Rose-Colored Glasses and Job Training

About the time God was creating dirt, I enrolled in a church college, and commuted to school, where the President--a man of no uncertain opinions--often spoke in daily chapel, molding our young minds as the Creator himself had once molded Adam from clay.  There was too much organic matter in the dirt that I was, so I failed creative pottery.  


The chapel was new during those years, and we heard often about the rose window at the east end, behind us, up in the balcony where dutiful student monitors noted which assigned seats were empty, and reported us to somebody.  Nobody reported which assigned seats were occupied.  It was the sinners who were important.  


The College alumni magazine recently reported that the rose window has been refurbished; hauled off to California, and back again, to reclaim its glory.  The article did not note that I had gone to California, too, years earlier, without achieving glory.  Nowhere in the article does it specify how often my seat had been empty.  It is as if I had never squirmed; as if I had not actually mattered to the student monitors or to God.  


But it is true!  It is all true, or it ought to be, and more and better besides! 


Can you imagine, today, going to a college that required daily chapel attendance, with student monitors noting which assigned seats were empty?  Not even Michele Bachmann could imagine that, and she has attended some rather earnest and zealous schools!  It would be too much like socialism, and thought-control, and . . . ugh!, government!


Sometimes I think about having been a child at a time when we milked cows by hand in a wooden barn lit by kerosene lanterns.  We drove horses, and harnessed them when we were tall and strong enough.  Halfway toward growing up, some of us took assigned seats, at daily chapel, in order to be allowed to get our college degrees.  


There still are monitors, taking attendance.  "Do you believe in God?", they ask.  "You do want to be President, don't you?"  "Or Senator, or County Commissioner?"  "Are you a Christian, or one of those . . . Jews, or Muslims, or Mormons, or un-be-lievers?"  "Do you really believe in evolution, and how old do you think the universe is, anyway?"


The Middle Ages dog us.
Simple answers still dog us. 
Maybe if we forced people to listen, and took attendance. . . .


Those balcony monitors, armed with clipboards, counting the row- and the seat-numbers, saw our absence through rose-colored glasses.  I hope it was just a job, and not the beginning of political careers.