The Rake Magazine

One muggy Minnesota morning during the summer straddling the scrawny divide between my fanciful childhood and jaded adolescence, my best friend Robby and I found religion. It'd been hiding, not surprisingly, inside the whitewashed pine chapel of Lake Bronson Galilee Lutheran Bible Camp.

Robby and I first met, with a magnetic force, five years earlier at a baptism. Hayseeds both, we each had Elmer's Glue skin, John Deere green eyes, and an electric shock of curly blond hair. We also shared a passion for C.S. Lewis's stories, a furious love of outdoor exploration, and a consuming need to spend time together. Bible Camp was just an annual extension of that need.

The morning we discovered religion, head counselor Neil finished Rise And Shine services by directing all campers to join hands around the chapel's suspended oak cross in a chorus of "Sing Hallelujah to the Lord."

Robby took my hand in his.

Seven measures into the round, late morning humidity oozed in through the levered windows. Sunlight beamed through the bible stenciled into the center of the most prominent stained glass window, angelfying each crooning countenance. Robby's slick and gamy hand swung gently with mine in time with the music.

Just before the last bit, Neil twirled his finger in the sunlit dust, indicating we should repeat the entire hymn, splitting the stanzas between the boys and the girls. With exponential vigor the music bounced from us to the chapel walls and back again. This swirl of echoes tugged at me with an insistent, muscular strength.

Something was at work. The song, the sunlight, the heat, Robby's hand, collectively they pierced through my skin, infusing a soulful mood. I felt sheltered, peaceful, and poised.

"I feel...religious," I thought. Not a jarring revelation, as I was after all in church, in bible camp. But God wasn't really what I was there for, and yet, in some form, He appeared anyway. How odd. Eventually Neil axed the air, and everyone filtered out into the muggy broth, eager to shed their clammy church clothes for swim trunks.

But neither Robby nor I could recede easily into camp tomfoolery. He too had felt simultaneously elevated and anchored by the music. While changing in our cabin we discussed that feeling, then religion, which inevitably fell to talk of Heaven.

"Maybe it's like Narnia," Robby gushed. "Aslan, enchanted candies, talking animals!" Any other camper would have saved face by chiding this fancy, but I admitted I had a similar hope. Heaven had to incorporate some childish magic, or it'd just be eternally dull.

Later that day we sprawled on our coconut-scented beach towels on the coarse pebbles above Nestea-colored Lake Bronson. Our conversation hadn't stopped, so naturally we came to hell. On this subject we knew only what we'd been taught by rural Lutheranism: whoever accepts Christ as his savior has a free pass through Heaven's Gate, as long as he asks regularly, meaningfully, for forgiveness of all sins. But within individual families, the rules were murkier.

Robby's family was bent meekly inward toward his father, Herald, who ruled fiercely, religiously, using confusion as a tool and hell as a strap. And occasionally he used an actual strap.

"Sometimes," Robby confessed, "like when we stole those crabapples, I'll think, ‘What if I died, right now? Would I wake up in hell just because I haven't, yet, told God, sorry?'"

"It's a puzzle," I admitted. "And what about all the sins we forgot to ask God's forgiveness for? What happens to those when we die?"
Robby frowned. "It's not like we see a priest; nobody's hearing the sins and asking, ‘Sure that's all of them?'"

"Right," I said scraping sand from my taffy. "It's just God and us."
Lutherans are proud to have removed the Catholic's confessional middleman, but at that moment I feared perhaps we'd been too efficient.