Campus Ministry

I was just another guy in class, older than most, grayer than most. I wrote poems about poems, or poems about death, or poems for my children. There was nothing about me that said "minister". I wanted it that way. I wanted to be just another student. Just a grad in the writing program. I wanted to be something other than "that minister on TV".

Then one night I was "outed" by a woman student, a faculty member in journalism. She had suffered from a concussion recently and was trying to learn poetry again. She was loud and awkward. She believed everyone in the room wanted to hear her story every week. I was chatting with another student when she stated quite loudly, "You're the minister, aren't you?" Heads turned. Eyebrows raised.

"Yes," I replied. What else could I say? It was true. She preceded to tell me something about her "crackpot brother-in-law who was some kind of Pentacostalist" somewhere. Doreen, with whom I was conversing, turned to me. "Is that true?" Yes it was. I downplayed it. I thought if people knew I was a minister they would put me in a box, talk in strange whispers around me. I would be dismissed along with all the other religious figures they had already rejected for being irrelevant to meaningful discourse. Far better, I reasoned, that they see me as one of the crowd, one like them, one not burdened by the requirements of right belief and doctrine. Like Doreen, for example, who was no longer part of any church. She believed it too divorced from the environment, the natural world, too interested in power and domination.

I don't recall whether Kevin was in the room that night or not. I do recall that on the last night of class, at a local coffee shop, we read poetry to each other and to the one or two patrons who sat around small round tables. Kevin approached me. He was wearing his kilt, his hair in a ponytail. "Is it true that you went to the G.T.U.?" The Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. I earned my graduate degree in Theology there. "Yes," I responded. He sat down.

"I am thinking about applying to P.L.T.S. in the fall. What do you think?" P.L.T.S. is the Lutheran seminary at the G.T.U.

"Its great," I said. We talked about Berkeley. We talked about call. I wished him well.

A couple of weeks later at the end of Multicultural Studies a classmate approached me. "I understand you know everything about the Bible." She was having trouble with the story of Laban, Jacob, Leah, and Rachel. She wanted a resource. A week after that I rode with Doreen north to Litchfeild, Nebraska to judge a high school poetry contest. On the way we talked about school. On the way back we talked about whether religion could be relevant to her life.

You're the minister, aren't you? I guess so.