Religion: The Thereness of It All

"Life is a cruel joke, and sooner or later I'm the punch line. Life is just the way it is — the thereness of it. The gift of arthritis. The gift of heart attack. The gift of the isness of life." The speaker was a lecturer at the Christian Faith and Life Community, a training center for undergraduate students of the University of Texas at Austin. His woebegone view of things, he warned, should not lead to despair but to Christian salvation. The man willing to accept "what is ugly and cruel and guilty as well as the contrary" is receiving Christ's message, and discovers that "this is the way it is, I am not what I thought I was, but I can live with my guilt." To hear this unorthodox theology, ministers from university campuses across the nation come to study at Austin's community in the heartland of religious orthodoxy. They hear God discussed as the "void," and the traditional dogmas of the Virgin Birth, Resurrection and Holy Trinity dismissed as so much deadwood in the lumberyard of faith. Fundamentalists, in turn, dismiss the community as heretical, but the leaders of the group consider themselves to be "in the middle of the Christian tradition." How to Be a Layman. Now ten years old, Austin's community is a radical Protestant version of the Catholic Newman clubs, which serve to provide guidance to Roman Catholic students at secular colleges across the country. The goal is to train students to become active Christian laymen as thoroughly as the university trains them for worldly careers. Each year as many as 100 students (including a few Negroes) sign up to live within the community's two residence halls. They pay up to $750 a year for room and board, supplement their academic studies at the university with interdenominational prayer services and lectures in theology. Everywhere—in the halls and in every community teacher's home—students are confronted by Picasso's Guernica, from which many lectures in theology are given.