I have had the good fortune of reading two of Cameron’s books.  Just like his and Kristina’s visionary simplicity in connecting with peoples our culture habitually misconstrues, they are replete with profound insights.  It is not often that I get entirely new perspectives on how our world is shaped through culture.  Cameron’s works are chock full of them.  For example, so many Americans take the oppression of women in the Middle East as a given, without ever imagining that below the head scarf, the veil or the burka there is a human being and a feminine expression of Life that deserves to be discovered before it is summarily and casually dismissed under the reductive epithet “oppressed.”  Cameron’s books speak of the amazing power of feminine presence in the Middle East, a feminine enchantment that, in the United States, people hardly have an inkling of, much less deep, experiential appreciation for.  To read Cameron’s books is to feast upon delicious new territories of the heart, it inspires taking the next flight to the Middle East so that we ourselves might become a little bit more roundly human.

            I recommend Cameron as someone who is an expression of the change our world inspires.  When you meet him, you realize that he is the change wherever he is, always ready to sing and travel widely with spirited gentleness into the landscape of the human heart.  And all of his words lead toward that knowing that there is a realm which is fully human that we can dwell in together in a way that words can’t express – but a voice, a drum or an oud can...  And that is the disarming genius that Cameron expounds; rather than taking us through more thought processes about how we might think ourselves into having a different perception of other, Cameron takes us directly into ecstatic song, directly into shared ecstasy which, once shared, radically softens the very sense of other and opens us to mutual discovery through the bliss that inhabits our core and is yearning for release and connection.  He is not out in the world resisting fear; he is out in the world inviting fear directly to the party and the feast which always awaits us in the communion of hearts.

            Cameron’s vision of turning the “missionary efforts” of the West inside out is brilliant: rather than sending Western young men and women out to the far corners of the Earth to spread Jesus and Tupperware, Cameron has a vision of sending young men and women out to learn songs, wisdom and culture from global inhabitants.  When I think of that, I am astounded by its brilliance: nothing to teach, nothing to propagandize – simply the willingness to learn from others a new way of being human together.

Olivier Tryba

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