Bend toward justice

In his interview, former camp director Jason told me that the vision statement of Shiloh is the following (it is also right there on their new Website): Equipping New York at-risk youth and their families with tools that build hope.  Providing tools that build hope.  So educational tools, spiritual tools, emotional tools, relationships, networks, fun.  From my observation of its history, Shiloh has been very good at being involved in individual relationships and mentorship.  It has also been good at providing opportunities for kids to see the world differently.  It has been a fun place for kids to go and learn new things.  And it has always emphasized the spiritual dimensions of life.

I suggest that this is enough.  I also suggest that this is not enough.

I want to use this paragraph of blog space to ask my diversity of readers to continue to think on behalf of at-risk communities.  Have a courageous heart when it comes to working against entrenched systems that are bad for these community members.  Have a soft heart when it comes to people who are at risk.  Study hard about why things got to be the way they are, so that bad cycles can be broken and not repeated.  And keep remembering to do these things, don’t forget them, because the way our society is set up is not conducive to automatically supporting their human needs.  

I am saying I think it will take each of us to make better that which can be made better, and I am encouraging us to make it better, as we think about Shiloh.

Well.  I got back from another interview trip to New York this past week, and here are a few stories I heard there:

Here is a concrete example of Shiloh working to provide educational tools to kids.  Nicole [I don't have a picture of her] is the liaison between Shiloh and public schools. She provides after-school, curriculum-based (and fun) educational projects for children attending partnering schools.  For example, she has worked with kids on a project that set the after-school kids up as entrepreneurs.  These young entrepreneurs were making, selling, and giving away buttons.  They worked on the business plan together.  They had a product and a market and goals.  She taught them that entrepreneurs give back to the community.  She emphasized math and cooperation.  She also served and continues to serve as the school's liaison to Shiloh, telling these after-school kids about camp and other Shiloh programs, and she stands in a place where she can be a person of trust for parents, a known quantity for parents who might not know what Shiloh has to offer.  In talking to Nicole, I got a clear sense of her joy in making learning fun for kids.  So this to me sounds like it is a tool that provides hope.

I also interviewed Kenny.  Kenny's story was a poignant reminder of how education can function as a tool in someone's life, but, even though Shiloh had a tutoring component at the time, Kenny was involved long before there was a formal link to the schools.  As a little boy in the 1970s in East New York, he got involved with the year-round Shiloh program in his neighborhood.  So many kids in his two-block radius were also involved in Shiloh.  Three other boys in his Shiloh class--Teeter, Douglas, and Terrance--became his close friends.  Here they are together in front of the Shiloh bus, in a picture taken by his Shiloh teacher, Karyn.

Kenny says he hadn't been aware of things beyond his two-block radius in his neighborhood, except through the experiences he had with Shiloh.  In this photo, the boys are on a field trip together with their Shiloh teacher.  Maybe in this instance they're going to Arkansas (they all have Arkansas shirts on).  Kenny is on the left with the hat.  He says he remembers playing on these field trips, being on the bus, meeting new people, seeing sights that were brand new to him, and one time meeting Shirley Chisholm on a trip to Washington DC.  He was able to see what was possible in the world, and he said if he wanted to go back to those places that were out there, he knew he had to choose a specific path in life.  

In the picture below the boys are back in their neighborhood and are honoring their mothers together on Mother's Day. There was a Mother's Day meal that Karyn facilitated, and there was a rose for every mother.  Kenny is on the right in the Yankees jacket.  In Kenny's interview, he talked emotionally about the positive power he got from his mother, who believed in him no matter what.  He said he would do anything for her.  In the end it was she who convinced him to move away from their old neighborhood, for his job, for his benefit. 

Kenny also told me he played a board game once at Shiloh that was designed to teach the boys that sometimes the long way around the game board is a better way to win than the quick and easy way.  He never forgot that game and referred to it multiple times in our interview.  Growing up, he took that long way around.  He emphasized his schooling and let go of relationships that would lead him down a path to trouble.  He wasn't involved with Shiloh after his earlier experiences, so it was his own pull toward education as a tool that moved him to make the decisions he made.  Today Kenny has a college degree and works just outside of Washington DC and oversees the creation of quality affordable housing in those neighborhoods.  He has made sure he is close enough to come back and take care of his mother, who lives in New York.  

One tool that Shiloh seems to be so good at is providing a fun place where kids can go and feel loved.  Camp is a place that has been Shiloh's consistent touchtone throughout its history.  Like I myself have done here in this blog, like Kenny did, it sometimes seems useful for other interviewees, too, to bring a metaphor along in their interviews.  Metaphors capture experiences, religious feelings, relationships, even a relationship to one place.  Here's an image that the camp director Ryan has for camp.  It has its literal basis in solid earth:

Ryan, the current camp director who started as the head of maintenance and who has spent long hours crawling underneath every camp building, was working to construct the camp's chapel (the interior is above) when he discovered that the entire property is situated on a solid rock.  This image of building on the rock of God is the one that has been Ryan's metaphor as he framed the physical aspects of camp, had midnight conversations with troubled campers, and as he led raucous singing of camp songs.   They sing: "You ought've been there/ When He saved my soul/ You ought've been there/ When He put my name on the roll!"--with clapping, stomping, and full-body spin.  

So it's got a metaphor that both Ryan and I like.  But how can something like camp serve as a tool for building hope?  Well, Nicole told me that the Shiloh people she knew were in love with a place, and that place was camp. And one former camper described the atmosphere of camp as "pure love".  Ryan described to me a situation between two people at out camp who didn't like each other.  Both told him that the other one couldn't understand his particular situation, because that other person had not lived such a hard life.  Both were angry and hurt at the other's actions.  But it turned out that both of these people had come from eerily similar backgrounds, and both were hiding from and judging the other.  Ryan was able to facilitate their shift in relationship, in seeing each other for the first time.  The people who work out at camp strive for this kind of atmosphere of safety and reconciliation, and sometimes they have experienced it themselves.  

Sometimes a counselor might see camp as simply one reasonable service in the journey of life's ongoing opportunity for service to others.  Cue was a counselor at camp around the time Kenny and his older brothers and sisters were there.  Cue grew up in Brooklyn, too, not too far and a bit earlier than where Kenny did, and she, too, had supportive parental support.   She remembers her parents exposing her to the art, museums, and culture of the city around her.  Her stepfather gave her intellectual puzzles like building a working television set from a kit.  Like Kenny, Cue was an academic achiever.  Here's a picture of her as a counselor at camp.  She's on the right, with a little bunching of female counselors.

At the time she was at camp, Cue was exploring the intersections and divergences between the women's movement, the civil rights movement, and the anti-war movement.  (Talk about intellectual puzzles!)  Shiloh was a comfortable place for her to put feet under these explorations, as there were other people buzzing about these issues there.  There were not many African-American staffers at the time, but she did not feel uncomfortable and shook off any attempts that fellow staffers may have made to bend over backwards for her.  She saw her work at camp as a reasonable service.  It was at camp she heard about Pepperdine College in California.  And at this next step Cue's spiritual identity deepened, and she moved forward with becoming a neonatal nurse. Although she had a clear sense of her purpose and sense of service from early on in her childhood, Shiloh had been a directional arc for part of her journey.  

Cue's extended metaphor toward the end of her interview was of a circle in which we are all connected.  We bend in toward each other in the circle by both giving and receiving and by paying attention to the other people in the circle.  This next story is about people who sort of loved and lost their Shiloh experience, and who moved away from that experience by staying exactly in the same place.  Craig and Lynn Ann loved their 1970s Shiloh experience in the year-round program in Red Bank, New Jersey, so much that they left vowing that they would return again soon.  But when they came back, the Shiloh program had closed in Red Bank with no plan that the program would return there.  So with very little funds, in trepidation and faith, they started their own program, based on the Shiloh model, and gave it the name Aslan after the mythical Narnian lion who represents Jesus.  With their guiding imagery in place, they began the program with all former Shiloh Red Bank kids, and simply went forward forging intentional relationships from there.  They never stopped.  Aslan is relationship driven, they say, just like Shiloh was.  Now they, as the Aslan program, still work to empower local kids with bicycles, tutoring, mission trips, and intentional relationships.  This has not been an easy journey for them and their family.  Craig and Lynn Ann told me that, even though over the years their lives have had profound difficulties, and they have been oftentimes lonely, they both have felt unable to do anything other than that which they felt called to do, a call they first heard at Shiloh.  Shiloh changed our DNA, they tell me.  They've never been the same.

I mentioned Jason in a paragraph above, a former director at camp.

Jason told me that his personality is someone who likes to fix things.  He seems to be a person who can see the way that existing systems can be improved.  When he was camp director, he wanted to make camp special for kids.  And his desire to fix a previously ailing camp program led him to throw a wild array of fun at the wall and see what stuck.  So he initiated things like chess classes, rocketry sessions, "wilderness night" (when the electricity wasn't working in certain cabins, those cabins were specially "selected" to participate), and a homemade slip and slide.  He wanted to provide opportunities, like Kenny's field trips, that would open windows of thought.  He worked at camp until he had his first son.  Then he realized he needed to have time with his family, and took a job at the Manhattan Church of Christ, which houses Shiloh offices.  Now Ryan is camp director, and brings more of a pastoral style to camp.  Jason continues to advise Shiloh staff with the touchstone phrase: be intentional about how Shiloh can live up to its purpose of equipping kids with tools that build hope.

Jane worked as chief girls' counselor at camp in the 1970s, and she, too, talks about how much she and the counselors worked to give kids fun, broadening experiences and personal relationships at camp and in the year-round programs.  Although the language of "tools that build hope" was not a part of Shiloh's stated lexicon at the time, it was part of the spirit of what they were trying to do.  Jane formed her identity as a "rabble rouser" in the civil rights, anti-war, and women's movements, just as Cue did.  Her spiritual journey in college included a probing of the biblical text that led her to Shiloh, a place where the text seemed possible to live out.  At camp she was the chief girls' counselor.  She worked long hours to put together penny carnivals, pirate night, treasure hunts, luaus, and Christmas in July.  She worked in the year-round programs in Newark and in Brownsville in Brooklyn.  Jane ended up moving to New York City after Shiloh.  

Brother Maxwell's consistent support and service through hammer and nail have helped shape Camp Shiloh.  He has been a board member during times of change.  Brother Maxwell's conversion experience took him from a destructive path onto a constructive one.  After his conversion, he stopped his destructive lifestyle, began attending church, street preaching, and ultimately pastoring his church in a place where he felt he could be of the most service.  He says his experiences have led him to value the importance of honestly telling all parts of his story, even the bad ones.  They have also led him to believe in the importance of giving to others who are in vulnerable situations, a place where he, too, might have one day been.  

A minister of a Church of Christ in Long Island, Brother Maxwell was baptized in a predominately white church, and, although his congregation is African-American, he tries to keep conversation and teaching open between his church and white Churches of Christ.  But he mourns that the black church and white church have "divorced each other," a term he did not originate, but a concept he hopes is possible to overcome.  Which metaphor will trump the other in American church society: Cue's circle of mutual giving, or the divorce between the black and the white churches?  A quote from Martin Luther King seems to blend Kenny's image of the long way around the game board image and Cue's circle of connectedness.  He said the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.

So I have told a few stories today of people I have met, although there are a few more I did not include here.  Their stories are for another time.  But after I have told these stories, I continue to exhort us all, imperfect though we are, to remember, to bend toward justice.