wMar 28, 2004




retreat

And, I am home now. Julie and the kids came over for dinner last night. They were cute! 'Mia kept chanting, "Hi, hi, hi, hi!" with her two-tooth baby smile. After that, I went to church and then we (being Youth Liturgy whores) drove over to the Abbey. One of the novices showed us around...we got to go in the crypt, which was cool. We spent most of the evening in kind of a larger....multi-purpose room. Talked, ate a lot of food, watched Shrek, played some game, and talked again. After that, everyone went up to their rooms. Lindsey and I shared a room, :D The little rooms were so cute! They had two prayer rooms for people to use on our floor, and Ryan and I wanted to do the Evening Prayer from my Liturgy of the Hours book. So first we went in the prayer room by his room.....but the window that opened into the church was rattling a lot and it was really creepy! So then we went to the prayer room by my room.....but Heather was there and we didn't want to bother her, so we went back to the prayer room by his room. THEN I was looking at an incense burner, and there was a spider! It was creepy but I was like, "We're praying now!" and we did, and it was very nice. After that, Ryan went to bed and I went to the prayer room by my room (now empty), and used this little....cushion thing to kneel on. I stayed there for a while, and it was just...nice, I guess. I've been trying to pray every day during Lent, but I felt a lot closer to God there. I don't know why. Anyway, then I went to bed. Well, first I giggled a lot because the sheets were like, stapled to the bed or something (not really) because I couldn't pull them up to climb under them....I thought Lindsey was going to kill me. Haha. So yeah, I ended up going to bed at about 2:00. I went to bed 2:00 on Friday night, too....We got up around 7:00, so obviously I'm little....not fully charged. We went down to eat breakfast, and it was so good! They had so much food, wow. After breakfast, we went to the big room for a while again, and then we went to morning prayer in the Abbey.

Morning prayer was really cool. Because it's basically the same thing as what I've been doing with my Liturgy of the Hours, only they actually have notes to sing/chant for the music. So, I scrawled the notes down on a piece of scrap paper so hopefully now I can, too. ;D After Morning Prayer there was another like, half hour break during which we just talked, and then we went to mass. The church (where we also had morning prayer) was really pretty. The stained glass is just...awesome. I got two twenty-cent postcards with pictures of the stained glass on them to put on my bulletin board. Cool stuff. After mass was lunch, which also had great food. I ate too much, though....I feel gross now, :P

After lunch, we went outside to this labyrinth thing that they grew in the grass. It's an extremely windy path that leads to a center area. It can be like, a form of prayer, and it was cool because we came up with a lot of comparisons to life from it...passing people on the way, seeing how close you are but not being able to get there quite yet, feeling like you're wandering farther and farther away. Then we went to a cemetary where all the....priests/brothers/whatever else they are were buried. And then we went inside and left.

It was really cool, and I'm glad I went. Everyone who went was fun, lots of good conversations, and the prayer time was also really good for me. However, now I'm home on five hours of sleep.....I got everything done yesterday except my stupid paper. But I think I'm going to try and work on it really hard now until Julie and Kevin and the kids come over for dinner again tonight. Life is so awesome, but then there's school. Thinking about it seriously make me....sad. Stupid school, grr.
scribbled mystickeeper at 2:29 PM
0 comments
0 Comments:

Post a Comment