Square (the Hippy essay, continued)

I was working on my first master’s degree at Northern Michigan University, where I had also received my undergrad. During the four years I’d spent there studying English Ed, I was dating a guy named Michael, who grew up Lutheran (as I did) and had connections to the Lutheran Campus Ministry, a relatively small group led by a pastor named Jon.

Jon was unlike most pastors I knew. He had a degree in social work and ran a nonprofit that provided counseling services to other clergy. He practiced tai chi and drank green tea. He spoke with a quiet respect and reverence not just for matters of faith but for nature as God’s creation. And on Wednesday evenings at nine in a small, candle-lit University Center room, he tipped a wooden mallet against a brass bell he brought back from his Peace Corps days in Nepal. The bell echoed gently, seven resonant tolls. For the next hour, we sang the liturgy in quiet harmony, shared roses and thorns from our drama-filled college lives, breathed in the heady aroma of sweetgrass from an Indian reservation, received the Eucharist, murmured prayers, and listened as Jon shared a few verses from Scripture and maybe an anecdote from one of his travels.

On one of the very first of these gatherings I attended with Michael, Jon shared the New Testament story of Jesus feeding the five thousand. It was a chapter I knew well, an often-referenced narrative in my Sunday School classes as one of those fabulous miracles. Two loaves, two fishes. And He fed all those people. It was magical.

But Jon suggested another way to understand the story. What if, he posed, Jesus had shared such a message of hope and love with the multitude that those who had food with them—tucked deep in pockets, hidden away in the bottom of a basket—were moved to share what little they had with those around them? What if, instead of magically materializing from the hands of the Savior, the sustenance that fed the five thousand was supplied by changed hearts, by newly-generous souls?

A funny knot had positioned itself within my gut. But that’s not what happened, I thought. It was a miracle. Jesus performed miracles, that’s just what He did. I sat uncomfortably, probably pulling at a hangnail, likely crossing and uncrossing my legs. What kind of pastor is this guy, contradicting the Bible like that?

As weeks went on, though, I returned Wednesday after Wednesday, maybe because my friends were going, or because it helped me feel connected spiritually to my boyfriend, but ultimately because I was powerfully drawn to the new perspectives offered by the conversations that took place. I soon realized that Jon wasn’t misinterpreting Scripture; he was simply presenting it from another angle. We studied Paul Tillich and Diedrich Bonhoeffer. We slowed down our perpetually-occupied bodies by learning tai chi. We took field trips to walk labyrinths. It was though all my life I had seen my faith, my belief in God, as a square. And now that square had been jostled out of place, and it became clear to me what had been true all along: that two-dimensional square was only one side of a three-dimensional cube.

It was a miracle, I realized. It was a bigger miracle than I thought.