Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Lucy Jones is a journalist and author living in England.

Her books include loathing in Modern Britain

and losing Eden why our minds need the while.

In this essay, as she seeks an alternative to a culture of ecological destruction,

Lucy searches for stories, writes, and songs that honor and love the

earth. She arrives at druidry, an ancient tradition that continues to speak clearly to the essential

problems of our time.

Something strange happened to me when I was 19.

I was on day 7 of 10 at the Conservative Evangelical Christian camp for children and teenagers I had attended each year since I was 11.

It was at a significant point in the schedule.

Each year followed the same basic pattern.

Six days of persuasive arguments that we were separated from God by our sins,

with multiple Bible studies and talks, punctuated by

iced buns and activities like water skiing. Then the solution to our salvation was introduced,

Jesus, and a call to turn our lives over to him, followed by a couple of days on courage and a blueprint

for going out into the non-Christian world and spreading the word. That year I was born again,

again, perhaps for the eighth or ninth time. My pattern was thus. I felt close to Jesus while at the

camp, but as the school year progressed, I tended to mess up and commit the forbidden sins, feel

progressively guilty and ashamed, stop reading my Bible every day, become a backslider by the

...