The Lost Dispensation

dis-pən-'sā-shən
1 a : a general state or ordering of things; specifically : a system of revealed commands and promises regulating human affairs b : a particular arrangement or provision especially of providence or nature (from Merriam-Webster)

I was a freshman and in Bible college and something happened that we didn’t have a name for, but it was there nonetheless. It was glorious. Everything collapsed. Just that, like a mountain avalanche. Better, like the woodblock game people play where the whole stack crashes across the table and the floor when an important piece is removed and everyone gasps! But it doesn’t so much matter because then it starts again. Like that.

We had classes and schedules and lived in the dorms on our downtown Chicago campus. Christian doctrine went out the door when we walked in because we did not need doctrine. We saw God. We weren’t the same as we used to be, certainly not like the way we were in vacation Bible school. Not like Sunday morning service or even Wednesday night youth group. We had new leaders: student group presidents and resident assistants, peers who were regarded as saints. We couldn’t talk to them, at least not in the same way as we may have before. We couldn’t even talk to the seniors, or date them. We were to be devoted and we were to study and worship God. They read their Bibles and prayed all the time. There were conferences and chapel sessions and there were worship hours. Oh, there was worship in Bible school!

We wanted to know how it worked. We wanted to know it was real, and we thought that was the purpose of school. Only at Bible college, school wasn’t school; everything was backward. If you had a question, there was evidence of doubt. The economy of this Christianity was to capitalize on faith, not doubt. There wasn’t really a place for it at all. We didn’t ask and we figured most things would be that way, unquestionable, swallow it down. We never said anything about anything. We weren’t unbelievers.

Joey and I solved Bible college in a year. We’d leave campus, hop a train or bus, head to smoke-filled coffee shops in disreputable parts of town, the places no first year Bible student should go. So we went. It was our hermitage where we acted freely of the restrictions of others’ perceptions. The people around us could be anyone. So could we. We became saturated with the cigarette smoke of sinners, were glutted with the foul language of carnal men, and filled our heads with an abundance of thoughts expressed in brazen conversation. We carved our initials in the bathroom walls.

We used dirty words and spoke forthright about Christian taboos. We stirred every doubt, laughed at blasphemous jokes, ragged on our professors and plotted to infuriate the Dean. It felt good and we couldn’t explain why. It just felt good and for the first time in our lives there was no one to tell us we couldn’t. So we did.

When I had been a child we moved away, my family and I. We moved away a lot after the first time, too. We went to the mission field, see. It was disjointed and foreign then at first, especially for my parents, because everything new is like that until you get used to it. My brothers and I got used to it pretty fast. I was three when we moved out there. We lived everywhere else, too, until I left for Bible college. But Christianity was in every place. It was everywhere I grew up: in my living room, in my bed, in my home school textbooks. And the world was never mine, for it was blemished with iniquity, stretching across the ever-shrinking globe from my family’s perch on the Pacific Rim in Japan.

Joey had moved around quite a bit, too. He had found that Christianity was useful for an unpopular kid. At church he could acquire social status and friends. His mom was a children’s pastor, devoted to Christian missions. Though his dad was a tough case, and had left the family for several years before Joey came to Bible college, Christian heritage was deeply rooted in him. Joey and I each had so many models for a good, Christian life. But we got the talk instead. Oh, Christians can talk!

One Thursday after chapel Joey and I skipped class as we often did to smoke cloves and complain about roommates and the chapel speaker’s failure to provide scriptural support for his exposition. That day we found, in our usual spot in the alleyway between the high-rises, a quarter of marijuana. We knew about it. When knew it could be dangerous. Possession of it was illegal. We got really excited. We knew it was just great.

We knew we had to decide what to do with it. And we knew, because of a lot of things, that we couldn’t just share our little happiness with just anybody. This discovery, this best thing, would probably incite a witch trial. That’s how it works with Bible students, like with any questionable thing we had ever said or done. They would tell us, “Get a Biblical life!” Simple.

So we came up with an answer. We dug a hole in the soft, grey soil next to our slab of alley cement and buried it. We marked it by carving a cross with Joey’s car key on the wall by where we hid it. But when we went back a few days later and looked to see if we could find it again, we couldn’t. We pillaged the soil along the whole alleyway, scavenged for the cross, but we couldn’t find it. We tried.

Joey and I talked about the pot or whatever it was when we couldn’t find it. We used good, clean words. What we were saying was how much the bag was like our coffee shop revelries and our smoke breaks between classes. We didn’t tell anybody about those things, and we didn’t understand what that might mean about us. We had never given a thought to what we could call how we felt about it. We didn’t give it a name or label it in any way. It just felt good. It was perfect in the way it was our coffee shop or our alleyway. It was our quarter of marijuana. But once we buried it, it was gone forever.

The bag was gone, like our feelings that caused us to flee campus to hide, like the first time we bought cloves in Belmont; it was gone like everything else that had been taken away even though we tried to salvage this one thing. It was not the first time we had learned this. Christianity seemed to keep pushing us around one way or the other, teaching us the same thing wherever we ended up. It’s tough that way, always teaching us stuff.

Then every other week or so Joey and I would find ourselves sickened with secrets. We never could predict when the feeling would come. So sometimes we had fun and sometimes we didn’t. We found a thousand ways to explain our depression. Homework was difficult, roommates didn’t understand us, no one prayed for us, ministry was lonely, worship was empty. We came back to the dorms smelling like smoke. We lied.

We stopped going to the alley after the bag. I smoked at the bus stop a block from school. I smoked on the rooftop of the dorm with Val in the middle of the night. We watched Donnie Darko in her dorm room. I went to the movie theater and I made out with a senior. I had sex. We all started having sex that summer. We decided to leave Bible college. It was an adventure to find an apartment near Belmont. We could take the bus to Milwaukee Avenue. We still had our friends. We had studied about ministry and we had grown up in the church. We weren’t dumb. The Dean or some senior may have argued with us, insisting that we stay or change or not leave. We rolled our eyes at each other about that.

We had no more patience for that stuff. We took our Bibles with us and moved all of our things. We said our brief goodbye and left.

We got to live it up. We worked jobs and made new friends. We still went to church sometimes. We tried to tell our story, but we still weren’t sure what to say about it. People said they understood or that they cared. Who knows what they meant. Our life became what we thought it would be. Perfect. It was freedom. Freedom was full, unlike anything else in the world. It wasn’t heavy or anything like that because we had known heaviness and this wasn’t it. This was perfect, lots of things to experience. We went to everything laughing, laughing, laughing together.

We learned about art. We made art. Life was beautiful. We were throwing a party, celebrating something we called freedom in Christ and forgiveness. We raised our bottles and cheered. Aha! We had found them out! This was right. At last it was right.

There was a scream and some commotion sounded from the master bathroom. I went running. I had heard about this but I’d never seen anything like it. One of the girls was on the floor passed out, bleeding from her wrists. Joey sat between her and the tub mumbling. Was it being taken away from us again? Freedom. Gone. Happiness. We grew up a little bit and couldn’t go back. We learned. No one had ever told us about responsibility like this. They had told us about freedom, about happiness. And it went away. We got smacked with growing up instead.

Then we smoked pot in the apartment, counseled each other and our friends when we were depressed. We learned about great music and supported local artists. We worked at coffee shops, rode bicycles, told our therapists about our vivid dreams. We had known something of freedom, but when we buried that first bag we knew what would really happen. The truth is, we didn’t look so hard for it. We didn’t look so hard for that cross. We were Bible students and we weren’t stupid. Things get taken away.

Joey and I parted ways after the lease was up. We kept in touch. We have tried to have fun as best we can.

We buried faith because it was hard, sure as any foundation, but same as the stones thrown to bruise us. We buried hope because it was whole, because it didn’t belong to us and so that it wouldn’t get taken away. Like children we buried it, marked it with a cross. We buried love because it was perfect. We didn’t tell anyone, but together it was all we talked about, until we forgot. It was the dispensation.