Icing

Boston was as green as my Girl Scout uniform. I envisioned grinning fiddleheads that would feel like home. My brain and breath were called to seminary. My stowaway body bounced in my mother’s Subaru.

It was April, and prophecies of an ice storm were hilarious and heretical. We would not miss Prospective Students’ Weekend, two days of wooing, two miles from Harvard.

“The love of God leaps off every page.” I was enchanted by the guidebook, full-color gospel glossy.

“We’ll see what they’re like.” My mother was more cautious, always. “If they’re full of crap, you’ll go to Princeton.”

No. I was adamant. These people would be my people. These words would be my charter. This seminary would be my Shangri-La, except I would never use words like “Shangri-La.” Shangri-La was for universalists and tree people. Jesus was for me. Boston was for me.

My father had died, and my diabetes had moved in with an eating disorder. But I had my mother, and my New Testament, and my calling to convince a gruesome world that everything would be okay if they intellectually assented to the correct propositions. A tight weave of certainty, I had made macrame of my fears all four years of college, hanging dogmas in windows.

Holcomb-Bernet Seminary shone six hours away.

Holcomb-Bernet had accepted me, so the weekend would be mere confirmation of my coronation. For some reason I had also applied to Yale and Princeton, but the former was too frightening, and the latter had yet to say “yes” anyway. Clearly God had prepared a path to Holcomb-Bernet for his greenest girl.

Holcomb-Bernet was prepared for the ice storm, which perplexed us as we checked in.

“You may be here for a long weekend,” the bursar chuckled, handing us name tags and “HGS” soda koozies.

“I won’t kick ya out even if you’re here six days,” our host promised as we plonked our suitcases in her dorm room. Holcomb-Bernet had assigned us Sarah Colburn, a third-year Master of Divinity student who agreed to let prospective students and their mothers sleep on her floor. She was pale as a birch but fluorescent when she spoke. She spoke constantly.

“I have three classes, and then I’m writing a sermon that nobody wants to hear. But we’ll talk tonight.” She pulled her hair into a braid so tight her eyebrows changed.

Meanwhile, Holcomb-Bernet was flowing like butter, pats of proverbs settling us in. We sang like a thousand tongues in the opening chapel service, a buoyant dean names Dean declaring us good.

“We believe you are here for a reason,” he soothed with confidence. “Whether or not we become your seminary home, we are here together for such a time as this!”

“I love him,” I whispered.

“Take it all in,” my mother did not whisper. Concern coaxed her dormant Brooklyn accent to the surface. Sheepshead Bay seawater sloshed in her eyes.

The rain turned sleety by lunch, but I was too busy calculating carbohydrates to worry. I didn’t even notice that I was making news.

“Yahhhhh,” my mother whispered.

“What?”

She jabbed her chin across the salad bar. A wiggly boy was glancing at me like a life raft. Just over his shoulder, a wooly man was grinning in my direction.

I felt myself flush like a radish. This was all unorthodox. I had been four years of invisible at Vassar, a lonely party dress surrounded by men who loved my brain. I had been Wendy looking after Lost Boys who had no idea I was female.

My mother claimed that I attracted attention everywhere, too blinkered to notice all the noticing. Exasperated, she developed a code word—a vaguely Swedish “yahhhhh”—to inform me when I was being actively appreciated. I rarely believed her but appreciated the effort.

But not even I could doubt this revelation. The Holcomb-Bernet lunch boys knew I was female.

“Such nice tomatoes!” The wiggly boy spoke, banging his head on the sneeze guard. “Tomatoes in an ice storm! We are blessed to be in America!”

His voice was not from America. “I’m Pavel.” He reached to shake my hand, covering his wrist in ranch dressing.

I laughed and shook his finger. “Angie.” My mother had strategically vanished.

“You are considering studying here?”

“I am. I think this is a very special place.” I built a Babel of greens on my plate.

“Me too. They preach the real Gospel, you know? Truth and love.”

Pavel was Pentecostal, I would learn, but “not the frightful kind. Everyone has Spirit within, not just the few.” His family had fled Romania when he was ten, and now they sold Range Rovers in Philadelphia. He was twenty-four, many chapters and verses ahead of my twenty-two, but he couldn’t shake the call to minister.

“Perhaps a chaplain,” he explained. “To soothe the sorrows. And you, Angie?”

“I’ve felt some sort of call to since I was thirteen.” I liked his dark eyes and ebullient eyebrows. I couldn’t stop talking, manic with the electricity that overtakes me when I’m comfortable.

“God is good all the time. All the time, God is good.” I would learn this was Pavel’s bedrock. “You will bring Jesus great joy.”

That was my intention, but first we had to hurry to our 3:00 gift, a talk by the famous Larry Jenks. Some sort of psychologist-pastor-seraph hybrid, his snow thatch of hair lit the chapel like a burning bush.

For all his soothing books, Larry was consumed today, Amos extracted from the 8th century B.C. and air-dropped in Boston. “You have come to serve the Lord.” There was weeping within two miles of his voice. “Yet my plea is that you let the Lord serve you. You must believe yourselves loved. You must know to your bowels that you are irrevocably loved.”

“Bowels.” The wooly man was beside me, unconcerned that my mother was near. “Bowels are a big word in the New Testament, ya know. Holy holy bowels.”

“God uses vowels and bowels.” Was I flirting? Was I nestling in wordplay, my private roadside chapel whenever street signs are faint?

“I’m God’s guy Garry.” Wooly shook my hand.

“I’m God’s girl Angie.”

Garry was from Asheville, and he would be the only person other than my mother who I would hear use the word “crap” over the next five days. He was already assistant pastor at a Southern Baptist chapel. “Preachin’ since I was still in He-Man underoos.” He wasn’t proud, just reporting facts.

Larry was getting loud up there, his hair turning into the Holy Ghost. “You can’t lose Jesus. You absolutely cannot. Please make this your message. Please let everything serve this. Genesis to Revelation: you cannot lose God’s love.”

“Damn straight.” Garry liked Larry.

“I like Larry,” my mother agreed.

Sarah liked Larry, too. “Larry Jenks is not an accurate representation of Holcomb-Bernet.” She crocheted wildly, cross-legged on her bed.

“What do you mean?” I had already decided that everything lovely was an accurate representation of Holcomb-Bernet.

“I mean just go to class tomorrow and listen.”

The Subaru was frosted now, and we all agreed we’d probably be here an extra night.

“Ice in April!” Pavel hooted. “It’s exquisite!”

“It’s Boston,” Dean Dean admitted. “It’s common.”

“It’s splendid.” Pavel had his own certainties. “I’m so happy we’re here.”

We walked around the bookstore together before our first class, Pavel a walking literary journal. “Have you read Boy Meets Girl? The concept of courtship rather than dating, exquisite! Do you know Dietrich Bonhoeffer? Do you have My Utmost for His Highest? I’ll buy you a copy. It changed my life.”

After “God is good, all the time,” this was Pavel’s favorite verse. America had changed his life, but so had Billy Graham and cheesesteak and Bruce Springsteen. “That man is God-haunted!”

“I think Pavel is falling in love with you,” my mother observed as we settled into Homiletics 101.

“Nobody falls in love with me.” I was simply reading from the Gospel of the past 22 years.

Dr. Tompkins read from the Gospel to begin class, and then proceeded to plunge us into the ninth circle of hell.

Not since Jonathan Edwards violently shook Boston’s shoulders with “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” had a roomful of earnest believers felt so unsafe. Dr. Tompkins did not want us to overestimate grace. Dr. Tompkins did not want us to “soft-pedal” the severity of the Most High King. Dr. Tompkins did not want us to put people in a “warm bath” without ensuring they had “made a decision for Christ.”

I had assumed there was a hell. I had not realized it was in Boston. I had not realized I also assumed no one was actually going there. I had not realized I was a liberal.

“Dr. Tompkins tried to get Holcomb-Bernet to stop allowing women into the M.Div. program.” Sarah gently placed this grenade in my hands when I reported on the day.

“What?”

“He and his good old St. Paul will not suffer a woman to preach. He’s not alone.” Sarah had waited for this moment. “I am one of six female M. Div.’s here.”

I felt Sheepshead Bay humidity rising from my mother’s breath. I thought of the guidebook. “But there are so many women here . . .”

“Yep, all the good little M.A.’s, future pastors’ wives. Sorry, did I say that out loud?” Sarah shrugged. “This place will turn you into a feminist.”

The ice was now four inches thick on the Subaru. The dining hall had run out of salad, so I took to eating exclusively mini bags of pretzel rods.

“Thy pretzel rod and thy staff, they comfort me,” Garry observed. “Can’t I get you a chicken nugget or something, lady?”

“I’m good.”

“You’re going to get scurvy.” Garry’s concern was softened by his need to break into air guitar at that moment.

I tried to describe Garry to Sarah. “He’s the kind of guy who throws tin foil in the microwave to watch it burn. He wants everyone to think he listens to basement blues CDs with names like ‘Gonna Stick A Finger In Your Eye.’ But he’s actually quite Opie, and he has never kissed a woman.”

“You’re too funny to be here, you know.” Sarah wasn’t laughing anymore. “And you love Jesus. And this fundamentalist crap is going to burn off in the next year or two. Mark my words.” It was the third “crap” I’d heard in three days.

Meanwhile, Pavel was emptying the vending machines of pretzel rods and presenting them to me like illegal manna. “You like them. I don’t want anyone else to buy them up.”

I was a dutiful virgin. I hadn’t realized this might not be important. I had not realized I also wanted to ride in Range Rovers with Romanians and forget about “courtship.”

The bonus ice time meant bonus classes for prospective students. Dr. Hathaway told us that witches and warlocks roamed America under the banner of human rights. Dr. Ganff seemed satisfied that a high percentage of people were going to hell.

I was now convinced that no one was going to hell, as long as we could get out of it. Ice formed kaleidoscope fractals while my scales peeled off. I picked at them, pimply dogmas angry and red in Sarah’s bathroom. I wanted the witches and deans and air guitarists and absurdists and refugees in God’s greedy green heaven.

“Did Larry Jenks get iced in with us?” I whispered to my mother. “I need to talk to Larry Jenks.”

I needed to talk to Jesus, who speak constantly. I felt naked, my knots going limp. The plants were falling out of my window.

I needed to call Princeton, the orange town.

“Yes, hello.” I whispered. My mother stood guard in case anyone asked why I was late for New Testament 203. “I’m trying to get in touch with the admissions department. I’m wondering if there’s any chance a decision has been made about Angela Townsend?”

They would be sending letters later this week, the jaunty man promised.

“Yes, but I’m stuck in Boston in an ice storm, and I’m very eager . . .”

“I’ll call you. I’ll call you personally.” He had no idea, but he sensed my urgency.

“OK. Thank you, Mr. . . .”

“Green. Ben Green.”

For three days of ice, pretzels, and anguish, my phone was a stale éclair in my hand, silent and surly.

Sarah grew wild-eyed, John the Baptist in baggy overalls. “Just promise me you’re not coming here.”

“I’m still waiting on Princeton.”

“You don’t need Princeton. You’ll serve God. Just not here.”

“Mom,” I asked, “am I getting obsessed with Princeton the same way I was obsessed with this place? You know how I get.” I tasted it like the salt that was probably poisoning me at this point.

“I’m so confused. I just want to serve Jesus. I just became a universalist. I just want to tell everyone that they are loved forever. I want to climb trees with warlocks and Jesus people. I actually want to move to New Jersey.”

I had never felt my innards change so quickly, but salt and light interact with ice in unorthodox ways. Pavel was right. It was exquisite.

My mother was also right. “You are going to Princeton. I am certain to my marrow. We need to get the hell out of here and get some protein in you.”

On the sixth day, ivy cracked the ice, and Pavel tucked a piece behind my ear. “Resurrection is everywhere! God is good all the time!”

On the seventh day, Ben Green called. “Miss Townsend, I am proud to welcome you to the Princeton Theological Seminary class of 2006. Well, if you still want to join us.”

“Pavel, how do you feel about New Jersey?” I asked my favorite Pentecostal.

“Bruce Springsteen’s ancestral lands! I am fond of New Jersey!”

“God is fond of you, Pavel.” Feeling safe splits my seams like heaven’s propped-open door.

“God is fond of everyone,” my mother started her Subaru to melt the last glacier off the tailpipe.

Our suitcases were heavy with bags of pretzels and signed books by Larry Jenks. Pavel went back to selling Range Rovers and wrote me a letter saying he was not ready for marriage. I expect to see Garry on television. I am confident Sarah is setting people free.

Princeton Theological Seminary provided three of the sweetest years of my life, deconstruction and reconstruction and divine comedy. It changed my life.

I did not become a pastor, but St. Paul said it would have been okay with him either way. I am the writer for an animal sanctuary, and my best friends include one-eyed cats, Presbyterians, and atheists. I sleep in on Sundays mornings and write essays about the unruly love of God. I have never felt so close to Jesus, so orange and so green. My mother and I still jab each other about boys and mercy and crap. I’m still afraid, so I hang crystals in the windows.

I haven’t been able to stomach pretzels since 2003. All the time, God is good.