I Felt Like Crying This Morning

The juxtaposition of kindness and cruelty was making me sad

Photo by author

I’ve been honored to serve as the chaplain at our Unitarian Universalist Family Camp for the past few years. This camp has a lot of meaning for me. It’s set in the Mendocino Woodlands, under towering redwoods threatened by logging plans, beside a creek I traversed with my children when they were small, looking for frogs, inside cabins and a lodge built as part of the Works Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s, back in the days when serving others and the greater good was the American way.

This year in a planning meeting, the deans mentioned that they wanted to focus more on building an intentional community during the one to two weeks we come to camp from all over California and beyond. There will be 127 people there the first week, which is when I’ll be chaplain, including my daughter and her family, who haven’t been there for years. They have two little daughters, one of whom will soon turn five, that age when children are sucked into the system, and begin to absorb its sometimes evil ways.

So I thought about her being there when I considered the assignment — building a community out of a disparate group of people, although certainly all liberal, all sharing a belief in the inherent worth and dignity of…