s1e7: Christian Dating

church camp in the Rockies, rock music, prayer group, passion and purity, and climbing up a fire escape at midnight in the rain

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It is a dark and stormy night on the campus of an east coast college. My floormate and I are huddled under inadequate eaves at the top of an iron fire escape bolted to the clapboard of the converted three-storey Victorian that serves as the campus community center. I am using the tail of my t-shirt to wipe the rain off a large window that we have already tried, and failed, to open. We push our faces up to the glass.

“Can you see him?”
”All I can see into is the Commons—they have to walk through to get to the over 21 area though, right?”
”Is that him?”
”Where?”
”There, in the corner.”
”There are like ten people in a group, how would we know it’s him.”
”I thought I saw his jacket.”
”I love that jacket.”
”You love how he looks in that jacket.”
”It’s not him.”
”I’m freezing.”
”Let’s stay just a little bit longer—I just want to know if he’s here.”
”Why do you care since you broke up?”
”If we had ID we could just go in…”
”Seriously, though, why did you break up again?”
”We didn’t want to.”
”Is this a Christian thing?”
”It’s a long story.”

*

I remember when Christianity started being about not having sex instead of singing songs, practicing kindness, and telling fun Bible stories.

It was a typically gorgeous day at Camp Bethel, the Baptist church camp I went to every summer in the Bighorns: bright, cool sunshine; dry, clean mountain air, tinged with the scent of lupine; the wind breathing across stately, lodgepole pines. But, my cabin mates and I did not care about this perfection. It did not matter that we had the run of one of the most pristine alpine regions in the United States. It did not matter that the gneiss and granite rocks we were sitting on were some of the oldest formations in the world.

What mattered was that we’d just finished our turn at kitchen duty, for which we had expected to earn enough points to clinch our team’s win in the weekly cabin competition, and it had not gone well.

I was fiercely committed to winning this competition. Year after year, I would do my part to lead my cabin to victory by memorizing the most Bible verses of anyone at camp, standing the straightest and quietest in the line in front of dining hall, sweeping under my bunk and that of my cabin mates to make sure there were no dust mice, and taking first in whatever games we played each day in between sessions in the log chapel.

Kitchen duty was supposed to be a points bonanza—all you had to do was was the dishes and wipe down the surfaces of the log dining hall in the time allotted, and your team would bag a cool 100 points for the win. And the grossness of having to wash a zillion breakfast dishes by hand was made easier by the fact that the dining hall was the one place where we were allowed to listen to music.

It had come out of nowhere: there we were rinsing plates in the rusty-tasting water piped in from the creek, singing along to “Billie Jean,” practicing our Michael Jackson style step/turn moves, and just generally getting the job done, and the next thing we knew Doc—the guy who ran Camp Bethel— had pushed down the stop button on the cassette deck and shut the whole thing down. “Rock Music,” he’d said, with great condemnation, “is not allowed. That’s 50 points off your score, Antelope Cabin.”