Bethel University - Spire Yearbook (St Paul, MN)

Page 23 text:

Stark corridors long For imbued maturity Of experienced breadth. Hastily marked time Withdraws meaningful moments From ripe fulfillment. BRUCE DAHLMAN Ourglass sand settles in time, its course refined by crystalsandspace the current changes at a random fault only secure suspense 'til I am cast into the new hour, a tempered form of accurate chance, content only ’til rest donns the inversion, settling sand by BRUCE DAHLMAN and HOLLY SCHM1ESS

Page 22 text:

Oiling Hinges Crossing fields of varied green, 1 paused again to open gate. And found it stiff with underuse From keeping out and keeping in. Beyond the gate the field was fair. In silence cried for me to come And smell its earth and wade its stream That long had laid unshared, unknown. And so I turned to come again; With oiling can I overcame. Now every life’s a field of green. And oiling hinges conquers pain. MARTHA BARKER

Page 24 text:

The college career is one of the most unusual periods in our lives. It is a time of relatively little responsibility and great independence. Let’s face it. What do we actually do here anyway? Our daily obligations are an occasional encounter with classes, a token appearance at the library and writing yet another letter home begging for money. The rest of the day is occupied with some of the more important facets of the “student’s” life. Basically this entails coffee shop, trips to McDonald’s, flirting, checking P.O.s, etc. We arc our own bosses. If we stay outtilMa.m., no one is at home losing sleep about it. But more important, the college years arc unique because they are a time of unprecedented flux in attitudes and values. Our adolescent attitudes and values acquired from our parents are weak against the dialectical tug-of-war we go through every day during class and those late-night dorm room debates. Through the liberal arts education new values are not only acquired but strengthened. Within this process lies a potential pitfall—the college student’s fixation on, and love for, the avant-garde. As we question many of the existing Fstablishment’s beliefs for the first time, we realize that we have acquiesced to many as the result of a very non-cognitive process. Granted, many of the old values need rejection, e.g. the place of women in the church. But what we don’t need is the sort of jump-on-the-bandwagon mentality that commits logical homicide as a practice. And not only does this mentality commit logical homicide, but it is also the sword and breastplate of many a cynic. It is easy to slip from a valid criticism of the status quo to a blatant condemnation that puts the cynic above the “naive masses” in no one’s mind but his own. To the cynic it is stupid to adhere to anything less than the ideals of the avant-garde. You might be thinking this is a support of tradition. Quite the contrary.I cannot think of any situation when mere tradition is a valid supporting argument for much of anything. But to destroy a belief simply because it is traditional shows the same naivety that upholds a belief because it is traditional. Unless we rid ourselves of this sort of reasoning, it will produce in us another tradition-clad, void-of-rcason avant-garde that will become the Establishment of the future. MARK TROXEL