Retreats are an important part of our religious life. Our Constitutions call us to make time to draw aside from our regular preoccupations for several days every year (Constitutions of the Congregation of Holy Cross, 3.31). One of the great joys of working in campus ministry is inviting our students, faculty and staff into the privileged space of retreat.
Recently, our campus ministry took a dozen of our student faith leaders on retreat. This retreat is the most spiritually intense retreat that we offer, focusing on different ways of praying and relating with God and offering significant time for silence and personal reflection. The group that attends this retreat are often the students who will be asked to provide leadership for our other student retreats. We hope that this retreat will be a chance for them to “draw aside from their regular preoccupations” and be “attentive to the movements of the Spirit” in their own spiritual lives so that they can help provide that opportunity to others. We also invite other faculty and staff members to help lead this retreat. This makes sure that students aren’t doing any of the leadership – simply retreating – and it also provides a different perspective on the spiritual life and relationship with God than a priest, religious or even a campus minister can offer to our students.
My reflection on the graces that came from this weekend retreat resonated with two lines in particular from our Constitutions. The first is “All of us are involved in the mission” (Constitution 2:18). The Constitutions invite us to reflect on the different situations of our religious brotherhood, but it is also a reminder that our students, faculty, staff – all of those involved in our ministries – are involved in the mission. Sometimes our colleagues are hesitant to name that they are part of the mission, but carving out these spaces – both for our students and for those who helped us lead the students – gave them the space to name their involvement in the mission. Mission isn’t something that some people provide and other people consume; we’re all involved in it!
The second line that I reflected on was: “As in every work of our mission, we find that we ourselves stand to learn much from those whom we are called to teach” (Constitution 2:16). This retreat was a weekend full of amazement at how people are experiencing God and how the Spirit is moving in their lives. Even though the goal was to provide a retreat, I found myself edified by the listening that I did. The sharing that our students did and the reflections by our faculty and staff members were inspiring in my own relationship with God.
There is some divine irony that all of this points to: on this retreat where we were hoping to nourish our students’ leaders, I experienced a sense of nourishment and edification by the Spirit moving through them. But I shouldn’t have been surprised. When we acknowledge that all of us involved can be involved in the mission, it gives us a posture of humility to learn something from those we expect to be guiding.
God help us to continue to be open to your Spirit moving through all of those you’ve invited into relationship with you!
Fr. Brogan Ryan, C.S.C.
Published on February 12, 2025
