personhood and the nature of the soul. Nothing was new. Everything was connected. The teacher himself was fascinating, both for his appreciation for the ancient thinkers and for his own attempts to resolve thorny conundrums. It probably helped that I was no longer planning on going into the ministry. I could engage the subject with intellectual abandon because I did not have to worry about how all these ideas interacted with church dogma and Adventist spiritual culture.
New Testament exegesis was radically different. The professor was Erwin Gane, a well-known principal in theological battles then raging in the Adventist Church. Within days of the beginning of the term a group of us students was engaged in constant debate with him over his soteriology (theories of how a person is saved). We saw his views as unduly influenced by Roman Catholic theology. (We were aware he had studied at a Catholic university.) We students saw ourselves as more in line with the Reformed or Lutheran views.
At the end of the second week of the class we turned in our first exegesis paper. After he graded our papers, Dr. Gane gave us his own paper on the assigned passage. I was amazed. Despite our theological differences and intense debates in class over soteriology, my paper so closely paralleled his that you could have reasonably suspected plagiarism. The arguments in class continued unabated, but when we did our next paper, my work again was strikingly similar to Dr. Gane's.
A few days later he asked me to come see him. When I arrived for my appointment, Dr. Gane had me close the door behind me. He invited me to sit down and we exchanged pleasantries for a couple of minutes. Then he dropped the bomb. “Would you consider becoming my reader? I am buried with work trying to get my dissertation finished and I need some help grading papers and tests.”
I was astonished! How could he even think of such a thing, given the intensity of our debates in class.
Dr. Gane went on, “You are a good writer. You handle the New Testament text well. With all the commitments I have right now outside of teaching, I really need some help grading papers. Would you consider working as my reader?”
I accepted. Eventually, I was grading not only short exegesis papers, but final exams and term papers. I wasn't sure it was right for a student to be playing such a major role in the grades that other students received. It would have been one thing if the tests and papers had been multiple choice or called for short answers. Instead I was passing judgment on pages-long essays. How much of the grade should be based on concrete information included in the essay? How much weight should be assigned to style, to clarity of thought, to correct grammar and spelling? I had never heard anyone discuss these questions. Obviously, I had never taken any education methods classes. I was on my own. Which meant my classmates' grades were in my hands. Over the course of the year, I could feel my objectivity diminishing. Some students always wrote good papers. After awhile I knew just from reading the name at the top of the page what grade I was going to give. Other students struggled to make sense of anything, writing clumsy, awkward prose, misusing and misspelling words. I dreaded reading their papers and hated myself for all the red marks I scribbled on their essays. But I had been hired to grade papers, and college was supposed to be a meritocracy where grades were earned not granted. I did my job, less and less confident that I was competent to do what I was doing and more and more conflicted about the appropriateness of a student filling the role I was in.

Physics turned out to be a review of high school physics. Second day of second quarter I was sitting in class bored when I suddenly asked myself, “Why are you wasting your time sitting here?” After that, I only went to class to take exams. I remembered Mr. DeVasher's retorts when students complained about the rigor of his classes: “I'm getting you ready for college. Someday, you're going to thank me.” Well, I was thanking him. Of course, as always, lab was a challenge. No matter how well I understood theory and processes, effective manipulation of apparatus was beyond me. Fortunately grades were heavily weighted toward exams.
Cat lab was a one quarter long, two hour class that explored the anatomy of a cat through dissection. The body systems were fascinating. I loved the class. Unfortunately, it proved again that lab was not my forte. The best students in the class finished each class period with their dissection laid out like it was a picture in a textbook. My cat generally looked like the remains of a terrible fight. And my cat lost.
Embryology was amazing. Biochemisty was intriguing. In both classes evolution was prominent in the textbooks. And unconvincing. I used to scold my girlfriend for her mocking references to the preposterousness of evolution. I insisted that if we had grown up in homes that assumed evolution was true, we would believe it just as fervently as we now disbelieved it. However, the further we went in biochemistry, the more improbable the arguments appeared to be. Each chapter began with several pages on the putative evolutionary history of the biochemical system covered in that chapter. And each scenario seemed more implausible than the one before. I knew creationists faced intractable problems when it came to radiometric dating and other forms of geochronology, but I was sure that in biology, the great arguments were on our side.
In spite of my enjoyment of the science classes, the old question about a “call to the ministry” refused to go away. Nearly every night, my prayers featured one-sided arguments with God about how ludicrous it would be for me to go into the ministry. I couldn't get the idea out of my head that God was calling. Still, I couldn't see it. I enjoyed my science classes, embryology, cat lab and biochemistry. And in the scientific quest for truth, there was convergence. Over time, fierce debates were usually illuminated and often resolved by additional data. But in theology there had been no new data for 2000 years and none was expected. The insoluble contradictions remained eternally insoluble. I was fully convinced Adventist theology was the most coherent, biblically-congruent theology available. I was a confident Adventist. We had “the truth.” But I saw no way of demonstrating that to people who were not inclined to see it. This was highlighted by the endless debates in the church. It was vividly illustrated by the arguments my class had with Dr. Gane, and I had personally with Dennis Priebe.
Drs. Gane and Priebe were Adventist. They were obviously smart men. They had access not only to the Bible but to the writings of Ellen White, our prophet, and the theological heritage of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Still, they were stuck in the anxiety-based mindset of historical Adventism. In their theology, people were never good enough. They lived always under the frown of God. As a pastor, I would do everything I could to move the church away from the fear and anxiety characteristic of their theology. But, I wondered, would the church ultimately find their vision of Adventism more compelling, more persuasive? If so, where did that leave me if I became a pastor? On the other hand, how could I cede the formation of the church to people who used our theological heritage to enslave people with fear and anxiety?

Then there was Dr. Roger Coon's class on eschatology (the doctrine of the end of the world). He “proved” on the basis of Bible prophecy and hundreds of citations from all kinds of news sources that we were living right at the very end of time. He resisted ever suggesting a specific number of years, but if you did not dismiss the entire project of connecting Bible prophecy with current events, the inescapable conclusion of his lectures was that within three to five years at the very outside, the end would be upon us. Jesus would return.
I alternated between excitement about the “shortness of time” and a deep cynicism rooted in my awareness of how often over the last 150 years, Adventists had been equally certain the end was near. In the late 1800s our prophet had told an audience that before all of them died Jesus would return. Unless you counted babies that might have been present, it appeared even her certainty had been misplaced. How could I become a clergyman in an organization devoted to such breathless (and historically clueless) end time fervor?
Still, the call would not go away.

I did have close at hand a couple of models of pastoral ministry who were powerfully attractive, men who contradicted my stereotype of ministers as men whose intelligence and integrity was somewhere below the seventy-fifth percentile.
Most weekends I went to the Berkeley Adventist Church. The pastor there, Roger Patzer, was a creative, slightly heterodox pastor who had cultivated a church full of diverse, interesting people. I admired his pastoral leadership and the urban spiritual community he had cultivated. I frequently was troubled by his nontraditional theology. His interpretations of the Book of Revelation were suspect. He evinced a woefully inadequate level of deference to the words of our prophet. When I argued with him, I did not find him persuasive. But he was a dramatic model of the possibility of a high degree of individuality and personal freedom within the Adventist ministry.
The preacher at the College Church was Morris Venden, the same preacher who had so strongly affected me my freshman year in college. Because of my involvement with the Berkeley Church I heard Elder Venden only occasionally. But whenever I did, I was impressed again with his astonishing ability to command attention and connect with people's actual spiritual experience. If I could preach like him, maybe being a preacher was imaginable.
In March, Elder Venden gave a presentation at a theology department colloquium. He spoke of the satisfaction and fulfillment he experienced in ministry. It sounded so rich, so significant. He was making a difference in people's lives. I made an appointment to visit with him. When I sat down in his office, he lived up to his reputation of being as awkward and clumsy in person as he was eloquent and masterful in the pulpit. He did not put me at ease. Still, he managed to offer his standard counsel for young men considering the ministry: “Don't do it if you can happily do anything else. If God is calling you, he will make it irresistibly clear. You will know.”
But that was the problem, I didn't know. Certainly, I had been thinking about being a minister for a long time. Some people had encouraged me in that direction. On the other hand, I knew Dr. Priebe definitely had reservations about my fitness. And I still struggled with being able to see myself in the role. Could I live within the structure, the social expectations, the organizational requirements of an Adventist clergyman? Did I want to?

I was challenged by my Aunt Bernice's religion. (Nowadays, I would probably use the word “spirituality,” but it was not in common usage in the seventies. And in those days, “religion” was generally an appropriate term for designating the totality of a person's spiritual life because of people's much stronger identification with particular religious communities and traditions.) Uncle Ellsworth was quite deaf, so I could not carry on an effective conversation with him, but Aunt Bernice was warm and talkative. She was a physician which gave her credibility. Her religion was easy-going. Drinking coffee or going to a movie was not a mortal sin. She did not about the end of the world or prophetic charts. She felt no compulsion to be busy doing “the work of God” on Sabbath. She and Uncle Ellsworth came home from church and took a nap.
The emotional tone of her religion contrasted starkly with the hard-edged spirituality of classic Adventism. She was Adventist AND happy. Sabbath-keeping at her house was fun. There was none of the tense race to beat sundown that had characterized our house on Friday afternoons. She did what she needed to do, and when she was ready, we sat down to enjoy Friday night supper. There was no anxious watching of the clock to make sure everything was done before sundown. Aunt Bernice blithely dismissed the Adventist obsession with character perfection. She did what was right and was easy on herself when she didn't. And figured that God was easy on us, too.
Her gracious, laid-back approach to spiritual life would have been less seductive if I had observed it from a distance. But I was in her home often. Her husband had spent some time in jail. He had been a dreamer and schemer who had never effectively contributed to the family income. All he contributed was warmth and affection. (In our family, warmth and affection were negligible values.) My cousin, Janene, who was a lot of fun, had experienced some reverses in life—difficulties that in our family would have earned her unalterable scorn. But Aunt Bernice (a doctor, a smart person, a wage-earner) appeared to adore her husband. She adored her son who was in medical school. And she adored Janene whose life was more complicated. She showered affection on everyone in her orbit. In nine months I never heard Aunt Bernice utter the slightest hint of condemnation or rejection toward anyone. I still valued my theology. I thought Aunt Bernice ought to be more zealous in her religion. She should be more concerned with Adventist rules and particularities. For all of my questions, I was still deeply convicted not only of the correctness but the importance of Adventist theology. I enjoyed working with ideas. I believed Adventist theology did a better job than any other system of integrating the entire universe of ideas and history. The world needed to know what we believed. I remained zealous for the rigors of Adventist behavioral norms. But I knew Aunt Bernice's religion offered something that mine didn't—happiness.

I was supposed to take the MCAT that spring. I deliberately missed the deadline for registering to take the test, feeling that taking it would somehow be too bold an action in the face of the nagging sense of divine disapproval of my plans for medical school. I could always take it later and complete my application process for Loma Linda University next year
Spring break, I drove with friends down to Loma Linda, home of the Adventist medical school. I visited with my cousin Frank, son of Uncle Ellsworth and Aunt Bernice, who was in his fourth year of medical school. He was taking a clinical rotation he did not particularly enjoy, but because it was medicine, it was okay. He loved medicine. He couldn't imagine doing anything else. I visited another friend, Carlos. He had finished college a couple of years earlier but had not been accepted into medical school. He was living in Loma Linda, working, and taking one class a quarter in the graduate school. He told me was going to stay there until he died or they admitted him. Medicine was his life.
As we drove back north late Sunday, I replayed over and over my conversations with Frank and Carlos. My interest in medicine was tangential. I was not in love with medicine but with the benefits I thought it might provide. I imagined medicine as a way to be financially independent. As a physician I could be active in the theological life of the church without being dependent on the church for my income. My mind would be freer. Even when I imagined working as a medical support person in oceanographic expeditions, I realized I was more interested in the oceanography than in the medicine. There was nothing in me that corresponded to Frank's and Carlos' passionate love of medicine. Well, maybe there was—theology. The only things I enjoyed as much as they did medicine were the ideas and the engagement with people in their spiritual life that were the province of ministry. Pastors were paid to study theology and talk with people.
The “call” from God that I had been struggling with for five years was in reality a mirror of my own most intense interests. God was not calling me away from my greatest interests but to them. The next week I wrote Loma Linda University and withdrew my name from their applicant list. I wrote the seminary at Andrews University and requested an application packet.