Year 8 Day of Reflection

The Year 8 Day of Reflection had as its theme, ‘Needing others, needing Christ’. We began by experiencing our need for others in a variety of team games involving balloons and much hilarity. Progressing to a more reflective mode, we spent some time, individually and in silence, thinking about how we depend on other people for the basic necessities of life and for the enriching aspects of life. We noted that we depend on a huge number and variety of people, both near at hand and far away, both rich and powerful as well as poor and powerless. We mapped out ‘How wide is the web that holds me?’ This exercise generated some very fruitful discussion.

Focussing in on our school experience and relationships, we explored life in a typical classroom and, using a cartoon of ‘Bod’s classroom’, we concluded that each person brings something valuable to a group, in times of weakness as well as strength, in times of solitude as well as interaction. We need each other to walk alongside us in good times and in difficult times and to encourage us and bring out our gifts, helping us become more fully ourselves.

This insight that we need each other to help us become fruitful was expressed and consolidated through some drama. Each group of students devised a process leading to a product. The process was presented, with great ingenuity, in mime with sound effects and we were challenged to guess the product and identify the process.

At the end of the morning we were introduced to the main theme of the afternoon, our need for Christ, in a guided reflection. This was explored in groups in the afternoon through looking at a set of stations of the cross, each group taking one station, and discussing the issues arising from it. Students wrote prayers arising from their discussions which formed the basis of our closing liturgy.

This is an example of one prayer, written in response to the fifth station, ‘Simon of Cyrene helps Jesus to carry his cross’:

Lord, we pray for the courage to stand by Jesus and have the will to sacrifice our lives alongside him for the benefit of the less fortunate and those in need. 

Help us to make sacrifices to provide for them so they can have a better life. 

Help us as we try to raise money for those in need. 

We pray for the sick, the homeless, the lonely and those who are desperate. 

Amen.