Finding God at Columbia

Columbia University is off limits. Longtime neighbors who used to pass through its gates for a brief respite from the hurly-burly of the Upper West Side, or who took the shortcut through campus from Broadway to Amsterdam Avenue, are now out of luck. They’ve closed the gates, and guards make sure no one enters without proper ID. Columbia is now an island within the very island that drew so many of its students and faculty to its shores in the first place.  

Perhaps the new rules will limit what that earlier academic gatekeeper, George Wallace, once called “outside agitators.” Perhaps they will spare the statue of Alexander Hamilton the indignity of more red paint and graffiti. Perhaps Columbia will return to the business of—as Miss Jean Brodie once boasted—putting old heads on young shoulders. But in saving Columbia from itself, I fear something irreplaceable is lost. 

You see, I found God there.

Once upon a time, I was one of those neighbors, sharing a pre-war apartment on West 110th Street with my wife and daughter, and a Norwich Terrier named Gretel. I had made the down payment on our condo with the proceeds from the option on a film that never got made, and the check cleared the same day that the Writers Guild went on strike. Undaunted, we hired our out-of-work actor friends to help us renovate the place; and with a lot of sweat equity and enough paychecks from a peripatetic writer’s life, it became our home for thirty-five years.  

In those early days, the view was bleak. A methadone clinic stared back at us from across the street, while crack vials and needles littered the playground in Riverside Park. After dark, you entered Frederick Law Olmsted’s sylvan creation at your own risk, but the daylight hours were not much safer. My evening walks with Gretel followed a prescribed route: a brisk outing from our front door, within the line of sight of our part-time doorman, Edgar, to the corner and back. In the mornings and afternoons, we ventured farther—to the grounds of that massive, unfinished gothic sanctuary, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where my family and I attended church.

Or should I say I went along with them, unbaptized and unrepentant, a Bar Mitzvah boy who had left whatever faith he had in the graveyard where his father was buried back in Georgia. My last prayer was uttered when they tossed the dirt on the coffin, like the rattle of chains, and lowered it into the red Georgia clay, three months short of my fourteenth birthday. Haunted by that memory, I would remain in my seat while my wife and daughter took communion.  

I didn’t need St. John the Divine—the apostle or the pile of stones that bore his name. You see, I had Columbia. Despite a sign that read “No Dogs Allowed,” once a week—as regular as Sunday School—Gretel and I would pass through the gates, past the smiling guard, and stroll the campus with impunity. The greatest danger was the chance of being hit by an errant frisbee. While Gretel rolled in the grass and flirted shamelessly with the students, I enjoyed the vicarious thrill of being on an Ivy League campus. I, who had been rejected by Yale, not once but three times, soaked up the atmosphere, imagining myself climbing the steps to the magnificent library, sitting in the shadow of Hamilton’s statue with my classmates as a learned professor unlocked the key to Columbia’s celebrated core curriculum, belonging to the fortunate few, ordained by the SATs, convinced that the future was mine for the taking.

If there was anything amiss in this earthbound gospel, I was unaware. That is, until my sister came to visit. Laura was my big sister, the Homecoming Queen of my smalltown high school, as popular as I was pimpled when we were left at home with our widowed mother. It was Laura, a varsity cheerleader, who looked out for me in those awkward, painful days when our father’s absence filled the house—teaching me how to dance, coaching me on how to talk to girls, encouraging me to have confidence in myself. It’s no exaggeration to say that my cheerleader sister gave me the courage to get on with the business of living. 

Laura had a family of her own now, living the good life in Atlanta, but to my surprise she flew to New York for a few days, eager to spend some time with me and see the sights. I didn’t ask if there was something wrong at home. It never occurred to me that there could be anything wrong in my sister’s world. One night I took her downtown to Soho, to Raoul’s famous bistro, where my sister found herself sitting near Mick Jagger. I still remember the stars in her eyes. At long last, I was the cool kid able to show her a thing or two.  

But as the evening wore on and Mick vanished into a limo, I began to sense something was troubling my sister. It wasn’t her marriage or her children; it was something deeper, something she couldn’t name but that seemed to cast a cloud over our cassoulet. When we returned to West 110th Street, I suggested we take Gretel for her late-night walk. For some reason I broke with routine and headed for Columbia. The campus was quiet, almost empty, as we strolled among the buildings, saying precious little, unaware that the illness that would one day claim her life had begun to take root in her body.

Or perhaps she already sensed it, because my cheerleader sister began to talk to me in a way she never had before. She who had taught me the Twist, the Swim, and the Mashed Potato was seeking answers from her little brother. She had come to New York, not to see a Broadway show or shop at Saks Fifth Avenue, but to share that same emptiness we both had felt since we lost our father. Unlike me, she still went to Temple, if only on the High Holy Days. She celebrated Passover. But deep down she didn’t believe it. It was, to quote Tevye, tradition, not faith. She wanted more. She needed more. And in that moment, I realized I did, too.

I wish I could say I looked up into the night sky and suddenly saw the spire of St. John the Divine shining like a beacon upon the campus below. But the cathedral was just a shadow, unable to pay its electrical bill to keep the lights glowing at night. I was in the dark with my dog and my sister. But in opening her heart to me, in looking for that elusive answer, she taught me one more dance step and didn’t even know it. After we walked home, after Laura retired to the guest room and Gretel fell asleep on the rug, I told my wife that I wanted to be baptized.

I don’t claim that Columbia was my Damascus. I wasn’t struck by lightning or the hand of God. But something happened there. It happened, if for no other reason, because Columbia opened its gates to a neighbor who was searching for something, even if he didn’t know what it was.