St. Alexander’s Winter Retreat
— Posted by Annie (January 24, 2007 at 12:05 pm)
This past week-end, my brother Eric and I spoke to a group of close to 100 teens on the topic of chastity. The retreat, which was based on the famous Steubenville Retreats, separated the guys from the girls. Even though almost all of my chastity talks are to a co-ed audience, I have to say that there is something sort of neat in speaking to just the girls. I’m sure any woman reading this can relate. I can talk about certain things or not even talk just give the look and they know exactly what I mean. Not that I’m saying anything bad about guys, that wouldn’t be very conducive to the quest for chastity, but there’s just a different feel in a room full of women. It was a nice change anyway.
I did get a chance to meet with the guys. Prior to our talks, we each spent 5 minutes with the opposite sex explaining what a holy guy should be looking for in a woman and what a holy woman should be looking for in a guy. I’m not sure of the exact details of my brother’s talk, except that he came from the point of view of a father (he has 5 daughters). I talked about how much pressure women feel in our culture to come on to guys and do things that they instinctively know they shouldn’t be doing. There are all sorts of reason for this which I couldn’t go into, I only had five minutes. But I told them that as upstanding men, they needed to respect all women. They needed to make good choices and treat all women with respect. No matter what her actions, deep down, like all human beings, a woman desires respect. And I told them to practice chivalry.
It was great to see such a good group of kids getting together to grow in their faith. My brother and I were proud to be able to bring the chastity message to these kids. Some of them said they had never heard it before. Others said they needed to hear it again.
Thanks, Luciana Santacroce for inviting us! It’s a lot of work putting on a week-end retreat and she did a great job!
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Quinn says:
“Some of them said they had never heard it before.”
That’s a reality that we have to be sure and remind ourselves of often. Not all have heard the message and need to hear what we have to say.
Comment posted January 26th, 2007 at 4:34 pm