I Can.

Before I was sixteen, I played out every summer of my life at a Fundamentalist Bible camp, every day of every summer, because that is where I lived.  When I was very small, this was a magical place to grow up—almost from the time I could toddle I had freedom to roam the campgrounds looking for adventure.  My siblings and our summer friends striped the sandy roads with our bicycle tire tracks, we peeled bark off towering pines to use as money in our imagined town, we paddled canoes in sweeping circles around the lake while belting out songs of eternal friendship.  We even got into a little trouble now and then, to the inconvenience and annoyance of my grandpa, the camp director.

With the melting away of innocence, my summers became more difficult.  Teenagers will ask questions, and I was no exception.  But I think my questions were not so typical; they sounded like this: Why will God be angry if my culottes don’t reach my knees?  What will happen if I swim with boys?  Why does God want girls to dress differently than everyone else, though boys can blend in?  Why does God have so many rules about music?  Why do God’s rules change every time a different pastor is in charge?  After a few years of asking these questions with only frustrating results, I began to be angry—at God, at my church, at my parents, at the camp authorities, at every Christian I knew.  Because this was the only Christianity I knew.

The summer after I turned sixteen, I spent four weeks in Panama.  The obvious purpose for my journey was to visit my aunt and uncle, who were teaching at a missionary school in a small town southwest of Panama City.  But, to make the story interesting, I’ve imagined my parents had other motives for sending me.  In my revised version, they saw my fermenting rebellion, realized it was a byproduct of inconsistencies at camp and church, and decided to remove me as far from that environment as they could, if only for a short time.  I don’t know if this is true.  If it is, the plan had the desired effect.  During those four weeks I saw Christians of a very different kind. They had no formulas for sniffing out ungodly music.  They didn’t spend any time at all arguing about whether or not women should be wearing pants.  They were simply and quietly busy about their work dressed in whatever they happened to be wearing.  I brought home this souvenir of my trip: “I can be part of that.”

Here I am today recycling my adolescence, and my questions have grown along with me: Can a just God create beings for a purpose and then punish them for fulfilling that purpose?  Why does God send breathtaking tragedy to the poorest of people, whom he claims to defend?  Is God anything more than an imaginary friend?  In this most recent installment of my story, I make another pilgrimage, not to a foreign country, but to Nashville, Tennessee.

This weekend I attended the interestingly-named Hutchmoot gathering organized by the folks at The Rabbit Room.  A frequent ice-breaker question at the conference was, “Why did you come?”  I could mostly only answer, “I don’t know.”  I’ve been quietly reading The Rabbit Room since the inaugural post and supporting the musicians and writers they recommend.  I’m hoping someday to be the kind of writer they would recommend.  So when I read the announcement about Hutchmoot a few months ago, I knew it was something I wanted to be a part of.  Yet I also had my doubts.  I’m not so comfortable with most Christians these days, and the organizers of this conference are unapologetically Christian.  But, in the end, my trust in their artistry and honesty beat out my hesitation.

I spent Sunday morning “Nashville style,” as one of my new friends puts it,  i.e. attending two different church services.  The first was at the Anglican church where the conference was being held.  During Communion I crouched on a kneeler in front of a wall-sized stained glass window: “The Bread of Heaven,” the robed celebrant murmured, as he offered a half-dollar-sized wafer.  Dipping it in wine from a silver chalice, I placed the bread on my tongue, letting it slowly dissolve as the majestic and formal sounds of an organ filled my ears.

The second service took me to a contemporary church, where informality called the shots, from the start time of the service to the clothing of the preacher.  And this congregation had their own variation on the Communion theme.  Each group of family or friends walked to the front of the auditorium, knelt around low tables and served each other by tearing pieces from a loaf of bread and offering to one another grape juice in tiny plastic cups.  “The body of Christ, broken for you,” said my freshly-made friend as she offered me a bit of bread.  My group walked forward early in the proceedings, so I returned to my second-row seat and watched as, over and over, the window opened before me.  Then we started singing…

The love of God is greater far
Than tongue or pen can ever tell;
It goes beyond the highest star,
And reaches to the lowest hell;
The guilty pair, bowed down with care,
God gave His Son to win;
His erring child He reconciled,
And pardoned from his sin.

With the first words of that song I left that bright little church in Tennessee and traveled back several months and a couple thousand miles to the last time I heard that tune, sung in words I could not understand.  It was the darkest of nights, and the singers lacked bread and wine.  They lacked a home, having pulled themselves from the lethal rubble of theirs only a few hours earlier.

You simply can’t plan these things.

I’m cautious of emotionally-based spiritual promises, having made and broken a myriad during a child’s lifetime of camp chapel manipulation.  But the essence of Christianity is what I saw in those Nashville church services and what I heard in that God-forsaken place: Christ has died.  Christ is risen.  Christ will come again.

I can be part of that.