Retreat Debrief

Dear [organizing team of the Christ Renews His Parish retreat I attended last weekend],

I go back and forth on whether to actually write to you honestly, because so many women love this weekend, and if it works for them, who am I to second-guess it all?  And, after all, I participated a decade ago, and even came back as a member of the team the next year, and really enjoyed being the “liturgist,” and planning the liturgies and prayer services.  But this year it didn’t work for me, and as I recall, even last time, the retreat itself was so-so, and it was only once I began attending the formation team meetings that I felt connected to the other women (plus, I think it’s like parenting a newborn — the bad stuff, you forget).

I mean, yes, I cried when the first speaker gave her talk and shared her experiences with a child with developmental delays — I mean, I cried, cried, because in that moment memories of my own experiences with my firstborn, with therapists, and word cards, and feeling like everyone else’s kid was doing just fine and mine couldn’t say more than three or four consonants, all came back.

But then the the table discussions — well, they were just meh.  And I had forgotten just how social the CRHP retreat is.  Great for extroverts, sure, but the nature of the way it’s structured didn’t lend itself to a lot of quiet time, and I had hoped that I would be able to get to know some of the other women but that was a bust.  Instead, I just felt on edge.

And — hey, I tried to follow the rules.  “Keep your phone at home.”  Felt like a fool having to borrow a phone to tell my husband about something on the schedule he didn’t know about, when it seemed like everyone else had been “in the know” that this instruction was optional.  “Sit next to someone you don’t know.”  Yeah, that worked out, as I sat there, with two groups of friends talking to each other, one on each side of me at the table.

Look, I’m an introvert.  I know that, and I probably had unrealistic expectations coming into the weekend, thinking that I’d get to know other participants.  But still:  sitting at church during what was supposed to be medidative silence, and having to move because two women were chit-chatting, and going straight from a quiet, prayerful Saturday night liturgy to a cocktail party, in which I was very quickly surrounded by clusters of women chatting in groups of three or four or five (I awkwardly wedged my way into one such group until, thankfully, it was announced that a group was walking back to the building with the sleeping accomodations), was jarring.

So what was missing was, fundamentally, some means of facilitating more connectedness, a chance for interaction with others at a deeper level, though I don’t really know how — or, failing that, at least making available to participants the opportunity to talk to someone with “listening ear”-type training as a resource for anyone who needs it.

And for good measure, here are a couple other not-quite-right things about the weekend:

The women giving the talks are baring their souls — until you realize, afterwards, that many of the talks fall into a pattern and there’s a lot that’s unsaid.  Deaths of loved ones, disabilities, actual or feared, and medical crises, yes, as they produced a later-resolved crisis of faith.  But afterwards, you start to realize that there’s a lot that’s unsaid:  the marital crisis, the addiction, the domestic violence, or even the garden-variety job loss and financial crisis, which surely even women at an upper-middle-class Catholic church are not exempt from.  Does it matter?  No, not really, I guess. It would be a lot to ask someone to speak about somthing that’s that deeply personal, on a whole ‘nother level.  And maybe it’s just as well, because, boy, would it be awkward for a well-known fellow parishoner to say that her husband, known to all, cheated on her.

And (spoiler alert) the weekend is intended to build toward a commitment to Jesus — but this aspect of the weekend felt like it came out of nowhere, rather than being a natural outgrowth of the weekend to that point.

But I did have some takeaways:

I wasn’t the only one whose child needed speech or other types of therapy.

It would probably not be a bad idea to pray a bit more often.

Enduring the hardship of a loved one’s experiencing a medical crisis, living with a disability, or even dying, is a natural part of life.  Whether you believe that God has a deeper plan for us that brings meaning even to awful tragedies, or just that God gives us the ability to survive and ultimately find a “new normal,” a world in which no suffering exists would be a spiritually impoverished world.

And, according to the decidedly non-spiritual conversation to the right of me during dinner, Illinois’ in-state tuition is so high that, depending on the school, it can actually be more cost-effective for a kid to go out-of-state for college.  Good to know, eh?

*******

OK, so I’m not actually going to send this.  But I felt like I needed to write about my experience anyway.  Tomorrow it’s back to politics and the report on housing for seniors that I’m in the middle of blogging about.