Seeking Shelter

How beautiful is youth! How bright it gleams with its illusions,

Book of Beginnings, Story without End,

Each maid a heroine, and each man a friend!

--Henry Wordsworth Longfellow

It's been a rough past few weeks. Even amidst my fervent political talk or my excitement of becoming "one of the Joneses," I've been hurting. My friends have been supportive, as has my loving husband. Yet because of how complicated the source of my pain is, it cannot be easily remedied. And so I am aware that I am just going to have to work through it.

A nice dose of happiness, however, was received yesterday when I received a Facebook message from an old friend I had met one summer at camp during my younger years. We had met at a summer camp run by the United Methodist Church in 1988. After she and I parted ways following a week of campfires, creek hikes, singing, and Bible study, we began corresponding by snail mail (this was pre-Internet days) for the next two years. I remember how excited I would be to open the post office box and see her familiar handwriting on an envelope addressed to me. I would run home, go to my room and shut the door, open the letter, and read the details of what I perceived as her more-exciting-than-mine life. She was a year older and therefore much cooler and prettier than me. After two years or so our exchange of letters was less seldom, as she became busier with a boyfriend, applications for college, and everyday life, and I became more engrossed in my life as well. By the time I began my senior year of high school we no longer stayed in touch. Life went on, but I never forgot her or our friendship. Through the years I wondered where she was, the person she became in the adult world....What became of her?

Then, earlier this week I located her on the increasingly popular website called Facebook, where I have found several childhood, high school, and college friends with whom I hadn't communicated in eons. Recently it's been like a trip down Memory Lane for me, where at every corner or intersection I discover yet another old friend from my past whom I have not seen or heard from in years. I sent her a message and was so delighted to not only receive a response but to find that she remembered me and that she, too, had been searching for me recently on the World Wide Web.

The rekindling, rediscovering, reconnection, and all other appropriate "re-" verbiage has been good for me. It's allowed me to open doors I had for so long left closed and locked. To wipe dust off mirrors ignored for so long and gaze at the reflection. To walk into rooms untended for many years and to breathe the musty stale air caused by the years of abandonment.

I suppose that these rekindling of relationships and pondering of happier days filled with innocence and hope has all been a way for me to seek shelter during a sad period in my life. There are events of late in some of my interpersonal relationships which have caused me to feel much sadness when I look back into portions of my younger years. But to reflect on the friendships I had--and still have--with some very special people, to know that they actually thought of me and that they care for me....Well, that does the soul much good in a time of sorrow.

Thinking about my friend from camp has allowed me to also reflect on that summer camp, Camp Glisson, and the years of friendship, music, happiness and spirituality which I found in the those wooded mountainous acres for one week’s time every summer. Sometimes when I'm feeling lonely, spiritually abandoned, or have a hunger for the security I once felt in my younger years, I think of Camp Glisson. I sing the songs that I memorized by campfires. I can hear the birds chirping, the faint hum of the waterfalls, and the smell of the musty chapel which is hidden under a tent of dogwood, maple, and evergreen. The cool flagstones underneath my legs as I sat on the great big cafeteria porch, waiting for dinner to be served after a long day of crafts, chapel service, hiking, and swimming. If ever in my life I have encountered a place that truly felt holy, reverent, and blessed with God's presence, it was here. Especially in those walls of the chapel, where years of wear were evident on the primitive wooden benches, where sunlight found its way through the canopy of leaves, escorted in through the open windows by the fresh mountain air….Where birds and bees felt equally invited to join the chorus of celebration both inside and outdoors....Where the doors were never locked or chained, but instead graciously awaiting the arrival of a young person in need of meditation and prayer.

I suppose that after all these years and having witnessed so much change—change in me, my friends, and family--I'm all the more grateful for those few constants in my life. Even constants that I am not regularly aware of, such as Glisson. A constant I can use to seek shelter to try and re-ground myself, to remember that by some I am loved and not forgotten, and to relish the roots which it established and which still remain intact today.

"I can see....The shadows of ….Woods;

And the friendships old and the early loves

Come back with a Sabbath sound, as of doves

In quiet neighborhoods.

And the verse of that sweet old song....

....There are things of which I may not speak;

There are dreams that cannot die;

There are thoughts that make the strong heart weak,

And bring a pallor into the cheek,

And a mist before the eye....the native air is pure and sweet,

And the trees that o'ershadow each well-known street,

As they balance up and down,

Are singing the beautiful song....

...My heart goes back to wander there,

And among the dreams of the days that were,

I find my lost youth again....

....And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."

--Longfellow's, "My Lost Youth"