Summer camps have been written about so much, discussed and remembered endlessly. Yet anyone who tries to describe them soon realizes how difficult it is to capture in words the emotions that ten days together can stir up and provoke. These emotions go beyond the simple fact that, after all the planning, we set out as a true community—friends, young people, a few parents mixed together. They go beyond the days spent in circles, playing games, praying, taking trips, cooking meals, washing dishes, cleaning bathrooms in shifts, resting (more or less), receiving visits. The summer camp is the litmus test of what Faith and Light really is—the good and the difficult alike. Like a marriage that exists through good times and bad, or a deep friendship that only proves itself when it holds through both joy and fear: so a camp lets you touch both the beauty and the pain of being a community, and of living within a community. And if communities sometimes soar, they sometimes stumble—with the rhythm of each person, sometimes in tune, sometimes at risk of falling out of step.
In many ways, the camp is simply the continuation of a year lived together. After meetings, some pizzas, a few walks (more or less hurried), many visits, countless (too many?) gatherings—off we go. Because you take vacations with friends, obviously. That was a discovery of growing up: suddenly free to choose who to go with. Choose? Well… you notice right away that there's some difference, underneath all the talk. Never mind—I've-already-said-I'm-going. (Maybe fewer of those gatherings would help.)
You probably experience a camp because you're curious, drawn by the desire to know someone else and discover them—only to discover something about yourself along the way. You go seeking a deeper chance to connect with faces, voices, and gestures that don't speak the language you're used to. Because Faith and Light takes your time and doesn't just fill it—it slows it down. It makes dense a moment you wouldn't have noticed "out there." Because if a smile, a tear, a touch, or a glance are the only channels you have to understand anything, you'll never be rich enough to waste them. And ten days and nine nights will give you countless chances to listen—and to hear things you won't like. Because everyone speaks about the light; few speak about the darkness.
As you imagine it beforehand and experience it afterward, a camp is an inextricable flood of sensation. There's the joy of being together, the effort to share a gesture and the moves of a song, the infinite ways of praying, giving thanks, and asking for help. There's the wonder of feeling close to someone you thought too different, the mystery of faces in a circle, each with its own story and its own way of giving you courage—and of cutting you down to size. But there's also so much, so very much noise when you want silence. There's the pain of a misunderstanding that becomes a wall when you're tired. There's loneliness sometimes—even in the whirl of so many voices speaking. And there's that question gnawing at you: why? A question that works away at you without mercy, threatening to make you feel truly powerless. Yes, you came carrying the whole weight of it. There's fatigue in a camp, the fear of showing yourself as you are, the strain of listening when no one seems to have time for you, the despair of a cry you cannot understand.
But above all else, a camp is about staying in this blessed boat—at least for a while. About living in it. There's no room for visits from the shore; no time to dress nicely on the dock and judge those who won't accept their situation; no room to lecture about what it means to sail together with people whose struggles are different and more visible than mine, while my daily life sits safely back on solid ground. A camp is sharing fully—or at least trying to share—some part of the crossing. Being near and together when the sea suddenly swells, and when it's calm. Days (from breakfast to chores, from games to crises, from singing to shouting) and nights (sometimes off-key: sleepless even when you didn't plan them that way)—they are nothing but the small, great chance each of us has to walk a real stretch of road alongside those who are Faith and Light. Finally, along a path where we're no longer just holding hands (as we do during the year), but actually trying to take each other's hand. Always, with full awareness, on tiptoes.