This is a repost and an update. After hearing that Oral Roberts passed away yesterday, I thought I should say a little about my experience with him and his ministry. 

Oral Roberts University is a school shrouded in mystery and legend; a school which boasts alien-spaceship buildings, the infamous Prayer Tower, and a 60 foot statue of praying hands. It is a school where athletes from South Africa and missionary kids with well-to-do parents sit together in the cafeteria. It is a school where well-known missionaries, preachers, and televangelists speak at chapel meetings.

This is my alma mater.

The chancellor, Oral Roberts, told us every time he came to speak during a chapel service that God told him to build this university. We were here at the school because it was our purpose, our divine destiny. Oral Roberts seemed like a sweet, humble, elderly man. Everyone, even the most cynical of us, liked him. His physical presence was much different from how the news reports and media rumors portrayed him.

Oral Roberts would tell us that God had spoke him about us:

”Raise up your students to hear My voice, to go where My light is dim, where My voice is heard small, and My healing power is not known, even to the uttermost bounds of the earth. Their work will exceed yours, and in this I am well pleased.”

I knew of ORU because of my dad. He always said that his time at ORU was the best time of his life. He talked about the silly antics of the boys in his dorm, the kindness of the professors, and the peaceful atmosphere.

I can tell you that these things hadn’t changed much when I was there from 1999 to 2003. But, I want you to see the ORU that I saw when I first got there. So, try to forget everything you’ve heard about the place and just imagine.

Imagine how you’d feel if you had just escaped from a tyranny-ruled kingdom. You would be walking across campus in mid-August, carrying all you own in a two backpacks and a sleeping bag. Your mom would be happy for you, but distracted because her boyfriend didn’t want to help you move into the dorm. He wanted to visit his family on a Cherokee reservation. The landscape on campus was beautiful. You focused on that. People were all smiles. Boys opened doors for you. Everyone said hello to you like they’d known you forever. The girls in your dorm were as sweet as pie.

There were rules you didn’t like, of course, but they were not as bad as your dad’s rules. There were girls’ dorms and boys’ dorms. They were locked down. You couldn’t enter into a boys’ dorm except during move-in and on one designated evening during visiting hours. You had to sign in and out.

Sure, the girls had a curfew and the boys didn’t. The university logic was that if the girls had to go to their dorm rooms, then the boys would too. Cause there weren’t any girls living in Tulsa who didn’t go to the school? Cause boys couldn’t get into “trouble” all by themselves? Right.

You didn’t like wearing a skirt or dress every day, especially since you didn’t have many clothes. So you quickly bought a cheap, ankle-length, black skirt from Walmart, which you wore every day until you got a job.

The boys were silly. They did stupid things like drop water balloons on people from their dorm windows and played prank phone calls. But even during your rose-colored months as a new freshman, you heard stories of male athletes taking female students down by the darkly wooded area on Riverside Drive in order to date rape them. If, by chance, the female student actually attempted to tell someone in authority, the athletes got off scot-free. Athletes at ORU were treated like athletes everywhere. If they were valuable, they could do whatever they wanted.

There were more rules that you didn’t like. You have to live on campus unless you lived with your parents in town, you were married, you had children, you only went to school part-time, or you were over twenty-five.

Then you started to hear the hushed stories about the Roberts family. You heard that Oral Roberts had a son who committed suicide. Ronald Roberts had a drug problem. No one talked about him. Everyone acted like he did not exist. You heard about Richard Robert’s first wife, Patti Roberts, whom the administration pretended to ignore. You heard about their children, which were never mentioned. That’s because Richard’s second wife, Lindsey, was a holy terror. No one liked her. She wore an abundance of gold when she was on television and when she preached during chapel services. She was the image of the perfect Christian woman. (Except she stole someone else’s husband.) She liked to tell the female students how to be a Christian woman. But she was a poor public speaker and had the tendency to say very stupid things in public.

Chapel services were required twice a week. You had to sit with your dorm wing (hallway) sisters. You weren’t allowed to read or sleep. Everyone did both. Resident Assistants had to take note of everyone on his or her wing and try to keep them awake.

You liked chapel. You liked taking time during the day, two days a week, to think about God and your relationship with him. You prayed a lot for your family. You prayed for your mom that you didn’t talk to very often. You prayed for your brothers who didn’t have much food to eat and had to take cold showers because your dad couldn’t afford to pay for heat. You prayed for your dad even though you didn’t know what to say.

You found that this was becoming more and more common. You didn’t know what to say when you prayed. You found yourself praying, “Please, God, please” and then left it at that.

That is what I found during my first year at ORU. I found hypocrisy and selective blindness abounded. I found hurt Christian kids who pretended to be one person in public, but were partying and experimenting with illegal drugs on the weekends. I found that I didn’t fit in a Christian world where perfect facades and superficial kindness were encouraged more than honesty and a commitment to social justice.

I also found sparks of magic.

There was one thing that my dad was completely right about: the professors at ORU were kind and good. There were absolutely amazing professors in every department (especially the English Department). These were quite intelligent and remarkably observant men and women who somehow found themselves teaching at Oral Roberts University. They were just as passionate teaching African American and Women’s Literature as Christian Poets, Shakespeare and Milton. These professors kept me mostly sane during the four years I spent at ORU.

I met true blue, lifelong friends at Oral Roberts University. People that understood me better than I understood myself. People that will always have my back, no matter what. I made friends who dropped out because of the expense. I had friends who helped me get an apartment when my teenage brothers came to live with me. I had friends who were kicked out of ORU for drinking. I had friends who wanted to be youth pastors and missionaries. I had friends who introduced me to Kurt Vonnegut and Jack Kerouac.

We were the fringe students of ORU. We read constantly and listened to David Gray, Bob Dylan, and Wilco. We were obsessed with “SLC Punk”, “Fight Club”, and “Donnie Darko.” We didn’t turn a blind eye to the double standards and pretty lies, but we also thought that we were supposed to be there. Oral Roberts had created a college dedicated to educating thoughtful, hard working, and god-fearing people. When we first arrived on that futuristic campus, we thought we had come home.

We were only nineteen years old and desperately looking for God.