The Sandbox

The religious among us will forgive me if I observe that, these days, there isn’t as much space for God on college campuses as there used to be.

To some, this may present a crisis: in its flight from campus, religion may have taken our morals and purity with it, leaving a void to be replaced by the sacrilege of the classroom, the presumptuous blaspheming of the egotistical intellectual and the rampant anarchy of a godless education. It seems, at times, that the house of God at the heart of campus lays vacant after all.

That is, of course, until the clock strikes five.

When that happens, the oppressive edifice of the university all but comes crashing down. The bells begin to ring, clamoring their way into classrooms and overpowering the voices of professors, and all of the presumption of the intellectual is, in that moment, undone. The students can no longer hear their precious teachers, must scream in that moment to reach them and are presented with the weakness of their classroom in the face of their chapel. And the bells make it clear they have a message to be spoken.

“You will hear us now,” they cry in pained and clanging voices. But by then they need not tell us; when they ring, we can hear nothing else.

Shut the windows. Plug your ears. Make a concerted effort to have some sort of substantive conversation with anyone standing around you anywhere. Try as you might, you fail. You are overcome by their cacophonous anger. You are conquered.

They make us into modern Prometheuses: for having tried to attain enlightenment for man—here, at a university—we are punished, and everyday at five have our eardrums bloodied inside our skulls.