Part One: He played his guitar

I was fourteen and had never really been away from home by myself. Of course I had been to the traditional scout camps, or the periodical youth group retreats through my church. However, this was well beyond those experiences. I was travelling across the entire continent on four planes to go to a conferance of youth from accross the world who were affiliated with my church. I wasn’t all that excited to go. I wasn’t particularily interested in religion and basically wanted to go soley for the trip to New York we were taking after the conference was over.

The conference was a place called Allentown/Bethlehem. You may recognize the names from a famous Billy Joel song about Allentown and its painful economic situation after the closing of its factories. But I wasn’t to hear that song for the first time for about eight years.

Bethlehem was the centre for the entire church, and this was chosen as the sight for this years conferance. The history of the Moravian church had routes back to the beginnings of the protestant church and developed at the same time and place as the Lutheran church. From Europe, Moravian settlers came to Bethlehem as their chosen place in the new world.

After what seemed like years of air travel I was blasted by stifling heat and humitity as I stepped of the plane in Allentown. Something that as a western Canadian, living in a cool, dry climate, I was not at all used to. The sun was intense and the pavement from the runway after walking down the steps from the plane was painful. Even worse were the Bible college dorms that we were forced to stay in that lacked air conditioning. For me, they lacked the chance for sleep, and instead offered sweaty nights of hot, sticky sleeplessness.

The campus was quite beautiful, with extremely old buildings surrounding a massive recreational field which seemed to serve no official purpose. The campus seemed to be from the eighteenth century, a time in which my home city of Calgary didn’t even exist. The entire town was filled with such old buildings that reminded me of movies about witch trials in eastern America, the ones were men and women walked amongst misty wooden, and brick buildings spouting religious hatred.

The city was also filled with the normal rundown streets and buildings that always seemed to fill small town America. This part of the city seemed so distant to us in our safe little dorms at the warm clean university. The run down, rusty warehouses even looked pretty, and I took many pictures of then from different vantage points. I seemed to be forgetting, or perhaps ignorant of the fact, that these factories were a source of painful poverty and dispair.

I settled in fairly quickly at the college, making new friends and experiencing something I’d never experienced. Religion. The way my church worked at home was that it was simply a place where ordinary people came to ignore the sermon and eat donoughts and drink coffee and gossip. Here in Bethlehem, we talked openly about God, religion, souls, spirituality. We voiced our opinions, and heard those of others. I experienced religion as it was meant to be experienced. I heard for the first time the power of a gospel choir and felt the power of faith.

There was a kid by the name of Wilfred who played guitar and somehow became somewhat of a leader. I’m never sure why or how certain people become leaders, but it seems that groups of people will always tend to gravitate towards one person as its centre. He was dark skinned and came from some tropical island in the Bahamas, or perhaps Bermuda. He was fairly tall, and had a wonderful accent. He wrote and played beautiful music about God.

Everyday we would find time sit sit around and listen to Wilfred’s music. He would play us the songs that he had himself written, and then sing songs that all of us knew. Mostly from our nightly mass get togethers where the entire conference would come together and sing. We would watch the sun go down gently over the distant buildings and feel the heat of the sun slowly, and only slightly, lessen. We would sit and watch fireflies for hours, The way they would just suddenly light up and then disapear. They were everywhere, almost a blanket over the field. Everyone would laugh at me, because I thought fireflies were fictional animals from some childhood book my parents had read me, and I would stare with such intensity at their beauty that they thought I would never leave. There were no fireflies in Calgary.

As time went on, Wilfred became stronger as our leader. Between bible studies, tours of the beautiful Bethlehem buildings and its abandoned factories, and the numerous recreational activities, we were always with Wilfred. We listened intently to what he said as if his word was flawless and everything he said was stronger than our own souls. He spoke of the power of God, and his beauty and love. He read from the bible and preached. We listened, rarely speaking.

I remember one single day with more clarity than almost anything in life. We sat in a circle that included the mysterious Wilfred with his guitar. He played our favorite songs for us and we sang along, now knowing the words after almost two weeks of hearing them. But he didn’t speak to us about God this time. Instead, he put down his guitar and said,

“I want to tell you about my life.”

He told us a passionate story of his life. I remember nothing about the story aside from his complete vulnerabilty. His absolute sadness. His helplessness. He was our leader and he was telling us that he was imperfect, and he suffered more than any of us. It didn’t stop there though, everyone shared their suffering and pain. The only story I remember is that of one of the better friends I made who revealed that his Dad had AIDS and was going to die soon. My story, and everyone elses is lost on me. We released our pain to each other and to God. We built power through our emotions asking nothing of God, but for the sharing of struggle. We became one as a group and more powerful as a group.

Something happened to our group that day when I was fourteen and at church camp. As we spoke our stories, a surge of love came amongst us. A power beyond anything human and we all felt it. We all cried silently, and we didn’t know why. What we felt was a powerful, invisible, white light, circling around our suffering and begging it to go away. Begging us to submit to a more powerful force. Asking us to release our pain to the universe.

We all reacted differently. I stared into the distance in shock for the rest of the day, even in bible study. I couldn’t hear anything, see anything, do anything. All I could do was the white light, knowing it was the presence of God. It had silently spoken to us revealing itself to be God. I remember one Kid who walked for hours up and down the centre field mindlessly reading the bible aloud, weeping, while one intructor uselessly tried to comfort him in his emotional pain. Fireflies swarmed around his legs as the sun went down. Others just wept for hours and hours. Wept for the beauty of the experience, and wept because the white light was gone. We felt as though God had touched us in a time of need. And now that he was gone, religion was all that could fill that void.