Daily chapel wasn’t mandatory when I went to St. Olaf, as it had been in days of yore; but nearly everybody went anyway. It was to be one of many surprises for me. Another: the organ bit at the end — not for walking out. You stayed put, in your pew. Or more accurately, it pinned you there, helpless, until the final strains, grand or sweet, dissonant or of a simple harmony faded, abandoning you to the ordinary day. People stood, hands on the backs of pews, facing the simple altar, the warm windows, or looking up at the source of the music. Some sat, lounging on elbows or legs tucked under.
The organist was almost as new as I, a freshman to the campus in 1984 checking out the chapel. The psalm that day was one of the last in the collection, Psalm 148, a psalm of praise from the heavens to earth and back again. When the service ended, John Ferguson struck the first notes, and I began to walk out. But the music rose like a tide from the back of the church, came crashing. I sat. Ferguson let loose, forging the words in new lyric-less ways: “Praise YHWH, all sea monsters and ocean depths, fire and hail, snow and smoke, storm wind that executes His command…” It was as if the entire universe with all of its weight and all of its glory had come to bear on our little hill.
A dry campus with high academic standards, St. Olaf is remarkably comfortable with drama. Not the in-your-face drama of hyped radicalism but the deep drama of fierce weather and big-hearted actions born of an authentic faith. I am so proud of the cutting-edge sustainability that St. Olaf has realized, not just because it’s the right thing to do but because it fit with the integrity of a college that connects head, heart, and soul.
Cynicism flees from that place like stray leaves when winter hits. Then, winds that have gathered across the southern Minnesota prairie tear over the hill on which St. Olaf was built some 225 years ago by Norwegian Lutheran farmers. The air on a clear day is so clean that it almost hurts, as pure as revelation.
Yesterday I received the billet that my parents sent from an event their Duluth congregation hosted recently: “Songs for the Journey,” with the St. Olaf Cantorei, conducted by John Ferguson. He’s retiring. I left St. Olaf a long time ago, but it hasn’t left me. I suspect he’ll feel the same and maybe even more. Godspeed.
