USA/STUDENT YOUTH

Traveling Companions
and Signposts
LAST SEPTEMBER, 40 ADULTS WHO WORK WITH TEENAGERS GATHERED IN WISCONSIN TO HELP ONE ANOTHER GROW IN THEIR CERTAINTY.

by Annemarie Bacich

Driving from the Minneapolis airport, past signs for the Mall of America, into a vast expanse of Wisconsin countryside with nothing visible but a low slung amber moon, Fr. Franco Soma, a teacher at Georgetown Visitation High School in Washington, DC, glanced into the dark outside and wondered aloud, “Where the heck are we?” as he tried in vain to pinpoint on his Blackberry the location of the red Suburban that carried him and five other adults along an unlit stretch of country road to the location of the 2009 “GS Equipe.”

Not a teacher workshop. It is difficult to describe where you are when you are attending a “GS Equipe” because an event that brings together nearly 40 adults who work with teenagers from across the country and as far north as Canada, late on a Friday night, after an intense week of work, to a retreat house in the boondocks of Wisconsin, defies the standard categories of American thought regarding adults who “deal” with teenagers.  This is not a teacher workshop; the adults here include parents and scientists, a dentist, a college student, a parish music director,  and a high school principal, to name a few.  Nor is this a “leadership camp”–there are no leadership strategies or responsibility-building techniques taught here. As Fr. José Medina, the U.S. responsible for GS (the name given to members of Communion and Liberation at the high school level) told the adults on Friday night, “We are here together to help one another grow in certainty and maturity.  Our kids will grow only if we grow.  Our kids will be helped in their journey of certainty if they witness our certainty.”
Fr. José, along with Christopher Bacich, the national responsible of CL, led the GS Equipe weekend.  More than being facilitators or conference directors, Fr. José and Chris guided the adults in a work that helped to elucidate the nature of experience and judgment–two words of great concern to Fr. Julián Carrón in recent months.  Following the path laid out by Fr. Carrón for the whole Movement at the National Responsibles meeting in La Thuile, Italy, Fr. José started the weekend with an assembly on the experience of the adults in recent months. He asked, “How have you grown in ‘certainty’ during the past few months? What have you seen in the life of the kids that shows they have grown in ‘certainty’?”  As people responded in sincerity to the question, facts were recounted about dramatic circumstances and how they were faced.
People by and large expressed that within the drama of life, its beauty and difficulties, the awareness of a different factor emerged.  People spoke of facing illness, and death, the challenge of making difficult decisions and the temptation to despair, the wonder in front of the change in the kids they worked with–and most concluded by ascribing the difference to Christ. But the assembly was not a chance to give a nice speech, it was a proposal of work and growth in maturity, so Fr. José threw out the challenge by saying, “We’ve heard something beautiful–something has happened about which, over time, we have become certain. We find ourselves surprised by our own action. We are surprised that we are dominated by a thought that we didn’t know was there: the fact that I can be at peace; that I can be happy in the middle of a sacrifice. It’s not that I have just met Christ, it is that I have been changed by Him. Finding myself changed by Him, two questions open up. We find ourselves changed and we must describe this change. How did you get there? What happened to you from the moment you met Christ? The Apostles spent three years with Jesus–but they weren’t at the point of laying their lives down at the beginning.  There is an education that happens there.  What has happened to us?”
After lunch and a ridiculously competitive, spontaneous game of volleyball, the adults gathered for the afternoon assembly to answer the question Fr. José posed at the end of the morning, “What is experience? What is this judgment? How do we see it in action?” Once again, people gave account, but were challenged to look closely at what happened in what they were describing.  Marcie, a mother of seven, spoke about the challenge she faced in hearing of her sister’s diagnosis of cancer. She said, “It was traumatic for me. We had just read the translation of the Fraternity Exercises–and it says ‘no fear of life and death’–but I fear it all! I am certain of  You, oh Christ. I want to know Him so much and I think that that means I should not have anxiety or fear but I do!”

Starting from a wound. Pointing to Marcie’s experience, Chris responded, “In a moment like the one that you were living there... is then when you have the clearest awareness of how everything actually stands. This is the challenge for all of us. The truth of our existence is this powerlessness... So the problem is not to cover the wound, but to begin to judge according to that wound, to start from the wound, that I may find what continually answers it.” Work continued well into the afternoon, but people left the hall refreshed, enlivened, and accompanied. It was the kind of work that expands a person’s humanity, in contrast to the weight of intellectual spinning. The afternoon was dedicated to discussion about the individual communities around the country. How was the work on the School of Community, the weekly catechesis with the groups of students around the country? What was seen happening with the kids in the communities? Are they being helped to make judgments? The afternoon discussion continued in light of the day’s work. The nitty-gritty specifics of the individual communities could not be faced outside of the discoveries made during the day. They were part of the journey, as Fr. José recalled: “When we talk about experience and judgment, we mean that our experience is the capacity to compare everything to the ideal, to compare every circumstance, every relationship and action to this and to see how it fits with it.  It is not an intellectual discourse that you need to engage in. It happens in the interaction with reality.”

Back home with a new urgency. Chris recalled Giussani’s method in being with students, speaking of the importance of the decisiveness of the proposal, noting that time with the kids should always  be an expression of  culture, charity, and mission. By the end of the day, it was clear something had taken place that exceeded the quantitative boundaries of the weekend. Terese Black from Chicago commented, “I found the weekend to be a judgment on my life, on the way I’ve been living everything and on the way I’ve been ‘doing’ the Movement and GS. I find in myself a new urgency to do this work because I really want the whole 100% of what my life could be.” And Phil Mayer from Minnesota pinpointed the depth of friendship offered by Fr. José and Chris this weekend: “I was struck by how simple it is to make a judgment; simple, but not easy, not without discomfort and even pain. I guard my heart from the very One who comes to save it because I am afraid of this pain and because I am a man of little faith.  I am grateful for friends who are not afraid to tell me this. I want to grow and so I stay with them.”  “Where are we?” Fr. Franco asked at the beginning of the GS Equipe weekend. Phil might have answered best: we are within the depths of Christian friendship.