A Special Report on the Rainbow XXV Conference
A Taste of Rainbow XXV
Volume 2 Issue 3 January 2007
A Taste of Rainbow
XXV
It was probably about eight
o’clock in the morning when the bus first pulled into the Marriott
Hotel on Saturday, January 20th. I walked outside and was first bombarded by a
freezing cold wind that whipped cheerfully through the street, and then awed by
the sight of the Renaissance Center.
It was huge—it seemed to go up
forever. Then there was the sun coming up over the Detroit
River, which was also a beautiful
sight to behold.
I had been talked into coming by my religion teacher. This
weekend there was something called “Rainbow XXV”. It was an annual Catholic
conference held by the Catholic Youth Organization only for Catholic high school
students in the Archdiocese of Detroit. About 2,000 people were expected to
arrive for this particular conference. The theme was “Seek the Son”.
I must’ve looked somewhat like a dazed animal as I dragged
myself into the Marriott—I was none too awake at that time of the morning, and
the circular architecture of the building was a little too much for my brain to
process at such a tender hour. I was greeted by two exuberant youths, probably
of about college age, yelling “WELCOME TO RAINBOW!” from a balcony some way
above me. The day progressed much like that, as my youth group and I were
directed from one spiral hallway to another and high-fived by the CYO staff when
we happened to pass by them.
Sooner or later we made into the “Renaissance Ballroom” and
had our first official welcome and gathering. A band, Who Do You Say I Am, played a few songs. The current scene, a dark,
misty room that seemed to stretch on for a block with a band playing various
songs onstage, was quite different from one that I had kept close at heart
since the Trailblazers 2006 pilgrimage: a small, airy church dripping in sunlight
with Jesus displayed in a gold monstrance on the altar as some American pilgrims
quietly sang “Tantum ergo sacramentum…”.
Mr. Chris Padgett, a middle-aged man, came onstage for the
first talk. He spoke for about an hour of God’s immense love for each and every
human soul. Not only that, but he clarified that love is not what is portrayed
on the media nowadays—the romance scenes in popular movies today don’t contain
love at all, just self-gratification—true love is being willing to sacrifice
yourself for another person. He did it in such a clever way, though, that his
audience was somewhat tricked into paying attention. From the way he launched
into his talk and the hilarious anecdote he used delve into the subject (his
first date with the woman who became his wife), it seemed as if at first his lecture
wasn’t going to do with anything that deep at all.
Then, after some more music, we were set free to wander the
halls and eventually drift into whatever lecture we had previously signed up
for. I ended up going to “Making a Difference with Jesus”.
The speaker was an older man with graying hair who started
off his talk by saying “With children I only expect about ten seconds of their
attention… with you, my guess is that I will get… oh, seven, ten minutes.” He
paused as laughter rippled around the room and meaningful glances were
exchanged between friends. “You don’t want to have me talk for longer than
that, do you? So I’ll keep the part where I’m yapping short.”
True to his word, he only spoke for around ten minutes and
then pushed the group into several activities. The first was an icebreaker,
where the attendant was encouraged to talk with someone he/she has never met
before about a leader in his/her life. I met up with a friendly young woman and
briefly told the story of Perrito, which I will save for a later date to tell
in The Compass (stay tuned).
After this quick introduction, he had us share our stories
out loud, to the entire group, if we wanted. As we talked he wrote down on a
board the qualities of the leader we spoke of. And then things became
interesting.
“Now, I’m only going to give these directions twice. I will
not clarify them, so don’t bother asking me any questions. We’re going to do an
activity now, and I want you all to squat, like this, on the floor, with about
oh, half an arm’s length between you and everybody else.” He demonstrated and
then stood up again. His audience exchanged startled and wary glances. “With
your eyes closed. When you feel a touch, stand up, but keep your eyes closed.
When you feel another touch, open your eyes. That’s all, and I won’t be more
specific. I’ll narrate to you as you wait.”
We crouched down, closed our eyes, and listened. He spoke to
us about all those who would give a lot to be well enough to feel the pain we
were now feeling—people without a leg, perhaps, who couldn’t crouch down at
all, perhaps people without eyes who could never see. How would we reach out to
them? What about all those with emotional pain? How should we reach out to
them? How had Jesus reached out to the lepers and outcasts of His time?
As he spoke he wound his way slowly through the crowd and
touched people on the shoulder. I was one of the later ones to be touched and
in the meantime was left wondering if perhaps I was doing something wrong and
therefore was not being picked. I was eventually picked to stand, and saw that
there were people squatting still. Can’t
he come and touch them? I glanced over and considered asking him to touch a
girl at my left—she looked like she was in pain—but decided not to interrupt
his speech.
At the end of the activity he asked us how it felt to be
squatting that long (“painful” was the reply), and then dropped the bombshell.
“Did any of you,” he asked and looked around at us, “touch a person next to you
to have them stand up?”
One boy did. He looked to be around seventeen, and had
black hair that fell around his head. The speaker’s face lit up. “Who?”
“Him.” The boy replied and pointed towards another teen. The
speaker asked him another question—“Do you know him at all?”—to which he
replied “No”.
“What made you do that?”
The young man silently considered his reply before speaking.
“Well, I thought about the way you made such a big deal about us not being able
to ask you to clarify what you meant and figured that you wanted us to touch
another person. You never said anything about having you, personally being the
one that touches us, you just said that we needed to feel a touch.”
He’s smart. I
thought to myself. I didn’t even think of
touching another person.
The speaker nodded, but made no comment. “And how many of
you,” he asked and turned around slowly so that the whole room could see him,
“thought of touching another person but didn’t do it?” Half the hands in the room went up. “Why?” he
asked and pointed at random to one of the persons with their hands up.
“Well, I didn’t want to disrupt your talk. I didn’t know if
we were allowed to or not.”
“And for those of you left squatting, what did it feel like?
Yes, you… Helen?”
“Umm, I was wondering whether or not I did something wrong,
since I wasn’t being picked.”
He nodded. “Alright, and what about those of you who were
standing most of the time? What did it feel like? Did you feel superior to the
people squatting?”
He called on someone who replied to the affirmative. He then
called on the same boy who had spoken before—the only one of us that thought
and dared to touch someone else. “I thought the opposite,” he replied and
seemed a little insulted at the suggestion, “I thought that I shouldn’t be
standing when all those other people were still squatting, and that I could
handle the pain and would trade places with them if I could.”
The speaker nodded and left the primary message of the
exercise carefully unsaid.
The lecture over, the youths at the conference were given
the next few hours to have lunch, pop into various other optional talks, and
stop by the tables that several organizations had rented out for the
conference. I took a hand at passing out fliers for Trailblazers and attempting
to sell some hand-made rosaries to raise funds for underprivileged pilgrims.
Fr. Ward himself showed up to help pass out information, and
was greeted enthusiastically by the young man from the talk before—the one who
had reached out and touched the person next to him. Fr. Ward introduced me to
him—he was a former Trailblazer and had been with the group to World Youth Day.
Hah! No wonder! I
crowed mentally and shook his hand cheerfully.
Later on, I attended a talk on the Underground
Church in China.
A seminarian, Joseph Liu, was giving the lecture. It was only a half hour long,
and optional. The line to enter into the room reached down the entire balcony
and formed about fifteen minutes before the door even opened before his talk.
Once he began to speak the teens hung on his every word as he gave a history on
what the Church had done for and in China,
starting with apostolic times and then moving forward.
He spoke in simple and frank terms about what it was like
for Catholics in the past twenty years or so—of how they had been put in
prison, and even executed by the communist government for Christ.
The government’s plans to wipe out Catholics did not come
near to working. As it has been proven throughout history, Christianity only
grows stronger under persecution. The government loosened the restrictions
slightly, but he told us quietly that for those Catholics that refuse to
compromise their faith, imprisonment and death was still a threat and a
possible outcome for their lives.
“And do you know how many priests there are in my home
diocese in China?”
He asked us after saying all this. We didn’t.
“Over two hundred.”
“So I am going to ask you all to pray,” he said in
conclusion, “for the Underground Church
in China, and
for all the priests and Catholics there. Also for me.” The group clapped for
him as loudly as we could and for as long as we could, until our hands started
to feel sore.
As the day progressed I marveled how, when I came, I had
been expecting, at the most, to endure
the day. What had actually happened, though, was that I got far more out of the
conference than what I had even attempted to put in.
Contact us:
Virginia: editor of The Compass - compasseditor@trailblazerswyd.org
Amy : Trailblazers Secretary-
secretary@trailblazerswyd.org
(248) 722-5808 * www.trailblazerswyd.org
Mailing Address: Trailblazers, WYD, Inc., c/o Bovitz, CPA, C.P., P.O. Box 445 , Trenton, MI 48183
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