Where do sacred places go when they die?

I just found out that my childhood home is going to be destroyed.

It’s not a physical home, it’s not the house where I grew up, it’s not my hometown. The buildings where my adolescence took place will remain standing and will surely be renovated with time. The trees will remain standing, though those next to the road will probably be trimmed back, and the site will continued to be populated by many, mostly by people of around my current age.

But the community will die.

Flash back to the summer after my sixteenth birthday. I had just moved to Virginia, away from a high school where I was a champion of the out-crowd, and was soon to be entering a high school where I would retain the status of “foreigner” (a Yankee) until graduation. My parents suggested that to make new friends locally, I ought to go to a nearby summer camp. I was appalled by the idea of “camp,” which reminded me of a particularly bad incident with the scouts in the fourth grade. Too-cool-for-school kids such as myself were far beyond camp counselors, dining halls, and constant supervision. Nevertheless, I applied to the Young Writers Workshop at the University of Virginia, was accepted, and went to camp determined to be miserable.

Far from being the sulking, non-participatory camper I had set out to be, I was fully engaged in the workshop experience within the hour of my arrival. While I had expected to be surrounded by a troop of socially maladjusted teenagers who wrote masturbatory poetry in twenty-dollar Barnes and Noble journals, my new friends and classmates were, for the most part, bright, creative, and sensitive teenagers with a talent for writing. I instantly liked them and I grew to love them, and they felt the same way for me. I didn’t just fit in with my peers. I was one of the popular people.

This was a sense of belonging that had previously eluded me. School was brutal and unwelcoming. Organized religious groups frightened me, and middle school counselors insisted that I must surrender my freedom of thought to them in order to join the ranks of the faithful. Adults assumed I didn’t mesh with the crowd because I was a spiteful and rebellious child, but when I finally found some like-minded peers, I developed in ways that no one could have expected, least of all myself.

As many people find their spiritual identities when within a community of worshippers, I began to examine my previously nonexistent spiritual beliefs while at camp. My new experiences filled me with awe at the world and at my own capacity to experience such joy. I expressed such spiritual ponderings in a quiet way in some of my poetry at first. By my third and final summer as a “Y-dubs” camper, I was directly questioning my own vague beliefs during my many discussions with my roommate, a very dedicated Christian. Unlike the very religious people I had met in the past, she never pushed me towards her own beliefs and always listened to my thoughts on the matter. I would never have met her or many other wonderful people had we not been brought together by our common interest in creative writing and the Young Writers program.

The program, however, is ending. After twenty-five years of YWW, the UVA professor who heads the program, Margo Figgins, isn't doing the program anymore, and (we think) UVA’s funding for the program was tied directly to Margo. At any rate, without her, there can be no more summer camp. The community of students, counselors, and dedicated adults will fall apart, and lost kids like my sixteen-year-old self will not have that opportunity to find themselves. Just as YWW was becoming available to more students through the addition of some scholarships and increased name-recognition, it is dissolving.

Before camp, I would have been decently satisfied with a future spending my life designing video games or characters of animated films. Nowadays, I want to dedicate my life to awakening young people in the manner that summer camp awoke me to myself. The experience redeemed my soul in a way that school couldn't, cliques couldn't, gay pride couldn't, religion couldn’t.

Sometimes my current girlfriend, who met me at this summer's camp, and I will sit on the phone and just reminisce about the times we had (apart, as she was too shy to approach me). Who else can understand, but another y-dubber? I'm trying to impress upon you the profound impact this place had on me, but I secretly suspect that there is an understanding that only fellow initiates can share.

When I found out that next summer would be the last summer of the program, the second person I told was my dad, who has always seen eye-to-eye with me on matters of philosophy. He told me not to be sad, to think of all the good that the program had done for so many kids. I did not find in him the empathy I had been seeking, and in retrospect I realized that our minor schism in philosophy marked a much deeper divide: I was becoming more of an individual.

“I know that, Dad,” I said, “but I just need time to be upset.” Like the Mayans that have recently fascinated me, and like Eve Ensler admitted after her performance at Penn last Tuesday, I believe in the power of grief.

Excuse me, but I need some time to grieve over this.