Why Wood Badge Was My Latest Watershed

Those of you, dear readers, who have read most of my blog posts know that I haven't posted much of anything for the past year or so. Part of that was that the fire for lectionary analysis had died down to embers (becoming something I mostly kept to myself), and the fact that I didn't feel that I had much to share, now that I was not in the diaconal formation program anymore.

As such, I didn't share on the blog that I had joined up with a Boy Scout troop in September. I joined as an adult leader, thinking that I would be able to be a mentor, or that I would be able to contribute somehow to the lives and formation of these young men.

I suppose that I have, but more than anything, I have been taken with what Scouts has opened up for me, now that I'm back in as an adult.


I've been keeping a traveling journal, which has become something of a prayer journal. It's a very simple, grey covered notebook with some kind of Nordic-looking swirl pattern over the spine. It has a magnetic closure and all in all, I have found it very travel-worthy and very easy to travel with. As such, I have slowly been filling it as I travel on planes, or sit by a fjord in Norway, or sip my coffee while I wait for adolescent Scouts to rouse themselves from their tents. It was while I was doing that last activity that I started writing about Wood Badge.

So for those of you who are less familiar with the Scouting movement, I need to take a tangent here to explain that there is a training course available for adult leaders called Wood Badge. This was a course that was actually begun by our founder, Sir Robert Baden-Powell, and it has continued on since with adjustments made for temporal and regional changes. And I took this course over the last weekend in January 2016 and the last weekend in February 2016. As I was reflecting on it, I wrote this in my travel journal:

I'm really very thankful to be here [at Afton State Park] with this group, even though they may drive me up the wall at times. Our troop is borderline dysfunctional; sometimes it is completely dysfunctional. But there are a few good eggs who can rub off on the other ones.

I look back on the last year with this group and I'm thankful for them. After I left formation last spring (2015), I drifted for a while. I had school and teaching, but there wasn't much beyond that. I don't feel welcomed by the Episcopalians around here, so I didn't have much in the way of community. And yet Holly Mosely, God bless her, suggested that I get back to camping by way of Scouting. But I think Wood Badge was the real turning point...

Once I went through Wood Badge, it was like things clicked into place and I realized why we do a lot of the things that we did when I was a Scout. For example, I often thought that we had a lot of lazy, uninvolved adults. I now see that they were letting us boys figure it out for ourselves, and they were waiting until we came to them with questions. Even then, they would often ask a question to our questions, rather than give us a direct answer.

But the other thing that I encountered at Wood Badge was the sense of community that I had been lacking. I've said many times before that I felt adrift after leaving formation; as a result of participating in Wood Badge, I feel plugged into the Scouting network and that there was once again a whole world of Scouting beyond my own troop. I guess, to a certain extent, I had regained my sense of belonging.

With my next breath I should say that I learned that I love Scouting for what it can be, not always for what it is. that means that Wood Badge modeled how a unit can run when everything is optimal and full speed. Of course, that 's not always the case. Hell, that is seldom the case.

But such is the way of the world: I dislike people because I've so often seen the nasty, selfish people being horrible to one another. But I've also seen instances of people being noble, self-sacrificing to help out a fellow human in need. And that's when I feel hopeful that we might not make a complete mess of things.

LATER

We are now at the beach after lunch. I was reading The Troop Leader's Guidebook and specifically how the patrol method works. And now that we're at the beach, I'm watching the patrol form. The boys are building canals and islands at the water's edge. They even have a piece of driftwood that they are using as a frame for an island. They're using one of those push-pressure water canons as a drill to help excavate their sand-architecture. They're giving names to their creations. They're cooperating on the building and all of this even though the water will was it all away soon after we leave.

This is learning at its best. All of this is a game and they don't even know that they're learning.

It takes all of my energy just to back off and let them do this on their own.

There is the whole microcosm of humanity right here on the beach: the creators, the helpers, the bosses and the destroyers... and it seems like they each show up in that order.