Bishops and Cheerleaders

On Saturday, I went to the Northern CA youth retreat, or the “NCCYC” as it is referred to by those in charge (no I’m not kidding). It was nice to see everyone there, and it was doubly nice because the “retreat” center was the new dorms at UC Davis, which are like 30 yards from Ryerson, the dorm that I lived in freshman year. That brought back great memories. Here are some non-church-related things that I really enjoyed doing:

• Eating at the new DC. It’s like the old DC but way bigger and way better. I even ate healthily and met an Ethiopian food-service person who knew Mengistu! This brought back good memories.
• Playing wiffleball in front of the dorms. Is it even summer until you’ve played wiffleball? We must have played 50 times freshman year. This brought back good memories. More about this game later.
• Sitting and talking in a dorm room. Five or six of us talked PCAL Basketball for about an hour, with one person on each bed, one on the floor, a few standing up in the doorway, and myself on the dresser. Is there any other way to talk in the dorms? Seriously: no two people in the same talking position, people walking in and out of the conversation...this brought back good memories.
• Taking a shower in the dorms. I told Heather that I showered in the dorms and she was disgusted that I would use a communal shower when it wasn’t an absolute necessity, but my carpoolers probably would have been more disgusted if I didn’t shower after the wiffleball game. It was the touch, the sounds, and the smell, really: water pressure that stings your skin, being able to have a full-on conversation while showering, and the smell of 100 different types of bar soap mixed together. This brought back fantastic memories, and I’m baffled as to how the communal shower was one of my greatest memories of freshman year. I have a feeling that last sentence will be taken out of context. (By the way, the showers in the new dorms are not only individual, but also have an individual changing area for each shower!

Oh, it was also a spiritual “retreat”. Bishop Angaelos from England was fantastic as usual, with his intelligent, simple, straightforward lessons. I especially enjoyed his lesson to the high schoolers, which I filmed. It was not exactly focused on one subject, but he touched on a few different points that will certainly give each kid something unique to think about. My favorite part was when he asked the kids: “What is the most important thing that we possess here on Earth?...It starts with a ‘T.’” After a few half-hearted guesses, with the Bishop getting weary, one of the kids says “transgressions!”, so the Bishop says something like: “What? How does that makes sense to you?” Earlier in the lesson, I had told one of the quieter kids to say something, and so it’s at this point, of all possible moments in the day, with the starts-with-a-T parameter in place, that this quiet kids says: “be Christ-like”. Bishop Angaelos just drops his face and blinked in confusion. “I guess that has a ‘T’ in it!”

By the way, the answer to his question is “time”. We have to use our time wisely if we want the eternal reward.

So it was a good “retreat”. The reason that I am writing “retreat” in quotes is because you can’t really have a retreat when there are literally 2000 high school cheerleaders (in town for some annual competition) running around the dining hall, dancing and singing and basically drawing as much attention to themselves as possible. As the San Jose “Saturday-only” group went to our cars at like 10:00 pm, one of the cheerleaders yelled to us and then performed some interesting “moves” in her dorm window. Tony then said to all of us: “Welcome to the church retreat.”