Like most schools that offer Kairos retreats to their students, Roger Bacon High School in St. Bernard, Ohio, has developed its own traditions around the program’s basic framework of peer-led talks, liturgies, and music. But one tradition unique to the school doesn’t happen on the retreat at all.
At RB, parents gather at the school’s tiny Our Lady of Angels Chapel for an evening Mass to pray for their children. The students are told when the Mass begins, so they know the moment parents have begun praying for them.
“We started parent liturgies a a way of simply getting parents together to pray for their children,” says religion teacher Bob Von Luehrte, who helped start the Kairos program in 1995. “No ‘information’ or ‘meet the team’ or talk about grades. Nothing ‘practical’ as we usually expect from parents. Simply a way to support each other and support their children by prayer.
“Since we started the liturgies, we have always had more than half of the parents participate. Some of the strongest response has been from our non-Catholic parents. A small gesture of love, perhaps, but that is the point of Kairos – it is in the ordinary that we find, as Fr. Pat says, the ‘grace of God.’”
Fr. Pat is Fr. Pat McClosky, OFM (pictured), who has celebrated most of the parent Masses since they began in 2000. Formerly the school’s chaplain, he helped establish Kairos and has seen it affect many students’ lives by deepening their awareness of God’s presence, particularly as they experience it through the love of other people throughout their lives.
Kairos is a Greek word referring to time -- chronos is the word meaning ordinary time as measured by the sun or a clock, while kairos means a special experience where ordinary time seems suspended. At a Kairos retreat it’s referred to as “God’s time.” Clocks are covered and watches are forbidden so that “God’s time” can break through chronos. The Kairos program is based in part on Ignatian spirituality, and is used in schools throughout the country.
Roger Bacon offers three Kairos retreats a year to its seniors at Marydale Retreat Center in Erlanger, KY, and averages 50 students at each retreat. More than 2000 RB students have attended a Kairos retreat. The Mass pictured here is from November’s “K52,” or 52nd Kairos. More than 2000 RB students have made the retreat.
Students also attend Masses at the retreat -- the final Mass (pictured here with School President Fr. Bill Farris, OFM) takes place in the school’s library. But the parent Mass is its own special sort of “God’s time,” in which parents and their absent children are united by grace through prayer.
“When the students making a Kairos retreat learn that their parents are praying for them, it reinforces that we’re all in this together,” says Fr. Pat. “God wants all of us to ‘have life to the full’ (John 10:10); praying privately or at Mass reminds us of that.”
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