#29: Chehpel

Going to Chapel every Tuesday is like eating one of Bernie Bott’s Every Flavored Beans.

One day, after a few good choruses of “See God’s Light,” you may plop down in Row C, seat 107, to happily discover that today, Tony Campolo is speaking. Today, you picked a chocolate mousse bean.

Another day, you are slightly surprised. You don’t know what to think about the fact that there is currently a mime on stage, and said mime has replaced his invisible-box routine with the entire book of Hebrews. Today is a Marzipan day. Not bad, just not quite what you expected.

And then of course, there are those Tuesday mornings when you realize that today you lost your game of Chapel-Roulette. You should have used that chapel skip rather than saving it for flu season. And you find yourself repeating the famous words of Albus Dumbledore, “Alas, earwax.”

Due to the Forrest Gump, life-is-like-a-box-of-chocolates nature of Tuesday mornings at 10:00AM, many students have discovered means for combatting those earwax-flavor days. For, as every college student knows, nothing is more fatal than Boredom. And “listening to people older than us talk” and “Boredom” go together like Richard Simmons and inappropriate use of the unitard. I mean, how can anyone who doesn’t have a facebook possibly have anything worthwhile to say? I bet they can’t even spell the word relevance, let alone #hashtagit.

Visitors to Chapel may be flabbergasted to discover that Ouachita students regularly use Chapel as study hall. And sure, to those unenlightened outsiders, this practice may seem disrespectful. But how are they to know that home-working during the message is a long-standing Ouachita tradition? And not only that, it is a serious attempt at self-preservation lest the style of a speaker not measure up to our I’d-rather-just-listen-to-a-podcast tastes. Who, may I ask, would be liable in the case of a campus-wide epidemic of death by Boredom?

I, for one, am grateful for the way Ouachita Chapel has taught me how to cope with unentertaining situations. Heaven knows I’ll often be bombarded with them in the real world. Committee gatherings, seminars, board-room meetings, conventions? I'm confident that life after the bubble will involve circumstances that wreak havoc on my ADD, rendering my attention span comparable to that of a goldfish.

In fact, I have already started applying these coping methods to situations in my dad-to-day life. I now carry my IPod and Life Science text book on my person at all times.

Just the other Sunday, I showed up at church to discover we would be reading out of Deuteronomy that morning. I managed to don my headphones and whip out my Cellular Respiration notes before the pastor could say “thou shall not.” Maybe he was offended. I’m not really sure. I was too busy bobbing to the beats of Katy Perry to notice.

Next week I am supposed to go to this thing where the Pope like gives an address and stuff to a bunch of people. I’ve heard he’s pretty longwinded. Good thing I have an iphone. And unlimited texting.