I was a college freshman. It took all of ten minutes in the student union to become the arch enemy of two sophomores and a junior. I was playing pool, and doing pretty well, when the upperclassmen decided they could interrupt my game and start their own. The force with which they felt empowered to interrupt was immediately visible in their arrogant smirks and effortless invasion of my personal space. I was from the south, where people's general concept of human interaction enjoyed a level of courtesy a few notches below God and his angels, so this was truly a foreign engagement. Only a week in, I was still unfamiliar with the unwritten rules and customs of college life. I freely admit I was grossly naïve. In high school I had managed to avoid a single ugly confrontation. My high school was in the upstate of South Carolina. My college was in northern Indiana. Maybe it was not behavior unique to a particular region. Perhaps it was just a beginner's course on the subject of "dog eat dog" all newly minted college students were meant to learn. On this subject I was not a good student.

The college at which I found myself was a Christian college. What exactly that was supposed to mean is widely up for debate. But much of it could be formulated in the "Christian Life Statement" all incoming freshman were forced to sign. Signing the statement meant I would agree to abstaining from a list of unacceptable activities. Activities like watching movies, growing a beard or letting my hair touch my collar. I also agreed to not smoke (never had) or use seven specific words considered "obscene" (pretty sure I had in the third grade). Of course, the big one was drinking alcohol. Now, truthfully, I had never drank alcohol. So, this one was not a big deal for me. But it was a big deal for many others and some friends who had a serious problem with alcohol never got the help they desperately needed. So, unless you were a missionary to France; or at a state dinner with the governor; or at your Catholic friend's wedding, we were not supposed to drink the stuff. The presumption was that following all these guidelines would keep us all looking like good Christians. It has been a while, but what I do not remember in the agreement was "do unto others as you would have others do to you." That was not in there. Anywhere. Love one another. That was not there either. Anywhere. Come to think of it, "thou shalt not murder" was not in there either. But I guess that was covered in the state's penal code. Anyway, hair cutting: In. Love people: when it was convenient.

Perhaps this dissonance I felt when confronted with the upperclassman, who felt empowered by the school's culture to bully their way into my pool game, was just me. Perhaps I was just young and dumb. Inexperienced as I was in these college "games," there was always the prospect that one day I would come to understand and evolve into an arrogant upperclassman myself. It could happen. The following years I would strut around campus, confident in my capacity to order underclassman to wear their underwear on the outside of their clothes. Afterall, Christian values were measured to the height of the lowest hanging fruit. It was easy to see beard stubble growing on a freshman's chin. A much more difficult task was discerning the way old college traditions foster antagonistic encounters between total strangers. But this is college! This is what you sign up for, right? I was so naïve. In my defense, none of this was in the catalogue.

I do not know if there was an actual blacklist. By that I mean a piece of paper wherein recalcitrant freshman names were literally written down to be brought back up at trial one day. Be that as it may, I was told I was on the "blacklist." This was shared with me at breakfast the morning following the pool room incident. Less than twelve hours later, a third party had received intelligence from sources unknown. Yes, they literally refused to reveal how they knew. It was that serious. Sophomores I had not yet met were now scowling at me for no particular reason. My last name was soon married to a derogatory alliterative adjective that yet more sophomores artfully used in my hearing, but not to my face. It was great fun. How happy was I that I was learning how to be a real "college" student? This is what college is, right? I was just a part of the rich tradition. So. Much. Fun.

Of course, what all of this was leading to was freshman initiation. It is difficult to understand the actual institutional purpose for freshman initiation. To some, it was supposed to be a fun way to unify the freshman class who were, heretofore, mostly strangers hailing from all parts of the country. It is possible that this actually works. As I would later learn in my psychology classes, people bond through adversity. I mean, it works for the Marines. Put the freshman through a night of embarrassing, uncomfortable, or even terrifying games, and they will all grow up to be best friends. At the least they will form solid study groups to survive first semester exams. Exams were not on anyone's mind. It was survival. Accept personal humiliation in front of everyone in the cafeteria or endure enhanced treatment afforded to freshman on the blacklist. Most everyone chose personal humiliation.

Now, having survived freshman initiation, and looking back on that fateful night, I can say that the threat was much worse than the event. The way it played out was that sophomores snuck their way into the freshman dorms in the middle of the night and—this part was brilliant—blew on a trumpet! The trumpet part was great. What followed was a big letdown as they apparently failed to secure anything else to create more noise. College students living in dorms do not own pots and pans. So, they just shouted and banged their soft fists on locked doors. There were not that many, so it sounded more like an irate building super going around looking for contraband hot plates. My roommate and I, on the other hand, were both awake and fully dressed when the intruders made their stealthy entrance. We left our room door open and watched as they carefully tiptoed down the hallway. The trumpet sounded, the doors were banged on and very soon, bleary-eyed freshman filed out of their rooms and out onto the parking lot. For me, this is where everything went sideways.

All the Freshman were ordered to kneel on the pavement and bend over in some manner of supplication before all of the sophomores. This, of course, in keeping with the effort to ratchet up maximum humiliation while exercising the maximum sophomoric superiority...who themselves were humiliated in the same way only one year prior. More on this salient point later. Kneeling on hard pavement, for me, was out of the question. At the top of my left shin bone, where it connects to the patella tendon, were a set of bone spurs. These bone spurs would puncture the underside of the patella tendon when the knee was fully bent. The pain was particularly acute when one's near full body weight was pressing down on the knee while bent over in a kneeling position on pavement. So, I did not kneel. This, of course, moved my name straight to the top of the blacklist, circled in red.

"Kneel! 'derogatory alliterative adjective followed by your last name!'" This was the first time it was said directly to my face. Three sophomores approached me like we were about to recreate a scene from The Godfather. While two shouted commands inches from my ears, another walked around behind me and began pushing down on my back to force me into a bow. From sheer pain avoidance, I swung around and knocked his arms away from my back. After an angry explanation about the bone spurs, all three stepped back with a look that clearly placed the blame for this misunderstanding in my lap. I was briefly left alone. I remained standing while my other fellow freshman bowed before their lords, singing the school's fight song. Or was it the Lord's prayer? I forget. It all seemed remarkably silly, but the sophomores were hell bent on acting the tyrants and the freshman were magically becoming better friends. And, so it went. The girls soon joined us as the sophomores screamed insults, gave ridiculous commands and generally acted like junior high level psychological terrorists.

The entire assemblage ended up near the soccer field where a pit the size of a very small swimming pool had been dug and filled with water. It is here where the climax to the early morning activities would take place. I am certain It was meant to be a pit of thick mud, but it was really a large hole of dirty water. The sophomore planning committee had not gotten their recipe for mud just right. And so, unwilling freshman were, one-by-one, brought forth and pushed into the pit of dirty water. Most of the freshman had the good sense to not wear their new Izod shirts or Guess jeans that their doting parents had bought for them only weeks prior. Eventually, the two sophomores and one junior from the pool hall incident found me. I sensed no actual danger, so I willingly walked with them to the edge of the pit. After I felt a slight nudge in my back, I stepped into the knee-deep dirty water. Other than the dirty water's low temperature, there was not much there to be concerned with. My tormentors screamed insults. I just stood there as if to say, "this is it?" And yes, for me, that was it. Everyone on the blacklist was now in their place; standing in dirty water on a mild September morning in northern Indiana.

Happily, this was not the end. What happened next should have been written up in the local newspaper, because it was worth much more than the price of admission. My roommate, who had managed to fly under the radar during the first two weeks of school, came out of nowhere, running at a full tilt, jumped as high as he could, and fell flat on his back right on the middle of almost two feet of dirty water. It. Was. Beautiful. For, standing at the edge, all around the pit, were all those tidy clean sophomores—wearing their new Izod shirts and Guess jeans—getting showered in dirty water. Boy, were they surprised? This prompted the rest of us in the water to do the obvious—splash anyone dumb enough to be standing close to the pit. Sophomores, cursing their fate, ran in terror. Some in tears, some wishing now they had never gotten out of bed. And so, initiation ended. There were no more evil plans for the freshman. My roommate was the target of a few choice words, but nothing a hot shower and a load of laundry could not fix.

What followed for all of us was college as per usual. Books to read. Papers to write. Projects to complete. There was a great play that fall. There was a homecoming parade float competition between the classes. Chapel speakers spoke about being Godly Christians. Professors prayed to open their classes. The guys kept their hair short and the girls kept their skirts long. The year passed with very little about which to write home. But what went unattended was the underlying fire the first few weeks of the year purposely ignited. It seemed the embers refused to cool. As a teacher now myself, I can appreciate the feeling of relief after a big event that involves more than half the school. No hospitalizations? Good, what is next? The institutional juggernaut rolled on. But for me, lots of strangeness lingered. With one exception, sophomores still kept their distance. The one sophomore I would become friends with had transferred in that year. As a result, he did not carry the same necessity for revenge the other sophomores held so tightly.

In retrospect, my freshman year was a harbinger of a lifetime of strange encounters to come. Learning to negotiate the strangeness of being misunderstood or misread is probably the greatest lesson that began the school year. It is a lesson, though, I seem to have never learned. Because it still happens. That year I played trombone for a traveling music group. The group was packed full of the best singers the school had to offer. And they were good. What they lacked...what the school lacked...was a selection of students who could play the trombone. My agreeing to play for the group was my only redeeming quality. Add to that, at least for the first semester, I was the only freshman in the band. It was great fun, and I had a blast playing in a band that, at times, sounded a lot like the group, Chicago. On one overnight trip later in the year, one of the juniors in the group and I stayed in the same host home. The conversation we had was the first I had with this guy since I joined the band. To my surprise, he had assumed I was a kid from a difficult background. He thought I was a special case, saved from a life of street gangs, drugs and rock and roll. In fact, I could not be more opposite. For the life of me, I could not understand what about me made him think that. And he was not the only one. I would later get the same belief in my previous hard life from folks who were slowly becoming friends. It happened over and over. So much so that a very brief romance flamed out with a girl who just assumed from the start that I was a "bad boy." Was she ever disappointed. This belief followed me into adulthood. But it later transferred into a personal belief that I am either mad, mean, or just plain grouchy.

Maybe this image is what the guys in the pool room saw that fated evening in the student union. They registered that 'bad guy' image I was unwittingly projecting. To my knowledge at least, this had never happened before. It is cliché, but little did I know my cover was being judged now in ways that did not remotely reflect the book inside. I soon figured out that I had to be overly friendly in order to not immediately cement a negative image in the minds of new acquaintances. For me it felt very fake, but it was working. It worked so well, in fact, that by the end of my freshman year, I had been elected sophomore class president for the coming school year.

It is here where the beginning of my freshman year would collide, almost violently, with the beginning of my sophomore year. As president of the sophomore class, I had the dubious responsibility of planning and executing (no pun intended) the freshman class initiation. I, along with the candidates for vice-president and chaplain, had campaigned on a clear platform of ending freshman initiation. We each had said so in our campaign speeches. The campaign speeches that no one listened to. Oh, we spoke them to the whole class in an auditorium where sat the rising sophomore class. But, as I stated, no one listened. Because all three of us were running unopposed. What did it matter? No one thought we were actually serious about ending freshman initiation. Of course, we were serious. But then again, who cared? In a few weeks, our freshman year would end. The silly choices we all made at the end of our freshman year were but a vapor, blown away by the exhaust of cars joyfully leaving campus for summer break.

This particular summer was a low activity summer. I worked with my brother to help build an addition onto my parent's daycare business. Lots of hard labor in the southern months of June and July will go a long way toward reminding a guy why he was going to college. As with all summers, this one came to an end much more quickly than the three months that preceded it. Before long I was back on campus gathering the sophomore class officers around a table to make plans for our opening two weeks of school. It was here where the test of wills began to play out. Afterall, those silly decisions everyone made back in early May were now coming home to roost. There seemed to be constant conversations on the subject. They varied in length, but the summation and/or format of the conversations tended to go as follows:

"That is correct. We will not have Freshman initiation this year."

"WHAT!?!?"

"We talked about it when we gave our campaign speeches."

"You...WHAT!?!?"

And so, it went. The passion for initiating the incoming freshman was so intense that I was visited one evening in my dorm room by three sophomore guys whose apparent purpose for being in college was to play soccer, drink alcohol, and murder freshman. And they were intent on starting with my own bodily harm. In retrospect, it all seems funny. In fact, the truth is, it was funny to me then. The more people became incensed by this actual Christian way of behaving, the more I knew I was doing the right thing. And, in a masochistic sort of way, I felt great pleasure at being right. I was not particularly having the time of my life, mind you. But there is something energizing about explaining yourself without the need to hem and haw your way through self-serving excuses. Here were three highly agitated, red faced, nineteen-year-old boys whose greatest desire at that moment was to bully and abuse perfect strangers for no better reason than—it was how they were treated as freshman.

"So, you're looking for revenge," I said.

"Yeah! I was treated like crap!" Although, he didn't say "crap." It was the first piece of profanity I would hear on this Christian campus. The sophomore who claimed he was treated, during his freshman year, like the waste bi-product of digestion, would become a ministry team leader later that year. Mind you, I was treated the same way and I was just as angry. But the focus of my human nature was more personal and direct. It would take years before I could abort, with certain individuals, the stupid animosity conceived during those first weeks of my freshman year.

"You want revenge against people who've done nothing to you." I don't know why I was trying to reason with them.

The second sophomore laughed and shock his head at my clear naiveté. "It's tradition, dude! It's the way it's been done!" They were yelling now and knocking things over. "What gives you the right?"

"You did. You voted me class president."

"We'll take it to the Dean."

"I already did. He said it was up to me."

"Up to you?"

"Yes, and he said he would support whatever I decided."

What followed was the next one hundred or so profanities I would hear on this Christian campus. I am sure it did not help that I was unafraid and smiling the whole time. From shear exhaustion, they finally gave up their threats and left my room.

Plans continued on schedule. A concert would follow a day of games and food for an event we even coined a term for: Graciation. It was a take on the word, "ingratiate," meaning to "establish in the favor or good graces of someone." It seemed a tad more positive and in keeping with actual Christian values. The kind Jesus actually taught...over and over and over again.

Of course, everyone had their opinions about what was going on. Some thought it was much ado about nothing. Some were just glad they would not have to get up in the middle of night and drag freshman out of their dorm rooms. Others were actively opposed to the idea of breaking from such a long-held tradition. Not everyone, like my dorm room visitors were violent. My best description of the group-think at work was the notion that I had lost my mind in a whole new moral universe. Which brings me to breakfast.

As the day of "Graciation" grew closer, the stark reality of no actual freshman initiation was setting in. One morning, I found myself sitting at breakfast in the cafeteria, surrounded by very well-meaning intellectuals, who were finally wondering out loud. It has been much too long since that conversation to remember the specific arguments being made by some very well-meaning students. What I can say for certain is, no one at the table agreed with me. The discussion soon invited other students from nearby tables. A small crowd soon formed and stood around observing me like I was a maladjusted subject in a psych lab. By their arguments I knew they could not, and would likely never, understand the level of empathy I had for the incoming freshman. For whatever reason my conscience was driving me to this choice, I realized I could no more explain why I felt so strongly about this decision than I could explain why I preferred the color purple over green. But I was not budging.

I am not certain what the climax of an intellectual discussion is supposed to look like; I have not had that many. I had hoped someone smarter than me would have stepped up and dropped some seriously amazing words of wisdom, instantly driving off the mob that had formed around me and my bowl of frosted flakes. What did happen was a particularly loud sophomore, who had heard enough, was now ready to drop the question to end all questions.

"Steve, do you take God to the bathroom with you?" The question was asked with a sort of energized exasperation that only comes when one finally realizes the opposition will not be moved. It was loud. It echoed off the old tiled walls of the cafeteria. It had quite literally stunned everyone into a frozen state of wondering, "how is Steve going to answer that?" What was my answer? I did come up with a brilliant response. I came up with it that evening in my dorm room. In the moment, I had nothing. I must have looked like someone just blew dust in face. I blinked my eyes and shook my head as if physically deflecting the verbal debris that had just hit my face. It was one of those questions meant to shut you up because, well, everyone knows you do NOT take God to the bathroom with you! In fact, God could not possibly have any interest at all in what I do in the bathroom or, by extension, during college activities like freshman initiation. So, why would I bring God into the matter? Like a bucket of water on a fire, the question and, I am certain, my lack of a cogent rejoinder, extinguished interest in the conversation as all those in the gallery moved on to their first class of the morning.

The following evening, as I sat in my dorm room, my primary thought was how I wished I had not become the sophomore class president. In fact, I was already thinking about dropping out of school. I had lost my sense for the value of what was going on. I no longer cared. I still believed I had made the right choice. I had just lost interest in enforcing the point. Regardless, I remained bothered by that idiotic question. After some thought and conversation with my roommate, it dawned on me. The God I believed in was not someone I could take or leave where I wanted. To answer "yes" or "no" to the question would have been to believe something about God that I did not believe. Any God that I could take or leave, whether it be to the bathroom, classroom or boardroom, was not a God worth my time. I felt good about that answer. I kept it to myself. I did not chase that guy down and throw my brilliant answer in his face the way his question had been fast pitched into mine. I was settled in the fact that God was, is and will be there. Yes, and he is even there in the bathroom. And, in only five years, I would hang onto that fact with my very life. But that is another story.

Soon enough our plans for "Graciation" were finally realized. The sophomores welcomed the freshman to campus with a day full of fun activities, food and games. The day was wrapped up with a concert that everyone enjoyed. By just about all standards, it was a success. In fact, the whole year was a success. The sophomores even won the homecoming float contest. We sponsored the film, Brian Song, which generated one of the largest audiences the school had seen at a class sponsored film. Of course, that also meant financial success. So, there was lots of money in our coffers to do fun things for the class. But none of that mattered. There is one irrefutable truth, as sure as water flows downhill, no one anywhere remembers who their college sophomore class president was. And I was absolutely fine with that.

Around a month later I was in the student union, playing pool and talking the general, self-important nonsense most college sophomores talk about on Friday nights. "Graciation" was well behind us. Just about everyone had recovered from the loss of their inalienable right to abuse new students. It would be too much of an after school special here to say that our efforts turned the whole college community around; that my fellow classmates had seen the light, repented of their ways and carried me on their shoulders down the street in a parade in my honor. No, no such thing happened. The following year the next sophomore class did follow in our footsteps. But I became aware that eventually a version of the old initiation returned and, in half a decade, much of what we started that year vanished.

Back in the student union, as I played pool and tried to sound smart, I was hanging out with three freshman, two sophomores and a senior. There would be more Friday nights playing pool, or ping-pong or trivial pursuit with a mix of any student who made the walk down to this converted old lakeside restaurant. A brief time during which, class, rank, or seniority meant nothing. They were nights shared with fellow students, all with their own hopes and dreams for what lay ahead in their lives. For me, I was still unsure about any of it. Finding my calling was more about attrition. Unlike my Father always believed, I was now certain I would never go into politics. So, I could at least take that off the list. But I was content. Content that a small group of freshmen that year got the start I wished I had gotten the year before. It was a remarkably small victory. On the scale of significance, only slightly above holding a door for someone and a tad below helping a child find their puppy. It was just a choice I had made to treat others the way I wished I had been treated. In retrospect it was not that hard. And if I had it to do over again, at least I'd have a smart answer for that loud sophomore.