My daughter returned yesterday from
her sixth annual week of church camp. Every year since the summer before
third grade, I've packed her off to Camp Nawakwa, a Lutheran facility about
50 miles from home, not far from historic Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
Church camp was a priority for me in choosing activities for Lynn. "Sleep-away" camp, religious or secular, was not part of my growing up experience. To my knowledge, there were no Catholic-oriented camps. In fact, the whole idea of summer residential camp seemed to be the province of wealthy people who also sent their kids to boarding school. In 1993 one of my writing colleagues shared a lovely memoir of his many summers as a camper and eventually a counselor. He said that camp did more to shape his Jewish identity than any synagogue activity, and he credits that and his parents' example for his decision to make the traditions of his faith a centerpiece in the lives of his own children.
Thus sending Lynn to Camp Nawakwa filled two needs for me -- to provide for her an experience I felt was lacking in my own childhood, and to provide for myself a valuable aid in raising Lynn to be a woman of faith.
To my joy, Lynn has embraced the Nawakwa experience with a gusto that makes it her own choice instead of mine alone. Yesterday morning when I picked her up it was hard to pry her away from the seemingly endless rounds of tears and hugs. In the car she was full of stories -- the funny things, the silly things, the boy she danced with, her successes in soccer, how she got a blister on the palm of her hand.
"Did you learn anything about God?" I asked her. This was, after all, church camp. I send her there not just to gab with girlfriends, meet boys, and play sports, but to forge her identity as a Lutheran Christian, as an individual who a scant ten months from now will seek to be confirmed as an adult in the faith.
"Nothing I didn't already know," she said, almost casually, and then she pushed down her seat and fell asleep. Hmm, I thought -- not exactly a satisfactory answer.
At home she dumped her duffel bag, her sleeping bag, and a pillowcase full of her arts and crafts efforts on the kitchen floor, grabbed the new Delia's catalog, and disappeared upstairs. Once again the house crackled with her energy, her laughter on the phone, the chimes of the AOL Instant Messenger alerts only she uses.
In the kitchen, I looked at the pile of her stuff. Spilling out of the pillowcase was a poster labeled "I Am A Child of God." Apparently it was a sort of camp journal -- in dated sections, illustrated with magazine cutouts and Lynn's own drawings, it stated, among other things, the following facts:
Do we really need to know anything
else?