The Camp Tahkodah Oasis

Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord... He is like a tree planted by water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green, and is not anxious in the year of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit.                                                                                 Jeremiah 17:7-8

Tonight I'm cleaning the dust of -- not Canaan's Land (see March 21 post "The American Taliban Prequel") -- but Camp Tahkodah -- off my feet.  This afternoon Dan and I made the mid-session  pilgrimage from our new home in Searcy north to visit the banks of Salado Creek near Floral, Arkansas.  Since our oldest daughter was in third grade, we have brought one or both of our girls to Floral each summer to spend a week or two at their happy place, owned by Harding University.


We've come a long way from that inaugural year, when I took a month to pack Claire and paid too much for cute custom camp labels from a "Going to Camp?" website, which preyed on the separation anxiety of mothers.  Now they pack themselves in about an hour, and I just throw a Sharpie in their bedroom door and remind them they have a better chance of returning with possessions people can identify;  we have to decide each year whether we actually want all those items back anyway.  Camp Tahkodah dirt is a tenacious combination of sand and construction adhesive.  Whether it is embedded in the sole of a pair of Chacos or in the seat of basketball shorts, attempting to remove it gives pause.  We do a cost-benefit analysis, and sometimes the camp dirt wins and we pitch the item, a sacrifice to the Spirit of Tahkodah.


This year, the oldest has graduated to assistant counselor, which is a fancy title for someone who is allowed to wash lots of dishes and do other menial chores for the privilege of spending a little more time there.  She is also a lifeguard, a credential she sought expressly because she wanted a little edge on getting hired.  Our youngest, age 16,  is now in the senior girls cabin, and the idea that she might not return next summer is exquisitely disconcerting when she allows herself to think about it -- so she doesn't.


When we packed up our things to move to Searcy recently, we realized the girls had accumulated a handful of Bibles engraved with "Camp Tahkodah" and signed by former director Ross Cochran, souvenirs of the Bible Bee.  Although we are not especially athletic, our family tends to do well in competitive question-answering, and our children have won a handful of times over the years.  Occasionally we've lamented that we would have traded a ready recollection of the names of the twelve tribes of Israel for a decent jump shot, but it is what it is.  God gives us each our gifts and thank heaven there's a place in the Kingdom, and at camp,  for the less coordinated.


I realized today as I stood under the pines amid a circle of log cabins, with laundry neatly hung on a clothesline beside each, that there are people from Harding who have been ministering to my grimy children in this place for nine years now.  They prayed for them before they ever arrived, cooked for them, administered first aid to them, taught them, regaled them with ridiculous songs, hiked with them, rode horses with them, canoed with them, looked out for their safety, exhorted them to good hygiene and entreated them to more effective cabin cleanup, encouraged them in competitive activities, led praise and worship for them all, and called them toward stronger relationships and to a more authentic faith. When Claire arrived at college, a Tahkodah staffer welcomed her into her home for a weekly small group study, for which Dan and I have been most thankful.  Relationships forged here as the staff invests in the lives of campers from many states will have ripples into the future of each of these sweaty young humans.

We were pleased to note as we arrived at camp last weekend that Salado Creek was still running, although many ponds and creeks in Arkansas are dry.  I was especially thankful today that, in the midst of a miserable and devastating drought, Camp Tahkodah has seen some rain, cloud cover, and merciful relief from the heat, every day this session.  But I also know that regardless of the weather, at least for my girls, Tahkodah has always been an oasis.

Here's a link to a video about her Tahkodah experience posted online by a camper last year  It gives you some idea of her feelings about camp.  Copy and past to play:  http://vimeo.com/26932911

Pantsuits, Jim Crow, and the Head that Wears the Crown

My father once admonished, “Be not the first by which the new is tried, nor the last to put the old aside.”  At thirteen, in 1973, I saw no wisdom in his explanation of why I could not wear pants instead of a dress to church, at a time when most things, including fashion, were rapidly changing for women. Dad was not generally one to defend tradition for tradition’s sake, but he was an elder in our conservative church.  For him, there were other considerations -- larger, institutional implications that took precedence over my desire to wear a “pantsuit” for worship.  Then came the day of the rare Alabama snowstorm.  Of course, young ladies couldn’t be expected to wear dresses to brave the elements, at some peril, to attend worship – and the taboo fell on that sparsely-attended Sunday morning.  And so change sometimes happens quickly, despite opposition. But sometimes not.

My father was the superintendent of education who implemented a desegregation plan in the Florence, Alabama, city schools. I recall seemingly endless weeks of tense phone calls and late-night meetings, after which he would come home and stay up long into the night, drinking coffee, taking more calls, smoking, and considering his response to the latest incident. He met with groups of African American parents, spoke at African American churches, pacified groups of white parents, advocated for the plan to the press and to neighborhood groups.  And there were threats.  At the instruction of the police, Dad wore a shoulder holster with a 38-caliber revolver under his suit, especially when he was in his office or a school building at night. A plastic bag in my dresser drawer contains a bullet that was fired at our house one night by some faceless racist who couldn't stand the change that was coming.

This week’s Arkansas Times cover photo is of Dr. George Benson, one of the early administrators of my alma mater, then called Harding College, with the headline “HARDING and the AMERICAN WAY – How a College President Stifled Desegregation.”  The headline, overprinted on a black-and-white image of Dr. Benson, jumped at me from a newspaper box at a Conway diner where I eat breakfast occasionally.  The article recounted a 1958 petition by students and faculty in support of integration.  The writer detailed Dr. Benson’s initial opposition to integration, using Benson's own notes to reconstruct his remarks to the student body. I was fascinated to read the signatures on the photograph of the petition; I was pleased and proud to recognize many names on it. Dr. Benson finally announced that Harding would integrate in 1963.

When my sister, a Harding student, married in 1976, two African American friends were attendants in her wedding, so it never occurred to me when I arrived in 1978 that it had not been long since the campus was integrated. There were any number of African American students, and interracial dating on campus. A few years ago, however, when my eleventh grade history students investigated positions on integration among various church denominations, we learned that the subject of race had been complex, contentious and divisive for many churches and related organizations and colleges.

Now – indulge me - back to the pants issue.  Let me be clear, the question of whether to accept women wearing pants to church was in no way substantively equivalent to the question of whether to include as equals in the pew, or the classroom, those whom God includes as equal in the kingdom. But contrast the kingdom with the visible church: administered as it is by fallen humans with preferences and prejudices and petty insecurities that inevitably we bring into the earthly institutions that align their mission with God’s.  Heaven help us.  My father’s response to the trouser question did have this in common with Dr. Benson's: he felt that while he was a watchman on the wall, change would not be sudden, lest it be seen as capricious. Small comfort that was to a black student whose identity was trivialized and marginalized by Jim Crow, but I believe Dad’s reasoning is relevant to this conversation.

I don't defend the indefensible when it comes to any stance against integration.  My students know that I see those who make racist comments, or who romanticize the Old South with its forced labor economy, as the kindred of those who would have tried to hurt my father back when he was integrating that school district so long ago. But part of the job of a history teacher is to caution students against judging figures from the past by the standards of the present.  We may read the documentary evidence, learn about their lives, and discuss them in the context of a greater stream of culture.  We must certainly at some level make moral judgments about their actions – but they were of their time and we are of ours. Each generation has enough for which to be accountable without inserting contemporary sensibilities into the mind of someone from the past.  It’s presumptuous.

“Be not the first by which the new is tried, nor the last to put the old aside,” may seem a recipe for mediocrity -- one that doesn’t appropriately value innovation and clings to tired ideas, or even wrongheaded ones.  It's an expression more rooted in practicality than moral ideals. We prefer to believe our leaders would, on moral issues, act without fear of consequence or reprisal, but the Arkansas Times article illustrated what has always been true: the very young can well afford to be the reckless idealists among us precisely because they are not yet responsible for our institutions. The world needs the passionate vision of young people because they still see the world with a clarity unobstructed by the pragmatic considerations that might lead an older, more powerful man to compromise something important. "Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown," or words to that effect.

One last personal story: when that same man who held me back from the precipice of "slacks" at worship was young himself and had just arrived back from the war, he became the principal at the tiny school at Williford, Arkansas.  In 1951, he scheduled an exhibition basketball game between his all-white team and an all-black team.  When word got out, he was summoned to Little Rock by the director of the somewhat formidable arbiter of student extracurriculars, the Arkansas Activities Association -- where Dad was informed that he could only play teams “who were members of the all-white AAA or an equivalent association,” and the AAA definitely did not consider the black association equivalent. Dad said he thanked the man and went back to Williford and played the team anyway.  He was young then, and didn't know all the institutional considerations that were at stake, perhaps.

Dr. Benson acted much as many other men of his time who were charged with the protection and growth of institutions both large and small, from churches to country clubs to the armed forces -- he hesitated and resisted doing what was right on this issue out of fear of unpredictable consequences to the organization. Any number of progressive reformers of our nation's government, such as FDR,  likewise did not run quickly to full integration without reservation. They considered both advantageous timing and political fallout.  History is rife with examples of overt racism on the part of twentieth century American leaders, both secular and religious, who otherwise were admirable.  It’s a fact we should neither sweep under the rug nor rationalize. It’s a great tragedy of human history that segregation was played out in our nation long after the Civil War, with the blessing of our churches, and that Jim Crow was given aid and comfort by the highest court in the land. The story of the United States has always been a tale of a circuitous journey toward the ideals of the Declaration: a collective journey toward sanctification, if you will, by a host of the fallen.  

Raise Your Voice

Tonight was singing night.

The first Sunday evening of every month, the assembly at my church begins with a succession of little ones each taking the podium (that is, standing on a box behind the communion table) and leading the entire congregation in a song of their choice, starting with the youngest and progressing roughly according to age. After all, Jesus said, "Suffer the little ones to come unto me," and under the "decency and order" clause, we figure height is as good an organizational tool as any. Tonight, four-year-old Reece led the charge. Usually he announces "one t'ousand fort-teen" or something similar, and launches into the melody, counting on the faithful to follow along.

During the first seconds of each song, the air is close with anticipation, as we all root silently for the kid to make the song happen. If the tiny song leader falters, some parent from a pew will seize upon a key that is singable and bear down loudly until the congregation picks it up and falls in line. Occasionally if the young song leader pitches the song too low, we rewrite the entire arrangement on the fly; the basses sing the melody and the sopranos do high harmony, so the parts all get sung. One thing about a cappella church music is that the arrangements are usually stacked with moving parts and echoes or countermelodies, and it just doesn't work unless someone gets about the business of filling in the blanks -- so we do. "No part left behind,"as it were,  to support the youngster who is up there staring down the faithful and leading the praise.

What will Reece remember about these nights, I wonder?  Will he remember the carpet on the box he stands on, the nicks and scratches on the black trim of the communion table, the smell of the foam that covers the microphone, the voices of the old folks who occupy the front pews?  Will he remember the feeling of the blood pounding in his ears as he finds 350 people looking back at him?  Will he remember Albert's kind face up in the sound booth?  Will he recall the love in the room?  I think not. Often we don't recognize love for what it is.  Sometimes love hugs and kisses and gives presents, but sometimes love just fills in the alto part from a distant pew, to support one of His little ones who is learning how to fill a "grown up" job in the kingdom.

Of course, someone in the rear of the auditorium may not be acting out of love, but just singing the words instead. Sad for that person.  Love frames pedestrian obedience as calling.   It energizes every enterprise. It changes "sing along with the kids" into "lift up the future worship leaders of the church."  A loving motive enriches us as it glorifies the Father and helps the youngster. Reece may not remember the love in the room, but we frequently don't recognize love when we receive its benefits.  We all stand on the shoulders of those who raised us, taught us, or perhaps sang along with us when our own early solo efforts were insufficient -- and in a way,  it's all the sweeter that we aren't aware of the support at the time.  That's what we call grace.