It seemed like a great idea. Get a school bus driver license, earn a good part time wage, and drive church and youth events. That's how they get you and it works, 14 years later I'm still driving part-time through at least 4 different full-time jobs. It's a great gig while looking for your next opportunity or starting a business. Everywhere you go these days they are heavily recruiting school bus drivers. Recruiting drivers and training was part of my job for 4 years. It's also a great way to get to know the lay of the land, the back roads, and a sense of the youth attending your schools.
It was the Schoenstatt Sisters of Mary that I met on one of those youth church trips. While my passengers were attending a presentation at the Schoenstatt retreat center in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota (If you're a Laura Ingalls Wilder fan, it's that Sleepy Eye, MN) I wandered into the retreat centers bookstore. I gained the attention, as the only potential customer in the store, of the sister running the bookstore that day. I had about 90 minutes and took advantage of that time to learn all about the Schoenstatt mission and it's founder, Father Joseph Kentenich. I left the store with a couple of books. Father Kentenich (1885[–1968) had survived the Dachau concentration camp. I definitely wanted to learn more of his story. I had a teacher that had peaked my interest in the history of World War II although its history from a Catholic historical perspective was new to me.
My first retreat was with a Schoenstatt Fathers priest as the retreat master, and 16 other men. The theme of the retreat was "Discernment in Daily Life". It was a very fruitful retreat for me. The prayerful practicality of the Schoenstatt Apostolic movement as expressed in the teachings of its founder Father Kentenich. It would take many more words to really describe in detail "Discernment in Daily Life" as taught through this Schoenstatt Father. The broader take away for for me was getting out of my comfort zone and being aware of the things coming to me and attempting to put them in the right order with proper understanding. A tall order that I work on everyday.
Maybe these two graphics that I created will give you some insight to what I learned from the weekend. I like creating visuals usually more than I like writing but writing has given me the "pause" to remember the divine intersections that created the story I'm living. Not all of the intersections are Happy but they have meaning. One of my favorite reads was the book "From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life." The author, Jacques Barzun, has created "backstory" of a lot of the history that we learned from the homogenized history education system we may have experienced in our youth. In addition, if you have twelve minutes, I think the Ted Talk below gives you an idea of how it all comes together and a frame work to understand Happy. In German, Schoenstatt means Beautiful Place and is a real location in Germany.
