This past Saturday, I spent the day in Bloomington at St. Charles leading a Confirmation I retreat with about 50 high school freshmen in attendance.The name of the retreat: "Being a faithful freshman: Lessons from goldfish."
More about the fish thing later.
I remain very pleased about how it went. Acquainting students with the richness of Catholic spirituality, we talked about and did a lot: adoration (brief), liturgy of the hours, confession, Mass, rosary, saints (martyrs)...and lots of community building.
Why bother with all this stuff? Retreats are about doing something, not just thinking about how we can do something later. Retreats are moments of conversion...times to point us in a new direction...to give us a new hunger...to begin a search.
It amazed me in looking at evaluations of this retreat from last time, just how many people said that confession was their favorite part of this retreat. Awesome! If we can get people to at least not hate confession and look at it as an obstacle--but rather as a time to receive God's mercy--we have done well. Why? Because we have done something that has pointed someone in a new direction.
I hope all of the things we did had that effect.
One of the biggest things retreats are good for: the building of Christian community. For high school freshmen, this is what must be actualized heavily as it is the "funnest" way to do something with religion. I think we managed to do lots of this community building and grow in faith while having fun. Group activities, free time, competition (battle of the sexes after the "sex talk), discussions--all of these were big hits.
The Holy Spirit amazes me.
