I didn’t grow up religious. I didn’t attend Catholic school; I didn’t go to church regularly. It wasn’t an integral part of my upbringing, and it didn’t play a big role within my immediate family. Though I don’t feel any sort of sadness or regret that I didn’t grow up within organized religion, I felt in a way that this lack of experience affected my engagement in the Holden community. Holden Village is an incredibly remote Lutheran community-based in a previously abandoned mining village in the Entiat Mountains of the North Cascades. A self-proclaimed “intentional community,” Holden Village serves not only as a retreat center for affiliates of the Lutheran Church but as a gateway to incredible backcountry access. For 60 years, this community has held onto its ties to the Lutheran Church, and these values are woven deeply into the practices of everyday life. Between brief prayers during meals, the engagement in sacred spaces, and the acknowledgment of a higher power during everyday tasks, it became incredibly clear during the week we spent with this community just how deep these religious roots run.
Though I’ve had many conversations about a disconnect from religion with my classmates, I couldn’t help but feel extremely out of place within the Holden community. While they claim to be an inclusive community, the thing that binds almost all members of this community is some level of engagement in the Lutheran Church. As a college group of almost entirely non-religious students, our presence there felt like something of a sensitive subject during conversations with community members. It felt like a bigger barrier at some times more than others. I couldn’t help but criticize this community for holding so tightly to its religious affiliation while also claiming to provide an inclusive environment for all demographics. It was a challenging thought to catch myself with, though, because while I have no community connections through organized religion, there are many spaces in which I feel a strong sense of belonging because of other shared values and passions.
I spent six consecutive summers through the end of high school at a summer camp back in New Hampshire close to where I grew up. The larger in-camp community was much the same as Holden, without the presence of organized religion. Instead of the Lutheran Church, the thing that binds this community at its core and throughout its history is bringing youth into the outdoors. It is a campus of like-minded people who come together season after season to celebrate their love for one another, the outdoors, and backcountry experience in a beautiful natural setting. This summer camp, founded by the American Youth Foundation, was the vision of William Danforth. His hope was to highlight the necessity of a four-fold lifestyle emphasizing the physical, social, mental, and reflective aspects of engaging with the world and to provide a space for youth to practice these values to become better stewards in their own communities. My summers at this camp instilled these values in me, and they remain ideas that I come back to consistently. This camp community allowed me to spend weeks on-trail in the deep woods of Maine and New Hampshire, and on the roadways of Nova Scotia. Because these trips were almost entirely unassisted and the on-trail communities were so small, we were challenged year after year to forge intimate relationships with the people we had with us.
Through these experiences, I learned concrete wilderness-applicable skills. I learned how to move through the backcountry, and I learned how to hike through rain. I grew up on trails and in communities that taught me how to keep walking when there was no other option, no matter how exhausting or uncomfortable it felt. That was the type of community support that I grew to rely on. So while I didn’t grow up with the principles of any religion instilled in my daily life, I knew how to apply the values of on- and off-trail communities and experiences, and the things I learned while navigating wilderness. Because of these experiences, though, I felt that I could empathize in some ways with the community culture at Holden. I could reflect on those bizarre, hysterical traditions that live on year after year in small communities because I am a part of those traditions elsewhere. Engaging in a tight-knit community, while also reflecting on those experiences in the context of some higher value, whether that be Danforth’s four-folds or the belief system of the Lutheran Church, was not a foreign concept to me.
While I raised an eyebrow at the mealtime prayers at Holden and shied away from “Sacred Spaces,” I was feeling stuck in my internal comparison of these two communities. One thing that stuck with me the most during our time at Holden was this: Within my camp community, there are spaces and times for heavier conversations and group reflection not completely dissimilar to Holden’s “Sacred Spaces.” At camp, I had no issue participating comfortably. At Holden, the simple affiliation to organized religion turned me away completely. We’ve had group conversations since our departure from Holden about what binds a community, and how any “intentional” space must appear or feel to those who are not active participants. Any community that revolves around a set of values to which you cannot relate can feel unwelcoming or strange. Who am I to judge such a community then, when I know how hard it can be to adequately explain a group culture that still plays such a big role in my own life, whether religious or not? I don’t feel entirely comfortable relating my experiences in a non-religious community to a Christian establishment, though. Personally, the hardest part about engaging with community practices at Holden was balancing the recognition of how genuine the interpersonal connections of the residents were, and the establishment’s relationship to an organized religion that has perpetuated harm against many other communities. In this sense, it was hard to feel the same type of empathy towards the community. That is not to say in any way that the camp community that I am a part of is problem-free. There is much work to be done within both communities, but the lack of values to which I could personally relate stuck out to me. This, paired with Holden’s access to the Cascades and other incredible creative resources was a conflicting comparison.
I believe this comparison of communities is why defining what I took away from Holden, or what I thought of the place as a whole has been so challenging. I have no concrete answer because I’ve had a hard time balancing all of the aspects of life within the community of Holden. I learned how to knit, throw pottery, and play pool. I hiked to glacial lakes before breakfast and had incredible conversations over dinner. In that sense, I had a great time. But I also fell into deep conflict with the role religion plays in my life, and what I truly value in community spaces. In all of this reflection, I have not been able to separate these more enjoyable things from the parts that I relate to and value less. I find myself still stuck on these questions: What binds a community? How can these two establishments that I’ve engaged with feel so similar and so drastically different in every way? What would Holden’s separation from organized religion look like, and would they even consider it? How can they provide a truly inclusive space without doing so? For these questions, I have no answers. They will undoubtedly be things I continue to reflect on in the weeks to come, and I look forward to the ways the experiences of the rest of the semester will contribute to this comparison.