A Love Letter to Vassar

My Dear Vassar,

I’m not sure if this is a confessional, an apology, or a thank you.

Mostly, it is a love letter.

You may not remember me. Frankly, I’d be stunned if you did. I did my best, from 1999 – 2003,to crawl beneath the radar of all but professors, dining hall staff and cleaning people. (I will always cherish the “non-teaching staff” who befriended me.)

Even then, though, you wouldn’t let me content myself with crawling.

Oh, Vassar. I was a wounded young woman when I landed on your campus, too-skinny and too- scared and too-certain of all I was convinced held me together. A series of shocking losses had sent me scrambling for safety in black-and-white answers and a safe sense of “us” and “them,”“good” and “bad.”

And you – you, Vassar, with your limitless openness to ideas, your outrageously big tent, yourcomfort with mystery, your affection for the odd and the outcast and the outrageous – you utterly terrified me.

Your big, bleeding Vassar heart was so open that there were simply no pigeonholes where I could set my ways. 

You wouldn’t let me close my heart, and every time I tried you pried it open,stuffing in care packages of complexity and platoons of people who smashed my expectations over their heads.

I did not know what to do with you. And so, frankly, I hid.I hid in my dorm room. I hid in the rarefied air of academia. I hid in my very tight circle of predictable wagons.

I wish I could say the hiding ended before graduation. It did not.

But you never, ever stopped working on me.

It would be several years before your big Vassar heart would finally be victorious. But the great glorious secret about big, bleeding hearts is that they always, always win.

Funny, I (loudly – I’m sorry) claimed I knew Jesus. I should have known He was on the side of love. All these years later I love Him more and know His furious relentless goodness better because of you, Vassar. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. 

The way it happened was that my way went wonderfully awry. Something in me – or, more likely, something from very much outside myself, but very much of God and Vassar – led me to make a last-minute decision for Princeton Theological Seminary instead of the extremely- conservative seminary I was considering. Someone greater than me knew that I needed a more Vassar-like place of wide mercies and open questions and a tent bigger than Texas.

My tidy trajectory after seminary was supposed to lead to the pastorate, but I hit a divine detour and ended up at...a cat sanctuary. Picture the old Island of Misfit Toys. To walk into this bizarre place is to be accosted by three-legged cats, diabetic cats, cats who will bite you and fart at you and love you ferociously.

The least-wanted, most-desperate, freakiest creatures who ever needed big, bleeding hearts. As you can imagine, dear Vassar, such a place of radical grace has a way of attracting a certain species of humanity. Who would be drawn to such loudly-imperfect animals but those people brave enough to own their own imperfections? 

And so, in a plan I could have never scripted – can’t you just hear God and old Matt Vassar giggling with delight? – in my “this-is-just-for-a-year” break from ministry and academia, I came to work at the cat sanctuary.

Sixteen years later, I remain the writer, fundraiser and highly unofficial chaplain at this bizarre little outpost of love. 

It is a place where freak flags fly high for two different species; the odd are adored; and the misfits are marveled at for their courage and joy. Mercy is everything; love abounds; and there’s a sacred safety that can let in all the friends, all the ideas and all the complexities without running for cover.

It’s a sort of living parable. 

It’s a very, very Vassar place. (Seriously; these cats would have pink dreadlocks and Tibetan prayer flags in their dorm rooms.)

 And finally, I’m letting my own heart bleed. 

Vassar, you planted these seeds of love; watered them, even when I was a fractious fundamentalist; and you put the color in my tulips even now, in the garden that is half hipster and half saintly, half revolution and half sanctuary, half provocation and one hundred percent grace.

So, yes, Vassar, this is a love letter of sorts. I am grateful to be your strange daughter, a skinny sinner-saint who loves Jesus and writes for the cat sanctuary and cries over tulips. I wish I’d been able to love you with my whole heart twenty years ago. But I’m so grateful that – as you taught me so well – today is a very, very good day to love.