LENDING TO THE LORD
Mayer, Milton
Lending to the Lord by MILTON MAYER DO YOU remember when you were little—I remember when I was little—and your father took you to the County Fair and you saw the wonderful signboards outside the...
...Come home, they won't be the kids they were when they went, for they will have reached down in their pockets and pulled out a summer or a year of their lives, to lend the coin of His realm to the Lord...
...They are delinquent because they will not say that the show inside is as good as the signboards made it out to be...
...Konnarock, Va...
...and cooperating, not competing, all at one and the same time in one and the same operation...
...They need adult leaders and project directors, and money to feed and house the work-campers at that sub-marginal level that fattens on joy...
...you are clearing a wood or weeding a field or painting a hospital or an orphanage...
...It was a sell...
...The Service Civil International was to be a great army of young people armed with love and shovels, coming along behind the armies armed by the old people with guns and hate...
...build a Negro conference grounds...
...When you're there, or in the United States, or Mexico, or Canada, Puerto Rico, El Salvador, places closer to home— what then...
...Turkey...
...There are training projects for work camp leadership (there was one in India recently...
...Would you like to live in that world before you have to turn back, sadly, to the world whose ecstasies can be had for the buying but not for the giving...
...You are building, not destroying...
...feeding a famine, preventing a flood...
...Maybe they'll like it...
...You and we and I need to hold on to the dream that the signboards provoked in us, or recover it if we have lost it...
...While nearly every religious denomination sponsors camps, many secular organizations also sponsor them...
...And in the office a young Swiss named Hans-Peter Muller, executive secretary of the—draw a deep breath now—Co-ordination Committee for International Voluntary Work Camps...
...Maybe they'll stay there...
...That's a real committee, in a real office, in a real building on a real street in Paris, France...
...You can get the complete list of all sponsoring organizations by writing Hans-Peter Muller...
...The Co-ordination Committee for International Voluntary Work Camps is not a part of UNESCO...
...Are you too old, too tired, too tied to do it yourselves...
...Jean Jarues, Clichy (Seine), France, but you don't apply there for service in SCI camps...
...As you might suppose, the biggest work camp sponsor in the United States is the American Friends Service Committee (Quakers), 20 S. 12th Street, Philadelphia 7. There are work camps in Communist countries, because there is need and suffering not only in capitalist countries but also in Communist countries...
...Would you like to have a go at it, or let your children go into it...
...Only 600,000 died there, and it took months and months and months to kill so few...
...You are loving and serving...
...Without any science and without any engineering they'll be work campers, with shovels, saws, and hammers, constructing things slowly, but constructing them faster than they themselves destroy them— which is something that scientists and engineers can't do...
...The dispossessed postwar and between-war children of Europe wander the roads...
...the show inside is as good as the signboards...
...Let them go to Korea and build houses...
...You and your children begin by finding out what organizations sponsor what work camps when and where, at home and abroad...
...Keys-ville, Ga...
...living together, always under primitive conditions, usually for a six-week period during the summer (the duration of the camps vary, and there are work camps in more limited number all during the year all over the world), engaged in an earthy project of labor service...
...Wadley, Ala...
...What's the idea...
...Sudan...
...Meaning goes trickling through their hearts and into the ground...
...And I don't mean pie in the sky, or hope and dreams too fragile to resist reality, soon proved illusions, and soon sprouting cynics...
...there's something else...
...to Kenya and build cottages for a t.b...
...It is in the world that doesn't betray the signboards, the world that isn't a sell...
...those of America wander the streets...
...But it is out of this world...
...you apply through the work camp agencies of your own country...
...on the whole, the work itself is taken as worship...
...Then they cook and eat and clean up the camp and talk—and sing and dance...
...That's only the prelude and postlude...
...The work camp army is a tattered army, because it lives in voluntary tatters and finds its victories in another uniform than the Ivy League shirt...
...Then remember the woe that Jesus laid on the Pharisees who neither enter the Kingdom themselves, nor suffer them that are entering to go in...
...Youth loves and builds by nature...
...I mean a big old building at 19, Avenue Kteber, Paris (16e), France...
...They work five or five-and-a-half days a week and get no pay...
...A work camp...
...you are building a wall, or a road, or a bridge destroyed by war (or that never was there in the first place...
...They see it through their own happy little lives for a while...
...But that is only getting there and getting back...
...Montour, Iowa...
...You and your young need the work camps worse than they need you...
...It is in the world of adventure—perpetual doing and living, never cloyed, never pallid...
...and, sovereign over it all, the protean horseman of hatred, now numbing his victims with terror, now fevering them with rage...
...poor Europeans are rich compared with Asians and Africans...
...it's nothing more than the answer, "Yes," to the question, "Isn't there anything else...
...There are old work campers, too, men and women of forty and fifty and sixty, who, having once lived in that world, care to live in no other...
...Is that all there is...
...to build a neighborhood house in El Huacio, Puerto Rico, or reconstruct a village at Saida, Lebanon...
...In 1957 there are a thousand-odd work camps— some for a weekend, some for a year—in forty-five countries...
...A few months ago I wrote about the Council on Student Travel, at 137, Boul...
...The idea was that the young people of all nations and races and religions would build together, and that they do...
...Would you like to have your children have a summer or two, or a year, in that world, learning to live and work and talk with other young people of different countries and backgrounds and dispositions...
...Not everybody knows what a work camp is...
...They see it through our adventures (and most of us date far enough back to have had adventures) and the stories they're told and the stories they read...
...and the answer, "No," to the question, "Is this all there is...
...And then they're inside it (or they get a peek inside, when they're 14, or 12, or even 10) and they see the army waiting for them and the utter waste that it means, and the prospect unpleasing of premature death in the war to come, and a furious scramble, meanwhile, for as much as they can get of the goods that are soonest shiny and sooner tarnished, and everyone talks of security and nobody talks of adventure...
...So do the seventy or so constituent organizations, religious and secular...
...you are converting a city lot into a playground...
...Purpose sifts through their fingers like sand...
...Malaya...
...The work camp movement began after World War I in what was left of the city of Verdun...
...you can get it also from the Committee for Ecumenical Voluntary Service Projects, World Council of Churches, 257 Fourth Avenue, New York 10...
...And cheap...
...to clear a slum in Baltimore or build a bridge at Ponca Creek, S. Dak...
...where every prospect pleases and man is not yet vile...
...There are young married work campers...
...The winners of wars, as much as the losers of wars, sometimes more, are possessed of a moral dismay...
...Is that all there is...
...Remember Verdun...
...The chances are that they'll come back, out of the sunlight and into the cave, but bronzed forever against the wasting away of the soul in hatred of Communists or Nazis or Arabs or Zulus or anyone else who knows, as they have known, what it is to work for people who bring to the task the single ingredient of need...
...Its members are students (senior high school and college) from all over, investing a summer or a year in the dream, and artists of all sorts from all over come to feed their art at the root, and workers of all sorts from all over spending their two- or three-week holiday refreshing themselves by working, for a change, at something that means something to them...
...center...
...you are laying foundations for cinder-block houses for refugees who have lived for ten years in tents or shanties...
...Capital of the world that is being built, the Co-ordination Committee needs men and money...
...working, not fighting...
...I mean something you can lay a hand on, two hands on, live with and work with and play with...
...It is an independent world organization...
...That's all there is to it...
...They see it first as a glorious assortment, endless, too, of sword-swallowers, midgets, giants, fat men, two-headed babies...
...While they build they talk...
...Reedley, Calif, (prepare fruit for relief shipment overseas...
...They do not need youth—youth clamors to get into a work camp and you or your children have got to apply early...
...Indonesia...
...Maybe they won't ever come back and be scientists and engineers, each doing his deadly and deadening little bit to break the world down and bust it up, to produce anti-toxins, baby carriages or bomb carriages, depending on the national need...
...You are damning up a precious pool in Sicily...
...and in that building, which is the world headquarters of the United Nations Educational, Cultural, and Scientific Organization, an office with a sign on the door, "Youth Section...
...The idea is to live in a better world—the world that isn't a sell-while you're building it, and to gain admission to it by building it...
...to Sitka and build a college (or to Edmonton and build a fence around a hospital...
...Is it a sell...
...Saint-Michel, Paris (5e), and at 179 Broadway, New York 7. That's how you get there—anywhere abroad—doing and living en route...
...Bricks, N. C; Red Bird, Ky...
...Pakistan...
...And if that's what it is, or looks like, do you blame them for smashing it, throwing beer cans at it, and getting a jolt, or charge, out of seeing it suffer...
...Finland...
...Religious overtones are louder in some than in others...
...Let them build, with their own hands, a bit of the brave new world...
...the work camp is working religion: "He that believeth in me, the things that I do, he will do likewise...
...Describing her summer's experience in work camps in France, Belgium, and Germany, Kate White said in The Catholic Worker: "You learn what is called 'international understanding" not by singing songs around a camp fire, but by the necessity of working together and getting along to perform that work for a crying need...
...You are putting a water-line, and a spiggot, into a rural tenement in France that never had running water...
...Something tells me that a Swiss and a Dutchman, young people, or two or three of each, were mixed up in the beginnings, which go back to an across-boundar-ies meeting of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (American address, if you want to know more about the Fellowship of Reconciliation: Nyack, N.Y...
...What were they fighting for, what did they win, what did they lose, and what now...
...A work camp is a group of young people (minimum age 16, 17, or 18, depending on the nature of the project, whether it's at home or abroad, etc...
...UNESCO gives it space and other incidental assistance, and makes occasional small grants to cover such things as travel for conference delegates from Africa and Asia (European delegates have to be financed by their own organizations...
...Lending to the Lord by MILTON MAYER DO YOU remember when you were little—I remember when I was little—and your father took you to the County Fair and you saw the wonderful signboards outside the side-show and you begged and bawled and bel-lered until he took you in, and then, when you were in, it was disappointing and as you went out you said to your father, "Is that it...
...They love and marry, too, but there is something about the world they live in by building that keeps them out of trouble, matures them cleanly because it matures them hopefully...
...Best credential for admission to a camp abroad is "graduation" at an earlier age from a camp at home...
...shame on them...
...Germany...
...Is that all there is...
...vived and expanded...
...you can find out about them from Hans-Peter Muller...
...age, dying, disappointed, and racked with pain, destroys, or, at best, incapable of carrying a shovel, carries a fountain pen and writes treaties and agreements...
...you are young, and your soul is taking the shape of Charity, with a capital C, and Charity with a capital C is the charity that gives the person instead of giving the dime or the dollar...
...They pay their own travel (but many of the organizations sponsoring work camps are able to make partial travel grants) and they get room and board free...
...Is that it...
...But the Verdun project was a group of young Frenchmen and Germans, the Frenchmen astounding France by working with Germans, the Germans astounding Germany by working with Frenchmen, each Frenchman and German astounding every other by working with him, and all of them together astounding the world by giving themselves to repair one tiny, symbolic bit of the ruin the world had wrought upon itself...
...to build a new church at Mandaree, S. Dak., or demolish and salvage an old one at West Point, Miss...
...Could it be that that is what life is like—a sell, like the side-show— for our children now...
...Pierre Ceresole's army has sur...
...you are taking care of kids so that their mothers and fathers can learn or work...
...The name of Pierre Ceresole is identified with the project to restore a few too-well-fertilized fields at Verdun, and out of Ceresole's working dream came the Service Civil International (77, Boul...
Vol. 21 • May 1957 • No. 5
