It is impossible to explain the depth and expanse of the power that these movies had on me. I began to think differently and see myself differently. They made me cry, they made me laugh out loud, they made me sing. They made me a lone and brave warrior. I was a blank tablet for them. My imagination was ablaze. Would I ever grow up out of Hollywood’s World War Two dramas and musical comedies?
One day during my winter break my father and I were coming through the gate after a walk, and out of curiosity he reached into my back pocket and pulled out the paperback western The Valley of Dry Bones by Arthur Henry Gooden. As we talked he gave me the gut-wrenching news, which I had no choice but to accept: I would not be going back to the American boarding school where I had studied for five years. Instead I would be going to one of the Anglo-Indian schools across the valley, one of the schools against which we competed in sports. They do not want you back, he said, and I cannot afford to send you there anyway.
Strong bonds of friendships had formed at the American school with Richard, Ray, Ramesh, Jeremy, and many others. I had spent a boyhood there collecting ferns and beetles and chasing butterflies, the exquisite colors gleaming in their bouncy, erratic, unrepeatable flight and in the openings and closings of their wings after they alighted. There were so many species then, and the sightings never ceased to be new discoveries for me. Those creatures were manifestations of the resilient, transitory, and fragmentary nature of the earth’s beauty. Furthermore, visions in my head about my being a winner for our sports teams in the interschool Olympics had become part of the reason for my existence.
I also roamed the hillside forest and had secret places in it that were all my own. There was a gentle rhododendron slope with red clay that I loved. There was a shining slope with tall pines and an old abandoned cabin with broken doors in which I loitered. I loved the aroma of the pines and the ground beneath, a thick and soft carpet of pine needles. This second hillside dropped quickly and the trail led down to the stream from Dhobi Ghat, the washers’ village, and up the next mountain with a lone tree in the middle of a clearing on the ridge. We could see it clearly every day from Ridgewood, the young boys’ dorm. I called it Lone Tree Mountain and dreamed of hiking there someday.
The President Cleveland sailed on to Honolulu, and then when we saw the gull we knew we were approaching the United States mainland. I was met at the port by Ted, a tall, businesslike young man, the treasurer of the student body of San Francisco Theological Seminary in San Anselmo, fifteen miles north of San Francisco. It is set on a hill in the shadow of Mount Tamalpais and its forested slopes. My room was on the second floor of the single men’s dormitory, Montgomery Hall, a medieval castle-looking building with ivy on the walls, hardwood floors, and big windows. This would be good for me. I would not be alone here.
Among my classmate friends was a darkish, smartly dressed young man who carried himself with reserve, dignity, and poise. He became class president, to no one’s surprise. Pat and I spoke of how the seminary was split between liberals and conservatives, liberals being those who embraced the modern methods of interpretation and conservatives being those who resisted them. I quickly found myself caught in the murky middle with burning questions having to do with the doctrines I had been given to believe since I was a boy, and which I now began to test against the brightest of my fellow students and even my teachers. One tall former baseball player, Don, a senior, blew me away with an answer to a question I had on atonement. I could not beat him in ping-pong either. Bill’s room was at the end of the hall. He was a stocky man, a weightlifter. He was a gentle soul too, and a scholar who could read German. He told me about Karl Barth, the theologian who was all the rage here in seminary and all over the country, some of whose volumes he had, though I would have to wait to read them in upper level classes, he said. I liked and trusted Bill and visited with him often. Soon I was in awe of Barth and promised myself that I would master his work some day. Bill said that it was Barth who was responsible for the theological boom that was taking place in Europe and America. Surely Barth was saying something of pivotal importance, the guts of which I should know.
Dr. Arnold Come was the authority on Barthian theology. He had just returned from Germany, where he had studied with Barth himself. A serious man, he lectured with notes that were painstakingly precise. He was teaching a system, consistency and coherence were all-important, and every word counted.
The other theologian was the young, playful new graduate from Princeton Theological Seminary, Dr. Benjamin Reist. Both his lectures and his preaching were articulate, funny, and theatrical, charged with an irrepressible theological swagger. We smiled when he spoke. Someone signed Barth’s name on the roll that was being passed around in class. Norm Roddick’s impersonation of him was perfect on a Friday entertainment night. His palm stuck to the table, resisting release. When Billy Graham came to speak at the seminary, those two professors sat in the balcony as a sign of rebuff. It was widely known that they disapproved of his visit.
Hard work prevailed in Montgomery Hall. The muffled sound of typewriters emanated from the rooms late into the night. I would listen to the radio at times to the sounds of San Francisco, the jazz, the hit songs like You Send Me. Songs have a way of stamping an era with their seal. They shape the soul too. The voices, the lyrics, the rhythm, the melody, and the musical accompaniment all can blend so well that they penetrate, they escalate you to new domains of being and nonbeing. In my room I swayed and drifted with them, hand in hand with the girl of my dreams, from Ferris wheel and boardwalk out to the beach.
The songs I was hearing now had a different gestalt than the mild Because of You and A Kiss to Build a Dream On, which I had heard on the All India Radio Hit Parade broadcast from what was then Ceylon. These songs now conveyed a dark waterfront ephemerality. Something of a painful transition, perhaps a tipping point long in the making, a smoke gets in your eyes goodbye, was transpiring in the underground of the human soul. On the other hand, Be Thou My Vision and Come Labor On, two forceful older hymns I learned in my hymnody class, refurbished my reasons for being here in seminary. Pilgrim reader, you should have heard the vigorous sound of our class as we sang them in the stone monastery-style classroom building. I had never heard such powerful singing or such unsentimental and muscular religious music.
If I could only compose this book in musical notes! My symphony is about the still of the night. It starts with the jazz in The Hungry Eye of my imagination. Overtones of the hit songs come and go throughout. The threatening undercurrents of the Bay are realized by the basses and cellos, and the foghorns are heard as deep rumbling undertones. The sadness of Alcatraz, the rocky refuge of Sin and Death, and the ballad of the lonely young man longing for love are conveyed by an extended piano solo using deep, rich chords.
The music is propelled forward by the tensions, each in turn, between the seminary and the city, the East and the West, and the young man and the city’s promise of love. A male chorus singing the great hymns in the distance provides a counterpoint both to the flutes and gongs and movie songs of India and the Far East and to the desperate, abstract sounds of the city’s night secrets. “High King of heaven, my victory won” and the other lines of the hymns, not yet phrased in contemporary and gender-inclusive language, come out of the hills softly in the north wind and float mellifluously on the water like the lanterns of peace, swelling into a crescendo as they approach the city’s harbor. The Golden Gate Bridge, the arc of opportunity, reconciliation, and welcome, is rendered by the soaring lyrics of a soprano with a lucid, lambent voice pouring down like the full moon upon the big city, the waters, and Marin county, Tamalpais looming, on the north side.
Down the other end of the hallway from where Bill’s room was I would hear someone playing Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini on his stereo, and I also remember hearing the old American folk song