SVS Christmas Retreat Teaches Love in Action to Teens
Posted on Fri Jan 18 2008
St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary
January 17, 2008
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary
575 Scarsdale Road, Crestwood, NY 10707
(914) 961-8313
www.svots.edu
SVS Christmas Retreat Teaches Love in Action to Teens
Crestwood, NY --
St Vladimir’s Seminary joined with
Orthodox Youth Outreach (OYO) in welcoming 35 high school students to the seminary for a Christmas retreat with a mission. The retreat, entitled “Who Is My Neighbor?” gave teens the opportunity to reflect and act on the Gospel imperative to love one’s neighbor as oneself.
Each year, the SVS Christmas retreat has provided Orthodox youth with the opportunity to meet and spend time with their peers while learning about their faith. This year’s event marked a departure from past retreats in its emphasis on putting faith and love into action. Participants explored the connection between God’s love for us, our love for God, and our love for our neighbor, not only through talks by guest speakers, learning activities and discussions, but also through actual outreach experiences. These hands-on experiences helped the teens go beyond theoretical discussions of Christian love, allowing them to express this love concretely through simple but personal acts of mercy.
The teens and speakers who participated represented more than a dozen parishes of several jurisdictions, including the OCA, the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese and the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese, as well as the Coptic Orthodox Church. The teens volunteered at a soup kitchen, distributed food, clothing, blankets and toiletries in Manhattan, and shared a meal with some of the homeless people they met. Retreat participant Olivia Morton, during an interview for Ancient Faith Radio, commented, “The best part was hands-on getting to know the poor people not only as those who are poor…but people with names…we took them out to breakfast, we ate with them, we ministered to them, and really tried to show them the love of Christ through us.”
For this service-oriented retreat, the seminary partnered with OYO, a ministry that gives teens the opportunity to live out their faith by serving others. Launched in 2004 by SVS alumnus Fr Kevin Scherer, OYO has coordinated urban mission events in major cities across the United States. This is the first time that OYO and St Vladimir’s Seminary have co-sponsored an event. OYO Program Director Jordan Henderson helped to plan and run the retreat. He also led the orientation and debriefing sessions that are characteristic of all OYO missions.
Throughout the retreat, the catchphrase often repeated was, “to get out of your comfort zone.” The orientation and debriefing sessions helped the participants to prepare for the unfamiliar situations that they found themselves in, and to process their experiences.
Along with the orientation sessions, the guest speakers helped the group to understand the context of these outreach projects. George Hazlaris, pastoral assistant at the Church of Our Savior in Rye, NY, set the right tone by calling his listeners to see and love society’s outcasts as fellow human beings made in the image of God. Fr Hector Firoglanis, assistant pastor at Annunciation Orthodox Church in Lancaster, PA, meditated on love for our neighbors as a response to God’s love for us and as an outgrowth of our love for Him. “If we loved God with all of our heart,” he said, “then we would see [the] image of Christ in each person we came across.” Emphasizing the need to love others in concrete ways, Fr Hector reminded the group, “Christ tells us to be merciful, not merely to talk about mercy.” Jordan Henderson provided a concluding reflection on the experiences of the retreat and how those experiences brought the parable of the Good Samaritan to life.
“It was a great experience to see that they were like us, and smart, and knew a lot. And it was great to listen to their stories, good and bad,” remarked one teen, describing the transition from seeing the homeless as anonymous and foreign to seeing them as “real people.”
Finally, the teens considered how to apply the lessons they had learned during the retreat to their daily lives. They discussed the different kinds of poverty that they may encounter in the people around them – spiritual, emotional, material, and so on – and how to reach out to those in various kinds of need. All the participants in the retreat hoped to continue to grow in their ability to love those around them and to be merciful to others “as [their] heavenly Father is merciful.”
St Vladimir’s Seminary is grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with Orthodox Youth Outreach, benefiting from their experience and well-designed program. For more information about Orthodox Youth Outreach visit their website at www.orthodoxyouthoutreach.net.
A photo gallery is available at
www.svots.edu.
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