Dixie and the Guru

Rumor had it that he wore a sheet, sat in a lotus position, and rode around campus in an open palanquin.

The occasion was Cedar What, a mock election held every four years at my alma mater. This mocked the Nixon/McGovern election, but the late entry of a 3rd party candidate won instead.

If you check your history, you'll note that some famous White Guy was the 3rd party candidate in '72, but in Cedar What that year the winning dark horse candidate was a black student.

But I'm talking about half of the ticket known as Dixie and the Guru. "Dixie" was the English prof who was married to Paul Dixon, who went on to be President of Cedarville College. "The Guru" was a philosophy prof named James Murray Grier. Years later, we still called him The Guru.



He was my Guru. The man taught me to think.

I said Jim Grier taught philosophy. He was reputed to have an intimidating vocabulary and was one of the two toughest profs on campus. I took Intro to Philosophy from him and I proved the perfect foil. He would present some theory and an objection would form in my mind. I'd raise my hand, and voice the objection. He invariably slapped it down with the greatest of ease. Little did I know I was reinventing each of the classic objections and he needed only recite the classic counter-objections from memory. I entered this class thinking human will was the center of reality and left this class thinking that it is secondary to divine will.

I still got a B in the class. Cedarville didn't use pluses or minuses. That bothered me because any class I put my mind to I could get an A in. So, I took another and another Grier class. It took me until my senior year to learn how to get an A from him.

In his classes, I was the sole Math major and my questions always reflected the technological or scientific perspective of whatever he was discussing.

I suppose this must have had an impact, because years later he was preaching in my church and I raised my hand. He recognized me, and said, "You! No more questions!"

(Along these same lines, I found a tape of when he came to speak to my Calculus class. As I was listening--years later--a question formed in my mind. Seconds later I heard an annoying nasal voice on the tape--mine--ask the same question.)

It wasn't that Jim Grier devised some marvelous new way of thinking, but that he managed to integrate a diverse collection of considerations into a single, coherent whole. The best summary of his thought was, "He's got it all together."

I well recall sitting in Ethics class my senior year when things slipped into place.

Life may be different for you, but for me I figured out little models of how the world worked. Each was effective in its separate domains. Outside those domains singularities appeared that would invalidate the model. And a different model would have to be created and used. Wittgenstein spoke of different languages that people bring into play in different contexts, and that's similar to what I've got in mind.

When I was in Ethics class, he mentioned a certain school of Christian mysticism that I had been a fan of and properly contextualized it. It was just like putting a piece into a jigsaw puzzle--not the first ones around the edges, but that one where you've got most of the puzzle together and then suddenly the pieces start flying in as fast as you can pick them up.

I suppose you could call me a Protestant Scholastic. It's as accurate as Zen Baptist or Libertarian Puritan. At Cedarville I could say I was a "Grierian" and everyone knew what I meant.

Rest in peace Jim Grier. You left big shoes to fill.

The Christmas Chair

It was 1980 and I was working for the government and my bride of less than six months, Mary, was working for WRBS doing the morning drive-time on-air shift. We had just moved from West Michigan to Laurel, Maryland.

All family was several hours away and we were on our own. It was a good time as we found our own solutions to the nuts and bolts of living and we established new rituals for the holidays with neither parents nor kids to distract us. It was a good time.

I had discovered just a little while earlier that I was a Puritan and thus I felt a need to reinterpret and reexamine all the things that I had taken for granted—for instance, Christmas. That first Christmas far from home, making a home, was the time and place to reinterpret the holiday.

Let’s recap. Christmas occurs on the 25th day of December and we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ on this day. Thus you might reasonable expect Jesus to have a birthday of 12/25/00 or some such, but this is not the case. Contemporary Christian scholarship now says Jesus was born a few years earlier. Moreover, we also think Jesus was born in a different season than winter. (Else the shepherds would not be out in their fields watching their flocks by night.)

So where did this December 25th business come from? It came from Pope Julius I. In 350AD he declared Christ’s birth should be celebrated on this day. Why this day? Lots of European Pagans celebrated on December 25th, which is close to the Winter Solstice. I figured Pope Julius I intended to glom onto the pagans’ holiday and make it his own--typical Roman syncretism, baptizing a pagan holiday and declaring it to be Christian. A quick review of the Pagan religions operating in Europe during this period will turn up a fair number of coincidences between Rome’s rituals and pagan ones. As a good Calvinist I wasn’t going to participate in any of that Roman Catholic—Pagan syncretism.

This extended to the Pagan practice of bringing an evergreen tree into one’s house. Animism believes that spirits inhabit things. And the spirit of the tree is strong enough to overcome the spirit of winter, as evidenced by the tree’s ability to remain green through the winter. This notion of spirits in trees is why one knocks on wood. It is to invoke the spirit of the tree to ward off misfortune.

That is just Animist thinking, and I was no Animist then and I am not one now.

Thus I decided there would be no Christmas tree in my house. You can keep your Roman syncretism and Pagan Animism. I would have nothing to do with it.

And thus the trap was laid.

The weeks leading up to Christmas came and I did not buy any Christmas tree or decorations. I would see trees on sale at the shopping center, and I’d summon my will to walk past.

Mary and I planned to fly back to Michigan the day after Christmas to see our families. I had the week between Christmas and New Years off, but Mary had to work at the radio station on Christmas morning. This meant that she got up at oh-dark-thirty and left for work hours before I rolled out of bed.

Christmas morning dawned and I awoke alone in the apartment. Padding around in bare feet, I looked around. There was no Christmas tree.

Someone had stolen Christmas, and that someone was ME.

Something snapped and I had to do something. I scrounged around the apartment looking for materials. We were just married so we didn’t have a lot of extras. I found a broom, a sheet, a kitchen chair and a table lamp. The kitchen chair had a cheesy green Naugahyde upholstery seat and the sheet was a pastel green color. I set the chair in the corner with the table lamp sitting on it. Then I fed the broom handle through the back of the chair and placed the sheet over it. It looked like a chair covered with a sheet. Then I took some books (I’ve always had plenty of those.) and put them around the perimeter of the sheet, pulling it out to give the assembly a sort of lumpy conical shape. The lamp beneath gave off a sick pastel light.

It was the best I could do and it sucked.

Eventually Mary came home from work. I don’t know what she thought of the Christmas Chair, but we sat on the couch that Christmas evening in its muted glow. It was good to be together.

The next day, we flew back to Grand Rapids and enjoyed our families with their real Christmas trees for a few days.

The first thing after we got back, Mary and I went to the Big-T Lumberland and found the biggest artificial Christmas tree they sold. It was 60% off.

We still use it decades later. It has gotten threadbare in places. I've patched broken parts and Mary suggested getting a new one last year.

I wouldn't think of it.