Dear [organizing team of the Christ Renews His Parish retreat I attended last weekend],<\/p>\n
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? \u00a0And, 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 \u201cliturgist,\u201d and planning the liturgies and prayer services. \u00a0But this year it didn\u2019t 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\u2019s like parenting a newborn \u2014 the bad stuff, you forget).<\/p>\n
I mean, yes, I cried when the first speaker gave her talk and shared her experiences with a child with developmental delays \u2014 I mean, I cried<\/i>, cried, because in that moment memories of my own experiences with my firstborn, with therapists, and word cards, and feeling like everyone else\u2019s kid was doing just fine and mine couldn\u2019t say more than three or four consonants, all came back. <\/p>\n
But then the the table discussions \u2014 well, they were just meh. \u00a0And I had forgotten just how social<\/i> the CRHP retreat is. \u00a0Great for extroverts, sure, but the nature of the way it\u2019s structured didn\u2019t 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. \u00a0Instead, I just felt on edge.<\/p>\n
And \u2014 hey, I tried to follow the rules. \u00a0\u201cKeep your phone at home.\u201d \u00a0Felt like a fool having to borrow a phone to tell my husband about something on the schedule he didn\u2019t know about, when it seemed like everyone else had been \u201cin the know\u201d that this instruction was optional. \u00a0\u201cSit next to someone you don\u2019t know.\u201d \u00a0Yeah, that<\/i> worked out, as I sat there, with two groups of friends talking to each other, one on each side of me at the table.<\/p>\n
Look, I\u2019m an introvert. \u00a0I know that, and I probably had unrealistic expectations coming into the weekend, thinking that I\u2019d get to know other participants. \u00a0But still: \u00a0sitting 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. <\/p>\n
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\u2019t really know how \u2014 or, failing that, at least making available to participants the opportunity to talk to someone with \u201clistening ear\u201d-type training as a resource for anyone who needs it.<\/p>\n
And for good measure, here are a couple other not-quite-right things about the weekend:<\/p>\n
The women giving the talks are baring their souls \u2014 until you realize, afterwards, that many of the talks fall into a pattern and there\u2019s a lot that\u2019s unsaid. \u00a0Deaths of loved ones, disabilities, actual or feared, and medical crises, yes, as they produced a later-resolved crisis of faith. \u00a0But afterwards, you start to realize that there\u2019s a lot that\u2019s unsaid: \u00a0the 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. \u00a0Does it matter? \u00a0No, not really, I guess. It would be a lot to ask someone to speak about somthing that\u2019s that deeply personal, on a whole \u2018nother level. \u00a0And maybe it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
And (spoiler alert) the weekend is intended to build toward a commitment to Jesus \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
But I did have some takeaways:<\/p>\n
I wasn\u2019t the only one whose child needed speech or other types of therapy.<\/p>\n
It would probably not be a bad idea to pray a bit more often.<\/p>\n
Enduring the hardship of a loved one\u2019s experiencing a medical crisis, living with a disability, or even dying, is a natural part of life. \u00a0Whether 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 \u201cnew normal,\u201d a world in which no suffering exists would be a spiritually impoverished world. <\/p>\n
And, according to the decidedly non-spiritual conversation to the right of me during dinner, Illinois\u2019 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. \u00a0Good to know, eh?<\/p>\n
*******<\/p>\n
OK, so I\u2019m not actually going to send this. \u00a0But I felt like I needed to write about my experience anyway. \u00a0Tomorrow it\u2019s back to politics and the report on housing for seniors that I\u2019m in the middle of blogging about.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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? \u00a0And, after all, I participated a decade ago, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[143],"class_list":["post-194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-crhp"],"yoast_head":"\n