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[Back to index of April articles] Retreat focuses on choices, consequences By Lucy Chumbley Sex was the subject of the diocese's Feb. 24-26 High School retreat, "Choices and Consequences," which drew more than 140 teenagers to Maryland's Camp Letts for a weekend of honest and sometimes embarrassing conversation. Though sex is not a conventional topic for a church-sponsored retreat, Paul Canady, the diocese's deputy for youth ministry said, "if we can't talk about it in the church, then we shouldn't be talking about it at all." Organized by the diocese's Committee on Youth, a 15-member panel of teenagers from around the diocese, the retreat addressed sexuality from a spiritual perspective, one that is largely overlooked in public school curriculums. The Rev. Brian Prior, rector of the Church of the Resurrection in Spokane Valley, Washington, served as the event's keynote speaker. Prior has coordinated numerous events for young people in the Episcopal Church. "It's very difficult for schools to teach the values," Canady said. "It's one thing to teach them about STDs [sexually-transmitted diseases] and how to prevent them and abstinence - it's common sense. But it's not a values-based conversation." "I know they have lots of conversations about sex in the locker room and at the mall," said Janice Thomas, a nurse practitioner who serves as the pastoral care coordinator at St. Columba's, in Northwest Washington. "But they come to a church weekend to get something different. They want to talk about how they make relationships in God's world." In her presentation, Thomas gave the teenagers a clinical overview of everything from the male and female sex organs to STDs and birth control. But she also spoke to the retreat participants about the body's main sexual organs, "our heads and our hearts." "That's what makes us human beings and separates us from animals," she said. Thomas also spoke of the emotional complexity of sex, of how it makes people vulnerable and of the potential for shame. "We were in no way giving kids permission to be sexually active, but we're not damning them either for the choices they make," she said, explaining that she was able to draw from her experience at a pediatric school-based practice in a high-risk section of Atlanta to describe the consequences of some of those choices. In addition to learning about the less 'sexy' aspects of sex, "we talked about how sexuality is a gift and how we use that gift to serve another person, with the idea that it is best used to serve another person in a lifelong relationship," Canady said. "They might have never thought about what God wants us to do with our sexuality or that our sexuality is a gift from God and that we have some really big responsibilities with that gift." Following Thomas's talk, she and Canady answered around 30 anonymous questions that participants had placed in a specially designated bag over the course of the weekend. The questions ran the gamut from, 'Is oral sex sex?' to 'I think I might be gay; is that wrong?' Canady said. "We answered all of them," he said. "There were great questions. We answered those questions really honestly and gave young people some opportunity for feedback as well." In other weekend workshops the teenagers produced a collage of pictures cut from magazines that explored how the media portrays sex; created a “mirror” by writing 'what do I think people see when they see me' on one side of a piece of paper and 'what do I want people to see' on the other; and assembled and decorated small boxes as a representation of their sexuality. The retreat leaders had some pointers for the parents to take home, too. Thomas said she hoped parents had not sent their children to the camp in order to avoid having potentially awkward and uncomfortable conversations about sex themselves. She urged parents to prepare to answer their teenagers' questions about sex with candor. "[Teenagers] are struggling," she said. "They want very much to be good people and they need guidance about how." "I think that the most important thing parents need to know is that they need to be talking to their kids about sexuality and that they need to talk about it from the standpoint of values," Canady said. "Kids want to know, why is sex such a big deal? We want them to go home and ask their parents that." [Back to index of April articles]
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