Summer Sundays

8-3-12

This is the first church in which I felt God's presence.


To this day I can smell the fragrance of the balsam, the dried needles we collected from the forest floor and sewed into calico cushions to take home with us for the winter.
I can hear the rustle of the birch leaves and the calls of the birds that woke us in the mornings and the owls and loons that sang us to sleep. And the bugles that told us the time of day and signaled to us the presence of the boys camp across the lake.

My mother took my brother and sister and me to St. Paul's on most Sundays, but the thing that made the biggest impression on me was the General Confession in which we claimed that we were miserable offenders and that there was no health in us. Sunday School was OK, but I didn't love church.

But at camp on Sunday mornings we began with special breakfast...pancakes or waffles or blueberry muffins served in the open-sided dining hall as the mist rose off the lake, where we'd free swim later in the day, and later, dressed in our crisp green shorts and white blouses, we'd go to the Quarry, where older campers and counselors would lead us in worship. What must it have sounded like to hear all those little girls' voices singing 'Oh, master let me walk with thee,' and 'This is my father's world'?

Camp, unlike home and school, was not a place of shoulds and oughts and reminders of all the ways in which I fell short, whether it was my hair being unruly (which it was) or my room being messy (which it was) or there being something wrong with me because I was not an extravert like my mother. Camp was a place of acceptance, where I learned I could sing and was given the role of YumYum in The Mikado. It was a place of wonder, each day beginning with a question to be explored in the nature hut. It was a place of possibilities, where I could weave a basket and paddle a canoe and hike to a granite quarry and read to my heart's content during rest time.

I remember a few of the names of other campers. Clare Morison. Marcia Whitney. Anne Ogden. Pat Latimer. I wonder where they are now. I wonder if they treasure these memories as I do. Whether they do or not, we were very much in that sacred circle together.