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retreat |
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sit for three and half days in
a room with forty senior boys... just sit and watch and listen.
if you could watch and listen well (which i don't claim to be
able to do), you would probably learn some amazing things...
things about "kids these days" and a timeless process,
things about being hurt and hurting, things about losing and
winning, about resilience and resentment, mistakes and intentions,
things about feeling no good and trying to be better, about being
lonely and being connected... mostly, in one way or another,
things about love... and... god who is love.
my talk to the group this year
felt eerily disordered, vague, inconclusive... no work of art...
my own damn fault... a mess... and yet... it seems to have mattered
to some... this, in itself, is solid enough proof of the existence
of god... if that talk touched someone it was absolutely none
of my doing. something else was going on... mysterious as a thick
black stone the size of a fist... giving birth to a bright soft
limestone egg... giving birth to...
mr. wendell berry of kentucky
writes that "a community ... has to do first of all with
belonging; it is a group of people who belong to one another
and to their place." i don't have to distort too much to
apply this definition of community to carmel high school at its
best, which is carmel high school touched by kairos. institutional
voices, especially the recruiting and development offices, love
to use this rhetoric of community, of family, because it sheds
some golden light over the place. but it's also as much - or
more - of a true thing as a hope or advertising strategy. seems
to me that kairos helps us to notice how we belong to each other
and this place... and it's only the belonging that matters...
still... i know there are kids
- too many - walking the halls and sitting in classes who feel
utterly alone and unclaimed... angry and sad...
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