Building a Community: The YE way

By: Sem. Lester P. De Guzman

 

Let us know more about the YE, the Youth Encounter (YE) is a basic Christian formation program especially design for young people, it was started Virac, Catanduanes, in 1971. And it was founded by     + Msgr. Jose “Ping” Medina, and Bishop Jose Sorra.

                The YE program was approved in 1986 by our bishops and endorsed for the catholic youth of the Philippines. Today, it is being conducted in various parishes, schools, centers, and dioceses all over the country.

The Seminarians of Fr. Angelo Pasa minor seminary Cagayan de Oro, experienced their first youth encounter along with some youth ministers of diocese of Malaybalay Bukidnon, and was facilitated by Sr. Lerma (Canossian sister) and Youth Encounter facilitators. It was held at Mary’s spring retreat house at Bukidnon on October 23-25 2013. Before the youth encounter starts our Superior (Fr. Fermin “Jao” Leoveras, Fdcc) was asked to give a message for the youth at that moment and leave us with a saying “In every situation, take it as an opportunity to learn”. The facilitators gave us three days to experience this one of a kind journey -- a journey of prayer, realization, meditation, and to have a strong bond with our Lord. In three days span we were able to finish 12 sessions and each session has its own uniqueness to jog our minds and remind us that this is the right attitude that we need to posses.

There are a lot of lessons that we had learned from that experience, but let me emphasize one phrase that strike me most and it was: “Remove the crowd and build a community.” taken from Matthew 20:29-34. Well we can correlate it with the community itself like when we are in a crowd we tend to go with the flow, remain to the status quo even though we know that they are wrong. Some of the crowd’s characteristics are to judge one person without even knowing him/her, having a negative perception to others, being too laud and be likely to forget the things that are important. We can also associate this to ourselves, the crowd of our being. Each of us has a crowd to remove our traits who always Judge a person, having a negative point of view to others, and even being too loud and tend to forget the things that Jesus wants to say to us. Based on our facilitators it is the crowd within us that needs to remove, in order for us to construct a new community, it should start within ourselves.

After the three days of being with the Lord and trying to get rid of the crowd within us we can feel the difference within ourselves as if that we are a changed person, truly the youth encounter experience was one of a kind, our sufferings in going to that place has paid off, we had learned new things, made us strong in different aspects of our lives emotional, spiritual, and even changed us. Truly the youth encounter is not to be told, but it is to be experience.