Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Volunteering to Serve

Volunteering to Serve

This week Salesian Missions, thru the Salesian Lay Missioners program, has been providing orientation to 14 new volunteers, most of them young (like right out of college) but a few apparently well beyond that. They're getting about a week of intercultural and other aspects of life in the missions, together with some young people from at least one other sponsoring organization, at Maryknoll.

That will be followed by a week or 10 days of experiencing Salesian youth ministry, and practicing it, at the summer day camp at our 2 Port Chester parishes, Holy Rosary and Corpus Christi. Finally, the new SLMs will make a 6-day spiritual retreat, together with about 20 SDBs who happen to making that particular retreat; they'll get some more theoretical orientation at the same time and complete on some of their final paperwork. On Aug. 6 Fr. Tom Dunne will commission them for their missions.

This morning I had the privilege of going up to Maryknoll to offer Mass for the SLMs and other trainees and then being available to them for Reconciliation.

Here's a photo of our 14 generous folks taken right after Mass. Most of them had their eyes open by then!

No comments: