Enlightenment
The light striking the leaves outside this window makes them look white rather than green. They’re so white I can’t even tell their shape nor what they are without context clues. The point of light is to show us true things—the way things really are. At least, God would agree; he needed it before making anything else.
But I also know that too much of a thing is wicked. Too much light and we’d roast alive, too much schooling and students would never experience life for themselves, too much exercise and the body would collapse.
I remember when I was at Bryan Christ-Above-All College and how frustrated I was by nonsense. That’s what never leaving an ivory tower does: breed nonsense. At Bryan, the nonsense had a distinct Evangelical tanginess to it.
In the last of my Christian Life Formation (CLF) classes, our senior seminar, I recall a most godly point that our professor made. Dr. Paul Bolin was a serious faced man who might have been more pleasant had he learned that smiles weren’t something you were supposed to fake.
“Who here believes that the world, that people, could be good without God?” He smiled when no one, not even the people who agreed with his statement, raised their hands. We’d all been trained and shamed into the correct answer. “Let me read you something.” He then proceeded to read a Voltaire quote, one of the most vile things to assault my ears, that compared Black people to monkeys. He summarized with, “Does that sound ‘good’ to you? This man was a father of the Enlightenment!” He stared out at the quiet room. “There is no Enlightenment without God.”
I didn’t have the courage to point out to him that plenty of God-fearing Christians in our very college and in history had similar views to Mr. Voltaire. It wasn’t something worth the fight I reckoned.
I turn my gaze back outside. That light is fading the lovely brown paint on Daniel’s backporch. A few years from now, and it’s gonna be bleached pure and dry. Why must light be brutal like this? Why can it not be gentle and learn to caress the world rather than pummel it?
Jordan Peterson once remarked that something had gone deeply wrong with the Enlightenment, but that he wasn’t sure what it was. He knew, though, that it was the reason why moral relativism and the declining power of truth were threatening our “once great civilization.” I can’t help but agree with him. Something did go horribly wrong: hypocrisy.
I’m looking back through an old essay I submitted to Dr. Bolin, and I’m shocked I was as brave as I was. In an essay titled somewhat after Wilde called “The Picture of Jacob Funk,” I explained how struggling with my reality as a gay man pushed me towards god and away from church. I even wrote, “I left the church without much fanfare; I’m not sure anyone noticed as I slipped out the door and into the night.”
Why night? I’ve felt more comfortable at night for years now. Sleep travels to me slow so I read, write, walk, talk to stars, wonder where I am. I do all my living while everyone else is dreaming.
I don’t remember Bolin appreciating my description of God as “unified diversity or diverse unity” very much. He didn’t call on me in that class, and I didn’t ask him to. We had this mutual agreement: I would sit in the back, all black sheep of me, and he’d leave me (mostly) alone. Though, I couldn’t help but notice the way he frequented the gays as being the source of every sin and evil in the Western world any chance he got. But that was Christ-Above-All College—just what it did.
If the sun could learn to hold nature how I wish a man would hold me, maybe Enlightenment would have a better role model.