We offer two witnesses from students who organized a study weekend in NYC.

Rose: Two weeks ago, we had a graduate student study weekend at the CL office in Manhattan. I had hoped to have something like this since I started my PhD over 4 years ago, and finally it was happening! The initiative for planning this weekend together, and the work leading up to it, became part of a continuous process of asking the question implied in the theme of the Rimini meeting this past year - "You are a good for me" -- Is this true? As many of my friends know, my entire time in graduate school has provoked me to ask this question, as I looked for friends with whom to share my work as a scholar and teacher.

When I started asking around to see if people were interested many people said yes, and so I started setting up all the details, making a flyer, a registration form, etc but of course for a while it slipped into the same kind of isolating project that my work has often been! However, one of my best friends, with whom I have shared my work for several years, pointed out to me that even in the way of preparing for this weekend I need to keep this question open. This pushed me to be more vulnerable with my desire - letting go of my need for everything to be perfect on my terms, and simply asking others if they could help with things that I couldn't do on my own.

I spent the day prior to the study weekend creating a program with a schedule, copies of morning and evening prayers from the book of hours, readings for Sunday Mass, etc. I arranged each page meticulously, choosing paintings by Vermeer and Renoir to accompany them. By 10 pm the night before, I finally finished, and realized it would be utterly impossible to actually print these programs! But I laughed because I realized that I made them out of love for these people coming, and excitement for the weekend, and if we had to use them on our phones and iPads then oh well! That love and excitement weren't going anywhere, and somehow I had become freed from my perfectionism and self-reliance to the point that I could give careful attention to each detail of the program, without being destroyed by the fact that we couldn't even print it out.

Finally the day had arrived, and somehow, everything was taken care of—Twenty people had signed up, my friend had picked up most of the groceries at Costco, everyone coming from out of town had a place to stay, and now we would be arriving early in the morning to set everything up and get started.

The first thing I saw when we unloaded everything on Saturday morning was a gorgeous bouquet of flowers. My friend Christina had bought them at Costco so we could make centerpieces for the tables. For me these became a kind of sign of what I came to see over the weekend. Immediately another friend, Giulietta, set to work making beautiful vases out of clear plastic cups and the brown paper the flowers came wrapped in. Before I knew it, these vases were placed all over the room, brightening each space where we would spend the next two days working, eating, praying and talking together.

All weekend, as we worked together in silence, shared meals and prayer times, discussed the questions we were facing in our work, cleaned up in the evening etc., I felt this kind of giddy freedom increasing in me. It took me about a week afterward to really understand what I was experiencing. I saw that weekend that everything was beautiful beyond all my expectation and planning. That even if I had spent 20 more hours arranging details, what actually happened—the spontaneous moments of conversation, the initiative of Karina, who offered to share her experience developing a research question, the witness of Paolo about his time in graduate school, the silly game we played of introducing one another around the lunch table on Sunday so that Giulia, who was only able to come for that day could get to know everyone—everything was more beautiful than I had anticipated. I was overwhelmed by something like the "hundredfold" of Mark's Gospel and the 12 leftover baskets of loaves and fishes.

On Sunday night, when we were cleaning up, we found that the beautiful flowers were almost all still fresh even after sitting out for two days on the tables. From these I made three new vases, leaving them behind as a thank you to my friends who work at the CL office. For me this moment was a small symbol of what I had experienced all weekend - Rather than making something perfect for my friends, I had been made new by Christ, who came that weekend in the midst of us.

Stephen: “Creator of all things, true source of light and wisdom, origin of all being, graciously let a ray of your light penetrate the darkness of my understanding.”So asks Saint Thomas Aquinas in his prayer before studying. I arrived at the Graduate Student student study weekend, tinged with anxiety, but full of hope. In addition to being in the midst of a bout of writer’s block on a 20 page paper that is due in a week, I also am facing the weighty question of my career path: is academia for me; what is the value of studying and what makes the experience full? I prayed that as I entered into these days, my time with other graduate students who share the desire to understand their work would cast some light onto the answers to these ultimate questions. While studying silently with the others, I saw in their faces the promise of something confounding. How could it be that in the banality of trying to find the right words to type on the page, the stress of trying to figure out my next steps as both a teacher and a student, that I could find the possibility of meaning and beauty? Though none of the others this weekend could shed light on the “answers” to these questions, seeing the brightness of their desire to discover beauty in their work became the means by which I began to discover the presence of the “true source of light and wisdom” within my own work.