By Gretchen Keiser

At the end of October, a group of 23 people spent the weekend together in the North Georgia mountain community of Cleveland.

The gathering, which included two priests, two married couples, a sister, and 16 single lay people from college age to their late 30s, was a new experience. It may be the beginning in the archdiocese of a significant movement capable of touching single people in the Church with real hope and healing.

It has the unpretentious name of “Single Young Adult Weekend.” This one was held in the simple community room of St. Paul the Apostle mission in Cleveland. Hosted by St. Paul and her sister parish of St. Francis of Assisi in Blairsville, the weekend drew people from Cleveland, Blairsville and Dahlonega. A married couple from All Saints and Father Al Jowdy were there to see if they might lead a weekend in Dunwoody. Others drove up from Lilburn, Decatur, Lawrenceville and Snellville.

Most didn’t know what they were getting into. The very word “single” attached to an event is enough, usually, to prompt many people to mentally write it off as fragmented, separate – perhaps mindlessly social and immature.

But this experience, from the beginning, defied those expectations. Hospitality and warmth surrounded it. St. Paul parishioners opened their doors to visitors and gave them food to take to the all-day sessions on Saturday and Sunday. Following the taillights of a parishioner’s car late Friday night, toward a distant “home” and bed, there was already a sense of belonging and care mixed with the tiredness.

As the weekend unfolded, the care was apparent in other ways. Leading the weekend were Father Bob Poandl, the Glenmary pastor of St. Paul and St. Francis, Ron and Donna Wildes, a married couple from the Blairsville parish, and three young single people – two women and a man – from Dahlonega and Snellville.

The group has worked together before in efforts to touch single people and help them find their place in the Church. The Wildes and Pat Doody, one of the single leaders, spent time last summer in New Jersey talking about the Single Young Adult Weekend with those who designed it. The other team members were Frank Isganitis and Theresa Fitts. Previously, all of them had participated with Father Poandl in a different experience for single people called CHOICE.

Their closeness invited the others who came to draw closer, too.

The weekend, which in some ways is modeled upon the design of the Parish Renewal Weekend, is surprising and daring in its willingness to speak maturely to single people and let them reflect on their needs, their family relationships, their sexuality and their longing for healing and help.

But its frankness and honesty are surrounded by prayer and strongly Catholic spirituality. Using a journal which those who come write in and keep, it approaches each topic with prayer for particular graces, with a vivid portrayal of a particular and human saint who displayed that grace, and with a Scripture reading and medication. Mass is celebrated both days.

Those who come hear one of the team leaders answer out loud the question participants are answering in their journals. Their honesty sets the tone and encourages frankness. Obviously carefully designed, the weekend balances private journal jottings and other sections which are shared with two other people in small groups. Even in the small groups people are encouraged not to discuss and comment on one another’s reflections, but to accept them as gestures of openness and trust.

On this particular weekend, the design and example of the team deeply touched people who took part and provoked moments of true reconciliation and healing. Memories, some painful and some happy, brought out real tears; they came in the careful structure of a talk on forgiveness, where it is needed, how to ask for forgiveness and how to give and receive it. The need for healing of a painful memory and the way to pray for healing was shown. Family relationships were at the heart of the weekend.

The discussion of sexuality gave people the chance to break free of distortions and provided a mature framework for a married couple and single lay people and celibate religious to talk about the wonder of sexuality and the way the various vocations in the Church complement one another.

People made friends. A single in her thirties got to listen to the freshness of college students and, in turn, won their admiration because she was a genuine graduate of the protest campuses of the sixties. People prayed simply for one another and, as the weekend progressed, confided their hurts to one another. Several groups formed who hope to prepare for Single Young Adult Weekends in their parishes during the first months of 1985. They looked around at their new friends, some in jeans and rock star t-shirts, and some in skirts and slacks, and thought about all the other people they knew who weren’t connected at all to the Church and who were really hurt.

Signs of the Church were breaking out all over the room by Sunday in gestures of love that could reach out to others. When it was time to leave, it really hurt to say goodbye.

(Gretchen Keiser is a not-so-young single person who took part in the Single Young Adult Weekend in Cleveland Oct. 26-28).