First Days: The Eighth Grade Retreat

At Mayfield Junior School, the eighth grade is a year of opportunity, responsibility and growth. To begin the year, students attend an overnight retreat. This has been a tradition for decades and is for most classes a significant experience. In the peaceful serenity of Mater Dolorosa Retreat Center, sixty plus enthusiastic kids celebrate their new role as leaders of the student body, the possibilities and experiences that lie ahead, and just being together. The retreat is a unique opportunity for these young adults to step away from their regular daily lives and see themselves and their classmates with new eyes.

Below eighth grade advisor, Lisa Byrne shares her observations and the opportunity found in these first days.

The theme of this year's 8th grade retreat was "CHOSEN.” For the last few years, Joe Melendrez has been our retreat leader, guiding our 8th graders through a series of team building activities, praise songs, and a variety of prayer sessions, allowing them to let loose while building bonds of camaraderie and fellowship that will last long past their final year at Mayfield.

"At first I was scared," one 8th grader told me during the retreat, "my older brother had told me to expect a lot of tears. I didn't realize that they would be healing tears." The most meaning part of the retreat for most students (and teachers) is the reconciliation service at the end of the first night. Students are each given a rock on which to write down a burden or disappointment that has been weighing them down. During the service, they have an opportunity to give and receive these "burdens" to each other, and to the priests in the sacrament of confession. Finally, each student is able to wash their rock, removing their sins and freeing themselves of the heaviness that has been holding them down.

This year, the reconciliation service was almost two hours of quiet reverence and compassionate sharing. Many of the burdens are not secret, these students have known each other for years, and they all instinctively gather around those who are suffering the most, relieving them of having to carry the load all alone.

The sacred reverence of this service is in strict contrast to the raucous enthusiasm of some of the other activities, like the "Amazing Grace Race" around the entire campus of Mater Dolorosa or the "Follow Me" invisible maze, but every activity is tied to scripture and the purpose of nurturing the next class of Mayfield Junior School leaders.