An Excerpt from Jeremy’s Thesis
Jeremy Sierra is a MFA student and lives in New York. A congregant at St. Lydia’s, he blogs here under the category Jeremiah Speaking. On May 15, he shared this excerpt from his MFA thesis at dinner church.
I went to an Episcopal Camp in the Diocese of Texas, about an hour’s drive outside of San Antonio. The cabins where we slept were spacious, with rough white stone walls, concrete floors and four sets of bunk beds attached to the wall in the corners of the large square room. Overhead, a noisy fan whirred and failed to keep the cabins cool.
The concrete slab at the center of the campus was where we would all lie and look up at the stars and listen to whatever story the priest would decide tell us. This was usually something with a traditional Christian message (God loves you, Jesus died for your sins, we are all forgiven) and forgettable. The stars were what I remembered. The sky was vast, seemed to pull me up into it, and as I lay back on the concrete I could almost feel the earth rotating silently in empty space. It could have been frightening, being so small, but then I remembered that God had created all of it, and God loved me.
On the last evening, before we were all to pile in our parents’ minivans and SUVs for the trip back through the hill country to our homes, they would hold a dance, a night that both excited and filled me with dread. In the cabin bathroom the other boys would be putting on cologne, which they would sometimes lend me, and combing their hair, looking at themselves in their khakis and collared shirts. I stood near the edge of the dance floor the entire time, picking out girls that I wanted to ask to dance but never asking anyone; I was too shy and self-conscious. Also, I didn’t know how to dance. I did not even know how to two-step, which was what many of the couples did, that or a kind of rocking shuffle across the concrete. I stood at the edge and made multiple trips to the water fountain just to feel as if I had something to do.
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