COLLABORATION bears Spiritual Fruits in Canadian Jesuit High School

We in Gujarat Had a number of meetings and seminars on collaboration.

A retreat can change people to organize themselves to collaborate:

An example below. 

Please respond to this.

I expect a short response to this report in blog Antaragni.

devasia

COLLABORATION bears Spiritual Fruits in Canadian Jesuit High School

How can the mission of the Jesuits be fulfilled as the number of Jesuits declines?

St. Paul’s High School, Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada has been wrestling with this question since 1970’s. From having a Jesuit Faculty with three lay teachers, we are now a lay faculty with three Jesuit teachers. Jesuit/ lay collaboration has evolved from grudging necessity to a welcome witness to the universal nature of the Ignatian vision. Similarly, 30% of our students are not Catholic: today this is seen as a richness that calls us to a deeper collaboration.

Great example of how collaboration can bear excellent fruit lies in the spiritual renewal which has transformed the school. In the year 1988 Ignatian Year, the Winnipeg Jesuit Community offered the Spiritual Exercises (Annotation 19) to our faculty, of which one-third took them. A significant number of the faculty now had a language and a common experience base in the spiritual life. This became the fertile soil for future spiritual programs developed for students.

Our major spiritual programs – Christian Life Community (CLC) – Kairos – the Freshman Retreat – and the Spiritual Exercises – are guided by the faculties who have done the Exercises.

In 1992 the arrival of a Jesuit Scholastic Alan Fogarty, SJ recalls it was not easy to begin the CLC. “There was some resistance among the lay faculty and even in the Jesuit community. I was beginning to feel that the time was not right, when three grade nine students said they wanted to form a CLC group and asked me to head it.

The then Mr. Fogarty’s group began to meet weekly, engaging in faith sharing, spiritual conversation, prayer and outreach, the hallmarks of C.L.C. Within two years there were 8 groups of 8-12 students meeting weekly, each guided by a faculty member. Today about 15% of our student body are members of a CLC group. Groups typically start in grade 9 and stay together, with their faculty moderator, for 4 years.

The Kairos retreat experience, is an intense four-day retreat which focuses on affirmation of the person and community building. Like CLC and, indeed, like the Spiritual Exercises, the student’s personal encounter with the Lord Jesus is the basis of building a community which proceeds to action in the world to build up God’s Kingdom.

One of the features of Kairos is that it is conducted primarily by students who have themselves made the retreat. St. Paul’s now has three Kairos retreats each year; 75% of our graduating students have chosen to make Kairos. A key element of CLC, Kairos, and all our spiritual programs is that we ensure that they are authentically Catholic, and at the same time are open to all our students and their faith backgrounds.

We have non- Christian students whose parents went to Jesuit schools in India, Lebanon, and around the world. We try to imitate the generosity of Mother Theresa who looked for the beauty of God in people of every tradition.

Hindu student Ankur Nagpal ’04 was a member of CLC, participated in Kairos, and made the Exercises. He said ‘St Paul’s has made me take into consideration ‘human interest’ at a whole new level. I no longer think that I am insignificant in helping out people. CLC and Kairos have made me realize to an extent that my vocation will certainly revolve around helping people. The best way of doing this is through my decision to study medicine.

Mehdi Seidgar ’01 a Muslim student commented “An aspect of St. Paul’s High School that really impressed me was how openly I was accepted into the community. As an active member of CLC and the Kairos retreat, I learned that as human beings, our differences are minuscule.” As a student director of a Kairos retreat, Mehdi shared his faith and talents with 35 other boys. He says that going to St Paul’s deepened his own faith: “I attribute who I am as Muslim today to my time at the school.”

Raed Joundi, whose father attended the College of St Joseph’s in Lebanon, said, “CLC was important to me as it set a time apart to allow myself and fellow members to relax review the week, and recharge for another.” 

Raed, who is also Muslim, attended Kairos after “extensive pushing and prodding” from his friends. He said, 

“Kairos was not at all what I expected. It gave me great insight into the spiritual workings of those around me, but most of all, opened an otherwise unopened window into my own beliefs, thoughts, experiences, life, and faith. Kairos was crucial to the understanding of myself and was a vital part of my St Paul’s education.

Orienting boys into our school has always been a challenge: they come from twenty-five or thirty different and elementary schools into a very big high school, and many are not Catholic. Our awakening spiritual senses challenged us to respond to the boys’ spiritual and communal needs and so in 2002 we introduced the 

Freshman Retreat.

For two nights and a day in November, the boys are conducted through an intense experience of prayer and community building. They are divided into groups of six students, each led by senior students. While the retreat is overseen by faculty members and parents, the actual work with the boys is done exclusively by senior students. The experience includes community service work, modeling talks by senior students, faculty members and local clergy, Mass, and opportunity for the Sacrament of Reconciliation and the close binding experience of “camping out”. 

We have found the impact on our students very positive.

Student Brendan Arniel commented, “The retreat was awesome. All of us really came together as friends and classmates. It broke down any barriers that we had. I really felt welcomed into the school community.”

Here our challenge is not one of integrating them into the school community but, rather, one of preparing them to move into the greater world and, we hope, be agents for the building up of God’s Kingdom. We felt, though, that we have needed more direct spiritual preparation for their life beyond high school.

The response was right under our noses: the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius are the foundation of the formation of Jesuits. St. Ignatius developed the Exercises to be given to lay people! So we decided to offer the Exercises to our graduating students. 

Our main challenges in doing this were: adapting the language and particularly the images of the Exercises to a post-modern teenage retreatant; finding in-house directors, for the Exercises require one-on-one spiritual direction with weekly meetings; and finding time for these meetings.

We recently met with a group of retreat alumni.

Tom Robertson ’03, a member of our first group, told us, “I did the Exercises because Kairos made me hungry for more. I wanted more to encounter God in my daily life.”

Dan Brick ’04 and Josh Fernando ’04 agreed. All found that the retreat experience, while challenging and sometimes difficult, was very rewarding.

Dan reflected. “I have found that the routine of daily prayer has continued into my life. Every day, doing the Examen, I can step back and look at how am I responding to God…or not.”

Josh said, “My whole life is different I try always to listen to Jesus and to respond. Sometimes he seems to shout, sometimes to whisper. He’s my friend my brother, my helper.”

Tom summed up for all the alumni when he said, “My Kairos experience and particularly my Exercises experience validated my faith, made it tangible, personal and real. I now can live my faith in daily life, not just in a retreat centre or at mass or at prayer.

These alumni represent the latest fruit of our school’s Jesuit-lay collaboration. Perhaps some of our alumni will go on to follow a vocation to the priesthood or religious life. But our hope is that all of our graduates, whatever their path in life, will have the tools and the motivation, God willing, to be ‘contemplatives in action”; to seek God in all things, and to build up God’s kingdom in word and indeed.

Johnston Smith