Camp!

Last week we picked up our son from Camp Stevens, hot and dusty at the end of a wonderful week. This was his second year attending the 'International Odyssey' camp, when Camp Stevens welcomes some 30 boys from the Rikkyo Episcopal School in Japan. The boys are thrown into the 'adventure groups' along with the American campers, and everyone braves the heat, spiders, outdoor campouts, and cold pool together. (One wonderful thing is that in the late '80s, I too got to know boys from the Rikkyo School at my own camp, Camp Huston, in Goldbar, WA -- the world, and the Anglican Communion, is that small!) Our kids' summers have long included some variation on camp, both Episcopal and secular, in East Coast humidity, West Coast dry heat, and English rain...and always with a lot of dirt. And with it all, a chance to be with other kids and young counselors in the wonderful, semi-feral atmosphere of the outdoors - with God both explicitly named and subconsciously experienced. 

I don't know yet what longterm effect this will have on my kids' experience of God, but for me, it was foundational. My Episcopal camp burned incense in the open-air chapel filled with the sound of the nearby Wallace River, all of us piled on top of each other in that sweaty, familiar way of summer camp - a full sensory experience of worship. They took us young campers off on trails with slugs and rain, my first experiences of backpacking and learning what grit and perseverance felt like. And we sang so many songs that still play in my head decades later. Can there be any better way of raising our young people?