Summer Camp

I’m at St. Dorothy’s Rest this week, working as a summer camp chaplain. St. Dorothy’s is an Episcopal camp (it’s part of our diocese!) located a couple miles down the road from Occidental, founded in 1901 by parents grieving the loss of their child to meningitis. They wanted a place where critically ill children could go to experience the joys and wonder and sacredness of nature. These days St. Dorothy’s hosts summer camps for children and teens ages 5-17, but one week a year they go back to their roots with Transplant Camp, partnering with Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital.

All the campers have had at least one organ transplantation—some of them multiple—and many before age 4. A team of nurses come to camp with them to make sure they all stay healthy, but in most other ways this week is a chance to just be kids at a sleepaway camp: they make new friends, sing songs around the campfire, make friendship bracelets, play basketball, and put on a talent show. And it’s offered at no cost to their families.

The great thing about Transplant Camp is that things that might make them not-normal in other places are perfectly normal here: taking medications, needing more rest, drinking copious amounts of water all day, every day, having big scars or a pacemaker or both, never playing football with the other boys your age at school. They talk about defective heart valves as casually as they tell stories about their dogs and cats and turtles, and everyone understands.

Every day, I’ve been asking them what their ‘wow moment’ of the day is. What happened today that made them say ‘wow’ or ‘cool’ or moved them in some way? They say all kinds of things, like the yummy watermelon at lunch, laying in a hammock looking up at the redwoods above them, hanging out with friends by the pool, meeting someone else who had a stroke when they were little. It's been a wonderful practice for myself, too, that I want to keep up when I get home on Saturday.

St. Dorothy’s is a scrappy place, held together with grants and donations and the love of staff and volunteers. And it strikes me as fitting that it’s rustic rather than perfectly manicured. It’s fitting that it’s imperfect, that parts of it are in need of repair, parts of it are breathtakingly beautiful, and all of it is loved.

This week at camp has been a reminder of how important it is to look for things to be grateful for, things to say ‘wow!’ to precisely because life can be really hard. How essential it is to remember that the hard things are really hard, but they are not all there is. How life-giving it is, as Leonard Cohen says in “Anthem,” to celebrate what you can, when you can. To “ring the bells that still can ring/forget your perfect offering,” because “there is a crack, a crack in everything/that’s how the light gets in.”

Every crack allows in light, if you have eyes to see it, and there are bells to ring, everywhere.