Student "edition" found at {thoughts dot com slash typed no space out no space loud slash blog}.

Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

There have been a lot of additions to the retreat that I've neglected to post here.

First of all, there's this demonstration that the brother facilitator gives about the cleanliness of the soul.

He has this crystal goblet in a basin that he fills with water. He says this represents a person's soul at birth.

Then he adds a drop of different colored paints in the cup, representing various sins from the supposedly most "harmless" (white lies) to the heaviest, giving some commentary along the way about such hot topics as masturbation.

When the water was sufficiently murky, he said that prayer is about continuously receiving grace from God, symbolized by pouring more water into the cup.

And almost like magic, before the pitcher was emptied, the water in the glass was clear again.

@@ Another thing I've noticed is that the facilitator (and in fact some other brothers I've heard pray recently) have been praying "Glory to the Father" instead of "Glory be to the Father". There is a difference linguistically.

What I don't know (since admittedly I haven't been very informed of local Catholic ordinances) if this is widespread or just something they've started quietly.

@@ Last night the brother president, whose advocacy was spiritual formation in another campus before being assigned here, talked to the students again.

He usually arrives Sunday morning, but since they have their own retreat among the brothers on that day, and today he has a meeting with the Parents of College Students' Organization in another campus (more on that in another post) and the JS prom mentioned in the student accessible version.

It's the first time he had a post-dinner session, and he could tell there wasn't much attention in his listeners, until he got to the sharing and prayer sessions.

Besides the small group gathering, he also had a large group prayer where there was an inner circle of those who had specific problems (family, career, studies) and an outer circle of support praying with laying of hands, very nice.

Session 2573 ambivalent on being here. Class dismissed.