Sunday, January 29, 2006

I Return

Yes folks, I have returned from a great weekend at a CSA Retreat. The CSA is the Catholic Students Association at the University of Victoria.

I learned a lot this weekend, a lot about others and thus a lot about myself by getting to know others. The first thing I will say is that it was MUCH better then my previous experience at a CSA retreat. I had a bad taste left in my mouth because of said previous experience. However, there are now new people who are heading it, a wonderful couple, Charlie and Jean Allen, who I've slowly gotten to know over the past couple of years. They have a great love for Christ and a great love for the youth.

My big highlight was that there was such an amazing balance of prayer, talks, and fun. Everything fit in nicely. I'll be honest, my idea of fun is sitting in front of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament for the entire weekend. However, I know that I must experience Christ not only through the Eucharist, but by being at service to others. And so, I tried to lighten up a bit this weekend and have some fun and I did. I will be the first to admit that the more modern music used for singing and such generally doesn't take to me. However, I know that it is a perfectly valid way to show your love for God and is a very reverential way to show it. This is not anything new though, I've always like older music, since my musical tastes will only go as far as 1945 generally. But I forced myself to experience and understand the various ways people show their love for God, because it is important to know how to relate to various people in the Church. I saw that people show equal reverance to Christ in there way of singing as I would by singing a good ol' Salve Regina.

The talks were fairly good too. Some people really opened up and it was definitely quite a different experience, in a good way, to see where people are at in their faith and I was glad to see that Jean and Charlie had variety with who they had talking and such.

There was Eucharistic Adoration whenever we wanted which was amazing! And there was fun too, like dancing on Saturday night spontaneously, so I pulled out my swing music to add to the fun. It was a good time overall.

Still have much to consider about the weekend, to see what God wanted me to learn from these interactions with others, but it was great overall.

I best get my Theology of the Body post up!

-Harrison
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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I hear you on the music front - I always prefer the older things to newer ones in a liturgical context. You can't beat singing something that's been sung for hundreds of years before you.

Out of interest, as I've had mixed experiences on the CSA retreats, what was wrong with the last one you were on?

2:16 AM
Anonymous said...

i'm glad you had a good time. i love jean and charlie, they're awesome and i'm so glad that they're the ones behind the CSA now. it's about time.

9:31 AM
Harrison said...

Well, for me, the first thing that I had problems with at the last one was there were certain abuses by a priest taken with regards to the Mass and Confession. He may very well be ignorant, but I was very uncomfortable, that, and there didn't seem to be much in the way of prayer. This one, however, had no abuses and there was a good balance of prayer and everything. I think prayer must always be included in a retreat and such.

11:03 PM

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