Internship Orientation Retreat

What does it mean to orient oneself? According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, to orient oneself means to determine one's location. On Wednesday, May 20, the Gregory the Great Internship kicked off the summer with an orientation day filled with hiking, games, and talks. It was a fun day, accentuated with team-building games such as song competitions and spikeball, in which I sensed a wonderful spirit of camaraderie and enthusiasm among us interns. Orientation always has a reference point, which we move toward as a form of preparation. As interns, we were orienting ourselves to working together and preparing for our mission. This included focusing on our many gifts to see how they will work together to fulfill our mission of equipping Christians to renew culture.

Through the talks, we learned about the charisms of the Holy Spirit and the Working Geniuses, the forms of culture, and the different models by which we can help Christians renew culture. These have led me to reflect on how self-knowledge is the beginning of helping others. If we do not know our strengths and weaknesses, it will be impossible for us to employ them in serving others; furthermore, we will be unable to provide others with what we have if we do not even know we have it! Identifying our charisms and geniuses provided us with a basic self-knowledge that inherently required a natural openness – the desire to know. Self-knowledge is the beginning of wisdom, and receptivity is the beginning of self-knowledge, and therefore of wisdom and of cultivating culture.

The model of culture that Dr. Topping presented in his talk comprises four important elements: ideas, institutions, individuals, and the supernatural, which encompasses and vivifies the other three. Getting to take part in the internship community through games, hiking, and shared meals made it clear to me that we were already engaging in the kind of culture this model proposes. This means that we were actually putting culture into practice. And we were preparing to give it to others by receiving it ourselves. By spending the day thus, we were allowing ourselves to be open and receptive to ourselves, to culture, and to community, preparing us to go and share those values with the world.

In light of all this and looking back at the day’s schedule, those two words stood out to me most. The two things I experienced the most on orientation day were culture and community. Our mission is to equip Christians to renew culture. And to equip Christians with the tools to do so, we need to receive them first.