By: Canon Brendan O’Sullivan-Hale
As evening gathered in quiet woods, a twig snapped. A rustle in the underbrush, a shadow in the trees. There was a sound of breath, somewhere between the pant of a sprinter after a 100-meter dash and the menacing reverberation of Darth Vader. From the campfire clearing, out of sight, obscured by leaves and branches, the muffled sounds of camp songs and laughter. Night would soon fall, and something was coming.
That something was a full-grown middle-aged man in half a gorilla suit with a graduation gown tied around his waist and a curly blond wig on his head, namely, me. Half an hour earlier, after camp staffer Hannah Resnick asked, “This is an unusual request to make of a chaplain – but do you think you could dress as a cryptid for the opening campfire? Sneak in, be a little scary, but, you know – not too scary,” I dug through costume cast-offs in the corner of Waycross Camp’s craft shop, trying to conjure a visage of a fearsome (but not too fearsome) woodland creature. This week, Waycross’s Adventure Camp would be celebrating cryptids – imaginary creatures along the lines of the Loch Ness Monster and Mothman – and Hannah was looking for someone who could, as they say, “commit to the bit.”
I am proud that my week as camp co-chaplain included a star turn as Waycross’s answer to Bigfoot, but prouder still of what I got to be a part of during that week in June. I hadn’t been to a summer camp since being a summer camper, nor had I been around more than a handful of 8-14 year-olds since I was 8-14 years old. I had volunteered as a camp chaplain because chaperoning teenagers on two diocesan youth mission trips had strengthened my own faith in wonderful and surprising ways. But as a first-timer, I still wasn’t sure just how I would fit in.
The job of a chaplain at Waycross is to help maintain and strengthen the spiritual underpinning of what happens during a week at camp. Waycross brings strengths that make this work comparatively easy and exceptionally rewarding. Waycross’s beautiful setting lends itself to a reverence for creation that in turn leads seamlessly into reverence for the Creator. Of course, at camp reverence manifests much differently than it usually does in churches on Sundays – with boisterous, joyful noise emerging all hours of the day, indoors and out. This happens most obviously in the songs, where the silly (“The Eggplant that Ate Chicago”) is punctuated by songs that provide biblical and theological formation. I was surprised to find that Christian contemporary megahit “Oceans” was especially affecting when stripped of heavy production values and turned into a camp song.
Within this context, chaplains lead morning and evening worship. My co-chaplain, the Rev. Jennifer Oldstone-Moore, and I identified campers for each service to do readings and lead prayers so that they could have ownership of their worship services. By the end of the week, we had so many volunteers we couldn’t accommodate them all. At each service Jennifer and I delivered a 2-3 minute mini-sermon where we addressed whatever the campers might be going through that day and connected it to scripture, and occasionally to the cryptid of the day. For instance, before the campers’ overnight expedition away from the cabins and into the woods, we addressed the naturalness of fear, and God’s presence with us and our companions as a source of courage as we take risks.
The campers and staff inspired me by the way they embodied the values we talk about as Episcopalians. For one cabin, getting through a low ropes course relied much less on athleticism than mutual encouragement. Differences among campers, including neurodivergence, gender nonconformity, and all the various gradations of personalities in development and flux at these ages, were incorporated into the whole as a matter of course. So it was little wonder that the closing worship service, when the campers said thank you and goodbye to a week where they got to be fully themselves in a beautiful place with caring adults and a pervasive sense of being enveloped by God’s love, was a tearful event.
Parents who send their children to Waycross, volunteers who spend their time there, and donors whose vital financial support helps keep camp costs affordable can all do so in confidence that the values we teach in our churches are being lived at Waycross. This chaplain fervently hopes for a chance to reprise his role as a mysterious benevolent creature roaming the Brown County hills, but even if not – I’ll be back as a chaplain next summer.
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