You Make Beautiful Things

One of the unique things about being a Cap Corps Volunteer is that we have a privileged place from which we can see the hand of God at work in many different people in many different ways. We see Him in the way kids open up and start to talk about their faith in small groups. We see Him in the lit up faces of retreatants leaving adoration. We see Him in the way CYFMers live out their faith in the activities they do and the way they choose to do them. Not surprisingly though, we probably see His hand most clearly at work in each other.

At the very beginning of the year, the Cap Corps Volunteers made a retreat on Lake Cayuga in Interlaken, New York. Coming from the world of five day silent retreats, this was more of a vacation for me than a retreat, but I certainly wasn’t complaining. Swimming, barbecues, evenings watching the sunset while reading a book on St. Lawrence of Brindisi, life didn’t get much better. But there was a spiritual purpose that dominated the retreat: it was time for us to reflect on where God had been at work in our lives and where He was taking us in the course of this next year; then we got to share it with our fellow Cap Corps Volunteers. Fr. Marvin explained that in the course of this year we would be asked to share our spiritual stories with retreatants and so it only made sense to first share it with each other. He wasn’t kidding.

Over the course of the year, we’ve given more retreats than we can count and at each of them, one of us is called on to give a witness talk. We know each others' stories by heart. We’ve heard over and over again what our quirky younger selves were like. We've heard about how Katie was more concerned with getting peach Snapple after church every Sunday than with the Mass itself. We've laughed regularly on hearing how Hollis gave bunny ears to the bishop in her Confirmation photo. And I admit, I never fail to wonder how Kelley managed to beg her way out of CCD in the 5^th grade.

But we also know the other side of it, about how at some point in our lives, God’s grace began to transform us. We’ve heard how Hollis came back to the Eucharist after months at a yoga ashram and was overwhelmed by God’s grace. We’ve heard how Megan on seeing a boy her age kiss the feet of Jesus on the Cross first felt a burning desire to pray. We've heard many times how on reading the lives of the saints in middle school, Kelley felt inspired to live like them. And my housemates have heard more times than I’m sure they can count how I first encountered Christ in the Eucharist on the Feast of Corpus Christi ten years ago.

A lot of the kids who come on our retreats are familiar with the former paragraph, with the ways in which God can be a secondary concern in our lives or something they’ll think about later. Some of our retreatants are beginning to understand the latter paragraph, are encountering God’s grace in their lives and taking the first steps to saying “yes” to Him unconditionally. What few of our retreatants fully realize is that latter paragraph is just the beginning. We give witness to these conversion moments because they help others bridge the gap between giving bunny ears to the bishop and abandoning all for Christ’s love and joy, but they’re just the tip of the iceberg.

In the course of this year alone, we as Cap Corps Volunteers have grown tremendously in our relationship with God. Just as many of our retreatants have had intense moments before Our Lord in adoration, so have we. We’ve had moments where we recognized God’s awesomeness in a way we never did before, until we just can’t help but say with Lindsay, “God is so cool, why doesn’t everyone believe in Him?!” 

Just as we challenge our retreatants to follow God more closely in their lives, so too we have been challenged by God in many ways this year. Some of us have been challenged to make prayer a more regular part of our life as we learned to pray the Divine Office and began attending Mass every day. For me, as many of you know, God challenged me to be more outgoing, to reach out to people when I’d really rather be sitting back and observing. All of us have been challenged by community life, learning to be forgiving of each others’ quirks and faults, and to always love the people we live with, eat with, travel with and work with. Through this year God has been grinding away at all that holds us back from loving Him and our neighbor with our whole hearts. However deep we thought our relationship was with Him before, in some ways it’s grown deeper for all of us.

We tell the conversion story a lot, but it’s only the first chapter of a longer and more beautiful narrative. As Cap Corps Volunteer we have the rare privilege of seeing the bigger picture in our fellow housemates’ lives. In the lives of those we serve, we only see the beginning. The end is up to you.