Connie and Denny:
They all had very different stories: Chip and Mendy were at camp in the mid- 1980s and then again in the early 1990s, and they talked about leading camp and fundraising and the dramas of religious disagreement and lack of funds. Connie and Denny lived at Shiloh year round in the early 1970s in Hempstead, Long Island. They lived in a former office space that had never been intended for living quarters, that had no showers or stoves or dish sinks. Connie took care of the living space, and they made it work. Kim lived in Brooklyn and was the only African-American woman on staff at the time she was there in the late 1970s. She found some of the restrictions placed on female staff members to be detrimental to her sense of credibility in the neighborhood.
Each of these people had to face challenges with living in a community of people, challenges having to do with beliefs or space or sense of identity. And beyond that, at one point or another, each one of them would have small children in the places where they lived (Kim would stay in the city for a while after Shiloh, and begin to raise her children there).
I made the following video to honor the families of Shiloh, the places we all come from, and the messages we give to all children. Whether we are immigrants through Ellis Island, or born in the Bronx with family history from Puerto Rico, or an East New York mom raising kids, or have painfully indistinct lineage, or grew up on a farm in the Midwest, or like me a post Civil Rights-era Nashvillian, all of the origin stories are fully worthy and precious. In New York, where the dream of America is at its most visible, tangible, beautiful, and painful. In Shiloh, where the stories meet and then touch in a new form of community. In the family of God, where every story is meaningful and precious, and every footfall is a part of the gracious dance. Hope in the Eyes of A Child is a motto of Shiloh. I wanted to pay tribute to the idea of family in its many forms, of ancestry in its many forms, of relatedness in its many forms, for all my family members that I interview and hear.
