Students - USA

The Way of Peace

In the Big Apple, GS high school youth at work preparing and setting up an exhibit in schools in Brooklyn, Central Park, and Washington. Becoming aware of reality through seven panels

BY MAURIZIO MANISCALCO

“Chris, how did the “Peace Exhibit” idea arise?”
The question was addressed to Chris Bacich, a teacher at Xaverian High School in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, New York City, who is a point of reference for GS.
“The massacre at the school in Columbine shocked everybody. When it happened, we–young people and adults–met together to talk about it, as we do every Sunday morning after Mass. We prepared a flyer with our judgment of it, trying, ourselves, to understand what really was underlying these events and hoping to open a discussion with young people, teachers, and parents.”
“Getting to work on the exhibit was the next step,” continued Monica and Fedi, two GS girls who attend Fontbonne Hall Academy.
But how do you “do” an exhibit? And on what?
“We wanted something that would be captivating, that would grab our classmates’ attention, and at the same time would enable us, starting from what everyone thinks, to reach what we have encountered.” This was Ritchie and Sean speaking, who are now freshmen at St. Francis College in New York and last year were among the “protagonists” of this adventure.

The beginning of the adventure

At first, when a small group started thinking about it last summer, the idea was–precisely because of what had happened at Columbine High School–to do something on the theme of violence. But later, thinking it over more fully, we chose peace, a term that is probably over-used and abused, but one that is full of hope; a positive thing.
How did the work get started?
As soon as they had an outline, the students, divided into small groups, presented the results of their work. At the beginning, things were not very simple. Sometimes it was as if the kids felt the proposal was just one more piece of homework. However, at each weekly meeting there was at least one person who had been moved by curiosity. And the next week maybe there were two who were curious until, patiently moving along, the whole thing started to explode, with the adults (two teachers, Chris, Andre, and one parent, Doni) helping them to search, to look, to understand, to discuss, to go more deeply into things. I would find them every Friday evening spread all over my house, in little groups, some in the living room, some in the kitchen, some down in the basement, some at the computer or in the bedrooms, looking for images, poems, words to songs, and newspaper articles, while they followed their outline. How did they go about making this outline? “With the students, we were working on the first chapters of The Religious Sense,” Chris went on. “The question we asked initially was what was meant by the word ‘peace’ as we heard people using it.” And this became the first panel, the starting point. “The next step? Comparing everything with our own experience.”
If we follow, step-by-step, the seven panels that make up the exhibit, we retrace the journey made in the months of work on the show: from the dramatic images of places where there is no peace, from the most obvious, banal, and insipid statements about peace as the absence of war, tolerance, and dreams for the future, to the need for a lasting self-fulfillment. This led all the way to the recognition that peace is the gift of an encounter, of a relationship, and the certainty that this encounter has happened and continues to happen with Jesus, the way, the truth, and the life.

Astonished

As this journey unfolded, the panels became better and better.
The students made the final choices regarding content as well as design, which included the final images, quotations, type fonts, sizes, and colors to be used.
In the last days before the opening, it was a wonderful sight to see them piled together, excited and happy, in front of Michelle’s computer, while the sketches turned into actual posters.
Thus the “Peace Exhibit” was born, very American and totally theirs, completed by American and “Americanized” kids.
This is only the beginning of the story, even if it is the end (almost) of my report of it.
Last week a small group of New York GS students took the exhibit to Washington, DC, for the Beginning Day of the newly founded local GS group. Saturday the exhibit was in Central Park, keeping the CLU (university) group of New York company. Most recently, Fedi, Monica, and Maria presented it to the principal of their high school. The result? The principal was astonished and proposed that it be presented officially to all the girls in the school as well as to the teachers. And so this too will happen.
The “Peace Exhibit” has already become one of our traditions. A young one, like everything in this country, with some of last year’s protagonists already having passed it on: Mike, Sean, and Ritchie are in college; Michele, Vero, Giulio, and Irene are back in Italy. But Giachi, Giò, Maria, and the others are here, ready and waiting to carry on the tradition. They are learning it by heart, even down to the details of the photos selected. It belongs as much to them–even though they didn’t do it–as to those who spent months working on it. This is the way things go; the story happens all over again, and each time it is both the same and different, because the protagonists are different.
And thus my heart skips a beat when I hear Kate, who has not even been baptized, explaining the seventh panel, “her” panel: “Peace is a gift along the way, the experience of life as a pilgrimage, with the certainty of the goal.”