If I were a retreat director...

Let me preface this by a funny and great quote from the retreat this weekend from Sissy:

If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plan for life.

Well, I don't think God would laugh at your face if you tell him your plan, but you get the idea--we create great designs for our lives, but it is not our say that is the final one. Well, my plan (here you go, God... you know it already) is to do some combination of post-grad service to the Church and get a Masters in Arts-Theology, Pastoral Studies, or Divinity, then go on to find a job in a Catholic high school that has a dedicated campus ministry department (preferably) and concentrate on retreat ministry and forming Christian leaders from high school youths. Also in there, I want to help out with improv and theatre and baseball coaching.

Well, this weekend affirmed that retreat ministry is one of the elements to the route that fits my charisms and gifts. I am not writing to bash the retreat but to point out where its parts aroused responses in my internal monologue that are the seedlings of the part of me that hopes to direct retreats one day for young people.

We had only short, surface-level small-group time. The short reflections by Fr. John were nice but not especially cohesive or provocative of thought, and his questions did not stir up great introspection or thoughts. The result was timid, brief conversation that did not really do all that much. If I had the opportunity to lead, I would be sure to create a more cohesive theme--not necessarily to box in the direction of things but to guide and aim it to some kind of end. Also, a dynamic of comfort and sharing needs to be established beyond the simple here's my name and fun fact. A degree of that has to continue into the next couple conversations. A good way to encourage sharing and open people up to prayerful participation is to ask for volunteers to lead prayer at the start and end of group time. Familiar prayers led by the group-leader are good prayers, but prayer led by a retreatant, especially spontaneous prayer, is much more pastoral and inclusive and definitely contributes to an atmosphere of faith-sharing.

Our masses were cozy and brief. We were constricted to a small half-room for our chapel with barely enough room to greet each other with the sign of peace. However, we could have done better to be liturgically conscientious and create the best environment for prayerful worship. First, you need to choose lectors beforehand so the readings happen in a timely, decisive fashion that makes them proclamations and not shaky, tentative recitations. Also, we did not have EMs; the small room meant we just passed the Body and Blood around. A nice touch here would have ministering to one another--giving the Body to the person next to you rather than just receiving it yourself and passing on the vessel. Though not everyone is a trained EM, it gives occasion for us to present Christ to one another in the way we should be seeing through our retreat and life. Also, though we had no piano, we had a shelf of hymnals, a few confident singers, and people willing to join along. Given that, I wish we'd have planned out a bit of music to bolster some kind of theme. We could only choose hymns we recognized, so the ones chosen would have been sung by everyone, creating a nice group setting for the mass.

Those are just two aspects of the internal monologue that endured throughout the weekend. The other theme within me was my stubbornness when expectations are not met. Rather than seeking to reconcile reality to my expectations, I cling to a duality to perpetuate some sense of what I wanted and expected alongside a half-assed approach to entering into the actual dynamic. I tried to jot down ideas and write when I wanted to or had something good to scribble down, and at one point Saturday night (when the rest popped in Chocolat for free time), I just left the room and wrote, read, and got to bed a bit early. Meanwhile, I only dwelled peripherally in the laid back, hanging out in Portsmouth vibe that everyone else seemed so content to be in. The result is that I characteristically missed out on the socializing that everyone else so naturally does. I didn't know how to reconcile my personality and desires to be spiritual and introspective with the way everyone else was going with the flow. It was nice to meet some new people and relearn the constant lesson that people are never exactly what you think, but I was disconnected in a way that I didn't really make any friends. But I enjoyed the nice people and the glimpses of their stories that I caught.