I was ten years old when my family moved to Sandy Spring. We had been living in the Boston area and when my Dad learned that he was to be promoted and transferred, he came down and picked out an old farm house not all that near his office in Clarksburg Maryland but only a mile or so from the Meeting House. He had grown up in Prague, a definite city boy, but thought my Mom, who hailed from a coal mining community in Southwest Pennsylvania would like it. Once settled in, we spent successive Sundays visiting different churches in the area. Perhaps it was because ladies with surnames that go back to the first days recorded in the Sandy Spring Annals called on my Mother, in a formal sort of way that she found charming, that we became attenders and then members of Sandy Spring Monthly Meeting. That was 47 years ago.
As a child, I struggled mightily in Meeting for Worship and did only a little better in First Day School. So my memories of that time include the sheer boredom of sitting on hard benches (never, thank goodness, on the facing rows) trying to make my twin brother laugh while not succumbing to his attempts, often successful, to do the same to me. On occasion we would be eldered on the front porch of the Meeting House generally for being too noisy in the graveyard or playing football in the space between the Meeting House and the Community House. I look back on all of this fondly now. Still, I would be transfixed by those who rose, sometimes leaning on canes, often with large hands from a life of farming, and spoke. I also came to like the smell of the place which to this day I find unique and which I associate with men and women sitting in silence patiently waiting to discern the soft still voice of God.
I didn’t know Barry Morley all that well as I went to the public school and couldn’t carry a tune. It is true that we were both Baltimore Colts fans. Still, it took a high school football injury which knocked me out of summer practices for me to say yes when Barry asked me to be a counselor at Catoctin. That was 1969 and for the next four summers and ever since camp (what I mean is the experience of grace that permeates camp) has been present in my life.
There are lots of different ways and different vocabularies that we use to describe the camp experience. This is always apparent around the fire circle when people draw on metaphors, song and symbols encompassing nature, friendship, community, magic, courage, forgiveness and, of course, love. The richness of the experience, one of the ways we know it is real, that we did not just imagine it or experience it in isolation, is that all of these different means of expression are perfectly understandable to all within earshot. They each have the ring of truth. Nevertheless, for me, maybe more so as I have gotten older, the camp experience is, at its essence, a spiritual experience and I am most comfortable describing it using the language of the spirit.
The philosophy or idea or notion or wish that is expressed when we say there is that of God in each of us became real for me at camp. It happened in many ways and because of many things including a, well, fall off the horse-type revelation. Mimi Ligon, my co-counselor, had sprained her ankle and the doctor in the local emergency room was insisting that she stay off it and, in fact, return home to recuperate. This was a disaster in more ways than one. As a last measure, Barry had Mimi and me and 4 or 5 others gather after fire circle for the nights that we had left together. We prayed, in silence, holding hands and channeling all the love we could imagine back into that swollen ankle. It was one of those nights, in front of the lodge near where Thorny Brown used to set up his pop-up camper, under a Catoctin sky bright and crazy with stars, before stepping into the pop-up for another try at the ankle, that I felt God’s grace. It called me and it was loud, clear and unmistakable.
Yes, Mimi hiked out of camp with us the next Monday after the same doctor declared her now-healed ankle a miracle. We were teenagers, we healed fast. I don’t recall but we likely used a lot of ice and for all I know Mimi might now have a different explanation informed by her PhD in microbiology. For me, especially now, it really is beside the point. The reality was the knowledge that no matter what, even should I be taken in that moment, God was love and God was near. We didn’t have to look any further. It is all within each of us.
In the intervening years, I have gotten off track and, at times, way off track. Or so it seemed. Now it feels more like a journey with different stops, different lessons. But the experience of grace still happens. It often feels like an embrace, a sense of pure happiness for no reason. Sometimes a sense of contentment. Sometimes simple joy. Sometimes it feels like sharing a familiar inside joke. Really inside.
There was never any question about whether Kiah and Nathan would go to camp. They neither one had a choice in the matter. And it has been a potent joy for me that they were Catoctin lifers. Kiah is a counselor now and is forming her own vocabulary, along with her camp soul mates, to describe and to deepen their camp experience. Nathan, too, became a Quaker at camp and brought what he experienced to the SSFS camp this past summer.
When I returned home after that first year as a counselor to start my senior year at high school, I tried to tell a friend about what had happened. He wrote down a poem on a little piece of paper that I kept in my wallet until it, for lack of a better word, biodegraded. Now I keep it in my heart.
One climbs,
One sees,
One descends,
One sees no longer, but one has seen.
There is an art to conducting oneself in the lower regions
By the memory of what one saw higher up.