20. Religious Camp

My parents went on a vacation trip to Hawaii and sent my brother and me to sleepway camp. My parents had gotten the camp’s name from the Presbyterian Church, but I don’t think they realized how religious it was going to be. At this camp, three times a day, following meals, there were prayer meetings. Sometimes you were supposed to pray alone, and sometimes the counselors led the prayers. The counselors talked about how the most important thing was to admit your sins, how if you admitted your sins and allowed Jesus into your heart then God sees you through a special kind of glasses that makes your sins disappear so you can enter the kingdom of heaven. After the dinner prayer meeting, we all read the Bible. If a counselor came by and you weren’t reading the Bible, if you were reading another book or writing a letter, they would give you a hard time. Ask if you didn’t love God, if that was the reason you were offending Him.

My brother and I were at the same camp, but he was in the younger kid’s program. I only saw him a few times, in passing at dinner or full-camp events. From what he described, his program wasn’t nearly as religious as mine.

Most of the other kids in my program were inner city kids. There was some sort of deal where they could go to this camp at no expense to them. Their churches paid for it. I would have had trouble fitting in anyway, since I was a quiet and this was my first time away from home for such a long period of time, but with these kids I was totally on the outside. When my parents called on the third day or so, long distance from Honolulu, I happened to mention that all my bunkmates were black. My father got mad at that. He must have made a few phone calls, because by that night the bunks had been switched around. A couple of the black guys had been moved out, and a white guy moved in. The other black guys weren’t happy with the changes. They’d all been getting along just fine.

“There must have been complaints from parents,” our bunk’s head counselor, whose name was Ross, explained. He was white, as were all the other counselors.

“Complaints about what?” the black guys asked. “Who complained? Who can we complain to?”

We were all sitting around, after quiet time at night, talking about this. I was right there.

“Various complaints,” Ross said. “This is the way it is. No more complaints.”

“Whose parents complained?” the black guys kept asking, but Ross wouldn’t tell them. The black guys must have suspected it was mine. I waited for one of them to say something. But they never did, that I heard.

The other white guy’s name was Fred. We became friends, mostly because we just ended up together. Fred was big on the camp candy store. The candy store was open only an hour a day, in the afternoon between two and three o’clock. Fred went every day. He described to me the different candies he bought, why one candy bar was better than another. He had various strategies for getting the best candies in the store. You had to be there at least an hour early, Fred told me, if you wanted to guarantee a good spot in line.

On Sunday night at the end of the first week, the founder of the camp gave a sermon to everyone, including the younger kids. He had a TV show, and there were cameras all over the place recording him as he spoke to us. He was a short man with silver hair, and a very dynamic speaker. He never stopped moving. We sang songs he had written, hymns that were published in a little book they had given us when we arrived at camp. The counselors had been coaching us in these songs, so we could impress the founder. We all sang our hearts out, and the founder gave us a beaming smile that must have looked great on television.

After the sermon and songs, the founder said that anyone who’d been moved by the spirit of the Lord should go outside and be saved. The counselors were waiting, and if we felt the call, they would save us. That first night, only a few people went, but on the nights that followed the counselors asked again, and more and more people went, even after sermons nowhere near as good as the one the founder had given.

A few of the campers left after a week, and others after two weeks. Those of us who stayed the third week got to go on an overnight camping trip. It was a miserable day, drizzly and cold. The black guys complained about the backpacks we had to carry, and then when we made camp about the terrible dinner the counselors made for us. I didn’t complain, but that was only because I was still feeling shy. I hated the hiking and the food, too.

The next day we went mountain climbing, and there was an accident. A guy named Red got hit in the head with a rock that was dislodged by the foot of someone up a litter higher than him. The rock had gone right over my shoulder, before it hit Red.

I knew Red, but only by sight. He was tall, and had reddish hair. It was actually closer to blonde. He was one of the three or four other white guys in the camp, besides Fred and me.

The counselors immediately stopped the trip. Two of them herded us back down the mountain, and the others clustered around Red. We practically ran down that hill. The counselors yelled at anyone who said a word. We came out on a road, and one of the counselors went to make phone calls. There was a beautiful, vast lake on the other side of the road. It seemed to go on forever, right to the edge of the horizon and beyond.

Soon the other counselors came down from the mountain, carrying Red. There was a shirt around his head, stained red with blood. An ambulance pulled up and took Red, and an hour later a bus from the camp came for us. “Red’s okay,” they told us when we were on the bus. “But you have to pray for him. He needs your prayers right now.”

The bus was silent the whole ride back.

The night, after sermon, we all got together for a special session in the main meeting room, and the counselors took turns telling us what a great guy Red was. They talked about how he never complained and always had a smile on his face. They told us Red’s parents had been notified, and they were trusting the Lord to guide them. They told us to pray for Red’s parents as we prayed for Red. Red’s counselor was the last one to speak, and began to cry as he described how he’d just witnessed for Red a day or two before. Red’s counselor was my favorite counselor in the camp. He went jogging every morning, and if you wanted to go with him, you tied a sock to your bed and he woke you up. I’d done it a couple of times.

Back in our bunk, my counselor Ross led us in some more prayers. “Lord, help us know what you mean to show us by this,” Ross said. “Help us know that it could have been any of us this happened to.” “It should have been Fred, not Red,” one of the black guys sang as he took a shower before bed, but without rancor in his voice, more because he enjoyed the rhyme.

The next morning, they told us Red had pulled through. The counselor who’d carried Red down told us the details of what had happened. He said he hadn’t wanted to until he was sure Red was going to be all right.

“Red stopped breathing,” the counselor said. “Red’s face turned color, it turned blue. And that’s when I called on the Lord for help. That’s when I asked the Lord to please, please help. And He did. The Lord was with us on that mountain.”

We took up a collection for Red’s family. Fred put all his candy money in, everything he’d been saving for the rest of the trip. It looked like around twenty dollars.

Two nights later, when they asked that people who wanted to be saved go outside, I went. I’d been wanting to go ever since the day of Red’s accident, but I didn’t want it to seem like I was going because of Red’s accident. I wanted it to seem like my own decision.

The night was warm, and there was a bright moon. Out on the lawn, there were pairs of counselors and kids. The counselors were doing most of the talking. The counselor I’d gone outside with had wire rim glasses. He asked me questions about God and my life. Yes, I answered, yes, yes, yes. He hugged me after we were done and then laughed and hugged me again. “Chris was saved tonight, praise the Lord,” Ross said, when I got back to my bunk that night. All the black guys gave me high fives.

The day before we were to leave, a group of us who’d been saved went by bus to a nearby city to proselytize. None of us knew what that meant, but they explained it to us. We split up into groups of two when we got to the city. It was Fred and me. We stopped people and asked them if they were interested in being happy. Then we asked them if they knew what it felt like to be free. The counselors had told us the questions to ask. Most people listened up until the time we showed our Bibles. Then they got an uncomfortable smiles on their faces, began edging away. One guy called us Moonies and cursed at us for wasting his time. But there was one woman who wasn’t even that much older than us, maybe high school age, who listened to everything we had to say. She didn’t let us witness for her, but she did take all our pamphlets and said she’d think hard about what we’d said.

One the way back to camp on the bus we told the counselors our experiences and sang the founder’s songs as loud as we could, until our throats ached.

The next day my parents came. I didn’t tell them about any of this. But I thought about it a lot, in the weeks afterward.

The more I thought about it, the angrier I became. I’d been brainwashed, I told myself. They’d hounded me until I didn’t know what I was doing and taken advantage of my feelings of being alone and my fears about Red and then they’d used them to make me go out and do something humiliating like telling people on the street about Jesus. My skin crawled whenever I thought about myself doing that.

But I knew I wasn’t blameless. I’d wanted to do it, and I’d felt good as I’d been doing it. Really good, like I was part of something so much bigger than me.

I resented the camp for that, too:  for making me feel like there was something bigger than me I could be a part of.

About two months later, I got a letter from Ross. He wrote that he’d been thinking of me, and how important it was that I keep up my Bible reading and spreading of the word of God. He encouraged me to write back, and even included his phone number if I ever wanted to talk.

I was going to tear the letter up, but then I got a better idea. I put it back in the envelope, and on the back of the envelope I wrote everything I could remember of what that guy on the street who’d called us Moonies had said to Fred and me. Then I put the letter in another envelope and mailed it to back to Ross.

It didn’t make me feel any better. But it did stop him from ever writing me again.