II.  Jack’s analysis of a failed ‘revival’ at Wrigley College, entitled “Robbed of Revival”

45.  general description of an extremist-Protestant event known as ‘revival’

Jack was, by now, half-crazy from the stress of trying to solve the riddle of his universe. Nobody could deny it. But he was not so far gone as to miss the point that he had to change the way mj lorenzo lived in that universe. And the next batch of Mortimer’s notebook passages reminded Jack of a very big near-change that had occurred at Wrigley College. So he kept hammering away at the subject of self-reforming change in the next section of the Fort Simpson package too. And: this particular effort at writing seemed to quiet his ire a bit. Something did, for he wrote with less agitation than he had in a while.

Some pundits, citing the ‘eulogy’ above and its neighboring paragraphs, would theorize later that Jack had been feeling uncommonly sorry for Mortimer at this point in the summer. Maybe because Jack had by now labored his way through the notebooks to Mortimer’s last year at Wrigley, ’63-’64, where several entries mourned an opportunity for ‘revival’, i.e., a kind of deep meaningful personality change. It was an opportunity that poor depressed Mortimer had lost, sadly. And so Jack felt sad for him now, in retrospect, some pundits thought. For he realized that Mortimer actually had made an effort to consider changing himself at Wrigley. But Wrigley had blocked the effort.

Now, ‘revival’ was a term certain very conservative U.S. American Protestants had been using for two centuries, at least. It referred to something very special that would occur from time to time among certain conservative extremist-Protestant groups, by design most often, or by unexpected chance occasionally. If one person saw the light, that was not a revival. It had to be a group event to be called ‘revival’, and it had to spread within the group, from one individual to another, just like AIDS would spread years later, only much, much faster. The bug for spiritual deepening had to run virulently and rapidly from a first person to a second, who would become infected in turn with the fervor of revival and would pass his heated fever to others, until revival spread like wildfire, like an epidemic. Only, instead of victims dying from it, as with AIDS before anti-viral combos, ‘victims’, or ‘products’ of revival, more respectfully said, usually tended to live with more energy and inspiration than ever, and tended to produce something close to pandemonium wherever they went, especially if they went anywhere in groups.

It was the kind of thing a preacher might have wanted to happen to his congregation, because people came to church more. There was new spirit and conviviality, even happiness, and even fun sometimes, though a terribly dead serious kind of fun. And people gave more money. They sacrificed more. They even volunteered for the mission field, and ten or twenty would take off for the Colombian Amazon at once and get killed by jungle natives, every single last one. And LIFE or some other magazine would do a cover article on this massacre with huge black and white jungle witch doctor photos. The word got out and the preacher got a promotion, or a raise, if everything happened with class.

Revivals by their nature, however, were spontaneous and unpredictable animals once let loose to run. They could in fact gambol in any direction imaginable, even in many wrong directions, and for that reason many a preacher who might have loved to foster a revival during his charge might nonetheless have feared encouraging it. For LIFE or TIME Magazine might one day show the white shrunken heads of his church’s revival victims hanging on dark brown or black naked jungle natives’ chests. And it would make him and his church look stupid.

Yet something close to a ‘revival’ had occurred during mj’s senior year at Wrigley, as Mortimer’s notebooks complained. And Jack, too, was still upset about it because he still felt that he, Jack, had been robbed of a chance for a deeper and more lasting, drastic change and a greater freedom to express himself way back when, and had been ripped off of very interesting company to do it in too, by the way. Part of Jack’s upset in 1970 was that he had been left on his own to find a way to reform and revive himself now, finally, all by himself. And that was why he wrote Rev several paragraphs now expressing his feelings about having been robbed of revival six years back.

The subject was not extraneous, in other words, as Remaking pundits would realize in the 1980s, once they had overcome some of their ignorance of this extreme Christian world. The subject of ‘revival’, they would learn, did shed some light on Jack’s trip and ‘remaking’. Revival was an old-fashioned church-sponsored kind of re-making or overhaul and re-doing of a person, you could argue; or, in fact, of a whole group.

Although, as certain astute ‘geopolitico’ pundits would add in time, it was not the kind of remaking or redoing that Dr. Lorenzo or they should have wanted for themselves or for the rest of the world; not ‘these dangerous days’, given the fact that ardent ‘revived’ Christians were ‘some of the world’s worst culprits for heightening global tension among extremist fundamentalists of various religions and ideologies, given their love of the kind of nuclear saber-rattling (in the name of Christ) that threatened the future of humanity itself’.

It was important to reflect on the fact, said Dr. Lorenzo’s pundit following, that if college-age mj had not escaped this conservative Calvinist-type religious revival at Wrigley, he might have ended up as another of the world’s worst literary saber-rattlers. Thankfully instead, they said, both Mortimer (in his Wrigley College notebooks) and Jack (in his Fort Simpson notes) had shown prodigious wisdom in the way they had ‘cut through mass religious-fervor insanity’ and evaluated the pluses and minuses of this failed religious revival at Wrigley.

And by the way, said later pundit defenders of mj lorenzo’s sanity during his Remaking year: the fact that Jack could make himself so clearly understood while exploring such a crazily complicated subject as this ‘near revival’ at Wrigley argued for his having been ‘not quite as crazy in 1970 as he had seemed to like to make himself look all too often’.

Revival should have been a subject of special interest to Rev and Jo too, for they had grown up in two separate churches, both downriver from Florence, in the Collingswood area. And in those two churches ‘revivals’ in the early twentieth century had been encouraged and frequent. Church leaders of most U.S. Protestant denominations had not feared revival in the nineteen twenties or thirties. But now, only four or five decades later, the world had changed and Protestant leaders were more fearful of any ‘revival’ erupting during their calm and orderly period in office, thank you just the same. And Jack discussed this subject too in his paragraphs to Rev about revival.

46.  Jack’s canny analysis of an example of this rare kind of self-reforming change as (almost) experienced by him (once)

Robbed of Revival

Rev, you’ve often wondered why I lost my respect for the supposedly sacred while in Illinois, so I’d like to lend you a feeling for what was happening.

According to campus scuttlebutt my last year at Wrigley, Prexy felt that the ‘time was not yet ripe’ for revival; so he discouraged its spread as soon as he saw the bug trying to germinate. My theory is, though, he did so because Miss Hubackoff, on the other hand, was the main person promoting the idea of revival.

Now Esther Hubackoff was one of the very few people at Wrigley I ever found thoroughly fascinating. (So what did that say about me?) But Mortimer was in charge of our mj lorenzo back then, and Mortimer was afraid of her, though fascinated, maybe because sensing my interest; and so he kept a safe but watchful distance throughout this entire episode.

It didn’t take long to get a quick and convincing picture of ‘Miss Hubackoff’. Any five minute period of her life seemed to describe the whole lifetime picture. Someone could write in the campus paper, for example, ‘Miss Hubackoff is a converted Jew who tried to evangelize the East Village beatniks during her years studying at NYU’. And the whole Wrigley campus got the picture in a flash.

The same paper quoted her as saying:

You know, here were souls to be saved and nobody was working with them…. My first year there I would pass by these beatniks on my way home from school, about evening, when they start to come out of their… well, you know, holes. And all my first year I said, ‘Why isn’t somebody working with these beatniks?’¹

And she had a Bible group going with the beatniks (who were ‘seminal hippies’ in reality, for this was ’60 or ’61), when she was ‘called’ to Wrigley to teach Russian and had to leave New York, and leave behind her gospel outreach to ‘beatniks’, or ‘seminal hippies’.

The Lord had to work on me for two years before I was willing to come out here to Wrigley.

She was irrepressible anywhere she went, of course. And once at Wrigley she wasted no time finding within herself the nerve to loudly criticize hypocrisy, of which she had early discerned several blatant varieties at Christendom’s bulwark in the Chicago suburbs, even as hard as it tried to live up to its motto, ‘For Christ and His Green and Blue Kingdom Come’.

So, if Wrigley was for Christ, and was all for helping His Kingdom To Come here on earth: then why did Wrigley nip revival in the bud? The school president, ‘Prexy’, seemed to like revival, after all, usually. He often had reminisced out loud to the whole student body, recalling the great 1950 campus revival in Pearce Chapel, after which many a revived student had marched off to Life-Magazine missionary-massacre martyrdom in Colombian jungles.

Rev, as a product of several revivals yourself (‘Let out the Devil from your soul!’), maybe you can help me figure out why Prexy, sincere as he seemed, was skeptical of reviving revival in ‘63-‘64.

Do you think he thought the school was drifting into evil hands? For the year before, when ‘speaking in tongues’² had begun to sweep the campus, Prexy had taken to the chapel pulpit to warn the whole student body, ominously, that ‘speaking in tongues’ ‘could be’ ‘an instrument of the Devil’. Yet, at Pentecost, Christ’s own disciples had thought it fine and dandy. So what in the world was happening on Christendom’s most perfect college campus?

Was Prexy mindful of early-sixties social-action approaches brewing everywhere? Could he guess the likely future economic and political consequences of Wrigley’s student organization having just joined the National Student Association, a group which by early this year, 1970, would lean so far to the left as to call for a student strike nationwide to protest the war in Vietnam and Nixon's decision to send U.S. ground forces into neighboring Cambodia? Could Prexy foresee alumni contributions diving to zero?

Yes, I think he thought he saw where ‘things’ were headed, Rev. He knew his school; and he knew the times; and he thought he knew where Miss Hubackoff was headed too, right with the ‘times’ and with ‘things’, if not making those ‘times’ and ‘things’ happen her very self.

She had to make him uneasy, let’s face it. There had never been anyone remotely like her on Wrigley’s faculty: she had been born and raised Jewish and could talk a mad Jewish sister lingo when she wanted; she had grown up in a New York City neighborhood, on New York streets and could talk street jive; she had hung out in her free time with hippies & beatniks and could throw in hipster lingo; and she not only spoke the language of the communists, Russian, but also, most shockingly of all, was more than willing to go to that communist land right away if necessary.

And so, for every one of these character-buttressing demesnes of know-how, she was at high risk for being feared, misunderstood and mistrusted by conservative ‘Evangelical’ corny corn-belt ‘Christians’ who had never dealt with such foreign- and un-Christian-seeming worlds in an ACTUAL COLLEAGUE, even less in such a multiplied combination, and least of all in a vibrant, provokingly outspoken WOMAN. Wrigley was run by MEN, and Hubackoff had already called the men ruling Wrigley on the carpet for their hypocrisy; and now she wanted to spearhead some kind of ‘revival’, when no one knew what earthly kind of revival, under her weird inspiration, it might turn out to be. They must have imagined she was about as likely to foster campus stability and tranquility, and to increase alumni contributions, as some future unknown Jack Lorenzo preaching naked to a whole chapelful of clothed Mortimers.

And anyway, Prexy was getting overly nostalgic between heart attacks. No ‘revival’ these days could ever equal the ones of the good old days, so why bother? Back in ‘50, men were truly alive and warm and met in small holy sepulchers like Pearce Chapel, not in big plush sterile coffins like Prexy Chapel, even if they were named after his own slowly dying self.

But then he must have remembered that Pearce was where Miss Hubackoff and her little revival party were meeting, Rev. Not only Prexy, it seems, must have known the difference between chapels. Hubackoff too did, you see. And this would have spooked Prexy still more, and offended him, even: I would be willing to bet. For Pearce had cradled his favorite campus revolution, the revival of 1950.

And, granted: Esther had never hidden the fact that she was a revolutionary; for the campus paper quoted her as saying that classmates as far back as sixth grade had foreseen that one day she would be “shot as: – a revolutionary.” But what kind of revolutionary was she likely to be shot as? That would have been Prexy’s question. For, the word ‘revolution’ had changed meaning drastically in the U.S. in the thirteen years since Wrigley’s famous 1950 revival-revolution. Everything seemed to be changing rapidly in the good ol’ U.S.A. by ’63 and ‘64, in fact; and that must have spooked Prexy too.

Christ was a revolutionary, if you like; he broke ancient Judaic Law, campaigning to replace it with a religion of Love then died as punishment within and through the Roman-Jewish system. But in the Wrigley-Christian system, Hubackoff’s elimination would be less crucial; so now she was going to transport her mission field and her war to Russia; that’s what she said in an interview, right after her little Wrigley revival was nipped in the bud.

“Because,” as she quipped: “in Russia at least they seem passionate in their mistaken beliefs.”

Touché!  Wrigleyans lacked passion, or the right kind of passion, better stated. They held on passionately to a dead past, and that was at least one of their ‘mistaken beliefs’.

And if they don’t like what I’m doing there…

(Since: Wrigley didn’t like what she was doing here, and was ‘sending her’ there, i.e., Russia, in effect.)

…they can send me to Siberia…

(For she had said too, by the way, “…in New York going to the Midwest is like going to Siberia.”)

…and there’s always prison work there, you know, so you haven’t really lost anything.

Do you hear those brilliant hidden inferences, Rev, designed to inspire the tender following she had just created but was now having to leave behind? Wrigley had been a ‘Siberian’ ‘totalitarian’ ‘prison’ by inference; a punishment, an incarceration for Miss Hubackoff, Rev; just as it was for me too. Her hyperbole and double entendre, her perspicacity, in short, her instinct always led her unfailingly to wherever the revival would be, just as soon as she got there, prison or chapel. Wrigley, naturally, had been too uptight and spooked by her, to withstand her fire; so, then, some other place, more receptive, had to be waiting for her somewhere. For she had faith sufficient to believe that.

And do you know what, Rev? It was the most impassioned and spirited, i.e. the most discontented, questioning, thinking and outspoken members of the student body, the cream of the rebellious 60s generation crop, that suffered that incipient and ephemeral ‘revival’, if revival there was. I knew them, and can speak for who they were.

And where can those warring souls, crushed in the infancy of revolution’s love and hope, be locked up now?…

Said Miss Hubackoff as well then, landing more delightfully dirty punches, long after poor old missionary-school Wrigley was down and out and bleeding:

Only the physically, spiritually, psychologically, morally or emotionally unfit don’t belong on the mission field.

Which meant NOBODY qualified for missionary work; which meant that EVERYBODY qualified of course, since missionaries were needed everywhere in the world all the time; and by this she implied that such a slogan must have been her own hyperbolic induction notice to have come to the mission field of Wrigley College in the first place, or anywhere else for that matter, as it would now be every other New York converted-Jew Christian hippie’s on the street, too.

Most people expect God and a choir of ten angels to pick them up and dump them bodily in the jungle of South America, and that’s the missionary call to them.

She scoffed at the revival Prexy revered, in other words, Rev. She scoffed at the old-time notions of ‘missionary’ and ‘mission field’. She scoffed at the 1950 Wrigley revival, even though she was an ardent ‘born-again’ Christian. Good for her. Because: times had changed. And she was hip to the change. Who needed that kind of old-fashioned revival to lift you to a new plane of spiritual existence, when anybody in the world these days could remake and lift his or her own self, just like she had done?

Really, if a choir of ten angels comes to stop you, then you know you don’t belong in the jungle. But people should be making themselves call-able by preparing for mission work.

To some students, Rev, Esther Hubackoff taught Russian; but to others she taught the value of contagious religious revival, which was zilch, when you could remake your own self just like she did, ‘making yourself callable’ with just a little hard work, and then make your mission field ANY unholy place on the planet like Wrigley College or a Stalinist prison in Siberia.

“‘Just a little hard work’. He’s driving himself crazy!” said Jo with alarm weeks later, one day when she and Rev had finished reading this passage for the umpteenth time and she finally grasped the extent of the cheek in those lines for the very first time, somehow.

“And you and me too,” said Rev, raising a cautionary eyebrow.

¹ All of the college newspaper snippets which Jack quoted directly here (for Rev) and in the following paragraphs could be found in an article entitled “Naumoff Plans for Missionary Service” which appeared in an actual American college campus newspaper entitled The Wheaton Record on February 6, 1964. Other supporting evidence for the authenticity of Jack’s tale in this letter to Rev Lorenzo can be found in a book once sold in the Wheaton College Book Store, Steps Toward Apostasy at Wheaton College, by Wilhelm E. Schmitt (published by Schmitt himself, P.O. Box 712, Wheaton, Illinois, 1966). This book conveys the intensity of emotion in the USA during the 50s and 60s which resulted from the global conflict between the two competing nuclear-superpower world-views, or life philosophies, the two views which might be called the ‘American neo-Calvinist’ Weltanschauung and the ‘Russian Communist’ Weltanschauung, or way of looking at the world.  Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary Version 3.0 (2003 computer version) (Merriam-Webster, Inc.) defines Weltanschauung as meaning: “a conception of the course of events in – and of the purpose of – the world as a whole, forming a philosophical view or apprehension of the universe,” or as meaning “philosophy of life.”

² ‘Speaking in tongues’ is the extremist-Protestant religious-fervor behavior of talking in an incomprehensible language.  Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary Version 3.0 (2003 computer version) (Merriam-Webster, Inc.) defines the ‘gift of tongues’ as: “…ecstatic usually unintelligible utterance called forth in a moment of religious excitation.…”