One thing that happens at the very beginning, during the introduction the weekend, is that the director of the retreat house is given a chance to say a few words about the venue. (I’ve got a vague feeling that I introduced this practice when I was either rector of Tres Dias #27, Coordinator of Aventura #12, or running one of the SNECYR weekends for area youth at Camp Washington. But then again, many of the brilliant and insightful thoughts I think I’ve had turn out to have come from others, so maybe I didn’t. But I digress…)

Up gets Sister Theresina to have her chat. I like her – she’s a bubbly and feisty nun who seems to barrel her way through the day. She introduces the founder of their order (The Sisters of the Cross and Passion, aka “The Passionists”); she mentions that Elizabeth Prout grew up as a member of the Church of England before converting to Roman Catholicism, and is part-way through being canonized by Rome. She notes that this will be the first time someone who started out as a member of the C of E has ever been canonized by Rome.

She then goes on to ask us all to pray that this canonization will be successful… basically asking a bunch of Protestants to pray for the public acknowledgement of someone who switched sides to Roman Catholicism as an ‘in your face’ to the Church of England.

She’s a riot.

I’ve been involved in Tres Dias since 1989 here in Connecticut (CCTD #17, to be exact). Tres Dias is a type of community built around what is commonly called a “3-day weekend”. It started with a Catholic Cursillo in Spain in the mid 1940′s and has been growing and branching ever since. In 1981 my local Tres Dias started a teen group called Aventura. I was asked to be the music director for #8, and I’ve been involved with the teens ever since (we’re on weekend #26 now, holding one weekend a year). I wear several hats; one of them is that I write the newsletter for the group.

There are a lot of different organizations of this type, besides Cursillo, Tres Dias and Aventura – you can go here to get a (slightly out of date) very impressive pdf picture of the development of the 3-day weekend structure. Cursillo and Tres Dias exist to develop leaders in the local and global church; other communities may have other goals – Aventura‘s goal is to share the unbounded love of God for each of the teen guests; Kairos is a prison ministry; Kairos Outside is for women who have relatives incarcerated – often these prisoners have gone through Kairos and have changed lives as a result.

The 3DayOL site lists weekends that are coming up so you can send email “greetings” (on one page) or sign up to pray for them (on another page). Last year I wanted to give the teens a sense of what God was doing around the world, so I took the weekends listed on that site, put them into the newsletter and showed how many communities are meeting each month. I wrote a rough little server-side program in PHP to read the three-day weekend site and built an easy-to-grab table. You can run it here.

Later I thought it would be nice to share the tool – it allows people who are sending these greetings to other communities a way to grab all the contacts for the upcoming month at once. Considering that the only people I’ve told about the table are people on other weekends to whom I’ve sent these email “greetings”, it’s neat to see it starting to get some use:

Not a lot, but I think it’s climbing by leaps and spurts. I’ll continue to monitor the page and see if it catches on more.