ABSTRACT
I was a child of small-town Texas, and of a single-parent mom, a feminist. We were poor closet liberals. Austin was my Mecca. I excelled there, in the late ’50s, and morphed into an existentialist at a residential community of learning alongside the university, the only integrated housing on campus, both by gender and by race. We met in rigorous seminars with a collegium of renegade Christian ministers, headed by a chaplain from WWII who’d seen the carnage, demythologizing the church fathers and scriptures; studying the contemporary theologians Bultmann and Bonhoeffer (based in Kierkegaard); Buber, Tillich, the Niebuhrs; and readings in cotemporary thought: Sartre, Camus, Arthur Miller, Dostoevsky, Ionesco, Beckett, and more. We lived in joy without hope, like Camus’s Sisyphus pushing that rock up the hill, watching it roll down. God was dead, the word “god” empty. All words were empty of intrinsic meaning, symbols pointing to experience. The collegium attempted to create a language of experience: One struggles against the absence of final meaning, “coming up against it.” Surrendering illusions through honesty, one was opened to creating meaning: an authentic life, freedom. This surrender to reality was “the Christ event.” Our freedom, our commonality in receiving it, and our common task of passing it on were realized in community through rituals of confession, forgiveness, surrender, and gratitude. Worship as theatre.
