Copyright © 2004 The Episcopal Diocese of East Tennessee

Grace Point Camp and Retreat Center’s first ’04 summer campers were greeted June 8 at the camp entrance with a big counselor-created sign.

Three additional weeklong sessions followed, each for a designated school-aged group, and the regular season closed with a special weekend camp for rising first-, second- and third-graders with a parent. A special extension of the season was scheduled for youth from Appalachia, whose camp fees were paid through donations from East Tennessee parishioners, churches, seminarians, diocesan convention delegates and others.

A rough survey found nearly half this year’s campers hailed from the Middle East Area of the diocese, a third from the South East Area, about 10 percent from Upper East and about 10 percent from outside the diocese, including campers from Texas, West Tennessee and Arkansas.

This year’s camp schedule was set to avoid conflict, where possible, with dates for Camp Gailor-Maxon at DuBose Conference Center. That change allowed most age groups to attend camp at both Grace Point and DuBose if they wished. The one exception was the camp for high school students, many of whom would find camps at other than the start of summer in conflict with summer jobs.

Another welcome change this year was the installation of another bathroom in the Commons Building, thanks to a May board of managers’ vote. Previously, second-floor campers had to make do with only one bathroom.

The Commons’ kitchen also was expanded to allow for two refrigerators and two stoves. The camp caterer, Frank Moore, now can prepare foods ahead on site instead of transporting ready dishes from his home, which allows greater food variety, Vicar Bo Lewis said.

Campers enjoyed traditional summer-camp activities including swimming, boating, fishing, hiking and crafts. Session 3 co-director Mike Keene reports the barn across the lane from the Commons Building, dubbed the “Art Barn,” has “been cleaned out marvelously into a great and usable space.”

Unusual twists on traditional camp activities and unpredictably special moments are what each camper will long remember, including secret prayer partners, compline by the light of the moon on a pontoon boat, new songs including “All God’s Critters Got a Place in the Choir,” Silly Olympics, hikes “in” the lake, a pirate raid for ice cream, scavenger hunts for the counselors — with each one captured read a list of “charges” before water-balloon “punishment,” greetings to Herman the Heron and Poker the Swallow, jug fishing, yelling “Good morning, God!” each morning at the point and listening for the echo ... and all the other memories that make summer camp a unique, shared experience in every session.

photo © Annie vonRosenberg for the Diocese of East Tennessee
Session 2 campers gather around Bishop Charles vonRosenberg, center, on the Retreat House screened porch.

Mention “summer camp” to many adults around the diocese, and you’re likely to be treated to instant smiles and fond remembrances:

“I have been blessed with many camp experiences – as camper, counselor, program director and chaplain. In each of these roles, I have grown in ways that would be difficult, if not impossible, to duplicate anywhere but camp.

“Perhaps most significant for me, though, was the opportunity to try out leadership responsibilities as a camp counselor, under close supervision.

“The responsibility for children’s safety and well-being was quite real, but in the organization of ‘camp,’ my own judgment was not the children’s only safety net. Rather, camp provided a ‘laboratory’ environment for me to develop my own leadership style and to experience a growing responsibility, as I became capable of accepting it.

“The gift of that camp environment has paid great dividends later in life for me, and I am indeed grateful for it.”

“I remember my summer at Camp Mirramichee on the Spring River in the Arkansas mountains. We all gathered around the transistor radio to hear Neil Armstrong land on the moon. I met friends from out of town with whom I still stay in touch.

“I remember we had to wear navy shorts and white ‘Peter Pan’ shirts for the evening ‘Taps’ service where we lowered the flag. I learned how to swamp a canoe and how important it was to write home. I also learned what a panty raid was and how miserable a really cold shower can be early in the mountain morning.

“Mainly I remember how much fun it was to be far away from home (well, about four hours) and to live out of a big black trunk with a lock and how cool it was to get care packages from home. I learned that friends can come from all over.

“My dad called me ‘Bunny,’ and I decided to use that name at camp. So I have some friends who still call me ‘Bunny.’ What a hoot.”

“One year I had a cabin full of 3rd- and 4th-graders at the Episcopal camp in Mississippi. We had made ‘God’s eyes,’ and one of my girls had very carefully stored hers under the covers of her bed for safekeeping.

“Some of the girls came in one day and had fun jumping on each others’ beds, so when the girl with the hidden God’s eye returned to the cabin, she found her artwork broken in two. I heard her crying over her discovery. 

“I comforted her as best I could and assured her that this was not a malicious act, but a careless one. And we made plans to try to glue the twigs back together without letting the yarn come undone. Before it was mended, this child stopped her tears and forgave her cabinmates both in their absence and later, in their presence. 

“When we left after the week of camp, I received this God’s eye as a gift. It reminds me of how willing this nine-year-old was to forgive and to repair the damage to her possession and to her relationships.”

“There’s this common bond [of ‘camp’] similar to when I was in the Peace Corps: You find someone else who has been to ‘the place,’ to Mecca ... it’s a privilege.

“I started going in 1963 to summer camps at Shrine Mont, a conference center of the Diocese of Virginia in the Blue Ridge mountains. The Shrine of the Transfiguration is there – an open-air cathedral with the bishop’s chair.

“I went to camp until I was 18, then was on staff. At that time, for me, it was the best part of the Episcopal Church: creative and energizing. Camp pretty much kept me in the church.

“A big bell in the tower called everybody to morning prayer, then we’d go to the dining room for breakfast. Every day had its menu, and it’s exactly the same now as it was then – Sunday is fried chicken, green beans and rice, with peach cobbler for dessert.

“It was a beautiful setting, rustic cabins, no phones. The swimming pool was icy – fed by a mountain stream. It was built as a conference center, with buildings going back to the Civil War. The cabins had big old stone fireplaces.

“Camp is a wonderful chance for anyone to go and sort of try on different ways of being: If you’re really shy at home, go to camp and be really bold and try that on; if you’d like to sing and don’t feel like you can at home, go to camp and just try it.”

“Arriving in my 1950 Chevrolet in early June [to be a counselor at a Mississippi camp after my freshman year at Sewanee], I began a relationship with that place and the people which continues to this day.

“The memories from that summer are precious – leading my first worship services, growing close to an older black man (a first for this New Jersey Yankee!), watching James Meridith [the first black person to enroll at the University of Mississippi] walk right by on his march from Memphis to Jackson, and above all, getting to know the clergy who served on camp staffs as people rather than roles. Learning about what characters clergy can be encouraged me to continue to think about seminary for myself.

“I worked closely that summer with a boy two years younger than I, who was the son of the resident manager. Thirty-seven years later, I am godfather to his daughter; I drove to Mississippi to attend the funeral of his grandfather a month ago; I get invited to family reunions; and I have been asked by his parents to officiate someday at their funerals!

“Such is the lasting power of relationships formed at places where people are particularly aware of the movement of the Spirit.”

“I’ve been thinking a lot recently about our connection to place. I suppose it’s because we’re physical beings that on a literal level we simply need a place just to exist, to put our feet down, to hold onto, to claim as our own. I’m a very tactile person, so I like all of that. I like to touch natural things – wood, pottery, animals – to hold things and roll them around in my hands.

“Looking at things and hearing sounds always evoke memories. Our campus coffee shop has a great screen door. Every time it slams shut – every time – I’m reminded of the cabins at the camp where I spent 17 summers.

“Camp Tegawitha was one of those special places that was so formative in my life. I know a good bit of who I am today is because of my experiences there. It closed a few years ago after almost 100 years of being a summer camp. The place was sold and all the buildings torn down. It broke my heart.

“I knew that place as sacred space because my life was irrevocably changed there. I still vividly remember plays we put on, horses I rode and then the years when I taught a new generation of campers to ride.

“Those of us who experienced that camp life keep that place alive in our sharing of those stories. I loved that place more than any place I’ve ever lived. I still have friends from there, we still know all the songs; it’s a real live place in my heart.”

“Grace Point Summer Camp is growing in more than the quality and amount of spaces we have to use for our programs. One of the things about being at a camp that is so young is that it hasn’t formed deep and strong traditions yet.

“The camp where I got my own experience — Camp Nebagamon for Boys in northern Wisconsin — has been around for more than 75 years, and sometimes there it seemed that every aspect of camp life was dictated by how it’s always been done. But at Grace Point, that book’s now being written — and rewritten — each day.

“This came home to me when I learned no one was playing ‘Taps’ at night. I tracked down an old Rexcraft (Boy Scout model) bugel on E-bay.

“A camper came up to me and said he played first trumpet in his school band, and could he try out that bugle, please? He made a fair run at ‘Taps,’ then pulled the mouthpiece out and shook the bugle. A watercolor pen fell out, after which the bugle made a much better sound.

“From then on, each night just before bedtime — curfew at 10 and lights out at 11 — this camper stood outside the building and blew a slow ‘Taps’ — clear, just loud enough, meditative and lovely.

“That won’t happen every week, as not every group will have a bugler in it and not every director will want it, but I smile thinking of that sound making a place in the memories of the campers in Session 3, young people who perhaps had never heard ‘Taps’ coming through the night, on a cot by a lake, at a place like Grace Point.”

Web site: www.etdiocese.net/gracepoint