“Two ravens sit on Odin’s shoulders and bring him the news they hear and see. Their names are Thought and Memory. Odin sends them out with each dawn to fly over the world, in order that he may learn everything that happens. Always he fears that the raven named Thought may not return, but every day his deepest concern is for Memory.” [adapted from Norse mythology]
There are moments of awareness, sometimes even remarkable, that become the distilled essence of our memories that often, over time, create our sense of self, or perhaps life reconstituted not as a list of events, but as a narrative searching for recurrent themes with intimations of a larger order, with intentions to slowly reveal underlying experiences.
So what is it that makes certain incidents and perceptions from the past truly “live and move and have their being” in our present? The relationship between experience and memory is complicated. Between the period of childhood’s vulnerability and the ensuing years of personal agency, many of us “wrestle” our stories “out of the circumstance of landscape.”
From 1959-1963 I was a camper. As an only child of less than nurturing parents, I immediately found a welcoming home with “sisters,” younger and older, happy to listen and talk and play and sing with me. My feelings of being included and valued as one among many were developmentally noteworthy.
I was most drawn to Hagan’s Delaware River waterfront, finally swimming my way to the outer rafts. I returned to Hagan in 1966, and remained on staff through 1972. As the Waterfront and CIT and Hagan Unit Head, I learned to navigate the challenges of leadership, which I confidently applied to my first years of teaching large public middle school 8th grade math classes.
With others, I continue to “wrestle” my story “out of the circumstances of landscape.” There are clues from pictures under the glass of my current writing desk … the Hagan altar flanked by tall pines that whispered both the wind and the river’s current below; the sanctuary of Christ Church Cranbrook of English Gothic Style; and a quote from C.G. Jung – “Anyone with a vocation hears the inner voice: the voice of a fuller life, of a wider, more comprehensive consciousness.”
David, my husband, and I were residential faculty in Cranbrook Schools’ boarding program from 1984-2000. Its landscape too was breathtaking, and on the historic registry. There were some 700+ high school students, both day and boarding. With the exception of homework, tests, graduation, and college admittance, Cranbrook brought back memories of Hagan … those feelings of belonging and a welcoming “home.”
Those “coming-of-age” years when relationships and events impinge directly on the formation of identity, from the vantage point of retrospect, they too tell one’s personal story … this, in part, is how we each came to be.
Through the lens of mystery, the Hagan altar and its symbolic sanctuary within a sanctuary, was for me a place of quiet and stillness and song and reflection and prayer. I somehow unconsciously welcomed this altar and its steadfast yet quiet presence as a sign and symbol of what would one day become “a fuller life, of a wider, more comprehensive consciousness.” The grandeur of the altar of Christ Church Cranbrook was linked, so to speak, with my memories of the simplicity of Hagan’s river-stone-built altar.
But again, the relationship between experience and memory is complicated. The memories of the past speak both to the Hagan setting and as an influence upon my later process of going to Princeton Theological Seminary whose faculty were published scholars, and the Episcopal Divinity School, whose faculty included Sue Hyatt and Carter Heyward, two of the first female ordained Episcopal priests, signature writers of liberation theology, social justice movements, and uncompromising, and published tours de force for equality across divisions of racial, gender, sexuality differences, and all other created forms of dualism or bigotry that deny the full humanity of some. David and I met at EDS.
Memory awakens the past in some form, and often finds life’s patterns, and on occasions, a revealing narrative. With just a bit of hindsight, there sometimes occurs a found continuity among change, and a current self emerging from several younger versions of self charged with the process of growing up.
This only child found through experience a longing for more meaning more feeling, more connection, more life, more love. At Hagan, I found a summer family and a sanctuary not bound by walls or doctrine or hierarchy. Hagan’s days were filled with self-forgetfulness, with reverence, with a recognition of some universal likeness of myself, and all of ourselves, in another.
In 2000, David and I retired from Cranbrook and settled into our home on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. David worked several congregations, both full and part time. I was ordained in the Episcopal Church in 2006, working for one parish for two years and another for one year before my “awakening,” as it were, took form. With relentless transparency, it soon became clear to me that the Episcopal Church was an institution bound by a variety of walls, some letting in light through beautiful stained glass windows, and others with a more institutional bent, often simply revealing uncompromising creeds and doctrines, and the old “who’s in, who’s out.” For me now, it often seems that the institutional church is so committed to where’s it’s been or where “we’d” like to appear to be going, that there’s little time to be where we really are.
And then I remembered the Hagan outdoor chapel, the river-stone altar, and the entire camp community summer-family, and found not self-interest, conquest, indifference or abandonment, but rather young girls and older adolescents wanting to belong, and to be
accepted for themselves. The outdoor chapel and altar encouraged and fostered us to remain intentionally silent; for some, including myself, it was a visceral memory to have found the “entrance to the vast wilderness inside.”
William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury during World War II wrote: “the whole harmony of creation depends upon the offering of each humblest spirit of its own appropriate note of music in which no other can sound without discord.” Years later, Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa asked, “Have you seen a symphony orchestra … There’s a chap in the back carrying a triangle. Now and again the conductor will point to him and he will play ‘ting.’ That might seem so insignificant, but in the conception of the composer something irreplaceable would be lost to the total beauty of the symphony if that ‘ting’ did not happen.”
Each of us in our own way cannot be replicated. We are each irreplaceable; each individual’s ‘ting’ continues to add to the harmony and completeness of the Hagan symphony throughout the years. And so our lives were and are in many different ways still bound together.
Yet, as always, the present leans into the future to shape a new reality. The “landscape” of Camp Hagan once nestled between the mountain and the river remains. But now, the buildings and cabins and tents and waterfront are no longer there. Now the whole symphony of Camp Hagan no longer echoes through the winds passing through the trees, or follows the currents of the river that both framed Hagan’s former landscape. But forget not your own lens of mystery, and embrace a new life, for Camp Hagan is now wherever we are.
Camper 1959-1963; Junior 3 1966, Waterfront Director 1967-1969, 1971; CIT Head 1970; Hagan Unit Head 1972