The 2012 Encampment was a new experience for me, as I had never been around this many (70+) students of the New Message from God in one place at one time.  I had an inner nervousness that the participants at Encampment would be True Believers, uncritical fanatics.  They dispelled my nervousness by the end of Day 2, not only by their decency and magnanimity, but by their curiosity and engagement as well.  I adopted the hypothesis that the people there were, more or less, people like me, with some people being a little more advanced as students than I am, and some people being a little less advanced students than I am.

My nervousness about my fellow participants was a layer of nervousness covering my nervousness about me being a True Believer in the New Message.  I have been a True Believer in previous seasons of life, and what I have learned from this experience is 1) True Believers aren’t very helpful to other people, except other True Believers in the same thing, and 2) True Believers aren’t much fun to be around, due to their obsession and inflexibility.  The niceness of my fellow participants not only dispelled my nervousness about them, but helped dispel this particular nervousness I had about me.  Got that?

During the evening session of Day 3, I wrote the following in my notebook:

Moses, are you angry with me?  I hear “No.”  Why are you not angry with me?  Moses asks “Why should I be angry with you?”  Buddha, are you angry with me?  I hear “No.” Why are you not angry with me?  Buddha says “Why should I be angry with anyone, much less a stranger who has been reasonably polite?”  Mohammed, are you angry with me?  I hear “No,” and I find that shocking, because there have been times, many times, when I have been angry with you.  Jesus, are you angry with me?  I hear “No.”  Why are you not angry with me?

I was imagining conversations with the figures the New Message calls the Messengers of earlier times in human history.  Contemplating Mohammed as a Messenger of God, and getting over my antipathy of Islam, are challenges for me as a student of the New Message.  I confess to having had a desire to be an exceptional Christian, not just a boring, generic Christian, but the Christian the devil warned you about.  I don’t know how much of that was genuine, and how much was idealism and egotism.

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