One muggy Minnesota morning during the summer straddling the scrawny divide between my fanciful childhood and jaded adolescence, my best friend Robby and I found religion. It'd been hiding, not surprisingly, inside the whitewashed pine chapel of Lake Bronson Galilee Lutheran Bible Camp.

Robby and I first met, with a magnetic force, five years earlier at a baptism. Hayseeds both, we each had Elmer's Glue skin, John Deere green eyes, and an electric shock of curly blond hair. We also shared a passion for C.S. Lewis's [3] stories, a furious love of outdoor exploration, and a consuming need to spend time together. Bible Camp was just an annual extension of that need.

The morning we discovered religion, head counselor Neil finished Rise And Shine services by directing all campers to join hands around the chapel's suspended oak cross in a chorus of "Sing Hallelujah to the Lord."

Robby took my hand in his.

Seven measures into the round, late morning humidity oozed in through the levered windows. Sunlight beamed through the bible stenciled into the center of the most prominent stained glass window, angelfying each crooning countenance. Robby's slick and gamy hand swung gently with mine in time with the music.

Just before the last bit, Neil twirled his finger in the sunlit dust, indicating we should repeat the entire hymn, splitting the stanzas between the boys and the girls. With exponential vigor the music bounced from us to the chapel walls and back again. This swirl of echoes tugged at me with an insistent, muscular strength.

Something was at work. The song, the sunlight, the heat, Robby's hand, collectively they pierced through my skin, infusing a soulful mood. I felt sheltered, peaceful, and poised.

"I feel...religious," I thought. Not a jarring revelation, as I was after all in church, in bible camp. But God wasn't really what I was there for, and yet, in some form, He appeared anyway. How odd. Eventually Neil axed the air, and everyone filtered out into the muggy broth, eager to shed their clammy church clothes for swim trunks.

But neither Robby nor I could recede easily into camp tomfoolery. He too had felt simultaneously elevated and anchored by the music. While changing in our cabin we discussed that feeling, then religion, which inevitably fell to talk of Heaven.

"Maybe it's like Narnia [6]," Robby gushed. "Aslan, enchanted candies, talking animals!" Any other camper would have saved face by chiding this fancy, but I admitted I had a similar hope. Heaven had to incorporate some childish magic, or it'd just be eternally dull.

Later that day we sprawled on our coconut-scented beach towels on the coarse pebbles above Nestea-colored Lake Bronson. Our conversation hadn't stopped, so naturally we came to hell. On this subject we knew only what we'd been taught by rural Lutheranism: whoever accepts Christ as his savior has a free pass through Heaven's Gate, as long as he asks regularly, meaningfully, for forgiveness of all sins. But within individual families, the rules were murkier.

Robby's family was bent meekly inward toward his father, Herald, who ruled fiercely, religiously, using confusion as a tool and hell as a strap. And occasionally he used an actual strap.

"Sometimes," Robby confessed, "like when we stole those crabapples, I'll think, ‘What if I died, right now? Would I wake up in hell just because I haven't, yet, told God, sorry?'"

"It's a puzzle," I admitted. "And what about all the sins we forgot to ask God's forgiveness for? What happens to those when we die?"
Robby frowned. "It's not like we see a priest; nobody's hearing the sins and asking, ‘Sure that's all of them?'"

"Right," I said scraping sand from my taffy. "It's just God and us."
Lutherans are proud to have removed the Catholic's confessional middleman, but at that moment I feared perhaps we'd been too efficient.

Then Robby and I splashed out to the bobbing dock. We dived in.
The lake did not wash away our worry. At twilight, we caught up with Neil on the way to supper. First impressing upon him how moved we had been by the morning's service, we shifted carefully into an expression of our distress. "Oh, by the way, are we going to hell if we don't confess every sin right away?" we asked.

Walking beside us, he explained that God's love for us was His reason for being. "Love of that kind begrudges nothing," Neil said. "Simply honor Him by asking for forgiveness whenever you can." Then he smiled at us. "And don't fret about the stray sins; nothing slips by Him, and neither will you."

Neil had drawn a straightforward, two-step path to salvation: forgiveness and respect. Heaven looked much more accessible. The earlier sense of joy flooded back, and I felt saturated with relief.

That evening the humidity finally receded, and while much of the camp slept, some of us remained awake around a diminishing bonfire. Neil was there, and Robby, of course, sat beside me. Like ghosts, two sisters in Holly Hobby pajamas reappeared suddenly out of the darkness. One carried a book.

"Whatcha got there?" I asked, fracturing the quiet.

"A couple days before camp, two guys stopped by our house to give us this promo book," one of the sisters explained. "And talk about their church, The Jehovah's Witness."

Pious snickers circled the fire. We knew from our sermons that Jehovah's Witnesses were somewhere on God's priority list between Mormons and Satanists.

"And we brought it here to burn." She handed the book to Neil. He lay it across his lap, opened it at random, paused, and then with all the satisfaction and disgust of a man peeling away a scab, he ripped a page from its gluey spine and tossed it into the fire where it curled defensively. He then passed the book to the boy beside him who did the same.

This inexcusable act of defacement singed and then consumed my new faith. To me, books, good or bad, were sacred objects.

A tiny but determined sense of self-assurance swelled within me as the burning ritual continued. "Hitler burned books!" I wanted to shout. But every glowing face, including Robby's was wild with the sacrificial zeal of Antinomianism [9].

The book made its way to my hands, and my opportunity to extinguish this righteous pyre with a discussion of forgiveness and respect arrived. Robby, my bookworm kin, warmed my side, but youth cooled my heels. Sheepishly I passed what was left to Robby, willing him to pass it on again, but he tossed the remainder into the pit, and I burned with disappointment.

Ten years later, a major in biology at the U. pushed God out of my heart and into my brain, and so the final remnants of my relationship with Robby drifted away like smoke and ash. Ten years after that, a newspaper article concerning Herald, now a minister, reached me. Herald and his congregation were protesting the imminent removal of a Ten Commandments monument cemented outside a public building in the Great Plains. I looked for a photo, or even a mention of Robby, but found nothing. I wanted to know if he'd added children of his own to his father's expanding family. If so I'd ship them a boxed set of The Chronicles Of Narnia for some summer reading, along with an old snapshot I have of Robby and me standing against the lake.