As an agnostic from a broken home studying at Oxford University, Carolyn Weber seemed like a poor candidate for embracing Jesus; but that’s what happened as her creative memoir, Surprised by Oxford, makes clear. Carolyn introduces her book to YouthWorker Journal:
This excerpt from my book Surprised by Oxford takes place just before the Christmas when I began to consider seriously the Christian faith. Having come from a loving but broken home, and an agnostic myself, I was still riddled with questions, especially questions that raised concerns about the goodness of God, the relevance of faith and the importance of anything we do in our lives.
A scholarship student, I was invited to Christmas dinner at “high table” at my Oxford college—an extravagant and beautiful dining experience—to which I brought along my new Christian friend “TDH” (otherwise known as Tall, Dark and Handsome). As a result, I was memorably impacted by a conversation about science and faith in general, and by the modeling of a faithful life in particular. I consider this scene quintessentially Oxford in its setting and challenge, and I hope it offers a window into the magical and moving experience of my conversion path as a student there.
Here’s the chapter from Carolyn’s book:
Chapter 10: Does Love Justify All?
These dull notes we sing
Discords need for helps to grace them;
Only beauty purely loving
Knows no discord;
But still moves delight,
Like clear springs renewed by flowing,
Ever perfect, ever in them-
Selves eternal.
—ThomasCampion
Very little exists comparable to the experience of high table at an Oxford College. The opulence, breathtaking; the event, a smorgasbord for the senses. It makes me think of the young heroine Cassandra Mortmain’s description in I Capture the Castle: “There was a wonderful atmosphere of gentle age, a smell of flowers and beeswax, sweet yet faintly sour and musty; a smell that makes you feel very tender toward the past…The table was a pool of candlelight—so bright that the rest of the room seemed almost black, with the faces of the family portraits floating in the darkness.”
Family, in this case, consisted of monarchs, patrons and formerheadmasters. Fine china, silverware older than the United States, numerous crystal glasses set around your plate that chime with the music of the spheres when clinked in a toast. The meal may be interspersed by entertainment or speeches, guests ranging from actors to philanthropists to presidents. Waiters carrying silvered domes surreptitiously emerge from doors hidden in the wainscoting. It reminded me of an Agatha Christie novel, fortunately without the murder when the lights go out. I half expected Batman’s Bruce Wayne to emerge from a secret cellar.
The meals are always extravagant, but on a guest night (or a meal in honor of a special college visitor or event) the feast numbers several courses, ushered in with sherry and then wine pouring white, pouring red and then dessert punctuated by coffee. Sweets mark a false end, for an array of cheese, crackers and fruits follow, enjoyed with cordials, liquors, ports and whiskeys, which overflow far into the evening in the adjoining comfort of the faculty lounge or Senior Common Room (SCR).
For the traditional Christmas dinner, this guest night was particularly beautiful, the room adorned with garlands of evergreen and wreaths of holly like the Ghost of Christmas Past. The air like a John Betjeman poem, all “heavy with bells/And mushroomy, pine-woody, evergreen smells.”
I had been invited by the provost to join him at high table in honor of my Commonwealth Scholar status. Because each guest at high table was welcome to bring a date, I invited, in turn, TDH to join me, partly because I knew he would appreciate the decadent meal as much as I; but also because, even though he irritated me, I was, in fact, fond of him in some strange way. In spite of his being a Christian.
I wore an exquisite cream-colored dress that my mom mailed to me just for such a special event. It must have cost her a month of lunches and all her gas money, at least. I tucked into my purse the elegantly calligraphed menu card to mail to her as Mom loves reading menus even more than actually eating the food. This way, I felt as though she could savor every bite along with me.
Startlingly memorable in his tuxedo, TDH met me at the hall porch as the dinner bell chimed. We lined up with the crowd to enter under the frontispiece with the Virgin and Child.
The guest of honor was a brilliant scientist whose expertise lay in the intersection of time, space, speed, sound and light. He once cracked a notoriously complicated algorithm, which won him much fame. I had the honor of being seated between him and the provost’s wife, a lively and incredibly informed woman who had the knack for bringing a group of seemingly disparate people into a rich conversation with ease. Within minutes of being seated and being sherried, we were all engaged in a fascinating discussion about the relationship between spirituality and science.
The scientist explained patiently, as best he could in layman’s terms, his theory of black holes in the universe and the dimension of time.
Then the provost’s wife leaned in and asked intently, “But Dr. Sterling, do you believe in God?”
For a moment, he seemed taken aback. A hush fell over the table.
She rephrased the question. “For all of your immense scientific knowledge and rational research, do you think your theories, or any scientific theories, are, or can only be, at odds with the existence of God?”
“Of course these theories must be at odds with the existence of God. What rational theory would not dispel an irrational one?” Dr. Rieland, our token professor of philosophy, interrupted.
“God and state don’t mix, so why should God and science?” a prominent American politician chimed in.
I took a sip of my wine, trying to swallow the increasingly familiar fear creeping up my throat. The laughable temptation to defend something I did not understand.
Suddenly I felt extremely young…and very little.
Then I noticed the famous scientist remained silent, too. In fact, he had not said a thing. He just kept listening and looking—it was hard to say—was it sad, or was it, well, slightly amused?
I broke my bread and started buttering it, trying to act nonchalant. “Dr. Sterling,” I heard myself saying, “you haven’t answered Mrs. Nicholby’s original question. I would be very curious as to what you have to say.” I ignored the irritated glares from a few senior professors, startled that a lowly student tolerated at high table would dare speak. Others, however, agreed, and the provost’s wife gave my hand a squeeze.
At first, I thought he might be put out at having been put back on the spot, for Dr. Sterling looked straight at me, saying nothing. Then he smiled. Something about him—I could not say exactly what—but something about him reminded me of Dr. Deveaux.
“I’ve been enjoying this lively conversation, this God-and-science dilemma; such a treat for a reclusive researcher like me,” he winked. The table now turned on him, expectant. He paused, as though measuring his words carefully. Then he began.
“Well, I wonder if it’s much like the secret of the magnet, Miss Drake.”
As a Romanticist, his science intrigued me. I smiled back.
“Do tell,” Mrs. Nicholby urged him.
“Everything I’ve witnessed in the natural world seems to operate in a desire to attain equilibrium. What rises, falls. What heats, cools. What freezes, thaws. The magnet attracts and repels the thing most like it, another magnet. Yet without this force, nothing in the world would function. We are the only planet in this solar system with such delicate conditions for life. The axes of the poles would cease to spin, the tides would halt, the sun would fail to rise and set, if these forces did not exist in a relationship of attraction and repulsion, a relationship which seeks this equilibrium that allows for life,” Dr. Sterling explained.
“Are you saying that these things exist in perfect relationship?” the provost asked.
“That’s a difficult one to answer, as things currently stand. Perfect enough, yes, to perpetuate life on the planet. But imperfect enough to contribute, at times, to our suffering, wouldn’t you say?” Dr. Sterling tried again to get the peas to stay on his fork.
At the remembrance of peas, I stole a glance at TDH, seated further down the table. Everyone was listening now, and, strangely, he seemed to wear the same look of amusement as Dr. Sterling.
I stifled my own giggle. Here we are, I thought, TDH and me, poor scholarship students at high table, and still eating peas! The peas were soaked in brandy and sprinkled with a mix of aged imported cheeses, mind you, nestled alongside tender venison wrapped in buttered white asparagus tips, with tiny roasted potatoes topped with toasted pine nuts; but they were still peas.
“What of life and death?” Dr. Rieland queried.
“Precisely,” replied Dr. Sterling, finally successfully maneuvering several peas into his mouth.
“Huh?” the American politician coughed before he caught himself.
“You mention what rises, falls; what heats, cools. But what of what lives? It dies, as all must die, Dr. Sterling. Then what of this equilibrium? This great magnet?” Dr. Rieland persisted.
“Yes, true, that’s where there is a momentary crack in the equilibrium,” Dr. Sterling conceded. “Remember, though, I didn’t say it was perfect in its current state, did I? Just perfect enough, for the moment, which seems pretty generous to me.”
“A momentary crack? Surely this is a cop-out, given the nature of time,” intervened Dr. Rieland’s guest. A fellow philosopher from Cambridge, they were editing a volume on Nietzsche together.
“We barely scratch the surface of time!” Dr. Sterling exclaimed. “A fissure is only as broad as you perceive it to be. It may be miniscule from one perspective—barely perceptible—yet from another, it may seem massive, even overwhelmingly uncrossable, like a black hole in space. Is it a mountaintop or an abyss? It might depend on how you are seeing. For instance, from which angle you are looking or with which eyes.” Capturing some more peas, he added, “What lives, continues to live, forever, if the perfect equilibrium is restored, if the relationship is repaired between the two ends of the magnet, or the two sides of the chasm, so to speak.”
“Oh my! What has this got to do with God and science?” asked the politician’s wife with a little laugh.
“Everything,” Dr. Sterling cried most seriously. “Everything!”
“Are all scientists mad?” she leaned in and whispered to me. I nodded, turning my head away slightly as a means of trying to escape the overpowering cloud of Tabu. Now I understood why the word perfume translated from the French as “through smoke.”
“Let’s be frank, shall we?” Having finished his peas, Dr. Sterling set down his fork.
“Oh, let’s!” the politician’s wife clapped her hands together with glee. I braced myself as another wave of Tabu came at me.
Dr. Sterling wiped his mouth with his Christmas-red napkin, then spread it out before his plate. “The more I discovered of the scientific world, the more it convinced me of the amazing interconnectedness and brilliancy of God’s design. People tend to think of science as being at odds with faith, but nothing could be further from the truth. The one only confirms the other; the one only illuminates its echo, and yet its limitations and dependence in the face of the other.”
He meticulously arranged his silverware on top of his napkin as he spoke.
“While they are connected, there is a difference between fear and awe,” Dr. Sterling continued, fiddling with his knife. “We shouldn’t be afraid to embrace the awe. All of my work has only proven to me that the imprint of the Divine lies on the natural world. So why wouldn’t the same be the case for science?”
With a quick flourish, Dr. Sterling yanked the crimson napkin out from under his silverware. The cutlery remained undisturbed, but now glinting on the pristine white tablecloth.
“Oooh, well done!” the politician’s wife clapped again. I held my breath.
Dr. Sterling turned to another guest, Dr. Inchbald, an eminent heart surgeon from the States.
“Dr. Inchbald,” Dr. Sterling appealed to him passionately, “you see people live and die in your line of work. You literally know what it’s like to hold a beating heart in your hand. In many circles, and especially among your astonished patients and their grateful families, you are a god.”
Dr. Inchbald blushed. I marveled at his humility, this man who saved lives daily as I sat reading.
“What say you?” Dr. Sterling pinned him with his smile. “How do you reconcile God and science?”
Dr. Inchbald set down his fork and looked down at his hands. At first, I thought he was just trying to finish chewing, but then I realized he had stopped doing everything, his head bowed. When he raised it, he looked at all of us very sincerely.
“I admit,” he said softly, so softly we all had to crane to hear, and so we all moved in closer, a disparate bunch of similarly expectant faces. “I admit that I don’t know what to think about God, about death when I see it happen. When I have to inform a patient’s family that he didn’t pull through, or that no matter what we can try to do, it won’t be enough to save him.” He grew very quiet. “The hardest ones, for me, I think, are the children.”
We waited amidst the clinking of antique silverware on fine china plates rising up from the other tables, like dissonant music from a nearby room. Dr. Inchbald shifted a little uncomfortably under the attention, but then he took a breath and drew himself up, speaking more loudly.
“Sometimes I want to rage against God when I see the lifeless body of a teenage boy who was running a court and shooting baskets only a short while ago. Or when I operate on a tiny new baby with a hole in its heart. Or when I see the blue lips of a grandmother who was only just kissing her grandbabies that morning.” He paused, and then smiled wryly. “One of my specialties is massive coronaries, a funny kind of ‘specialty’ to have in life, when you think about it.”
Really? I thought to myself. Try reading dead people for a living.
Dr. Inchbald looked at each of us. “But one heckuva alarm bell.”
We looked back, quiet.
He continued, “You had better think through God if you’re going to stay in one piece. I’ve had colleagues try to sidestep God, but that only cracks them apart even further in the long run.”
I thought of my own specialty in 18th- and 19th-century literature. We all have specialties, special gifts. Are they important, I began to wonder, only insofar as how they bring us to God? Is it in how they reflect His perfect love through each of us to others? Charged with a sudden volt, I thought back to the orientation movie night. Otherwise, it dawned on me, these “specialties” are nothing special.
The surrounding darkness threatened to swallow me up, seated at the table in its midst, in my little pool of light. Without warning everything we do seemed meaningless, regardless of our lines of work. Was any way of trading my time for money, or for that matter, any expenditure of time, for nothing of any true value in the end?
Just as suddenly the darkness receded, the pool of light seemed to take me in, as I thought how anything we do—any job, act, gesture—becomes meaningful if done with a heart for God. Was this the great diurnal paradox looming up again—nothing matters and everything does? I stared at the candle flickering before me, deciphering the seeming coolness of blue and green dancing, so improbably, within the bright orange and red. Which was hotter? Which was purer?
I had to admit, to my growing concern, reading the Bible was becoming rather addictive. There did indeed seem to be something for everyone, including me.
After all, who reads the Book of Ecclesiastes and identifies with not a single thing?
I blinked the flames from my eyes and turned my attention back to Dr. Sterling. He was studying Dr. Inchbald thoughtfully.
Dr. Inchbald continued, “I’ve seen science and medicine do much good, and I’ve seen it have no effect, despite the most valiant efforts. These lines on my old face are hard-won, and I’m now slowly growing proud of them,” he chuckled. Then his voice grew even stronger. “After many years, and I admit after many stiff drinks after many hard days, one morning I stood suspended over one heart, scalpel in hand, about to cut in. It was a bit of a Monty Python moment, as I’ve liked to come to call it.”
The provost raised his eyebrows and gestured with warm curiosity for the doctor to continue.
“Well, as I was standing there, all the uncertainty of my life, the absurdity of all this death, and all our attempts to ward it off, came down to a pinprick of light—like the glint off the scalpel in my hand. As I looked down I realized my hand was shaking, the ultimate downfall for any surgeon, but especially a heart surgeon.
“I panicked and felt as if I was being swallowed up in, well,” he looked over at Dr. Sterling, “a black hole.”
Dr. Sterling chuckled.
“When all of a sudden, I heard it. A ping.”
“A what?” the provost opened his eyes wide with confusion.
“A ping. Like a, well, high-pitched ping. Like the sound that the machine that cost over a million pounds makes in the delivery room in the opening birth sequence to Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. You’re British, you should know,” he leveled at the provost. “The machine that goes ping!”
“Wow, all these scientist folks are mad,” the politician’s wife Tabu’ed in my ear and nose.
Dr. Inchbald continued, “This ping marked something that finally went off in my head, in my heart, in my hand—steadying all three by what I can only call a miracle.”
Please don’t clap again, I silently beseeched the politician’s wife. By some other miracle, she didn’t.
“Do explain!” Dr. Sterling urged.
Dr. Inchbald tried his best to comply. “I’ve come to the conclusion that God is sovereign, even over science, and that I cannot pretend to fully know His ways. They really are mysterious, as the saying goes. They are not of the mind of men, no matter how hard we try to wrap our minds about these ways. I can marvel at the intricacies of the human body, which really are pretty miraculous to behold. In fact, I don’t know how one can go to medical school and not be in greater awe of a Creator than ever before. The original, in both senses of the term, pings into the banal; the heavenly pokes in, pokes through.”
Several guests nodded, a few looked confused, one or two took a hard swig of the liquors now circulating.
“To cut to the chase,” Dr. Inchbald said, no doubt seeing the same reactions I saw as he glanced around the table, “when I see death, I know it is wrong.”
“Obviously,” Dr. Rieland snickered.
“Really, really wrong. In my gut wrong,” Dr. Inchbald almost pleaded. “It was not meant to be. It was not meant for us. We were not built for it. Everything in my body, at a cellular level, let alone a metaphysical one, twists against it. Not just my death, but the death of every living thing.”
The politician’s wife next to me sniffed. “Yes,” she said. “I had a beloved Shih Tzu who escaped from my purse and got struck by a car. I held her broken body as she breathed her last, looking at me with bewildered adoration the entire time. I was heartbroken. When I think about it, it felt so wrong.”
We all sat there in silence, serious or otherwise, but unified, thinking of dead pets, birds fallen from their nests, whales washed ashore. Of unborn babies, abducted children, hospices and the elderly. Of loved ones wasting away, suffering, shattering against a windshield, bleeding from a wound. Of aging. Growing weak. Losing one’s mind. Of ourselves.
Buried. In the dark. Devoured by insects. Turned to dust. Burned. Cremated. Turned to ashes. Was this really all there was, forever? That we were lost to ourselves and to each other forever?
Wrong.
Wrong!
Dr. Sterling interjected into all of our ruminating thoughts. “Yes, I would have to conclude that no matter how misleading the title of the theory of relativity, absolutes rule the physical as well as the metaphysical. For me, God’s love is so great that it can attract even the farthest, most lost, most seemingly random cell to Him. That we desire to respond, to have right relationship with Him, is the secret. To set it all right. For everything to be all right.”
The politician’s wife was dabbing her eyes with her napkin now. “Poor Fifi,” she whispered.
Darkness surrounding. Light at the table.
“Which it is, which it will be, depending on how you view time,” Dr. Inchbald smirked, as he finished Dr. Sterling’s thought.
It was only when we stood up to say the parting grace that I remembered Dr. Sterling sat confined to a wheelchair. As the rest of us filed from the platform, two waiters came to lift him off. One of the waiters broke protocol and actually spoke to a parting guest. As he set his side of the wheelchair down, I heard him ask Dr. Sterling a question.
“Sir,” the waiter knelt down beside him, “I wondered if you could tell me what you consider to be the strongest force in the universe?” He rushed on, “Please forgive my intruding, but I was curious as to your opinion, your being such a great scientist and all.”
Dr. Sterling put his hand on the waiter’s shoulder. “Excellent question!” he marveled.
“I’m a bit of a science-fiction buff,” the waiter admitted, “and I read all the science magazines. Always have. Before I had to quit school, science was my best subject,” he added proudly.
Dr. Sterling nodded in praise. “Well, what a delight and an honor to meet a fellow with similar interests. Yes, I don’t think I’ve ever been asked such an excellent question.”
The waiter beamed.
“Love.”
The waiter’s smile froze, and then it started to melt. He gave Dr. Sterling a confused look.
“The answer to your query is Love,” Dr. Sterling repeated.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” the waiter hedged. “I mean, love is an abstract, an emotion. It’s not a force or a substance or even a theory.”
“Are you so sure?” Dr. Sterling’s eyes danced.
We were waiting for the rest of the procession to go through the dining hall doors, so the waiter risked a few more moments of conversation. He leaned in even closer to Dr. Sterling, resting his arm intimately on his wheelchair. Dr. Rieland threw the waiter a withering look, but Dr. Sterling seemed delighted.
“Please, sir, do go on,” the waiter urged, ardently, seeing only the doctor’s delight, and delighted in response.
“Well, I used to have this hunch,” Dr. Sterling began, “but years of experience have only confirmed it.”
“What?” the waiter asked with bated breath. Now several of us were listening intently, but Dr. Sterling continued to speak only with the waiter.
“There is nothing more powerful, more radical, more transformational than Love. No other source or substance or force. Do not be deceived, for it is all of these things, and then some! Often folks like to dismiss it as a mere emotion, but it is far more than that. It can’t be circumscribed by our desires or dictated by the whim of our moods. Not the Great Love of the Universe, as I like to call it. Not the Love that set everything in motion, keeps it in motion, which moves through all things and yet bulldozes nothing, not even our will. Try it. Just try it and you’ll see. If you love that Great Love first, because It loved you first, and then love yourself as you have been loved, and then love others from that love…Wow! Bam! Life without that kind of faith—that’s death. Therein lies the great metaphor, Miss Drake,” he nodded toward me. “Life without faith is death. For life, as it was intended to be, is Love. Start loving and you’ll really start living. There is no other force in the universe comparable to that.”
Through the tunnel of my mind, I heard the silvered tinkling of a coin dropping.
The great doors opened off the dining area, and the line started moving from high table. In celebration of Christmastide, voices from the college choir lifted into the air “O Holy Night” as the recessional:
Long lay the world in sin and error pining.
Till He appeared and the Spirit felt its worth.
A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices,
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.
The waiter stood up, wrapped in a sort of awe. The candles flickered in the reflection of the benighted windows like tiny lanterns floating on a dark, still lake.
Fall on your knees! Oh, hear the angel voices!
O night divine, the night when Christ was born…
The waiter began pushing the wheelchair of the man at whose side he had just kneeled.
He knows our need, our weakness is no stranger,
Another waiter came to help him ease Dr. Sterling down the final steps.
Behold your King! Before Him lowly bend!
The waiters wheeled Dr. Sterling around the corner to the old-fashioned elevator, or lift as the Brits call it. The kind that makes you feel as if you are being cranked up or down by a monkey working a cumbersome pulley in a metal cage, and which gives the disconcerting effect of passing through the skeleton of a building. The large formal staircase to the SCR antechamber loomed ahead of me. I found myself already missing Dr. Sterling’s dear company as I dug into the first step.
Truly He taught us to love one another,
His law is love and His gospel is peace.
Chains He shall break, for the slave is our brother.
And in His name all oppression shall cease.
The music followed us through the open door:
His power and glory ever more proclaim!
Mounting the stairs, I looked over my shoulder as the waiters began extinguishing the candles. I felt TDH take my hand, steadying my attempt on the steps in my dress shoes. The door closed gently behind us and, like Wordsworth’s traveler emerging from the valley, “the music in my heart I bore,/Long after it was heard no more.”
“More Madeira, my dearah?” the provost tipped the prismatic decanter over my delicate demi-glass.
In the SCR, where faculty gather, I joined the throng in praise of Dr. Sterling’s work and dazzling intellect. Like Dr. Inchbald, he handled all the fawning with disarming humility.
“It is amazing that you can be a believer in God and an accomplished scientist,” our perfectly coifed senior dean sniggered, as the result of, I suspected, holding Madeira a little too dearah. “That you can be given, your, well, uh, your…” he stammered, now caught uncomfortably in his inebriated trap, “…state,” he finished, clumsily raising his glass.
“You mean my wheelchair?” Dr. Sterling asked.
We all shifted our weight uncomfortably in the circle.
Without a shadow in his pleasant tone, Dr. Sterling replied, “Yes, I’ve had this facet to keep things interesting since birth.”
Then turning with a look of particular kindness toward the senior dean, Dr. Sterling smiled broadly. “Like you,” he nodded as he raised his glass back, “I am not a mistake.”
Carolyn Weber is an author, speaker and associate professor of Romantic Literature at Seattle University, currently holding a Visiting Professorship at Santa Barbara’s Westmont College.
Adapted with permission from Surprised By Oxford by Carolyn Weber (Thomas Nelson, 978-0-8499-4611-0, $16.99, August 2011).
