The first day on a retreat is usually the most difficult for any number of different reasons, from lack of sleep, lack of food, tracking registrations, handling money, locating supplies, and fielding questions from the parents (no ma'am, you cannot pull your daughter early from the retreat for soccer practice). I try to fight it, but usually I get really cranky because I'm running around counting markers and picking up Chinese food instead of doing what I really love, which is interacting with the kids and helping my staff. Needless to say, I don't get a really clear picture of what's really going on at the nitty gritty level of the retreat until after the first *full* day.
Right from the first night, I had some misgivings, from the relatively small turnout (less than 50), the crop of first-time leaders, but it all turned around so quickly when I saw the kids get into it. We had an amazing spiritual director, Fr. Ben, who was able to devote all of his time to our program for the 5 days. I've never heard so many teenagers say they actually enjoyed sitting in a room to hear talks in the middle of the summer as when they were with Fr. Ben. He has that rare gift of parsing complex ideas into digestible pieces, and along with his infectious joy and sonic boom of a voice, he'll stand out as someone we'll never forget. "God bless God!" he'd rumble, by way of greeting and general benediction, reasoning that since all of our gifts are from the Almighty Himself, when we do something to please God, it's like God is blessing Himself. The kids were repeating it all week. It's a good sign when they're quoting your speakers over lunch.
We slept in boxes again, like we did for the Washington program. I wondered how well the Box City concept would work here. Basically, as a sign of our acceptance of our own spiritual poverty, we put the kids in a context of physical poverty, sleeping outside using boxes as shelter, such as the poor and homeless might. Earlier in the day, we took the kids to visit the Little Sisters of the Poor, who run a nursing care facility in Palatine. The sisters only take in residents who've run out of every other form of support, and basically take care of them free of charge. So the kids' eyes and minds were filled with that experience as we transitioned into Box City. I was worried about a "slumber party" atmosphere, or that it would make a mockery of the very real poverty that the homeless and the poor face, but the kids took it with the appropriate reverence. A bunch of the kids wrote "God bless God" on the outside of their box shelters.
One moment that sticks out in particular is a group of girls (the kids slept out in their small groups) who were making triangular tepee shelters with their boxes. One of the leaders suggested a different design for the cardboard pieces, but the girls replied, no we want to make it triangular because we want to "sleep within God, just like Fr. Ben said." They were referring to a diagram that Fr. Ben had used to explain God's equal presence throughout all of time (circular, instead of linear, totally fascinating stuff), and Father had used a triangle to show God's simultaneous presence at the beginning of time, at the death of Christ on the cross (like in the Mass), and our own deaths, and now here were these little 13-yr olds, on the back lawn of Marytown, making little tepees as a manifestation of what they learned. Awesome. I noticed another kid not using her cardboard pieces, not even a garbage bag as a cover over the grass, and I asked whether she needed anything. She replied, well, I'm not going to use the boxes because I was thinking about the homeless, and they don't even have sleeping bags like we do. So she'd decided to offer up that little bit of extra discomfort. Amazing kids, seriously. What was I worried about again?
Two down, one more to go in Toronto. I'll put up pictures when I get my camera charger back.
