Sibling Assignment #194: The Grass Was Greener

Here's the next assignment Carol gave the three of us to write about:

While attending Cosette's graduation recently, it got me thinking about when I graduated from college, what I did and didn't remember that day, and where I was at regarding my future. Think back to when you graduated and received your bachelor's degree. What happened next in your life, and how do you remember feeling at this crossroads in your life?

Christy's post is here and Carol's is here.

Here's mine:


There was time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and freshness of a dream.

--William Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality"


The grass was greener
The light was brighter
The taste was sweeter
The nights of wonder
With friends surrounded
The dawn mist glowing
The water flowing
The endless river
Forever and ever

--David Gilmour and Polly Samson, "High Hopes"

I completed a Bachelor of Arts degree with two majors, history and English, at Whitworth College. Our commencement weekend was held May 15th and 16th in 1976 and included a parent/student golf tournament, a gala at the Davenport Hotel, a Baccalaureate service on Sunday morning, and the graduation ceremony in the afternoon.

I experienced a wide range of feelings over commencement weekend. For starters, while I was graduating as a student, I would be returning to Whitworth in the fall as a Chaplain's Assistant in the college's Chaplain's Office. Therefore, I didn't feel the pain of separation that I might have. Had I been going elsewhere upon graduation, the pain of leaving Whitworth College would have been profound.

I loved Whitworth College and my wide and deep range of experiences at the college. For me, and especially given the faculty I studied under, Whitworth College was the perfect Christian liberal arts college. My professors were dedicated to the ideals of a liberal arts education with the core of their instruction centered around exploring, inquiring into the nature of human nature, the nature of the human condition, and the great value of self-examination. My professors and the many speakers who presented Forum lectures on Tuesdays and Thursdays raised questions about the intersection of Christian thinking, ideas, and theology and the more secular questions raised by the subject matter of the humanities.

As a result, I was going to college at a school devoted to its Christian mission, but, for me, in a decidedly interrogative way. I never experienced a professor try to impose upon me his or her theology or his or her way of living a Christian life. Because there was not a uniform way for faculty to be Christian at Whitworth College, I encountered a wide variety of possibilities for how to think about and how to read the Bible and pray, what my role in the world is as a Christian, and how to think of myself and my growth as a person as a Christian. This variety of perspectives gave rise to tension on campus, conflict between faculty members, between students, between students and professors, and between the administration and alumni.  Some faculty (and alumni) wanted the college to define its Christian more narrowly, more precisely and wanted to impose stricter controls on behavior on campus; other faculty wanted an (even) more undefined mission and resisted any movement toward the college issuing anything like a college-wide Statement of Faith.

For me, studying and making friends in such an environment was electrifying, thrilling, scintillating. Indeed, as David Gilmour and Polly Samson write in their song, "High Hopes", it seemed to me every day at Whitworth that "The grass was greener/The light was brighter/ The taste was sweeter". For me, studying for tests, writing papers, having discussions about literature, history, and what it means to be Christian provided me with many "nights of wonder/with friends surrounded". It was a time in my life when everything, as Wordsworth writes, "To me did seem/Apparalled in celestial light,/The glory and freshness of a dream."

Being in love also romanticized my two years as a student at Whitworth. Not only was I going to return to Whitworth as an employee, I would also be getting married in September of 1976. So, as I approached the crossroads of graduating from Whitworth, I had a job, I was about to get married, and I would be returning to this place I loved so much assisting the Chaplain's program. I remember how good life felt to me as the school year ended. Yes, I would be saying farewell to friends in the Class of 1976, but I had made a number of friends who were younger than me and would be returning to Whitworth, so it felt to me like much of my social life would be intact.

On the day of commencement, I was nervous. I'd been selected along with a handful of other graduates, to give a talk at graduation. I tried to use Rainer Maria Rilke's poem, "The Archaic Torso of Apollo" and its stirring conclusion, "...for here there is no place/ that does not see you. You must change your life" to make a point that I'm sure I thought was inspiring at the time. I have no idea what I said, but I do remember that my Grandma Woolum criticized me for reading my short talk and not having it memorized.

When the commencement ceremony was over, my fiancee's family and our family shared a meal outside at Grandma Woolum's house. My fiancee and I received gifts. Our families were proud of us. Dad bought Budweiser beer instead of Heidelberg. It was his way of saying this was a special day.

That night, a Sunday, the dorms were still open. The next day, I think, was moving day. I don't remember a lot of undergraduates being around that night, but several fellow graduates were and I remember aching with the pain of not wanting to separate. I spent the evening packing up my dorm room and my Volkswagen -- back then, I would only have as much in my room as I could fit in my tiny car. Friends dropped by, having had their own celebrations and I dropped in on people. We embraced. We wished each other the best. We talked. We remembered. We looked ahead, doing our best to disguise our uncertainty, telling one another that we knew we'd do great whether the next step was seminary, graduate school, a job, getting married, or whatever it was.

I returned to Whitworth the next three falls, first as a chaplain's assistant and then as a part-time instructor. I returned again as a full-time temporary instructor in the fall of 1982 and finished that appointment in the spring of 1984.

I've never loved a place again like I loved Whitworth College. When I returned to graduate school in 1984, I dreamed that I would finish my doctorate at the University of Oregon and hoped I would somehow return as a full-time tenured professor.

That didn't happen.

I didn't finish my doctorate. That made returning to Whitworth an impossibility.

But, to be honest, I think things worked out better for having worked all those years at Lane Community College. I'm glad I never brought the instability of my personal life, my failed marriages and confused sense of my self from 1982-1997 back to Whitworth permanently.  I'm very happy that I got to work with students for all those years at LCC who, by and large, lived in the Eugene area, were often trying to piece broken lives back together again, and who represented a far greater variety of age, backgrounds, and experiences in life than the undergraduates at Whitworth did.

That said, aside from the fact that I didn't integrate Christian inquiry into my instruction at LCC, I taught all those years at LCC as if I were teaching at Whitworth, focusing my instruction on philosophical questions, on self-examination, and on trying to determine if life has meaning -- and, if it does, what that meaning is. In other words, what does it mean to live a well-lived life?

These philosophical questions were foremost in my mind the day I graduated from Whitworth and have been alive inside me for the forty-two years since.

As a student and an educator, I was a romantic at Whitworth and I persisted in my idealism for the thirty-seven years I went to school and worked as an instructor after I graduated.

That's how things turned out.