Pruggling: A term used to describe the ambiguous state of…

Last week was teen camp on the Missouri District. It was a good week, filled with fun and games, worship and learning. As the week progressed, a strange phenomenon emerged during our worship times. While there is no doubt that God's Spirit was there working in people's lives, there was something else being worked up as well. This leads me to the strange title of this post: Pruggling. It's a new word that one of our helpers, Lance Wallis, coined in response to spontaneous groups of persons gathering together during our worship and preaching times. Here's what it means.  Pruggling is (a) a term used to describe the ambiguous state of two or more persons involved in praying and/or snuggling. Or, (b) the act of using religious experience as a front for gaining physical contact with a person of the opposite gender.

This last week, we had lots of pruggling. One couple, when I found them, was standing at the back of the gym engaged in a very close embrace. It was, in fact, an embrace that was more suited for Prom then teen camp. I am not so old school that I think high school students should never touch, but there is never a time when the pelvises of hormonally charged adolescents should meet. They seemed to be shocked when I suggested they find a seat. It wasn't just isolated couples who engaged in pruggling. Normally, a youth would make his or her way down to the altar. No sooner had their knees hit the floor than a throng of well meaning students would surround them. Touching and caressing of all sorts would then follow. It was impossible to know what exactly was happening at the center of these pruggling circles.

Needless to say, this raised some questions within the adult leadership. We found that the best course of action was for an adult to penetrate the pruggling circle, identify the individual at the center, and disperse the crowd. This would then allow for the adult to offer some kind of prayer and help. Most of these pruggling circles were innocent enough. I wonder, though, if there is a connection between our need for physical contact and intimacy and our need for a real encounter with the divine. Has the unhealthy separation of ourselves into two halves, the physical and the spiritual, resulted in the over intensified search for both? Or are we and our youth just slaves to our hormonal drives and exposed to sex at every turn? Probably a little bit of both.

But I'm willing to bet that our over emphasis (in the past anyway) on the spiritual at the expense of the physical has led us to seek God (unconsciously?) through unholy physical and emotional connections with others. I'm not entirely sure what I'm trying to say here, but maybe the physical connections that happen in situations like these aren't all bad. Maybe we can experience God's love, grace and forgiveness through the appropriate physical touch of another. Maybe not. What do you think?