.11 Convention, Part I: The Bunkhouse and the Fantasy

I packed like I was going to camp. I ended up in a barn that smelled like mothballs and martyrdom.

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Some stories ask to be read. Others want to be told aloud — maybe even performed. This one insisted on being both.

Convention: Part I is the first of two linked pieces about the annual spiritual gathering we called Convention, which I attended with a mix of anticipation and dread. For those of us raised in the 2x2s, Convention was as close as we came to a holy pilgrimage — or a holy endurance test.

I’ve recorded this essay for the first time as a video, and I’ll continue experimenting with this format as the Cultivated series grows.

If you’d rather read than watch, the full essay is just below. ⇣
And if you’d prefer to simply listen, click the audio version above. ⇡

Coming next week: Part II — The Beige Machine.

Until then, thank you for being here.

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If you've never spent a summer week sleeping in a converted livestock barn among strangers, consider yourself lucky — and frankly, a bit dull.

Conventions were the high holy days of the 2x2s: gatherings of the faithful that combined the austerity of a monastery with the charm of a rural county fair.

Minus the entertainment.

Think endless sermons, scratchy blankets, and an overwhelming abundance of grey. Heaven, apparently, had terrible amenities.

While all of this breaks my adult heart on behalf of that childhood me, what breaks it the hardest might be the original excitement with which I'd looked forward to Convention. Five days and four nights away promised a change from the norm, and our infrequent family vacations — a night or two in a hotel with a waterslide — no longer took place. I carefully packed my small suitcase, starry-eyed with anticipation, the newly purchased sleeping bag still crisp with store-fold creases. The way 2x2s spoke about Convention with reverent anticipation had me imagining something between summer camp and a cozy spiritual retreat. I'd constructed an entire holiday fantasy — one that didn’t include my mum, who I now know probably did have a holiday of her own, without husband and kids demanding attention — all based on childhood logic and wishful thinking.

Our Convention grounds, affectionately referred to as "the Convention grounds" (imagination wasn't our strong suit), hosted these annual tests of spiritual endurance on a farm a couple hours’ drive away. We piled into the van with suitcases and — in my case — overwrought expectations. We pulled into the farm’s long lane, hidden by purposeful trees, and parked as directed in the neatly arranged rows, hundreds of vehicles promising camaraderie and new faces. Dusty pea gravel crunched beneath our tires with a finality that should have been my first warning. Someone guided us to the sleeping barn, and as Dad took my brothers into the men's quarters, I realized I'd be on my own. I still buzzed with excitement. New faces, maybe friends. I climbed the staircase to enter the women's quarters and gazed at the cavernous space, with room for hundreds. The air hung heavy with the scents of mothballs, ancient wood, and generations of female piety.

Bunks had been fashioned out of what once must have been stalls, and a second level had been added. Thin mattresses had been placed in a grey grid of obedience, and I found one still unclaimed. I put my small suitcase on the wooden bench, climbed carefully over, and placed my sleeping bag and pillow on the single mattress. A grey-bunned woman called out sharply, her voice slicing through the quiet hum of arrival.

"Find a spot on the upper level," she said, not bothering to look at me directly. "The lower bunks are for the elderly." Her tone made it clear: I should have known, and my ignorance was both expected, and disappointing.

I gathered my things and climbed the wooden ladder to the top where I surveyed the vast pattern of twin sized mattresses, rows and rows of them, probably six deep and fifty across — a quilt of identical rectangles awaiting identical women. I found another unclaimed mattress and placed my things again nervously. Now what? I watched as others arrived and composed their spaces. Mothers and daughters. Female families busily unpacking and settling in with the practiced efficiency of annual pilgrims. I noted how they used the wooden frames to hang dresses on hangers, something I hadn’t known to bring. How they propped up hand mirrors (another unknown necessity); placed hairbrushes and tools nearby with territorial certainty.

The hum of conversation was sedate, but it was there, and I watched as women greeted old friends and as their daughters reconnected, whispered conversations punctuated by the occasional restrained laugh that never quite reached full volume. Gradually, I understood what I hadn't until then. I’d sleep adjacent to girls who'd known each other since they'd been born. I might as well have been a ghost with my bun that looked assembled by toothpick. My mother, the heathen sipping tea at home, hadn't known to prep me for the social deep freeze of the chosen. She knew Vacation Bible School and church picnics, and it’s impossible to picture what you can’t yet imagine.

For five relentless days, our schedules were strictly regimented: up at dawn to the sound of someone's beeping alarm clock and as inspiring as an emergency alert. I flowed up and down the ladder carefully so as to not snag tights — and also, invisibly, a survival skill learned late. Meals in the Dining Shed were bracketed by three hours-long meetings in the Meeting Shed, a massive silver shimmering steel Quonset. The galvanized steel walls amplified both the sweltering summer heat and any bored fidgeting.

Those first few conventions, I sat with my Dad and brothers on sticky vinyl benches near to the platorm, from which the Workers — gathered from all corners of the earth — delivered…not sermons (we didn’t call them that) but messages, long and winding and always cautionary. An endless rendition of warning against the World and its follies, repeated like liturgy.

In between each solemnly delivered admonition came the hymns — a capella, joyless, paced for funerals. They all seemed to share only one or two sedate melodies, sung until the mostly tone-deaf voices gave out.

Even packed with hundreds of the faithful, the Quonset echoed like a soup can. When the faithful stood by turn to offer prayer or testimony, it was always the same monotonous cadences, always variations on the same themes. But even those who mistook volume for conviction needed help to be heard. Several serious, sweltering men in suits operated plastic half-dishes mounted on tripods — primitive sound catchers meant to amplify whoever was speaking.

One of them would swivel the contraption toward each testimony in turn, trying to capture what we called the still, small voice of God, as filtered through the humble.

It looked like we were trying to amplify holiness with farm equipment.

Or maybe contact heaven.

Or in my case, send a desperate plea for help.