Squamping! The Complete Adventures

9:14 AM Marcellino DAmbrosio 3 Comments


Squamping! The Full Adventures.
Beloved friends, family, and distant acquaintances who I met one time, as many of you know, the past month has been right treacherous for yours truly. It was also a bit silly. That entirely depends on your point of view. My squamping story starts with the unfortunate beginning of waking up in the same place I used to wake up in high school: In my parents’ house.
It just so happens that this is somewhat normal for college graduates these days, especially if you've studied one of the top ten least marketable majors, like English. Now, nothing against my family, but living at home after not living at home for any significant period of time can be….. trying. From having to wake up early in the morning for no other reason than “9 am is plenty late” to the endless pile of dishes in the sink, it was becoming more clear by the minute, “It’s time to get the hell out of dodge. So I did the only logical thing that any one in their right mind would do. I commandeered a tent and sleeping bag and pitched that shit in the middle of the scariest, most apocalyptic looking abandoned farm I could find.


Yes. Those are shotgun shells.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: “Marcellino! That’s absolutely the least logical thing you could do! Only a person who is absolutely not in their right mind would do that!” If that is what you are thinking, please refer to my last post were I clearly outline how I am crazy.
                Anyway, as is the case with all crazy people, their methods, though unorthodox, perhaps, usually have some reasoning to it, and for me, I believe that I am following the long standing tradition of American men who do crazy things just to prove they can. From the guy who drives his mattress across town with nothing but his hand out the window to steady it, to the dude who said: “oh look a shark, I’m going to put on a santa suit and bmx bike over that crap,” I am in good company.



But really, in every culture that has ever existed, with the exception of our progressive, egalitarianized western culture, there has been a coming of manhood ritual. I will hold back from jumping on top of my “oh the feminized culture” soap box, if you would like some more on man’s need for such “primitive” shenanigans, as bunji jumping off a makeshift scaffold except with vines instead of bunji cords, head on over to the boys at the art of manliness, they’ll do you right. I’m just trying to let you know that I’m following in the tradition of very respectable, holy people have done similarly crazy things. People like Jesus.

Now make haste, go into the village before us. Upon entering you will find a miniature tyrannosaurus rex upon which no one has ever sat. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone asks, say unto them "the Master has need of it."
                For those of you who don’t know, Jesus spent 40 days alone fasting in thewilderness before beginning his public ministry. Throughout it, he was constantly going up on mountains alone to connect with the Father. Before him, John the Baptist lived in the Judean wilderness surviving off of stolen bee honey. After Christianity was legalized in the 4th century and the persecutions stopped, it just wasn’t quite as bad ass to be Christian anymore, so a bunch of dudes called the Desert Fathers just went out and lived in hermitages in northern Egypt. That’s a desert by the way. St Benedict, before founding the first monastic rule, lived in a cave. St Francis, the revivalist of all revivalists lived in the wilderness for… pretty much his whole life, and St. Ignatius, the evangelist of all evangelists lived in a cave alone for several years before founding the Jesuit order. If none of those do it for you, here’s Theodore Roosevelt riding on the back of a moose.


By now if you haven’t figured it out, the word squamping, is the combination of the words squatting¸ and camping. That is what I was doing. I highly encourage it. Pretty much every day during the month of October, I would go to work, make tasty food, eat it, and then go home in the evening to a campfire, howling wind, 40o nights, and a cozy, cozy sleeping bag. I smelled perpetually of campfire for the entire month. It was awesome.


 So here, chronicled, are some of my experiences for your enjoyment..
The light was already dim as I drove my motorcycle off the country road and onto the squampsite. The October sun had just dipped below the western tree line, and the cabin now stood an ominous dark structure, almost hidden under the canopy of two huge half dead cypress trees. I road down the overgrown path towards what would be my home for the next month. As I past the derelict barn and the heap of old rusted farm machinery, a realization crept in like the cold seeps through your coat in winter. This was going to be a frightful evening. The landscape, which had been unsettling during the day, was now downright terrifying in the twilight. The nape of my neck prickled and my heartbeat picked up as I neared the rotting wooden fence that surrounded the cabin. My tent was pitched just behind it, under the canopy’s dark outline. I had originally planned on clearing the broken glass from the cabin and staying inside it. This was about the time that I thanked God that I had brought a tent instead. There was no way I was going to set foot inside that thing now that it was close to dark. To the right and to the left of my tent were two lines of trees about twenty yards apart. They pointed all the way back into a thick, rugged thicket. Though there were farms on either side of this property, I was hidden from the world. The feeling of isolation sunk into me as I hid my bike next to the overgrown telephone pole a few yards away. It would do if I had to make a quick getaway. I cut the engine, removed my helmet, and listened.
The wind exhaled a long breath through the tree branches, brushing leaves together and snapping dead twigs, finally forcing their eviction. Crickets chirped and jumped from one square of matted hay to the next. You don't hear them jump, so it really just sounds like the largest raindrops you've ever heard occasionally falling from the sky. They did not fall at a high enough frequency that makes you forget their presence, but instead occur irregularly and rarely enough that each jump is profoundly surprising. In my heightened state of awareness, every one sounded like a footstep.
If you have never spent the night outside or in an unfamiliar place alone, you've got to try it sometime. Your senses jump to super human levels of sensitivity, especially your hearing. As my Uncle Stephan—a tried mountaineer and outdoors man—would say, “when you spend the night outside alone you can hear a mouse fart a mile away.”
That's really how it was. I could hear everything for miles around. A dog would bark all the way past Preston Rd and I would jump as if a ravenous pack of coyotes were at my feet. This never turned out to be the case, but my squampsite was not without its dangers.
  Every night after work, I'd ride in on my bike underneath a starry sky, hide the bike by the telephone pole, cover it in a tarp, and start to gather wood for a fire. I'd pack hay and twigs underneath broken fence posts and branches, strike a match, and it would go up in seconds. I'd sit back, smoke a cheep cigar and just feed the fire for hours. Every 45 minutes or so, I'd hear something moving right across the fence. I could tell from the sounds it made that it was small, about the size of a small dog. But it was only fifteen feet away, and it was annoying (scarring) the hell out of me. It was especially terrifying when I zipped myself into my tent and I could hear the thing padding around my fire. I would just be about to doze off when it would scamper from the tent to my fire pit and back. It would scare me just enough to make my nights miserable. I slept in that tent for 10 nights before I found out what that thing was. I was digesting a delightfully dense portion of St. Therese’s Story of a Soul, when the aggravating beast began its usual nightly ritual of making lots of noise and hiding when I tried to see what it was. I walked over to the fence, about three feet away from the noise. It stopped. I returned to my place by the fire, my curiosity unsatisfied. I picked up my book again and dove back into Therese of Lisseux. Just as I was about to grasp the meaning of life, once again the noises start back up. I tried to ignore it and read, but my eyes would just scan over the words without making any sense of them as my mind began to imagine what it could be. A fox? A possum? A poisonous snake? A HUGE RAT!?  I knew now, I must kill or be killed. There was only enough room in this squampsite for ONE! I picked up my shovel, determined to slay this huge rat—that must have been what it was—and strode toward the noise courageously. The noise stopped. I couldn't see anything in the darkness, just the fire casting long shadows on the cabin. I slammed the shovel down on the ground and grunted loudly. If I could not slay it, I would give it a taste of its own medicine! Maybe I could scare it away. I layed about me and banged on the fence, on the tree branches, on the old over turned rusty office chair beside it. I made a lot of noise, and when I was quite done, I returned to my chair, still holding my shovel. Seconds later I heard it move again. This thing was making a fool of me. This time, I just stayed absolutely still. The noise came closer, it moved along the fence till it was only about five feet away. I sat still. It came closer, right under the fence, and I could just see its dark outline begin to take shape. It stepped into the light.

It was a skunk.

My friends, this is how I know that there is a God. It is an absolute miracle that the thing didn't ink me in the FACE when I was banging around with a shovel.

That indecent, however, happened after I had already pushed through most of my fear. The first three nights that I spent at the squampsite were downright terrifying. The third night I came back late from hanging out with friends (who were, by the way, very curious as to why I smelled like campfire), and instead of making a fire and calming myself down, I attempted to go strait to my sleeping bag. This was not smart. It was the windiest night we'd had all fall, with the wind howling through the trees. The tent's lose material flapped so loudly that it sounded like a thunderclap on repeat. I tried to let the haunting melodies of Bon Iver lull me to sleep, but alas, it was not to be. I simply could not calm myself. What must have been an hour passed, and another hour passed, and still I could not shut out the noise and the fear that came with it. Finally, I was just beginning to lose consciousness when atom bomb exploded right outside my tent. My mind raced to keep up with my heart as adrenaline hit my bloodstream like fire. I immediately knew what had happened, but it didn't matter, the damage was done. I would not sleep tonight. My shovel had been standing upright, and the wind had blown it over. It was the loudest noise I'd ever heard.

I made a fire and spent the rest of the night calming my nerves. When little traces of light began to creep up on the outline of the eastern treeline, I finally pulled myself together and went to sleep.

I woke up to the sound of sirens and men yelling.

I must be caught! THE COPS ARE AFTER ME! Or maybe the caught someone doing drugs at the cabin by the road. NO I'M DONE FOR!
These thoughts and more flooded my mind. I didn't even stop to close my tent. I ran to my bike. The sounds got closer and in my morning haze I just couldn't piece it together. WHAT THE HELL WAS GOING ON?! The siren was on the property, across the other side of the treeline, but it was moving at a deliberate pace, not as fast as a car. Huh.

And was just about to drive out of the gate and make a run for it when I saw what was causing the commotion.

It was a bicycle race. It went all along the road and right across the treeline. The cops were there to make sure no cars hit the bikes. I realized that my bikes two stroke engine was going to do absolutely nothing good for me in this situation. I shut it off, pulled it up next to some trees and waited for the race to end. I waited and waited as a continuous stream of men and women passed right by. I ended up three hours late to work. What do you tell your boss in a situation like that?

For the most part, however, my time at the squampsite was one of exterior incident, but of inner conquest. Joseph Campbel wrote on the mythical hero's three part journey. The hero could not be a hero without a time of separation. He writes: "The hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder. . ." (30). Though I didn't have an oriental prison, or cult like secret society on the top of a mountain, or the Judean wilderness, or swampy moon, the squampsite, for me, was such a region of supernatural wonder, separated from the normal world.  Like Batman, the Apostle Paul, and Luke Skywalker, my time in the wilderness was defining for me. I left that squampsite a different person than I had arrived. The experience has settled deep in my soul, pinning me up, proving to my doubting self that I am, in fact a man. Such experiences, once common to a culture, are no longer understood or valued by our safe and comfortable suburban society. But something tells me that this safety is really a facade, and that as this time of crisis continues to deepen and take form, men are going to need their own proving ground. Hero's now, are once again needed. Maybe not to slay dragons, perhaps, but to lead families, to father movements, to be bastions of strength and integrity in a world that is increasingly dark and cynical. These are no less daunting, no less heroic. For Campbel, the hero's time of separation leads to initiation.  He writes that “fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won" (30). Think of Luke Skywalker's encounter with Darth Vader in the cave. Finally, the hero's time in separation ends with return. Campbel writes: "the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power
to bestow boons [gifts] on his fellow man" (30). The hero comes back "from the kingdom of dread (return, resurrection)" (246). This is the hero's legacy. I don't believe that I'm done with wilderness, but I think every man needs this turning to take place occasionally in his life. It's the heart of story, and unless we want a boring, un-consequential, comfortable life, we will find the wilderness and seek it out.

 I'd love to hear about y'alls wilderness experiences, so hit me up with them. I'm sure some of you have had wonderful, terrifying separation's and some equally as powerful returns.

–Joseph Campbell: The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 1949


3 comments:

Upon Visiting Villa D'Este

9:47 AM Marcellino DAmbrosio 0 Comments




Ancient pines stretch here through alabaster sky
Joyful fountains gurgle up though age and time
In this garden, dead gods still lie,
Emblazoned in memory by their stone etched features.
They stand among these, their flowery graves.
Many new deities come here, to this burial place,
And trod perfectly lined paths,
Only looking, never feeling its peace.
Oh ancient gods! Thy beauty hast been perfected by age.
Oh Garden! Wouldst that though had not
Been trimmed or cut back and allowed to age even further.

I long to climb thy limbs,
Bathe in thy long forgotten pools,
And drink from thine ever spring fed fountains.
But for now I must be content
To simply write unto thee a tribute,
A trespasser upon thy grass.

Burst forth garden!
Conquer this voyeur people!
Wrap thine wild leaves about these
New gods of frantic movement,
And make them, as you did the old,
Still.

0 comments:

The Tree of Life

3:34 PM Marcellino DAmbrosio 2 Comments






In the corner of a city,
Often passed by and forgotten,
Lies a small chapel named “Saint Clair’s.”
You can find it behind a heavy, chapped wooden door,
Down an ancient, murky alley
And to the right of an old well-

Thick jade vines climb all eight sides
Of its aged and tired bricks.
It’s hard to tell,
But it could have been a baptistery.

There's no roof over Saint Clair’s,
No Gothic spires or marble façade.
The alter perhaps was once baroque,
With all manner of
Angels and saints and beasts
Carved deep around all its edges.
Its cracked and broken now.
Its middle says “IHS,”
Which means “Christ,” I think.
The letters mark the face of a sun.
Moss and dirt sit, packed
In its ray's weathered crevices.

The mosaic on the floor is beautiful.
It's made of broken grey cobble stones
And wild poppies, which I hear grow
Only right before summer.
Their petals push up past the
Once proud altar rail,
Approaching the sanctuary
With sacrilegious courage.
Cypress trees and pines form
Something of a canopy over the whole thing,
A canopy peppered with bright little holes
colored in sunlight; They are majestic stained glass

Curiously,
Out of the middle of the broken altar grows the sprout of a tree.
I looked later in books, but never found one that matched.
I do not know it's genus or its name, but
The only way to describe it is to say this:
Its bark was ancient bronze, long aged, green and dark.
Its leaves were gilded iron.

I felt a compulsion to pull a leaf from the lower branch,
And look, it broke right off,
Red golden sap poured out from the branch all over the altar.
The scent of herbs, spice, nectar and every medicine filled the air.

The sap was almost too warm to touch,
But not near so hot as the fruit.
The fruit was fire;
The color of burning poppies;
Smokeless; flickering upon the leaves.

Again, I felt a compulsion to take hold
Of one of these most beautiful miracles,
I reached out and was surprised
When a fiery ball fell into my open palm.

Just then, a swan, one of seven,
swept off the broken altar,
And called out to me in a brass, trumpet like voice:
“Oh take and eat, ye son of man,
For power burns upon your hand,
To bind up and release,
To lie down and give peace;
Your blood is shed and mixed with His,
To cover all the land.”

A great wind blew as I ate.
The fruit was bitter and so I wept,
And then it was sweet,
And so I slept,
And in my dream I said
“Amen.”

I've never quite seen or heard such a thing,
And yet It grows dim in the dusty paths of my mind
When I sit among my life’s companions and delight
In the sun’s warm caress.
but the swan’s last words to me
I hear still  in snowy winter when I wake
in the black depths of the night:
“the gates of hell shall not prevail.”
“the gates of hell shall not prevail.”

2 comments:

The "Icecream Man" and Other Childhood Stories

10:47 AM Marcellino DAmbrosio 3 Comments

I am crazy. I mean that something is not right in my head, or maybe it is. That's sort of the problem. Anyway, I was about five years old when this became abundantly obvious to my parents. That's all the time it took, really. At the time we lived in a neighborhood in downtown Baltimore, just across the street from a community pool—which much to my chagrin required parental supervision to enter—and right across a fence from a low income housing apartment complex. One of the most wonderful discoveries of my youth took place in a small patch of wooded area by that fence. Anthony and I used to play make believe there all the time, running around hitting bushes with stick swords and shooting bad guys with cap guns. It was wonderful. One time we discovered some shiny metal bullet casings lodged in the tree trunk closer to the road. We immediately began to argue weather the gunmen had been GI Joes or someone fighting evil dinosaurs that got free from the zoo.
like this guy! 


 I don't remember if we ever completely resolved that conflict, but I do believe we came to a consensus that cowboys and Indians (I hadn't learned the term native american yet) may have played some role. What was absolutely certain to both of us, was that if the bad guys had been shooting at the good guys, the good guys hadn't been hit. If the good guys were shooting at the bad guys, then if they missed this time, somewhere down the road there must be dead bodies. After searching the massive forest that was the quarter acre of our back yard, we never found any dead bad guys. We did, however, dig out the shell casings. We brought them home and set them on the kitchen table like a trophy. As you might imagine, my mother was less than enthused. What strikes me about this incident though, is that already at the age of five, I the lens through which I viewed the world was clear, and it was simple. There was good, and there was bad. Good was anything that was heroic, strong, pretty, beautiful, and honest. Bad probably smelled greasy and eeewy, had facial hair, tried to kidnap pretty girls and hold them in tall castles or tie them up on train tracks.

^Bad Guy
My parents and I were clearly on the good guys side, and we were fighting against the bad guys. I have no idea where these ideas came from. But I believed in them very very strongly. To illustrate exactly how strongly they held sway over my five year old existence, I need to tell you about the ice cream man.  There were a lot of kids around my neighborhood at that time. I knew this not because I had any immediate contact with them, but because every summer, this curious phenomenon would occur. First you would hear a distant baring, a few notes would prick your ears, and your heart would beat a little bit faster. You didn't know exactly where it was coming from, but you knew the icecream man was closebye. It was absolutely necessary that you find him. You would be left out if you didn't. He would drive somewhere else and all the other children that found him and chased him would get to taste the explosion of sweetness and goodness that was icecream-the idol of every child's heart.

Tell me that girl isn't experiencing that exact thing right now
So every time the loud blaring carnival music started and the big white truck drove down the street, flocks of exuberant children poured out of apartments and down the streets after this man who held in his mobile freezer the promise of luscious creamy-sweet joy. I don't remember if my parents ever gave me the money I needed to take part in this liturgy of wild chase. I do know, however, that at some point, one of parents, probably my dad, told me that the ice-cream man was bad. Since my father was, it seemed to me,the bastion of all goodness and heroism in the world, if he said the icecream man was bad, than he knew what he was talking about. In hind sight, what he probably said was something along the lines of “you can't eat icecream all the time, it's bad for you.” What I heard was “the icecream man is a peddler of an evil product that corrupts all the good children and kills them.” So quite logically, the next time the ice cream man drove by I threw a rock at him.
 It was the first thing I ever confessed.
Seriously. It is the clearest memory of my childhood. It must have been fall because I was raking leaves in the back yard and no kids were chasing him anymore. Come to think of it, he probably wasn't having a very good day already. I saw his car come lethargically down Nottingham road (I remember that because “Nottingham” was where Robin Hood lived), and I began to get angry. My little five year old heart filled up with rage at the injustice of.... well.... some injustice must have been somewhere BECAUSE THE ICECREAM MAN IS BAD!! I knew something must be done, but it was so scary! This must be what Robin Hood must have felt like when he was going to fight the evil Sheriff of Nottingham! I labored over what I should do, and when the moment had all but passed, just before the ice cream truck turned the corner, I picked up a small rock and hurled it with all my might at this bad, bad man.
  I had never actually seen a bad guy before, mind you, so when the truck screeched to a halt, and a real guy stepped out of the door, I just about pooped my pants. I was so scared I couldn't move. BUT I HAD TO STAND MY GROUND BECAUSE GOOD GUYS DON'T RUN AWAY! The now, very real, middle age black man that was yelling at me was not what I had imagined a bad guy looking like at all. He just looked like a really really angry grown up. There is nothing more scary than an angry angry grown up to a child of five.

                              
One of these things is not like the other

Apparently I wasn't the only kid who threw  rocks at his truck. Kids had been throwing “Ga'ddam” rocks at his “Ga'ddam” truck and his “Ga'ddam” tail light had been broke just last “Ga'ddam” week. He told me to go get my mom. I really didn't want to because I now knew that I had done something really bad and I'd be in trouble. Adults only yelled at you when you did bad things. I stood there. I didn't say anything, I didn't move, I just stood there. And so with a “Ga'ddamit” he walked down my sidewalk and knocked furiously on my door. When my mom came out, I ran as fast I could to the trees in the back and hid. I didn't know what else to do! I cried a little bit. I was just trying to fight the bad guy, but for some reason that was wrong and I just really didn't know how Robin Hood would act if this happened to him! I thought maybe since he lived in Sherwood Forest, he might run back there too. But really, I just felt really guilty and really scared because I knew I was in huge big trouble. I was going to get spanked. I knew for sure I would be spanked.
  I don't remember getting spanked, but it was the first time I ever felt shame. It was my "first unfairness," as Peter Pan says. It was the first time the world didn't go the way I thought it should. That is a subject I'll get into more later. What strikes me about this story the most is how early I learned that good was good and bad was bad. I mean, I was only five years old and I already viewed the entire world like it was some game field. Good and evil were the two teams battling for the win, and I knew exactly which side I was cheering for. I was so convinced of this that when my Dad said: “Icecream is bad,” I didn't hear: “icecream has poor nutritional value,” I heard: “Icecream is evil.”

Skulls have lots of calcium, but they are really hard to chew.

 At that point, Christianity had very little to do with this core belief. I didn't know much about God, he was an old guy with a beard that owned the “Good Team.” All I really knew was that there was absolutely nothing more important to me than playing for the good team. Some people might say that this was because of the way I was raised, and yes, I believe that contributed to this oddity. But I can say this. I found the story of King Arthur and his Round Table far more compelling at five years old than the book “Are You My Mother.” I knew this because after My Uncle Cary told me about this mythical hero, the only thing I wanted to do all day long the next day was draw pictures of King Arthur, make believe I was King Arthur, eat majestically huge turkey bones I imagined King Arthur must have eaten.

not even kidding.
I never once walked around the yard asking inanimate objects if I was their progeny.  Back then, this was the norm for every young boy in the neighborhood. If other kids hadn't heard of King Arthur, Anthony and I would gladly tell our wide eyed audience the story; of course letting them know that we he was our great great great grandfather. We would then commence to make swords from card-bord boxes and battle each other for hours on end. The point my friends, is that regardless of whatever faith you may profess, good is good and evil is evil. The heart of man begins knowing the appropriate response to evil, it is only later that he gets it educated out of him. That response is not a “meh,” along with a casual shoulder shrug.

fail.

The only appropriate response to evil, as demonstrated by five year old me, is to throw rocks at it.

3 comments:

What MTV Taught Me About Jesus

9:12 PM Marcellino DAmbrosio 0 Comments


This blog will not pull any punches. It deals with human nature, where there’s dirt and mud and wilderness to be explored. You might want to pack a couple extra pairs of socks and another pair of pants with you because on this adventure, we're going to tromp though the swamps and the creeks and the canyons of my soul. I will (*&^ out expletives as a courtesy, but you will know they are there. I'm not going to p@#8sy foot around sex or drinking or anything else that needs to get talked about. So let us begin, shall we?

One time a couple years ago my brothers and I sat on a couch in our living room and watching a show on MTV about cliques. This school had the unfortunate problem of being normal and having a serious issue with cliquishness. The parents made a ruckus and so the principle brought in a team that specialized in breaking up cliques. It started with hundreds of these high school kids in a gymnasium, all sitting around looking disdainful and silent. They sat with their like kind, the football players and the cheerleaders, the band kids, the thugs. No one played with the basketballs, those stayed on the floor in the corner, and no one talked above the “whisper chuckle” level. There is no more awkward of a place in the world than a place where the normal daily high school culture. The discomfort is palpable. It's like catching a couple hundred deer in the headlights all at once.



“this place is SO lame, like omg."

They all seize up, stop moving and look around as if the light will just go away if they act like they don't exist. It's really funny really. Getting them to talk, much less play together takes nothing short of a miracle. But the group that was putting this little retreat on had a few miracles up their sleeve. After they introduced themselves and made a few jokes to lighten the mood, they told the kids they'd be playing a game. After some coaxing, turning on loud music, and offering few cool prizes, they had the kids jumping hopping around on one foot and trying to untie a knot of human arms locked uncomfortably close to one another. I couldn't believe it. Then after the games, they kids sat back down, read faced and smiling. The counselors then one by one got up on the stage and said the following. “Hi, I'm (insert name), and to know me you have to know (insert the most incredibly vulnerable experience of brokenness you've ever heard).” It was pretty wild. One of the guys, Jake, was kind of a hipster looking dude with a handlebar mustache and lots of tattoo’s said “Hi, I'm Jake, and to know me, you have to know that when I was a kid, my dad used to come home drunk and beat me and my mom till we were all shades of blue, green and yellow. My mom used to put makeup on me to hide the bruises.” A girl got up after him. She was really tall, like six foot, really big, but still really pretty. She said, “Hi, I'm Alyson, and to know me, you have to know that I'm a lesbian. The kids spray painted  “big fat dike” on my garage door one morning, and I started cutting when I got home that day.”  A cheerleader type got up and talked how her mom would make her stand on a scale every day before dinner, and wouldn't let her eat if she weighed any more than 100 lbs. After a while, she just stopped eating entirely.” And then Tyrel stood up and talked about starting to deal drugs so that they could pay the heating bill and his mom, little brother, and little sister wouldn't freeze to death in a Detroit blizzard. Every single one of the counselors came from completely different social groups, dressed different, talked different, but were no less broken. All of them had been really really broken.
     When I was in high school, I went on every single retreat my youth group had available. Then after high school I helped put on retreats with a few different churches, and I'd never seen anything like what I saw that day on MTV. We liked to stay at a comfortable level of detachment, where we would touch lightly on our stories of brokenness, but move off them as quickly as possible. It would usually go something like this: “I was going through a really difficult time in my life, like stuff was really bad, you know? I was depressed, and some kids said some things to me that were kind of hurtful, and then I realized that God loved me.” If you ever want to make sure that people walk away from a conversation knowing absolutely nothing more about you, the words “Stuff” and “things” are your two best friends.

“Well, I was struggling with some race stuff and one time...”
I remember being bored most of the time during those witnesses and just wanting to get to the parts where we jumped around to music or got to go play paintball. “You had to sit through these things to play paintball, its just the way it is,” I thought. And most of my fellow classmates would have agreed. They would kind of pay attention and offer lots of thoughtful cliche's in small group after, but these were just things you had to do to get to the largely unsupervised free time later. But not in this retreat. The kids were riveted. They might have felt awkward or uncomfortable at times, but their eyes were, without exception glued to the person talking. No one checked their phones, no one chuckled or punched their friends arm. They listened in a sort of palpable awe. The counselors never even did the classic turnkey  “but now I know God loves me” phrase. All they did was get vulnerable. And when they each finished telling their story, they broke all of the kids into small groups. The small groups were made up of eclectic bunch of random people who didn't really know each other or run in the same circles. The counselor opened it up, and said “we want to know your stories, so just go ahead and do like we did, just say 'hi I'm ____ and to know me you have to know ____.” By the end of the session, the cheerleader, the punk, and the math nerd were hugging and crying and telling each other how much they appreciated each other. It was incredible.       There is real power in vulnerability. Its crazy what it can do when a group of seemingly unlike people drop the facade of strength and actually encounter one anothers weakness. It's like we're actually all the same. It's like we were all on the same sports team when the coaches made us do “two a days” and we never knew it. Doing youth ministry, if nothing else, has taught me that every single person on this world has experienced tremendous suffering and brokenness, whether they live in a mansion, drive a Volvo or support the Yankees—Democrats and Republicans alike. Shared suffering somehow ties us together and inspires empathy in even the hardest of hearts. How that works is a mystery to me, but I know it's true nevertheless, and so did God. When he could have sent his Son to overthrow the Romans and set the Jews above all other worldly powers, he let his Son come and suffer betrayal, deep loneliness, and painful death. That was his plan to redeem us. It's so wild and so crazy, and so unintelligible, but at the same time so powerful!
    When I was a kid, I imagined heaven like they made it look in the cartoons. A bunch of people floating around on clouds strumming harps.

Pictured above: A place no 6 year old boy ever wants to go.
“Eternal rest,” sounded very unappealing to a 6 year old who hated the thought of bedtime even more than eating vegetables. I grew out of that pretty quickly, but I never had anything really good to replace it with. Suddenly I had a new image, that is probably still very incomplete, but much closer. I feel like heaven is going to be a lot like that gymnasium. Filled with beautiful individuals that never knew they shared so much with so many people, weeping in each others arms as they are forgiven, heard, and understood-- a place to belong.  
     Something woke up in me while I was sitting there engulfed in this mystery of human nature happening on a screen. I knew that I wanted to tell my story, because somewhere, someone is hurting the same way I was hurting, and will take comfort in sharing my suffering. We'd share it like a meal, and be healed and freed in its digestion. In that instant, I just wanted to go outside and introduce myself to the first person I saw on the street; and without any pretense or any smokescreen I wanted to say, “hi, my name is Marcellino, and to know me, you have to know that I'm really f*@#*g crazy.

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To the Land of Milk and Honey: My visit to the Holy Land

12:46 PM Marcellino DAmbrosio 0 Comments

 Part One. Mount of the Ascension



To start this off, I should first let you know that this probably not going to be the funniest post I’ve ever written, but I hope that you’ll enjoy this sharing of experience nonetheless.  This was not the first time I’ve ever been to the Holy Land. I went once when I was twelve, and once with my family four years ago. It’s hard to count my trip back in my childhood, seeing as all I really got from it was a vague feeling of boredom and an unbridled anger at Shabbat elevators, which stop at every floor. (Pushing buttons is “work” as specifically outlined in Leviticus.) My trip four years ago was amazing, but very different. The Lord used it to bring us closer as a family, and allowed me and my brothers to express ourselves in ways we never had before. We snuck off from the group at every opportunity to do such things as play “Prepare the Way at the birthplace of John the Baptist, and play “I Like Weather” on the Ruins of Mount Tabor (where the Lord was transfigured). That was a time of great growth joy, and almost homecoming for us, as the Father really affirmed the talents and eccentrically wild personalities of two of his sons. 

My boys, my boys. 

This trip was very different. It was different in three ways. Firstly, I was at a different place in my relationship with God. Second, I was not distracted by my family and spent a lot of time alone, taking it all in. Finally, I was in a place of responsibility in leading the group. These things made this trip dramatically different. Not better, not worse, just different. 
Those of you who know me know that last year was a really difficult year for me. Jesus humbled me a lot. My graduation was not a time of expectation but disaster. So this Advent I was beseeching heaven to not become that cynical old guy that tells kids that Santa isn’t real and that they’ll never be a power ranger.   Also that he would give me new purpose and revelations of his will for me. That remained my prayer when I arrived at the mount of the Ascension.


After leading the group in worship, I popped in my headphones, pushed play on Sigur Ros, and blotted out all of the tourists talking and snapping of pictures. I then read the great commission at the very spot it was given.  With the palm of my hand resting on the last stone that Jesus ever touched, I read:

“Then Jesus came to them and said, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And I am with you always, even to the ends of the earth.”
– Matthew 28:16-20
I felt the Lord’s presence there with me in a very real way. I felt peace, and for the rest of the trip I felt Him lifting my burdens.

Prayer  #1 answered. 

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Give up or Grow up? A Commentary on Responsibility

2:34 PM Marcellino DAmbrosio 1 Comments




What does it mean, growing up? This is a question that I asked myself today as I looked down at the pair of woman’s jeans that I was currently folding. They were slightly bleached and very precisely cut at the knee for the elegantly disheveled look that kids are going for these days. Every pair of jeans in the stack was exactly the same. In fact, every pair of jeans, every t-shirt, every single piece of clothing in this store shared the same mass produced, one of a kind of look. I spent my summer afternoons folding, re-arranging, and ordering unending stacks of this clothing for Rhuel, an offshoot of Abercrombie and Fitch, or “The Company,” as the employees warmly referred to it. This particular afternoon was different, for this afternoon, as I looked down at the jeans, instead of simply accepting the fact that college kids work minimum wage jobs over the summer, I asked the question. This question is what drove Plato to write the Republic, caused Socrates to kill himself (or get killed, depending on how you look at it), and also caused many a student to play Halo and forget about Plato and Socrates. In fact this is the question that makes us human. I asked: “why?”

MY DEATH WILL BE REMEMBERED FOREVER!!.... at least until they invent x-box
Now, there was a good reason why I asked the question “why,” and that reason was because whilst I stood in a poorly lit clothing store folding over priced and slightly trendy jeans, my friends where just a few miles away crowd surfing their way over thousands of screaming fans to the front Warped Tour’s center stage.
Pictured above: Not me
I hope that the agony in my being at this point has really hit home to you. If not, then you obviously need a lot more help than this article can do for you. However, if you do understand my pain, realize that it only increases from here for the following reasons: Firstly, I have never been to Warped Tour, and I’ve always wanted to go, for the obvious reason that I was in a band all throughout highschool. Secondly, that band that I was in, in highschool, was actually playing on a side stage at the very same time that I was folding these jeans.
I bet you are asking why the hell I wasn’t pumping my rock fist out there with my compadre’s right now. The answer to that question came from my parents the night before. “Because you have to grow up sometime,” they told me. What they meant was I needed to learn fiscal responsibility. What I heard was “Your life is over.” I really felt that way. I sat there folding jeans as the world of possibilities that I always envisioned was beginning to narrow.



This is fiscal responsibility kids. Take a good hard look. 
All I could think about at that point was a sitting at a table in my university’s cafeteria, advertising for one of the many events I put on. I genuinely believed that there was real value to attending a concert or dressing up in some ridiculous costume for a party. It brought people together, built community, it brought down the walls between the many clicks. But countless times, I would get a puzzled look and an immediate “maybe,” which, as we all know, means “no.” They would tell me how they had to study for some test they had coming up in the next few days, or write a paper that was due a week later. Sometimes it would be that they didn’t have the five dollars it would cost to participate. Sometimes, after suggesting that they borrow money, study instead of staying up late watching movies the night before, or requesting off work and trading with someone, they would inevitably say, “I just can’t.” They never even tried. Another thing that I noticed throughout the year was that it was always the same people that gave excuses as to why they couldn’t participate in college life, and more importantly, they where all completely and totally miserable, just like me and my overpriced jeans. I had become today what I hated most. I hadn’t just given up warped tour. I just plain gave up. I was no longer the kind of person that could do anything he wanted. Now that person had car payments and “fiscal responsibility.” My love of living went with my freedom out the window.
More often than not, this is what us Americans term, “Growing Up.”
“A man’s not a man until he pays taxes,” my Dad had said last night, as he attempted to talk me into sticking around the Fourth of July weekend and picking up extra shifts at work. I hadn’t even dared to tell him about Warped Tour, I could only imagine what his ‘fiscal responsibility’ would make of that bright thought. What he meant was that one becomes a man when he learns how to be responsible with his money. Car payments, phone bills, mortgages, not to mention insurance; in order to be an adult, one needs to keep these in the forefront of one’s mind, and apparently, that means sacrificing everything else in your life. We are all too familiar with the absent father, a pawn of a corporation that is more important to him than his family. He works long hours, goes on long business trips, and lives in the office. But that’s what it takes to feed the family right?

I’m quite familiar with this concept of “Growing Up.” I see it on the face of every freshman when he sees the first “C” he’s ever made. You see, freshman always come into school with spirit, full of idealism and ready to change the world. They participate in everything, they start new clubs, new sports, new fraternities and households, and then once they’ve over committed, they get their midterm grades back, and many of them inevitably have failed to budget their time wisely and where ill prepared for college by the public school system. All of the sudden reality comes crashing down around them, and their ideals vanish like the last bubbles of oxygen from drowning lungs. Now, the once bright young men and women, full of potential and dreams of change are welcomed with open arms into American Adulthood. They hole themselves up in the library, or in their dorm rooms, and no longer do they believe that they can have any effect on the world. No, it is all they can do just to pass their classes, graduate and get a job. They don’t even have the time to come to the occasional Open Mic Night.

The funny thing though, is that those same students that believe that they are having such a hard time passing their classes that they can’t get involved can be found on that very same evening, watching youtube videos at two in the morning with their friends. Those same students that say, “I don’t have five dollars,” will be found a couple days later buying an expensively fashionable cup of “free trade” coffee at the local coffee house. I’m starting to think that “Growing Up” should be substituted for “Giving In.”

I contemplated this as I took care to fold another pair of jeans so that the destroyed hem could be easily seen by the mindless consumer. I placed it on top of the eight inch pile and picked at it until all of the size stickers lined up perfectly. I was done. All of the jeans looked exactly the same. I exhaled a short unfulfilled sigh of completion, and looked up to see that all of my fellow workers wearing the same damned jeans that I just folded. I realized that they all looked exactly the same. They had the same hair, with just enough sidebang, all elegantly disheveled. They had the same grey v-neck t-shirts, with little variance in frayed lettering on the front. All of my coworkers, along with looking the same, shared something else in common. They where all students, working here so that they could go to college, so that they could get a corporate job, so that they could live in the same quaint little house, in the same quaint little suburb with a quaint little picket fence, and live for the quaint little weekends and Monday morning hangovers. Maybe C.S. Lewis was right to envision hell has a rainy suburb in which everyone was constantly moving farther away from each other. It was right then that I caught sight of myself, along with my breath, in the mirror. Today I had on a grey v-neck with elegantly disheveled sidebangs. I had on light jeans with holes at the knees, and I shared with my co-workers the same blank look that can only be worn by someone with nothing to live for. I almost broke down on the spot. I finished out my shift as anonymously as possible, and came home, went strait to my room, and cried my eyes out. Now that I was an Adult, with car payments and bills to worry about, I had little choice but to give in.

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe “Growing Up” really means sacrificing everything you’ve ever wanted, dreams and all. That night, I told my dad about everything that I was feeling, that I had sacrificed a concert, and not just a concert, but a dream, just so I could pick up a shift at work. He handed me a cold Sam Adams, and sat me down on the leather couches in the living room. He began by asking my forgiveness for not explaining himself better the night before. He had not intended to scare me into “Giving In.” He then proceeded to tell me how he had been a graduate school professor. He wanted to support his family, he wanted to send his kids to private school, he wanted to evangelize in a bigger way than his current job allowed him to do, so what did he do? He quit and started his own business with Wellness International Network. Now he’s got three kids in private Catholic University and his other two in Catholic school at home. We went as a family to Israel last Christmas on a pilgrimage he led, and we are going on a cruise together this summer. Most people could never dream of that kind of lifestyle, and that is precisely why they don’t have it. He ended with one short statement that I will always treasure as one of those defining moments where a father’s legacy is passed on to his son. He said:

“We do not live so that we can work, we work so that we might live.”

Life.
By live, I understood him to mean not just eating and drinking and having a roof over our heads. He meant LIVING, experiencing life, savoring it like you would savor a big juicy steak with your grandma’s mashed potatoes on the side. Living means making the sacrifices necessary to make your dreams come true, not sacrificing your dreams for a roof and a steady salary. You should never settle with forgoing life for existence. One of the most important lessons I learned from my father that night was that if you want something bad enough, you will make it work. Fiscal responsibility is not sacrificing your dreams so that you can exist, its not picking up a shift at work instead of going to the concert you’ve always wanted to attend. Fiscal Responsibility is drinking tap water instead of buying it bottled. Fiscal Responsibility is eating ramen noodles for a week strait. Fiscal Responsibility is going to freeking Warped Tour.

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