Seeking Sanctuary : Mother, Church at Odds Over Expulsion of Learning-Disabled Boy From Choir

There are few places in the world where 11-year-old Joshua Camberlan fits. Not regular school, not other children’s slumber parties.

But his church was another matter. That, his mother believed, would always be a refuge for her learning-disabled son.

Yet after years of strained relations with the Westwood United Methodist Church, where she struggled to keep her son in Sunday school classes and the children’s choirs, Alisa Camberlan recently suffered what she saw as her most stinging rebuff from an unaccepting world: Josh was expelled from the youth choir after one of the choir directors allegedly said he felt “embarrassed” by the boy’s often inappropriate outbursts and distracted manner.

“This is 1994. This is Westwood, “ says Camberlan, 51, a single parent to her only son.

Church staffers feel equally betrayed that Camberlan has chosen to attack them. For years, they say, they have coped and sympathized with a child hopelessly out of step with the rest of the children in Sunday school and choir. What they feel, they say, is frustration, not embarrassment.

“The church wants to do the right thing,” says senior pastor Sharon Rhodes-Wickett.

But that moral rule of thumb offers no easy guidance here. A congregation of sophisticated, well-educated people--a community filled with resources to solve all sorts of technical and social problems--is struggling to figure out just what the right thing is.

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Joshua Camberlan suffers from a cognitive, language and behavioral disorder (and, to a milder extent, a motor-skills disorder). It is the result of a trauma that occurred during his mother’s labor and delivery, his neurologist, Ronald Gabriel, surmises. The boy articulates poorly; he reads like a first-grader.

Blessed with a handsomeness that would let most boys glide into society, he trips over his own shortcomings, missing many of the social cues that his peers take for granted. Often unfocused and distracted, he will yell out or act impulsively. Tranquilizing drugs help him lead a semi-normal life.

So does his mother.

Josh’s disabilities have never stopped Alisa Camberlan from taking him on yearly sojourns to England and shuttling him each day from his special school to an after-school program. Like many a doting parent, she has filled his world with trips to concerts, operas, and restaurants and stocked his room with books and puzzles and computer games.

“Not that many people want to deal with a special-needs child,” she says. “Sometimes I don’t want to deal with him.” She lives with the heartache of knowing he will never change, that he will never become independent: “We can fix hearts, we can fix livers, but you can’t repair a brain.” Yet she is fiercely proud of his development. “I take Josh everywhere with me,” she says.

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Once a runway model, Camberlan is now an individual and family counselor. She sees clients two days a week and spends the rest of her time with Josh. She never married his father, pop singer-songwriter Barry Richards, who takes Josh to his own home one weekend a month and takes him to dinner once a week.

Financially comfortable, Camberlan, her son and a wire-haired fox terrier, Asta, share a cozy duplex in the flats of Beverly Hills. Photographs of Josh line the hallways and sit in frames on tabletops. On the stairway, she pauses like any doting mother in front of picture of him at 2 1/2. “Here he is--little lamb chop,” she says, stroking a bit of dust from the frame.

One thing the boy has never lacked is a love of music.

“Josh always sings when he’s in the car with me,” says his father. “I make up songs when we’re going along.”

But when he stood with the church choirs, he would rarely--if ever--sing.

“Everyone else is moving his mouth and singing and he will stand there,” says the mother, demonstrating a straight-ahead, calm stare. “He will move gracefully--usually gracefully--to the music.”

His expulsion from the youth choir was just one of the rebuffs that Camberlan says pains her. She remembers when Josh wasn’t promoted in Sunday school with his class. Once this past fall, she visited his Sunday school class and glimpsed how the children joined hands in a prayer circle at the end of the session--but they didn’t include Josh.

“Not one hand, not one head turned to include him,” says Camberlan, her voice showing she is still bruised.

In most cases, the church either remedied the situation or had an explanation. Sometimes, however, problems remained simply because the mother and church officials--all highly verbal people--could simply not communicate with each other about the status of a verbally deficient child. The church’s explanations sit uneasily with Camberlan, who feels alternately disappointed, infuriated and frustrated by staffers’ actions since her child was of school age.

And yet there she sits in the second pew most Sundays. She stays in the church, she says, because it is hers: She fell in love with the dark wood and expanses of stained glass when she attended a wedding there. Later, when she became pregnant, she decided she would raise her child there. Josh was baptized there.

On choir appreciation day this past fall, Josh’s name was left off the roster of choir members. His mother scrawled an angry note on her Sunday bulletin and said she would be forgoing her monthly $75 check to the church because of the oversight. Shortly after, church officials decided Josh should not return to the youth choir. A week later, his mother was stunned to get the news in a phone conversation with David Gray, the church’s program director for children and youth.

Camberlan is not insisting her son was a perfect fit. “If the other kids are singing and he’s standing there, it does look different,” she says. But she grows irritated at the notion that he can’t simply be there, singing or not.

“It’s not national television, it’s not a talent show. These are not professional musicians. This is a church, “ she says.

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If you gather the staff from Westwood United Methodist Church, they will tell you that they have not forgotten it is a church. If Alisa Camberlan has a checklist of slights, they have their own list--years of dealing with a squirmy, distracted child who never kept pace with his peers and classmates, years of dealing with a mother who constantly second-guessed them.

“We do recognize it’s a difficult thing for us to provide what she needs,” says Gray. “We are also very concerned to not penalize the other young people . . . we’ve tried very hard to find this middle ground.”

As Josh got older and the other children matured, he lagged further behind. At one point, when he was required to follow a hymnal, the choir staff asked volunteers to come and turn pages for him.

In Sunday school, Josh is allowed to stay in the classroom with his 11- to 14-year-old peers, says his teacher, Betty Holden, even though he rarely participates and often interrupts the discussion.

Staffers were irritated by the small things they say the mother didn’t do: She dropped Josh off at choir rehearsal on Sunday mornings but never stayed to talk to the teachers or observe the practice. Sometimes before longer rehearsals for special choral events, she dropped off his medicine and asked people to give it to him. She had to be asked to take a turn bringing snacks to the children.

“We feel she can be more involved in helping us understand Josh’s problems,” says youth choir director Ruth Drossel.

As Josh entered the junior high age group this past fall, the gap between him and his peers became more glaring. This year, Drossel has big plans for the youth choir. There are no auditions for the choir, but most of the dozen or so junior and senior high school age members can read music and play musical instruments. “It is a professionalism,” says Drossel. “We are training these kids to be worship leaders. Josh has not proven to us that he can be a leader.”

The beginning of the end of choir for Josh Camberlan came Sept. 25 when he showed up to sing with the youth choir.

“He was looking around and moving around,” recalls Richard Rintoul, a professional musician and the adult choir director who happened to be directing the youth choir that day. Meanwhile, the other children were “trying to hold him in place because it seemed like he wanted to walk away--which then throws some of the other ones off. So the end result was not as good as it could have been for the whole choir.”

Rintoul and Drossel decided that Josh shouldn’t continue in the choir.

“But I never said I was embarrassed by Josh,” says Rintoul. “I’m not embarrassed by Josh. . . . He’s been to some of my concerts. He always comes up afterward. And I’ve always found him a very sweet kid.”

Youth program director Gray admits that he told Camberlan that Rintoul said he was embarrassed by her son.

“I must have picked up the wrong word then,” says Gray, who has since apologized to Rintoul. “I thought that was the term that was used.”

But the word embarrassed is etched in Camberlan’s mind.

“If anyone is embarrassed by my son, screw them,” she says. “It’s their problem.”

Gray points out that the church has tried to include Josh in other activities--sometimes to no avail. “I was hoping Josh would be able to be part of the Nativity scene on Christmas Eve,” says Gray. Josh would play a shepherd. “It’s a tableau. There are no lines they have to memorize.”

Alisa Camberlan was less than moved. “I said, ‘Thank you very much’ but I have other plans.”

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The question persists: What is the right thing?

Since Josh was expelled from choir, the choir directors have offered Alisa Camberlan a compromise: “If Alisa were willing to be there with him at the rehearsals or have somebody else be there with him, we would reconsider our position on having him in the choir,” says Rintoul.

What does Josh think of being left out of the choir? Is he sad?

“Yes,” he says on a Sunday afternoon in his living room as he fiddles with a child’s game on the back of a cold-cuts package. His answer is sober but emotionless.

“He has a very flat (verbal) affect,” says Barbara Cull, head of the special Eras School that Josh attends. “If he’s told he can’t be part of something, he’ll be sad but he won’t know how to show that.”

During the afternoon conversation with Josh, his mother slips out of the room so that her son will better focus on his interviewer.

Why does he like the choir?

“I like it because they sing loud,” he says, eyeing his questioner. “Because it made me have a headache.”

A headache? That’s why he liked it? He gives a similar answer again.

“I know what he means,” says Cull a day later. “You know how you get chills when you enjoy something? It’s like that.”

Josh is often acutely aware of the little dramas unfolding around him. As he stands with his mother outside his Sunday school classroom after church one day, he watches as choir director Rintoul nonchalantly asks Alisa Camberlan if they can talk. The two walk down the hall out of earshot.

“What are they talking about?” Josh asks quietly. “Are they talking about me?”

As the Camberlans walk out of church one Sunday, Josh is more hyperactive than usual, jumping around as his mother tries to calm him down. But suddenly Josh passes an open door where another service is going on. People are singing energetically and he stops, transfixed, to watch and listen.

His mother indulges him, then coaxes him out into the air. “Come on, Josh,” she says leading him out. “We’ll put a Brian Ferry tape on in the car.”