House Retreat 2011
Now that St Aidan’s has completed its transformation to a full 13 to 18 house we decided to focus the retreat upon the challenges of living as a community. We all agreed that there are certainly many challenges when 65 teenage girls, three adults, one 22 month old girl and one 6 week old boy all try living together.
Thankfully St Benedict has quite a lot of advice regarding community life and so we decided to look at what he says and then audit ourselves against the key values of his rule: attentiveness, hospitality, respect, integrity, stewardship and integrity. We were fortunate in having an extremely able upper sixth who, with input from Fr Dominic and Mr Fogg, hosted a series of discussion groups throughout the day focused upon the Benedictine values and how they may be relevant to the challenges faced in St Aidan’s.
The morning was broken up by an Emmaus walk in which every new girl was paired with a more experienced student and sent out into the valley to discuss how they had settled in. A huge thank you must go to Alice McNeill who set up a challenging series of team building exercise in the house garden during the afternoon. A thoroughly enjoyable but tiring day ended with house mass said by Fr Dominic and a celebratory meal