Hello everyone! How are you all? Have you survived the cold winter months and the onslaught of the Omicron variant?
We are barely holding on and therefore very excited (literally running-up-and-down-our-tiny-hallway excited) to take a small trip over February break this coming week. Our first trip in over two years, our first restaurant outing as a family in over two years, our first aquarium and museum visit…you get the point.
Speaking of trips, the next few pictures out of the album feature a rather long car trip that Aunt Katherine took to Silvery Bay, on Lake George through her church work. In fact, there is a long and rather poetic article about the trip from the Middletown Times Press, dated July 29, 1915:
SILVER BAY REPRESENTS NEW FORCE IN MISSION MOVEMENT
Local Delegates to Recent Conference Learn True Meaning of the Word
The missionary conference, recently held at Silver Bay, was attended by a number from this city and vicinity, and the following description of the place and what is done there has been furnished by one of the party:
A beautiful indentation in the western shore of Lake George gives Silver Bay its name. Back of it for a hundred miles stretch the forestclad Adirondacks. Here, from July 9 to 18, the 14th annual conference of the missionary education movement is held.
In 1902 a few wide visioned young men saw the opportunity for a new force in missions. They based their belief on the need of wider missionary knowledge and larger acquaintance with the world situation. They got together and the first annual budget was but $1,200. The movement has grown beyond their fondest hopes. Hundreds have volunteered for Christian service as a lifework in North America and non-Christian lands, 1,300,000 text books having been sold and used in classes. Fifteen thousand select leaders have been given normal training for missionary leadership in summer conferences like Silver Bay, and many in institutes and other gatherings. Summed up, the missionary education movement may be said to have increased denominational efficiency through interdenominational cooperation.
Every year, in July, Silver Bay draws delegates from nearly all the evangelical churches for ten days of mission study, personal contact with leaders, and team play. This year they number 580 and come from 13 denominations. In numbers, the Episcopalians lead, the Methodists being next, followed by the Presbyterians, Congregationalists and Baptists, with smaller delegations from the Reformed Church of America, Disciples, Lutherans, Reformed Church in the United States, United Presbyterians, Adventists, Friends and Universalists. Geographically, the delegates represent a territory from Maine to Texas.
Virile young men and women with their life work in mind, busy pastors, board secretaries, and missionaries, representing home and foreign fields are here. The central topic is: “The Church and the Nations:” the slogan, “Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will be Done on Earth”. Twenty-seven study courses meet every demand of the varying conditions and different ages in the churches, Sunday Schools and young people’s and women’s societies. Inspiring addresses and sermons are given by such men as Bishop Stuntz of South America; Dr. Arthur J. Brown and Bishop Rhinelander of Pennsylvania, and many others. Not all of these are formal presentations, for sometimes the most effective messages are driven home while a hiking party is resting on the mountain side or in a shady nook along the lake.
Recreation is not forgotten, the afternoons being kept free for such features as bathing, boating, tramping, excursions to Fort Ticonderoga, tennis tournaments, stunts and athletic meets. Incidentally the denominational spirit is fostered by social picnics and other gatherings at which the delegates become mutually acquainted and plan for advance steps during the coming season in their home churches.
The spirit of Silver Bay is epitomized in the evening vesper service. Out in the open, seated on the gray rocks and grassy bank, with a sounding board of tree branches and the sound of lapping waves drifting slowly up from the lake the deepening twilight seems to bring with it an atmosphere of hope, a great welling desire to spend life for the highest things. This is the meaning of Silver Bay.
It’s a funny little article right? A meeting of “virile young men and women” with a passion for outdoor sports and…missionary work. No less strange in its tone when one considers that at that very moment the Austro-Germans were battling against the Russians in what is now southern Poland a year into World War I.
The “wide visioned” young men at the conference may have felt that they had a “larger acquaintance with the world situation” but it seems like the concerns of Europe were very far from anyone’s mind just then. In fact, that copy of the (admittedly local) paper only mentions WWI on page 3, in a section on the right side called “Sidelights on the War”.
On the other hand, what I like so much about the article (as other articles from this time period) is that earnestness, and “can-do” spirit that it seems to cheer. In fact, I just finished the book Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam that discusses that very fact. Here’s a quote:
[The Progressive’s] outlook was activist and optimistic, not fatalist and despondent. The distinctive characteristic of the Progressives was their conviction that social evils would not remedy themselves and that it was foolhardy to wait passively for time’s cure. As Herbert Croly put it, they did not believe that the future would take care of itself.
Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
The book was fascinating and extremely relevant to the posts I’ve been doing for this blog. I promise to come back to it!
In the meantime, let me just say how much I like this last picture. If nothing else, it shows how within 5 years, the layperson now had a different concept of how to take a picture. Rather than someone smiling directly into the camera, the photographer took the view from behind. Look how they framed the tree in the upper right hand corner – they saw how the picture could be used as an art form.
And I think they captured a really timeless sort of moment here. Reflection. Sitting there, taking in a moment. Retreat. Exactly the thing that my family and I are looking forward to this very weekend.
I hope you enjoy the weekend too in some sort of departure from ‘rigid, cold, and passionate service’! Thank you, as always, for sharing your time with me.
This yearning for new and distant scenes, this craving for freedom, release, forgetfulness — they were, he admitted to himself, an impulse towards flight, flight from the spot which was the daily theatre of a rigid, cold, and passionate service.
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice
Glad you are back writing.