Another Deleted Chapter, Broken Up Into Bits
Part II: Wherein we forget that we're writing a book about church camp
A couple of days ago I offered you a deleted scene from a chapter that didn’t make its way into the final stages (or even the first draft) of Church Camp. Head here to read that post if you haven’t already.
One thing I notice about this particular scene (and about a host of other scenes that subsequently got deleted) is that it’s not actually about church camp.
I mean, if you’re going to write a book about church camp, then you need to write about church camp. You need to immerse yourself in a land of periwinkle blue skies and evenings spent around a crackling campfire; you need to listen to the proverbial soundtrack from your days at camp instead of stomping your feet to the Best Hip Hop and R&B that your kids are singing along to these days.1 In a way, I don’t think I actually started writing about church camp until I revisited one of the camps that started it all for me — and until I started the interview process of nearly fifty former camp kids and staff from around the globe.
Getting back to a people and a place was critical when it came to immersing in the waters of church camp, especially since I had not frequented her shores in over half a decade.
In all actuality, what I hoped to initially do in this chapter initially titled “Creation” was to set the scene for a myriad of thoughts around the theme of creation — but in the end, this scene didn’t move the needle forward.
Judge for yourself?
“Are you a biblical literalist?” A man recently asked me after speaking at his church one Sunday morning. He didn’t know me from Eve,2 but after he heard me recount the story of the Road to Emmaus,3 when the resurrected Jesus comes up to a couple of men who walk alongside a road toward the town of Emmaus, he assumed I believed in a literal interpretation of scripture.
I guess the inner workings of my mind aren’t always apparent to those on the other side.
“Excuse me?” I replied, caught off-guard. Until that point, most of the conversations stemmed from the sermon itself: an invitation to embrace the mystery of God, to ask questions, and to know that we are loved, no exceptions to the rule. Supposing he took my confusion for a lack of understanding, he began to drill me on my favorite theologians and on whether or not I could really call myself an Episcopalian if I so clearly clung to fundamentalist belief systems. When had I become a fundamentalist? Had I always been a fundamentalist and not known it until our conversation? His questioning of me proved to tell of a tale as old as time: women cannot be believed, try as they might to preach the gospel from the front of a sanctuary.4 So fixated on proving me wrong, I let him believe what he wanted to believe — a thought that also likely included literalist understandings of a green and blue planet formed just a few thousand years ago, instead of closer to a whopping 13.8 billions of years before.
Christians, of course, remain split on the issue: how long did it actually take to create the Earth? One 2019 study reported that “forty percent of U.S. adults ascribe to a strictly creationist view of human origins, believing that God created them in their present form within roughly the past 10,000 years.”5 Young Earth creationists (YEC), as they are often called, are mostly made up of Christians and Jews who cling to the book of Genesis and to a belief that God made the Earth in six literal days. According to the study, however, even more Americans think that “humans evolved over millions of years, either with God’s guidance (33%), or increasingly, without God’s involvement at all (22%).” For many, it’s a question of literal versus metaphorical: Are God’s wildly creative ways big enough for the likes of scientific principles of evolution, the Big Bang theory, and other origins of life, or are they not?
When it comes to creation accounts, the older I get the more I see the threads of similarity across religious traditions. It’s not so different in Hinduism, when the Laws of Manu tell a story of the universe falling fast asleep. There’s a tale found in Taoism, when a Chinese sage, who lived four centuries before Christ, says, “In the grand beginning (of all things) there was nothing in all the vacancy of space; there was nothing that could be named. It was in this state that there arose the first existence: the first existence, but still without bodily shape.”6 Likewise, in Islam, Allah is called Originator and Creator, the one who created everything. I mean, I don’t know, I hope God slept at some point during the act of flinging stars into the sky and squeezing dirt into things called Human. No matter the lens of religious tradition, in all of these accounts, a whole lot of something came out of nothing. Creator and Originator remain pretty good names for a deity to me.
This, of course, is where belief, including the choice of particular beliefs, comes into play. Wherever we find it, and in whatever religious tradition we stake our beliefs, we find answers. Whether or not those answers remain acceptable to us is another question. But in this life and in this death, we discover the “light of love of the Creator, who brought them all into being, who brought me into being, and you.”7 We find meaning. We find significance. We find new beginnings.
Creation is made real, because in all of these places, something is brought into existence. Something is made out of nothing. Something is produced. Dreams are birthed, inklings squeezed into tangible reality.
I think this is when the word “tangent” starts to take on a whole new meaning. Your thoughts on this very windy deletion of a tangent? I’d love to hear!
What I’m reading: There’s a book I’ve been sitting with for several weeks now. I haven’t said a whole lot about it, both because I’ve had other books to read but also because it’s resonated so deeply with me. The book? The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd. Even though the book first released in 1996, the author is speaking my language now and bringing good trouble into my spiritual world. Have you read it?
What I’m growing: The counter still runneth over with tomatoes, to be sure, but fall starts are also underway! Lettuce, rainbow chard, cauliflower, broccoli, and Chinese cabbage are all getting toasty underneath the grow lights in the corner of the living room. Soon enough, it’ll be time to pull all 26 of those dead and dying tomato plants, but as long as they’re producing, I’ll keep them in the ground!8 All that to say, the backyard garden is starting to look a little tired and weary. Summer has taken its toll, I suppose.
We’ve got two more deleted scenes from the “Creation” chapter to go. Let me know what you think about this series when you get the chance.
To dissident daughters!
Cara
106.1, I’ll have you know.
Hardy har har
Luke 24:13-35
As luck would have it, we DIVE into this in chapter 2. Just not through this scene.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32141104
http://nothingistic.org/library/chuangtzu/chuang31.html
Madeleine L’Engle, of course
Last year, the tomatoes produced through November!