Wheaton College Alumni Magazine Winter 2013 | Page 51

A Psalm for Moving Up
on the dedication of BGC5
by Jill Peláez Baumgaertner
dean of humanities
and theological studies

For decades it was a functional set of stalls down a hallway
straight as a railroad car, each scholar’s cubby windowless and
packed, the air a melange of old books, dust, coffee, the passage lined
with empty chairs poised for students who never lingered. Selah.
Now this broad floor unsettles us slightly as we wander into new
spaces as yet unaccustomed, the paint still pungent, the carpeting
untrod. The books in each office are newly arranged and precise.
They stand up-right and perfect. The light expands through slanted
panes or startles through mirrored tubes. And we watch through glass
walls as students, backpacks thrown aside, water bottles on the
stretch of tables, crouch over books, and look up to consider Barth or
Hebrew verbs or the Trinity or Calvin. Selah. This is the place that
moors a college in words enfleshed in the Word, that schools us in
sophia and sola fide. Selah. These are the scholars who teach us that
light is created out of darkness, who balance the despair and wrath,
the hopelessness of the Psalms with the certainty and extravagant
love of the Psalms, the stark cries of the forsaken Christ with the
fullness of the empty tomb. Selah. Walk into the branching hallways.
Listen to the whirr of printers, the click of keyboards, the soft
conversation of students and mentors. Think of the always younger
faces of students, these chairs holding them, these walls hearing them,
our prayers now containing them, these windows pushing their vision,
as ours, outward to creation. Selah. Let us pause and remember the
future, thinking in the ways eternity entices us, the present moment
here, the past three floors below, the future as we imagine it, and now
the present moment fast becoming past and stepping every second
into our future and the Kingdom that is already here. Selah. Let
shared tea and other collaborations, quiet talk and impassioned, let
laughter and fervor know these spaces and link us, past and future.
Selah. We pray God’s breath would charge these rooms, unrolling this
time, as ready for filling as clean newsprint or blank screens with
blinking cursors or the still air before the words are spoken. Selah.

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