The Form of Faith. James Prothero
managed to shield us boys from the coverage of the murder of President Kennedy, but they slipped up with me on Oswald. I happened to be at home from second grade, sick with a cold and watching TV movies with my mother on the morning of November 24, 1963. As she stepped out of the room to hang some shirts she’d ironed, the news flash interrupted the movie, and I saw the whole murder live. When she returned to the room, the confused TV station crew had returned to the movie. I told my mother what I’d seen and she didn’t believe me until the broadcast was taken over by the news department soon thereafter.
But the central feature of my boyhood years is that I had a wonderful friendship with a boy whose parents were English, and who shared my imagination and love of research, though we wouldn’t have recognized it as such. He was Nigel Taylor, and we had all sorts of “favorite subjects”, including an obscure band from Britain called The Beatles. His British cousins sent him all the first release vinyl and we took badminton rackets and played air guitar to their music. With Nigel’s partnership and encouragement, my interests ranged far and I read copiously. This probably made up for the fact that I was diagnosed with some form of ADD and was almost unable to concentrate in school—that and the fact that my baseball-player grandfather had passed zero genes of athletic ability down to me. So I was a frustration to my teachers and I was broke in the currency that schoolchildren judge each other by: skill at games. I could please nobody. Teachers knew I was smart, but unless the lesson engaged my imagination, my mind wandered elsewhere. This was the era of learning math by drill-and-kill and I don’t doubt that the endless rows of arithmetic problems repeated for no discernible reason killed whatever interest I ever had in math, closing the door to the sciences for me beyond a layman’s fascination. I lived in two worlds: the rich imaginative world that books, and my father’s vast breadth of knowledge afforded me at home, versus the world where I was the clumsy, skinny, quiet kid who was no good at games and didn’t do much school work. Ironically, as a future teacher, elementary school was a torment to me.
But I did have a defining moment in faith. It was either the summer of my third or fourth grade year, making it either the summer of 1965 or 1966. My parents sent me to church camp in the mountains. It was called “Indian Village” and it was in the Mill Creek Valley of the eastern San Bernardino Mountains, part of a complex of camps connected to Billy Graham’s organization, called “Forest Home.” One of my fascinations was Native Americans, so I was very up for this. We lived in canvas tepees and there were ceremonies that pretended to be Indian. I had a blast. Years later, when I knew more, I realized that the “Indian Village” version of Native American life owed everything to the Hollywood version and nothing to any genuine research. But that did not affect me at the time.
One afternoon, our counselor, who was probably no more than eighteen himself and very halting and unsure in his speech, assembled us all in our tepee and gave us the classical Evangelical spiel about accepting Jesus Christ as our personal savior. Jesus was no stranger to my home; my mother spent every morning with him and sang us songs about him to put us to sleep at night. I did sort of feel like a fish being informed about the existence of water. Yet, somewhere in this teenaged boy’s halting, awkward language there were words about committing your life to Christ. I may have been young, but I did understand I was being asked to sign over the papers on my soul. What could a child understand, you might ask. Well, I could understand quite a lot at that age, probably due to my father’s answering every question we ever fired at him from his vast general knowledge. Though my brother Don was not there, I am sure at some point he had the same experience and assuredly did not sign on the dotted line. He knew what he was doing then, and he has stayed with that conviction all these years. But I knew what I was doing too. I said yes.
Now, my theology is such that I don’t place much weight on altar calls and showy, emotional one-time conversion experiences. Conversion is a long, long process and I’ve always had a problem with the Evangelical idea that we can get people to say they accept Jesus and then just move on and leave them in the dust. That is theologically irresponsible if not comically naive. Furthermore, it seems odd to call this a conversion experience since I arrived at camp believing Jesus was the Son of God and left the same way. What was different was that I knew I was signing over the pink slip of my soul and I made the conscious choice to do it. If I were going to characterize it now I would say that I chose to pass on merely being a “cultural Christian”, to just play the game of faith halfheartedly and for show. I signed on for the full treatment without anyone there to push me either way. I, who could barely swim, dove head first into the sea of faith.
The counselor was far too awkward to ask any of us to speak up. If we made the decision he asked us to, we kept it to ourselves. Indeed, looking back, I wonder if he fully believed it himself, or if this awkward talk he had to give was the price he had to pay for the small salary and the chance to hang out in the mountains for free. I don’t remember his name and little more than his face. I don’t know what happened to him. But though I’m sure he never knew, he set an earthquake going in my life.
I was aware, even in those years after my tepee commitment, of trying to live the life Christ talks about in the Sermon on the Mount. But how does a little boy do that when he’s the school pariah for his total lack of athletic skill, and far from being the teacher’s pet for his lack of ability to concentrate on and complete mundane tasks? Let’s just say I had a lot of practice in forgiveness. I lived in those two worlds, the disappointing world of the school where I was inadequate to everyone, and the second world of books and ideas and knowledge, which was exhilarating. And then my wonderful second world opened out when my father took Don and me, and my grandmother east of the Colorado River to the magical land of Arizona and the Four Corners states. I can’t recall if we were in a car or a camper. I think it was a car, but that detail is unimportant. We saw Zion and Kayenta I know—and I believe we visited the site of my grandparents’ former ranch in southwest Colorado. I don’t recall much else. Yet, it was for me as rich and magical as reaching Narnia. And I have been in love with that country ever since.
But something far more significant happened on that trip, something that had been brewing in my soul for some time: I discovered that I was a Romantic. I do not use this word carelessly. I have since earned a PhD in British Romanticism; I am a Wordsworth scholar. So I mean something very precisely when I say that the first trip to Arizona and the Four Corners, (and all subsequent trips as well,) confirmed in me a Romanticism that I was probably born with. I mean that I experienced what Wordsworth experienced at the top of Mt. Snowdon or when he toured the Wye Valley around Tintern Abbey—I experienced those surging feelings and thoughts witnessing the painted desert of Navajoland and the high forests of northern Arizona, southeast Utah, southwestern Colorado, and New Mexico. I experienced Keats’ and Coleridge’s sublime. This is vital, for how can one talk about faith without talking about this quintessentially religious experience? People have often accused Romanticism of being a substitute for faith. But I have never accepted that idea. I rather suspect that Romanticism is one of the more common doors into faith, without which, many of us would have been incapable of believing in, nor beginning to comprehend the glory of God.
So picture me: I was perhaps ten or eleven years old, a gawky, skinny boy, with thick glasses and high water pants, socially inept, unathletic, and a bane to my teachers. And I was a soaring Romantic, feeling what Wordsworth felt, standing on the holy land of the Dine People, Dinetah, my heart leaping up at the sight of the San Juan Mountains of Colorado, as Wordsworth’s heart leaped up standing on the top of Mt. Snowdon, looking over the moonlit sea of fog. I’m not sure whether such an image is more inspirational or absurdly comic. I suspect the latter.
Three: Joy and Junior High
He [Nicholas] could not but observe how silent and sad the boys all seemed to be. There was none of the noise and clamour of a schoolroom; none of its boisterous play, or hearty mirth. The children sat crouching and shivering together, and seemed to lack the spirit to move about .
—Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
Now that I’ve brought up Romanticism, I am remiss if I don’t mention another important element. Call it “joy.” The Romantics named it many things, but I knew this inexplicable and unpredictable euphoria that would come with beauty in some form, like happiness, but far richer and stronger, that left one wondering if anything