By Suzanne Haugh, Staff Writer

COLLEGE PARK — It wasn’t what they wore—Abercrombie T-shirts, fatigues, yellow scarves imprinted with a eucharistic symbol or hooped eyebrow rings. It wasn’t their native tongues—Vietnamese, Spanish or English. And whether they listened to Jay-Z, Blink 182 or N’Sync was of little concern.

Many of them, however, in a scene similar at times to a rock concert, stood shoulder to shoulder singing joyfully or professing with their presence a love for Christ and the desire to be “in the light and shine like the stars in the heavens.”

Over 700 teens were roused to their feet by the music of Ed Bolduc and Band and also challenged and uplifted through the stories and wisdom of speakers present for the teen track of the June 16 “Come To Me” celebration.

Jeff Cavins, EWTN Talk Show Host,

On God’s Transforming Love

The call to be Christ’s disciples wove its way into the presentations of each speaker, starting with Jeff Cavins, a television talk show host of EWTN’s “Life on the Rock.”

Cavins recalled a presentation by Lou Holtz, former Notre Dame football coach, who shared a poem called “The Dash,” written by one of his players as he reflected on a walk through a cemetery. The player was not struck by the birth date or date of death on tombstones but by the dash in between, wondering for what each person might have lived.

“You may have 80 years, 60 years—some of you only one year—to live. What will your dash look like?” Cavins asked the teens. “God has put a seed in each of your hearts to make a difference.”

One’s self-image plays an important part in how much that seed is allowed to grow, and is based upon which of two voices inside one’s head a person will follow, Cavins explained.

“One says, ‘You’re a loser.’ The second tells you, ‘Do something in life to make a difference.’”

Cavins candidly and humorously shared his own past secret of bedwetting as a middle schooler and how this fashioned in him a poor self-image.

“I would run home after school to make sure the sheets had been changed before my friends came over,” he confided. In the sixth grade, Cavins “was at the top of my game” until an embarrassing episode during a school assembly filled him with shame and fear to stand before others. His career in communications, however, testifies to God’s transforming love.

“God can do exciting things with every one of you,” he said.

Proof of God’s power and willingness to work through us is in the story of the multiplication of loaves and fishes, Cavins suggested, pointing to the apostles’ reaction when Jesus nixes their idea “to send (the hungry crowd) away to Wendy’s or Burger King.”

“Imagine if you were one of the 12 apostles and I say to you, ‘Give them something to eat.’ ‘Yeah, right. There’s not enough,’ you say. Right away when Jesus calls to you, you say, ‘I can’t do anything.’ Jesus is not looking for ability; he’s looking for availability,” Cavins exclaimed, adding that what may seem like only a “half a hoagie,” unable to fill even one person, is enough for Jesus to work with.

After giving thanks and blessing the bread, “Jesus breaks the bread and gives you a little piece and says, ‘Feed ‘em.’ He hands you each half a hoagie,” Cavins explained. “You turn around and face the crowd with a hoagie and you do what you can. Then you go back to Jesus who is standing with another hoagie and you feed the second row, then the third,” Cavins continued. “Do you know what’s going on? Soon you’re running the aisles; you’re entering into the supernatural . . . The key is if what you have is in the hands of Jesus, it is enough.”

Cavins drew attention to Mother Teresa who came to Calcutta with only the Bible, a rosary, a sari and 45 rupees, but most importantly with a desire “to do something beautiful for God.”

Fed by the Eucharist, Mother Teresa, a nun her order’s superior at the time had said was too frail to think of starting such a ministry, one day walked into the streets of Calcutta, Cavins said, and found a man dying.

“She rolls this man into her chest and says, ‘Jesus, my Jesus, welcome.’ First row,” said Cavins, paralleling the miracle of the loaves and fishes to one simple act of love from which has grown an international ministry. “Daily, she goes back to Jesus, then back to the streets. Back to Jesus, back to the streets. Back to Jesus, back to the streets.”

“God has put something in your hearts,” he challenged the teens. “Give it to Jesus . . . One little seed can grow into a big tree (only by) going back to Jesus, back to the streets. Back to Jesus, back to the streets . . .”

Father Stan Fortuna, CFR, On The Invitation Our Baptism Offers

Father Stan Fortuna, CFR, further developed the theme of discipleship in his session entitled “The Invitation.” One of the original members of the Community of Franciscan Friars of the Renewal and an internationally known musician and preacher, Father Fortuna shared his love and gift of music as teens joined him in one song’s refrain on living selflessly for Jesus: “F-A-M-I-L-Y—Forget about me, I love you.”

The song spoke of the breakdown of the family as “the devil’s prime attack.” He added later that through our baptism we come to realize the bond and access to the power available to us in battling our own weaknesses.

Through our “modus operandi,” or “mode of reason,” Father Fortuna explained, “we all have a particular way of thinking, but we have to begin thinking with the mind of Christ, with the mind of the church.”

Baptism provides us with a “full, complete cleansing of our sins,” said Father Fortuna, adding that we often fail to access the power Christ offers us through the church.

“We need to get online, use the phone line we have to the mystery of Christ, but we don’t know how to use it. We’re too selfish, saying, ‘Forget about you, what about me?’”

He referred to the recent NBA playoffs and the championship won by the Los Angeles Lakers made possible only after the players wised up, forgot about themselves as individuals and played as a team with the desire to win another ring.

“Personally you have to learn to swim against the tide of this world’s mentality,” which the 44-year-old priest referred to as “stinking thinking.” To reinforce his point, he referred to a bumper sticker that reads “Any dead fish can float downstream.”

Instead, one must seek to serve the interest of others by going “back to Jesus, back to the streets. And when the torrent comes to us, we can be like the salmon and swim upstream,” he said.

He challenged the teens to witness one skilled in defying the pull of this world, Pope John Paul II. “Look at the Holy Father. Watch the way the man is dying. Hear now, watch him, learn from him, be inspired by him.”

Baptism allows us the power to “live freely.”

“Show me someone who is free. That old man is free.”

He introduced the teens to the meaning of “concupiscence” or “what robs us of original holiness.”

“It gives us a tilt, an inclination to sin, like the way we feel angry, selfish or find it hard to pray, or lusting for a person’s body or people lusting for power,” he explained. Baptism, though, gives us access to the love of God allowing us to share in Christ’s “Sonship,” he said, adding that the “saints found a way to be free.”

Grace alone is not enough, he said, suggesting that teens need to attend daily Mass and perpetual adoration, pray the rosary and other devotions. “Get baptized into Him. Many people have no clue how good, how awesome God is.”

Father Fortuna shared a new song to come out soon entitled “Say Yes to Sex,” with lyrics based on “The Theology of the Body According to John Paul II—Human Love and the Divine Plan.”

“There is a plan God did design to make you shine,” he said.

One example of God’s transforming love ironically occurred on the day Timothy McVeigh was executed for the bombing in Oklahoma City. On that same Monday, the pope was beatifying a murderer who had sought asylum in a Capuchin monastery and who was later redeemed, Father Fortuna said. “The same stuff that causes us to sin, God wants it . . . God wants to take you and make you brand new.”

His final song was a prayer to Jesus, in which he challenged teens to let their lives be touched by Jesus as the saints before them.

Karen Reynolds, Youth Minister, On The Call Of Discipleship

Karen Reynolds, program director of youth outreach at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, presented the next segment on the journey of discipleship with Christ entitled “RSVP: Are you coming or not?”

Recalling how our God is the God who parted the Red Sea, Reynolds urged teens not to be afraid to ask God for things in prayer. She recalled the story of a person who died and went to heaven and to whom Jesus shows a room filled with beautifully wrapped gifts. Jesus tells this person, “These are all the things I wanted to give you, but you never asked,” said Reynolds.

She continued her presentation reflecting on the Eucharist, “which is what it’s all about.”

Although Reynolds went through a time when she was skeptical about the Eucharist being the “body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus,” she invited teens to face their doubts about the sacrament in order to have the faith to believe in the mystery of Christ’s way of dwelling with us. “ . . . Ask God to show himself and what he becomes in the Eucharist.”

Calling sacraments “kisses from heaven,” she added, “They’re God’s way of being affectionate to us, his way of being one with us.”

The sacrament of reconciliation was also a struggle for Reynolds at one time. “Why tell a priest when I can go straight to Jesus,” she admitted to thinking, but added, “Reconciliation is another way that God wants to give himself to me.”

Not only are those leaving the sacrament of reconciliation clean of their sins, but also they are saints, she said. “The Lord has called us to be the next saints because of our love of Christ. Get to reconciliation and let God love you through that. If you don’t know how to go about it, just tell the priest.”

Recalling how courage is one mark of discipleship, Reynolds confessed at how humiliating it can be to go before her confessor every three weeks and admit “that I messed up again.” But she does so out of her yearning to be in relationship with God. “I beg you to take a hold of what God has for you.”

She challenged teens to make this upcoming school year the best year of their lives by making a decision to “win the love of your high school to Jesus Christ, for every kid to have a chance to know about Jesus.”

She suggested teens be loving disciples of Christ, themselves, and to pray for their friends. “Let him use you to tell them about Jesus . . . Jesus calls you to be his disciples. Start loving your friends where they are.”

She asked the teens to continue to discover Jesus in Scripture, citing Romans 6:23: “For the wages of sin is death; the gift of God is eternal life with Christ Jesus.”

She expressed her love of the apostle Peter because “it seems every time he opened his mouth he got himself in trouble.” To show how Jesus never lets us sink too low if we remain in him, Reynolds retold the story of the apostles, terrified in the midst of a storm, who saw Jesus walking on water. Assuring the apostles not to be afraid, Jesus looks on as Peter, mustering up enough courage, attempts to walk on water toward Jesus. “It was when he took his eyes off of Jesus that he fell. Jesus doesn’t say to Peter, ‘drown,’ but puts his hand out saying, ‘Take my hand, oh ye of little faith.’”

“Do it afraid,” Reynolds advised the teens called to be disciples of Christ. “Ask God to give you the courage. Do it afraid and live life to the fullest. Don’t let fear grip you.”

She shared accounts of two teens that embraced life and not their fears. “Go be disciples,” she said, adding the pope’s challenge to them to be the “saints of the new millennium through Christ’s holiness.”

Real World’s Matt Smith

On Celebrating Discipleship

The afternoon’s final speaker was Matt Smith, a former MTV “Real World” cast member and now the national spokesperson for Life Teen. His humorous testimony of his own journey as Christ’s disciple focused on the celebration of how one moves within and is affected by the body of Christ, the church, and the secular world.

Following the abrupt end of a romance while at Georgia Tech, Smith recalled the ensuing hurt and darkness the following day that was momentarily interrupted by a knock on his dorm room door. “Have you been to Mass today,” a girl asked him as he wondered how she knew he was Catholic. He accepted the invitation to what the girl called the “teeny bopper Mass” at the Cathedral of Christ the King, Atlanta, and struggled to “keep from bawling in the car.”

As he walked into the church a young girl handed him a song sheet and welcomed him to the Life Teen Mass, Smith said, recalling how the simple gesture was a ray of sunlight on a dark day. Once inside, instead of finding detached teens taking up the back pews of the church, they crowded the front singing joyfully during Mass.

“I knelt down and had the most intense hour of prayer in my life,” Smith said. “I decided not to chase my goals but to do God’s will. I was so tired of my goals; they just hurt.”

During the profession of faith, Smith looked around at the youth. “I saw the fire the high schoolers had, the warmth they had; I was dying for it.”

He accepted the challenge to live out his faith, later becoming involved in the Life Teen ministry. As his faith life took front and center, Smith began to pursue a dream to be selected as a cast member on “Real World,” sending in an audition tape about his life. Defying a staff member’s prediction that he was “so not getting on the show” because of his openness in sharing his faith, Smith continued to clear the hurdles of each interview phase all the while unafraid to profess his love for Christ and the Catholic Church.

“I prayed before every interview,” he said, adding that he would pay $1,000 to have a picture of his interrogators’ faces when he would take out and flip open his Bible, or sit back and say, “Okay, let’s talk about the stigmata.”

Months after the interviewing began the phone rang, “See you in New Orleans,” the director said. “I screamed like a girl,” Smith admitted.

“When you’re living in God’s will a lot of cool things happen,” Smith said, foreshadowing what was to come of his stay at the Belfort Mansion in New Orleans, living with six strangers. “I know that God says, ‘I go before you always.’” And Smith made sure God was there, unafraid to share his faith with his new housemates. It wasn’t always easy, though. At one of the first house meetings on the show, which followed an incident where he privately asked two roommates to refrain from using God’s name in vain, Smith was admonished for “preaching to everybody” and being “close minded.”

It was then, during the season of Lent, that Smith knew he needed to attend daily Mass. Throughout the series, he continued to witness to his faith, sharing with one roommate, in particular, what sustained him. This new friend also began attending Mass with Smith and on Holy Thursday they washed each other’s feet. One event that never left the film editing room was when all the housemates went to church on Easter Sunday.

“I was the proudest soccer Mom in all of New Orleans,” said Smith, who drove them.

Smith recalled a personal prayer said shortly before his time with the “The Real World” crew came to an end. Standing on a balcony for a photo shoot with Mardi Gras revelers and decadence all around, Smith remembered his call to be “a man of God.” On a balcony directly across from the photo shoot, Playboy had its own party. He prayed for his housemates as well as those on the opposite balcony. During the fall of the same year, Smith and another “Real World” housemate were signing autographs for a travel agency at a convention when a young girl approached them. She was working at the Playboy booth. That night they walked around and Smith noticed how she attracted stares.

“‘I’m tired of this,’ she said. ‘People treat me like an object just to be consumed,’” he recalled her saying. He told her that he had made some good and bad choices in his life, but that we all remain children of God. He shared his decision “to wait to celebrate my sexuality in marriage,” admitting to his virginity. “I would do anything to have that right now,” she said. He discovered that the girl was Catholic and had grown up in New Orleans, and, in fact, had been on the balcony during Mardi Gras on the same day as the “Real World” photo shoot. “This was the girl I had prayed for; this is how God moves.”

Smith encourages discussions of faith, be it at a bowling alley at 3 a.m. in the presence of celebrities or on his web site, www.supa-fly.com.

“Why? Because in real life it is what sustains you after the highs and lows, the glamour and the glitz; God is always there.”

He urged the teens to share their faith, reminding them “to embrace God in your life. Accept him and watch your life grow.”

Nothing fills “the void” in life like God, he added, and ended with a quote by Nelson Mandela.

“We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our light shine, we consciously give other people permission to do the same.”

Teens React To Christ, To One Another

Besides a few problems caused by the larger-than-anticipated turnout, teens reveled in the chance to praise God together in the teen track, spearheaded by Jennifer Garrard, a parishioner at St. Peter Chanel, Roswell, and director of development, marketing and admissions at Queen of Angels School, Roswell.

Chris Tsui, a junior at St. Pius X High School, Atlanta, came to the event with his sister, Stephenie, and other St. Pius students. He likened the experience to a rock concert but added, “a rock concert is fun for one night, but this is like a mission we can carry out.”

Stephenie expressed her surprise at the crowd and how “incredible” the sense of community was. When asked about the Eucharist in her life she said, “It’s amazing; it changes your life.”

Calling himself a “big supporter of the Eucharist,” Philip Consuegra, 17, a parishioner at the Cathedral of Christ the King, said that seeing the turnout speaks volumes of his generation. “There are so many teens gathered together to worship the Lord—it’s just awesome and says so much about modern day teens. It goes against all they say.”

Wearing the yellow scarf of the Vietnamese Eucharistic Youth Group, Long Nguyen, 24, from Holy Cross Church, Atlanta, took in the event while overseeing those in his group. He spoke of the challenges teens face. “It’s difficult. The teens in the group face all kinds of trouble, in relationships, families, school, and how they deal with the pressures and influences.”

Events like these and studying Scripture lead the youth on the right path, he said. “God wants them to be happy with their lives, to love each other. They have each other and always have God and their families.”

A parishioner at St. Peter Chanel, Roswell, and ready to turn 15, Lauren Lagasse is overjoyed to have found Life Teen when she moved to Atlanta last October from Lexington, Ky. “There wasn’t anything like this there. I love it! The retreats are awesome.”

While holding hands with his girlfriend, Jeffrey Lewis, 14, of Sacred Heart Church, Griffin, recalled asking to come to the June event following his experience during the Homecoming Retreat held earlier this year. The day’s event calls him to “lead other teens at church to Christ,” possibly starting with his friend, Anna, who was also present but skeptical of the other teen’s enthusiasm and faith.

For most teens, Saturday’s brief encounter brought teens back to Jesus, back to the streets . . . and back to each other.

FUNKY FRANCISCAN -- Father Stan Fortuna, CFR, reaches his teen audience through music that bears sounds of rap and hip-hop with a spiritual message. When Father Fortuna is not preaching with music, he serves the poor and needy in his community of the South Bronx, N.Y.
Photo by Michael Alexander