A Plume of Ashes

In the grand scheme of things, getting swept into a new church and losing a familiar set of friends ... well, it doesn't exactly rate very high on the list of Life's Great Tragedies. I was plagued by no marauding hoards. There were no barbarians coming over the walls and no lions waiting in the arena. No earthquakes, fire or flood. There was only a pastor back home who had resigned from a church that no longer wanted his old-fashion notions about sticking to the Bible and only to the Bible, and the faithful band of followers who went with him when he left. There was only a church split. That was all.

But for me, that "all" meant, quite simply, everything. I needed my home to be still - to stay where it was when I left it, so that I could return to it, so that I could fly down through the cloud layer and into Portland's airport at the end of each semester and step back into my life, just like I stepped back into my favorite jeans.

Some of the other female students used to pack their jeans and hide them away so they could put them on again in bus stations, highway gas stations, and airports on their way home. I felt no need to do this. I could cheerfully wear a long enough skirt outside the dorm and keep my legs properly clad in pantyhose like a lady ought to do. I could wait until I got home to be comfortable again. Being a student was not hard for me once I got used to college courses, but being away from home was. Chafing at it only made it worse.

The first time I got off the plane in Pensacola, the air was so thick and hot that I nearly burst into tears of panic. Who could breathe that air? A person would need gills to breathe "air" that heavy and hot and wet. There were no mountains. No huge evergreens, either. I missed the Douglas Fir of the Northwest so badly that I used to stand on the walkway outside our nine-story dorm (the tallest building in town at the time), look up, and repeat to myself, "There are trees where are live that are taller than this building. There are trees where I live that are taller than this building."

I kept my mind far from the awareness that my home was at least six hours away by plane and that my nonrefundable tickets wouldn't work at an earlier date in any case. I learned to breathe, and to function in the sticky atmosphere of written and unwritten rules. I stopped brazenly appearing in public without makeup on my face, and I learned to dust our room or clean our bathroom or vacuum our floor adequately and to make my bed in time for the daily room check (and I resigned myself to accept a few demerits for doing it inadequately for the annual White Glove Inspection). I learned not to say what I meant unless I was in a private conversation with personal friends. I adjusted. I wanted my degree, and I could adjust. As long as I knew that the fir trees, and my bluejeans, and my friends and my church and my family were all waiting for me, I could concentrate on what I was trying to do.

The tranquility of the Mount St. Helens region was shattered in the spring of 1980, when the volcano stirred from its long repose, shook, swelled, and exploded back to life. The local people rediscovered that they had an active volcano in their midst, and millions of people in North America were reminded that the active--and potentially dangerous--volcanoes of the United States are not restricted to Alaska and Hawaii.

The national news made the eruption of Mount Saint Helens sound as if all of Portland were about to be submerged in molten lava. From the opposite corner of the continent, I wondered if my family were safe - if the house had felt the tremors - if hot ash had caused my father's car to stall in traffic or set fires as it fell on my friends and family. An "active volcano" cannot be good news. And yet, my mother's voice was perfectly cheerful in our normal weekly phone call. She just went on about my brothers' basketball teams or my nephews and my sister and what was going on with the New Church.

"Mom! What is going on? Are you guys okay? What about the volcano?!"

"The what? Oh! Yes. St. Helens blew up."

"'Blew up'?!"

"Well, it's not that big a deal. There is a lot of ash all over the place, and it is very hard to get rid of. It turns to cement if it gets wet."

"......"

"So, anyway ..."

The mountain blew. The city got coated in ash. Everyone was safe. Everyone but me.

* * *

I came home that summer and saw the second eruption, from where we were driving on a small highway to the coast. I saw my friends and I saw The Empire Strikes Back. I wore bluejeans and I didn't tuck in my shirt. I sent KJ's high school class ring back to him, and my Crime Fighter broke my heart, and I went back to school again in September. I pledged not to use any alcohol or tobacco and swore I had not done so while I was home in the summer, and no, a floor leader did not need to accompany me off campus for my own good. I was confident in my own resistance to those temptations. I had some dates in the dating parlor. I stopped walking down the aisle at the altar calls. I started taking more education courses and began to enjoy school.

And then I came home for Christmas with my friends. The church kicked out the pastor, my friends scattered to the winds, the New Church consumed my family, and under the surface of my wooded slopes, everything began to break apart in my soul.

For the winter and spring of 1981, while I was tucked away in the Independent Baptist section of the Bible Belt, waiting to turn 21 so that I could leave campus without at least one other student, my parents worked joyfully among the faithful band of followers in the New Church. While I studied my chapters and verses in Bible Doctrines 202, my folks wrote to me about the Doctrines of Grace, and T.U.L.I.P., about Calvin and Puritans and Reformers. While I was participating in my second Spring Revival Week, wondering if the Great Evangelist Bill Rice the Third always told that same story about having to shoot his horse, and if he always cried at that same part of the story, my family was learning to sing from an older Presbyterian hymnal and talking about the blessing of Predestination and the proof texts for Limited Atonement.

Inside my modest clothing and behind my better and better grades, the tectonic plates had begun to shift. I used the same Bible I had always used. As I studied it the same way, with the same methods and the same desire to hear the voice of the Holy Spirit as I studied, the last of my private certainties began to send warning ash into the air. Christianity looks different in the Bible Belt than it does in Portland, Oregon. And the Bible, I was discovering, not only looks different being outlined by a quietly studious teacher than it does being brandished by weeping evangelists, but it also looks different being outlined by that same teacher once that teacher discovers the Doctrines of Grace.

The Bible, it turned out, does not explain itself.

And the teachers can be wrong.