by Dymphna Morrissey

Created on: July 19, 2011   Last Updated: May 04, 2012

"Where are you going?" the little girl asked me around Easter of 1965.

"I'm going to church!  Yippee skippy!"

"Yuck!  But excuse me, because we have to go say our excellent prayers, so would you like mind sitting over there.  No not there, go further.”  She assessed the distance.  I had a measuring tape in my pocket and really wondered if it would be needed.  With a serious expression she nodded.  “Good, good!"

I started to inch my little toe a bit, but my sister nudged me.  Finally, we went home and went to church because her friends told her to tell us they did not like to play with us. 

The man in front of me was wearing a pair of jeans that didn't quite cover his butt crack.  I fell asleep on my mother's shoulder in the middle of the sermon.  On the way out, I dunked my hand in the holy water font and crossed myself.  I took some more and flung it at some withering plants.  The gospel was about Jesus walking on water.  It was windy and rainy so in the name of Jesus I commanded it to stop in my mind.  But instead of stopping it started to hail.

On our way home, I saw an ad on a post.  In the picture, there appeared a group of delirious ecstatic looking kids.  They were sitting in a circle holding hands and they were dancing around a pole.  Above them a pastor was laying his hands over one of them and looking up to the heavens with his teeth bared in a wide cavernous grin.  In hot pink graffiti writing it said, “Jesus Camp:  The wind and the hail are the signs of the Holy Spirit.”  There was no question about it.  Jesus wanted me there.

The first morning of Jesus camp my mother gave me a bottle of holy water, a case of pretty white rosaries blessed by Padre Pio’s glove, and a seven green scapulars to distribute.  I skipped all the way there.  From outside the gate, I heard children screaming in the pool, eager children on fire with Jesus.  Or so I thought.  The reality was that it was like regular camp that was just called Jesus camp to get kids like me to go.

Although in the morning we prayed to the Holy Spirit, the rest of the day we played.  We prayed to the Holy Spirit by not thinking or by seeing His presence in the raven and the owl.  In the middle of Marco Polo, I corrected the children and told them he was called the Holy Ghost. I saw from the corner of my eye that the camp counselor

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