Limerick laughter in Dominican Youth Club

Dominican sisters tell Chai Brady about their new youth group

Young people are longing to be “known and loved” says a Dominican sister based in Limerick, and that’s exactly what her order intend to let them know.

Coming from Nashville, Tennessee, Sr Mara Grace and her three fellow sisters have been organising events and making a splash in the community. Their most recent venture aims to be more consistent; creating a community of young faithful.

Their new youth club runs every second and fourth Sunday of the month from 7-9pm and began on January 27.

“It’s kind of a dual thing, first we’re all trained as teachers, that’s where our charism lies but also we just saw this need – you know there’s different events for youth, they’ll have a retreat or a pilgrimage or whatever – but we wanted to do something especially for the youth in Limerick to have consistency,” Sr Mara Grace told The Irish Catholic.

“We’ll meet twice a month so they learn to support each other in living the faith and having fun together. It’s building community outside of just the normal school, or sport community, they build a community around the faith really.”

Virtue

She says they’ll be teaching about “virtue and treating each other kindly”, but the heart of what they hope to achieve is to provide a place of encounter with Jesus, “so that they can go to the one who can really heal them”.

“We have all these different services for young people, but it’s really Jesus Christ alone who can heal us as we need, so I think that’s the main goal, is bringing these young people to a place where they can encounter him.

“So we do it through different things, we do talk about the Faith obviously but we have a lot of fun too. It’s also showing them that Faith is not just a Sunday morning in Mass, we can have a Christian community and have real fun and real friendship and how Christ can be the centre of that too.”

Usually beginning with an icebreaker so everyone can get to know each other, the theme of the youth club’s activities is the Olympics.

The theme acts as a “springboard” to talk about faith. “So the lesson might be ‘God has plan for my life’, but we’ll get the message across using sport and then the bulk of the night is just the young people assimilating that message to their own lives,” says Sr Mara.

They’d go on to do exercises, some would be team building orientated, and then discuss what was difficult and what was helpful. “When we use our gifts that God’s given us, how does that help the community? What’s difficult about not having a gift that someone else has?” she says.

They begin with a prayer and end with a “different flavour” of worship, perhaps Eucharistic Adoration.

Battling isolation among young people is also one of the core components of the youth club, as it’s all about building community.

Sr Mara says that although social media can be beneficial for reaching young people, it also has its downfalls.

Sr Mara says: “Young people, that’s where they are, they’re on social media, so part of it will be: How do we use that appropriately because it is a good tool? It’s a great evangelistic tool but then how do we use it for the good because it can also be used for evil – like any tool that we have.”

On the first night, Sr Mara remarks that they were discussing guidelines for the group, and the young people expressed a desire not to use mobile phones during the evening.

“So from our beginning prayer to our ending prayer we don’t take out the mobile phones, I think this creates a great freedom really,” she says.

“If I’m feeling insecure what do I do? I go right to my mobile phone and it looks like I have all these friends but on these nights it actually pulls you out of yourself. Like okay, ‘I’m not going to just go hide on that screen I have to go out of myself to encounter the person next to me and that’s hard to do’.

“I think it does build that community of being present to one another, that theology of encounter. Encountering the other that’s right there with me and that in turn will help us to be open to encountering the Lord who is there with me always.”

Locality

For those thinking about starting a youth group in their locality Sr Mara says it’s not “rocket science”, and young people are yearning for these sorts of community building initiatives.

Aine Kirby (16) has attended a few of the meetings and told The Irish Catholic a lot of organisation and planning has gone into it.

She said: “They didn’t want to bring us in and sit us down and make us pray t he Rosary and all this and make it a very strict thing.

“I think the form they do it in is really beneficial for young people. Whatever group discussion we’ll end up having they’ll always do a game before it, the game will have that hidden message in it so then at the end of the game everyone would get into their groups and talk about what you got from the game.”

It was after Mass the Domincans sisters approached Aine and her Mom and told them about the initiative which she enthusiastically responded to. “The first night I went to it I loved it so I kept going back,” she said.

“I think what’s brilliant is when we start the youth group we do the games, we eat the food, we have the discussions, we have a laugh and then at the end we’ll maybe gather around and we learn a song together or we pray. Everyone has had their fun and everything and it just calms down at the end so I think it’s great for new people as well,” she added.