Meeting 4. - Masks

Tags: Identity, Freedom, Truth, Art activity, Sharing questions, Text work, Formative

Notes for the animator

For this meeting we only have about 40 minutes. We don’t want to bombard participants with new content here anymore, but rather focus on sharing what we have experienced. This should be a meeting where you simply talk in the group about these retreats. The outline contains questions that can help with this. A brief sharing of God’s Word should also serve to summarize the retreats. A very important element of the meeting is participants writing on the masks they just made at LM, inscriptions that will reflect what for them is such a mask that doesn’t allow them to be themselves. This is very important - participants won’t have time later to do this, and masks with inscriptions are needed by each of them for the Lightmotiv summary.

Inscriptions on masks

Each of you just created your own mask.

  • How did you like it?

  • Have you ever done something similar?

  • What impressions did you have when you saw your face reflected in plaster?

We talked a lot at these retreats about freedom, about being a New Creation, about being a Christian and about the style of our life in the world. Now think about such a thing, such an aspect of your life that doesn’t allow you to be yourself.

  • What is such a “mask” of yours that prevents you from being yourself?

We emphasize that we won’t be sharing this and ask participants to write this thing/these things on their mask.

Warning

Each participant will need their mask for the summary -> it’s important that they think carefully and write “something” on their masks.

Questions

Now there is simply time to share what we experienced during these retreats. Example questions:

  • What was most revealing for me during these retreats? What surprising/new did I learn?

  • What did I experience most?

  • Reflections for evening prayer?

Sharing God’s Word

Let’s read the text with participants and share what we think about it, what reflections (also/especially apropos the experienced retreats) appear to us when we read this text. It’s possible that during sharing participants will want to return to content that was touched on during the whole retreats and share their experiences again.

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

—1 Pet 2:9-10

Prayer

It’s worth praying here for the fruits of these retreats, that leaving here for our homes and environments in which we live, we would know how to be ourselves and live according to what we profess. Proposal for form: you can pray together with the text of the song “Give us a great heart”.