for they getteth shit done. But the Christian way is the little way—small acts of radical kindness done with great love. In my world, you take possession of your life, exercising agency. But in the Christian one, you are not even the owner of yourself. Your talents merely flow through you; you give yourself to the one who made you.
In my childhood world, you delivered yourself from the slavery of other men’s oppression. Jesus also offers delivery from slavery, but it is a different kind of slavery—the slavery to pride, to ego, to self. In my world, wisdom was revered, but in the Christian world God chose what is foolish in the world to confound the wise, and he chose the weak to shame the strong. The meek shall inherit the earth.
I was and remain an amphibian, living half in water and half on land. I wish I could remember being confused by the two different stories that were rattling around in my head. But the truth is, I don’t really remember that. I was just raised in a dualism.
Judaism came to me through the precious lineage of my family and our people, especially all those great-uncles and -aunts with their Yiddish, their strange names (Aggie and Fagel), their matzo balls, the way they could feud and scream at one another for hours around the kitchen table. Christianity came to me as an arm draped around my shoulder, a hug, the sweaty contact of a basketball game.
Starting at age six, I spent my summers at Incarnation Camp, two months a year that overshadowed the other ten. The camp was Episcopalian in that progressive mainline sort of way—we sang “Puff, the Magic Dragon” and “If I Had a Hammer” along with “Lord of the Dance.” We were always rising and shining and giving God our glory, glory. The only explicitly religious people were the God Squadders, Christian hippies who played guitars, smoked weed, and expressed their love of Jesus through their hairstyles. But everybody else was implicitly Christian. There were tons of PKs—preachers’ kids—who had grown up with the Gospel and, a lot of the time, exemplified it. There was no success or failure at Incarnation, not even much status or lack of status. There was love, free flowing and unabashed.
We lived in tents, cooked meals over an open fire, swam and sailed in a mile-long lake, and had intimacy forced upon us. Incarnation is the most successfully integrated community I’ve ever experienced. Half the campers were from Westchester or fancy private schools in Manhattan, and the other half from the poorest areas of Brooklyn and the Bronx. We learned courage—to cliff-dive into the lake, to shoot the rapids on a canoe trip, to sneak across the camp at midnight to be with your girlfriend. Every significant rite of adolescent passage happened at Incarnation—weed, first drinks, kissing, second base, third. Every early metaphysical sensation happened there, too—the feeling on a canoe trip of seeing a mountain at dawn, the way a simple rock can be coated with enchantment when it was the place you sat during the first raptures of teenage love. I have few friends left over from high school or college, but I have about forty or fifty lifelong friends from camp, and for decades they did not even realize that Brooksie had a first name.
There were many people who left a mark at Incarnation, but I’ll pick out just one, a counselor and unit director named Wes Wubbenhorst. He was a big, athletic, goofy man-child. His conversation was all overflowing enthusiasm, interspersed with whistles, pops, weird exclamations, sudden laughter, and good cheer. He was always interrupting himself mid-sentence as another thing that delighted him sprang into consciousness. He lived to be over sixty and walked through the darkest parts of the world, but I don’t think he ever learned to talk in that serious way adults do. Some piece of him always remained a Holy Child.
I’ve come to recognize people who were formed by a camp, and they often had what Wes had: bubbling enthusiasm, a radiance, a wardrobe mostly of old sneakers, tattered shorts, and ripped T-shirts. Wes later became an Episcopal priest. He ministered to the poor in Honduras, comforted victims of domestic violence. His God was a God of love, and his life at camp was training for his mission of selfless love. He was, as the saying goes, a man for others: enthusiastically waking you up in the morning and singing you to