How do I know you?
This was my question to a man I met last week. His name and his face were so familiar to me but I couldn’t place him. Yet our 11-year-old sons played together, as our respective families were spending a week of family camp at Outlaw Ranch, an ELCA camp situated in the heart of the Black Hills, nestled in a valley of Ponderosa Pine.
You know my ex-wife, Tammy.
Yes, indeed. It all came back to me. How Tammy and I worked as camp counselors together, so long ago. How she fell in love with a cute staffer from another camp. How they got married. How they went to seminary together and got divorced.
That was about twenty years ago. What I did not know was that because of the divorce, this man, Jim, was required to live off-campus. Why?
Because the face of divorce would disrupt community.
That’s what the seminary administrators told him. The precise seminary shall go nameless here. You’ve probably already figured out that Tammy and Jim are pseudonyms. And my question is this: Is it possible to disrupt Christian community?
Christian community is what I wish for my kids. And so I panicked this last spring when I realized that it had been six years since we had last gone to family camp. At ages 11 and 13, my children are on the verge of no longer being kids. I wanted to go some place where we could unplug and be together. Can’t a mother want a week of utopia for her family?
Summer camp was how I met Christian community, as a college student so long ago. Summer camp was how I was introduced to the organized Lutheran church, although I certainly didn’t call it that. I called it living peaceably with one another, living harmoniously with nature, and living joyfully with a God who values unconditional love.
So last spring we signed up for a week at Outlaw Ranch, one of my former camping haunts. And on a hot August weekend the four of us packed up our big bad Buick. We drove across the glorious state of South Dakota westward—prairie to rolling grassland to moonscape to mountain.
We settled into our little cabin in the woods and for six days joined (or not) the community activities. A rhythm of eating, praying and loving. A pulse of horses, canoes and hikes. A pace of reading, napping and singing.
Personally, my favorite thing to do at Outlaw Ranch is to watch my kids try new things. Bob and I sat for two hours in a hidden location to watch our son get on a horse and ride.
One thing that didn’t change is our nightly habit of tucking in. Even as we are all in a one room cabin, when I asked my tween son if I could tuck him in, he consented. I sat on his bunk, rolled my hands into his, and prayed the same prayer we say each night at home.
Jesus bless this home of mine and bless my parents too. Make me, Lord, a child of thine, holy, pure and true. Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I sleep or if I wake, I pray thee Lord my soul to take.
And then the Lord’s Prayer. Sometimes I think my kids will be 50 years old before they discover that they could possibly go to sleep without our tuck in prayers.
Pray. Isn’t that what you do in Christian community? As Jim and I reconnected and reminisced on that first day at Outlaw Ranch, we wondered about Tammy—my long ago friend, his ex-wife. We both hoped that she was well, wherever she was.
Now a charming pastor, father and husband, Jim seems recovered from his year of “exile” from the seminary community. But I couldn’t help but feel sad that he had been officially treated that way.
He should have been officially embraced in love and support. If not out of sheer compassion, then out of a seminary model. How pastors-in-training might create their own utopia in their own congregations, which are chock-full of human frailty.
You may be laughing at me about now-equating church with utopia. Seriously? Yes. My introduction to the Lutheran tradition was living among all the flaws that human behavior can conjure up and learning that we are loved anyway.
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