I just got back from the same Kairos myself. I went out of curiosity about the aformentioned secrets, plus the chance to get to know new people. I am generally annoyed by wrong ideas, but I didn’t mind Kairos as much as Ciphermind. Also I think he’s exaggerating a little.
We did get some sleep, probably less than seven hours a night but more than four. I’m guessing that based on my mental state, because we really didn’t have any clocks. We did have occasional breaks during which we could be alone and sleep if we chose (I think around 4 hours of this on the 4-day retreat, of which I used 1.5 for sleeping). The secrecy is for real, though. Nearly everything in his reply to ZankerH is true, but we didn’t have to hold a cross (we could just hold the candle), and I didn’t pray and got away with it. Just for clarification, we were all fully clothed during the “naked bonfire.” Alumni call it that to non-alums and insist it involves actual nudity, but everyone is pretty sure they’re making it up.
I wouldn’t call it a “ritualistic breaking of my peers’ psyches for the sake of a retreat whose singular goal is to convert them to Catholicism.” We were encouraged to spill all our secrets and past traumas and family troubles and be consoled by our new best friends forever, but since nobody knows beforehand if you have any past traumas, it’s pretty easy to get away with not spilling anything. Some people did break down and cry on everyone’s shoulders, but I didn’t.
It was less about converting us to Catholicism than to general theism. One or two people out of the 11 I heard talk about it did claim to have found faith in God there, so it works at least a little). The main thing they were trying to convert us to is love and hugs and rainbows and flowers and bunny rabbits, which gets deeply annoying but not particularly horrible.
I mostly used Kairos to get to know the other people, trying to co-opt it for my own social skill-building purposes. The main thing I learned from it was how to pretend to love people I actually couldn’t care much less about. The first thing I did when I got back was tell one of my (graduated without going) friends everything. I’m not telling anyone who might still attend, much for the same reason I wouldn’t spoil a book. I notice as I finish writing this that my hands are shaking a little, but I don’t know why.
My objection isn’t with what effect the retreat had on me; but rather that I allowed the social benefits and the positive feelings it gave me cloud the fact that it is an institution of indoctrination. I didn’t mind it at the time, but the techniques employed were very obviously ways to put people in emotionally vulnerable, and secondarily irrational, positions.
Know that the primary goal of this “book” you refuse to spoil was always, from its inception, to make peoples’ relationships with Jesus stronger. To me, keeping Kairos’ secrets is tacitly condoning its practices. Of course it will make the retreat less impactful; that’s what we need. A golden, and easy, opportunity to lessen the hold that irrationality has on our peer-group exists here; all that needs to happen is a simple leak.
I just got back from the same Kairos myself. I went out of curiosity about the aformentioned secrets, plus the chance to get to know new people. I am generally annoyed by wrong ideas, but I didn’t mind Kairos as much as Ciphermind. Also I think he’s exaggerating a little.
We did get some sleep, probably less than seven hours a night but more than four. I’m guessing that based on my mental state, because we really didn’t have any clocks. We did have occasional breaks during which we could be alone and sleep if we chose (I think around 4 hours of this on the 4-day retreat, of which I used 1.5 for sleeping). The secrecy is for real, though. Nearly everything in his reply to ZankerH is true, but we didn’t have to hold a cross (we could just hold the candle), and I didn’t pray and got away with it. Just for clarification, we were all fully clothed during the “naked bonfire.” Alumni call it that to non-alums and insist it involves actual nudity, but everyone is pretty sure they’re making it up.
I wouldn’t call it a “ritualistic breaking of my peers’ psyches for the sake of a retreat whose singular goal is to convert them to Catholicism.” We were encouraged to spill all our secrets and past traumas and family troubles and be consoled by our new best friends forever, but since nobody knows beforehand if you have any past traumas, it’s pretty easy to get away with not spilling anything. Some people did break down and cry on everyone’s shoulders, but I didn’t.
It was less about converting us to Catholicism than to general theism. One or two people out of the 11 I heard talk about it did claim to have found faith in God there, so it works at least a little). The main thing they were trying to convert us to is love and hugs and rainbows and flowers and bunny rabbits, which gets deeply annoying but not particularly horrible.
I mostly used Kairos to get to know the other people, trying to co-opt it for my own social skill-building purposes. The main thing I learned from it was how to pretend to love people I actually couldn’t care much less about. The first thing I did when I got back was tell one of my (graduated without going) friends everything. I’m not telling anyone who might still attend, much for the same reason I wouldn’t spoil a book. I notice as I finish writing this that my hands are shaking a little, but I don’t know why.
My objection isn’t with what effect the retreat had on me; but rather that I allowed the social benefits and the positive feelings it gave me cloud the fact that it is an institution of indoctrination. I didn’t mind it at the time, but the techniques employed were very obviously ways to put people in emotionally vulnerable, and secondarily irrational, positions.
Know that the primary goal of this “book” you refuse to spoil was always, from its inception, to make peoples’ relationships with Jesus stronger. To me, keeping Kairos’ secrets is tacitly condoning its practices. Of course it will make the retreat less impactful; that’s what we need. A golden, and easy, opportunity to lessen the hold that irrationality has on our peer-group exists here; all that needs to happen is a simple leak.
I have noticed symptoms like that in myself when I (looking back on it) was trying to understate the emotional impact something had on me.
A 10-20% recruitment rate is pretty good as these things go, actually.
Yes but these effects can be very short-lived.