The Test at Winona Lake

"It was a test," he told me, after pulling me aside. "It's a story I thought you'd like, a story I wanted to tell you." We were in the den, a couple rooms away from the jabbering coming the family reunion that had grown up around the visit of this distinguished uncle and aunt from California.

My uncle was an accomplished academic who had become a college president after receiving a Ph.D. in chemistry and, during the war, working on the Manhattan Project. He'd always carried himself with a level of sophistication that distinguished him from anyone else in the family, even though he was born and reared just down the road. He was an old man now, retired. He took me aside because he knew his nephew, also an academic, liked stories and even wrote them. We were well out of earshot of the rest of the tribe so he didn't seem particularly furtive, nor should he have been. 

"This was way back when I was courting your Aunt Trudy," he said. Let's give the moment an approximate date: maybe 1935, give or take a year or two. 

"Your grandpa told your Aunt Trudy that he believed it might be nice if her boyfriend--that's me--would accompany the family to Winona Lake, to some Bible conference--lots of singing and speakers, a rambunctious bunch of believers for a staid Christian Reformed preacher like your grandpa." From his chair across from the front window, he tried, not hard, to hold back a smile. I was sitting on the piano bench. "Jim, you know, maybe, something about Winona Lake?" he asked.

I did. My father took us, his family, to Winona Lake once when I was a boy. Some family went along, including a couple of cousins my age, all Christian Reformed children of warm and pious parents. We knew what it was like to feel "power in the blood." Like our dads, all of whom were vets, we loved singing "Onward Christian Soldiers"--that's number 449 in the old hymnal.

But what happened under the tent was unlike anything we could have imagined. Scrambled end punctuation on the stemwinder's every sentence was so strange that we doubled up with laughter. "Hallelujah!" some crazy just down the row would yell, and we'd try to hold it in which only made it worse. 

"Grandpa Schaap," I said, "my grandpa the preacher, went to Winona Lake with the family?" I said.

"And me with," he said. He was trying to tell it straight, but a smile undercut his resolve. "It was a test," he said, and he was serious. "That's what it was--it was a test." He shook his head. "Your grandpa Schaap never asked me a thing about that weekend, didn't talk about it on the way home even, and it never came up in any conversation thereafter." He shrugged his shoulders. "It was a test."

"And you passed?" I said.

He shrugged his shoulders, chuckled a bit. "I married his daughter," he said.

Uncle Roger was raised in the Reformed Church, six miles away in another wooden shoe village named Cedar Grove. What's more, he'd gone to Hope College, not Calvin. But I couldn't help thinking that the test wasn't a tribal thing. Grandpa himself had gone to Hope. It was bigger.

"Your grandpa never brought it up, and for years it seemed to me to be something of a puzzle. Why did he want me along?"  Broad smile. Huge smile. "It was a test," he said, and then, "I should get back to the other room." He bounced his wrist on his knee. "I told myself that Jim would like that story," he said.  

He was right. It's stuck with me so fast that forty years after Uncle Roger told me I'm telling you. It came to me when I was reading Steve Mahonnet-Vanderwell's September 1 piece on The Twelve, about "concentric rings of purity" and his own "tangled relationship with evangelicals."

And then, too, Michael Sandel's essay in yesterday's NY Times, a regular Jeremiad on "disdain for the less educated" as "the last acceptable prejudice." Uncle Roger's story came to me as a  grandpa of college-age kids making decisions about goals and calling, and considering my own preferences, my wishes, my dreams for them in a culture and a nation that is very surely at risk of breaking up. 

It's difficult for some of us--for me, at least--to fight the very pride that did in Adam and Eve, to try to hide our discomfort, even our disdain for those who are not within our own "concentric rings of purity." Not showing that discomfort is one thing; it's even harder not to feel disdain.

"It was a test," my Uncle Roger told me. He'd come to realize what Grandpa had created was a test of his soon-to-be son-in-law. It was all about pride, as so much of our lives tends to be.