This year close to 200 individuals and families from the Mountains and Plains region – spanning across Kansas, Oklahoma, and Colorado – chose to spend a few days in the mountains participating in the CL vacation as many other communities did around the country, focusing on the theme: Here is the Great Paradox: Freedom is Dependence on God.

This year’s events were planned by several who spoke of how the friendship amongst them allowed the vacation to take form. The gestures came from a natural desire to hear from various friends as witnesses and to understand the circumstances faced by those in the world, including a presentation on the situation in the Holy Land and a witness of a refugee from Ecuador. An important moment included a meal served and prepared by the community as a gesture of gratitude for what has been given in our experience of the vacation.

But what makes a CL Vacation different from any other community event, church get-together, or family gathering? In short, we discovered it is not our own preparations, or the sum of the right gestures and initiatives. It is following Christ through the words and life of Fr. Luigi Giussani whose passion lives on in us who have discovered ourselves and our home in the Movement of Communion and Liberation.

This year’s theme helped us to focus on the tensions between our own capabilities, our trust or lack of trust in “God’s plan” and how this plays out in everyday life. “I showed up empty-handed,” said one participant, “my need was clear to me from the start, and many conversations at the vacation met me in this need, conversations in which I felt seen, and these tensions were less as I realized my dependency on God and other people.”

The fruit of the experience of this vacation has shown up in our conversations with each other in the weeks following as we continue to reflect upon and judge our experience. In leading the games, one friend experienced a peace in realizing that he wasn’t being judged by his performance and could be free by depending on others for belonging. A mother shared how she expected the vacation to be different after having children, yet the opportunity to depend on others to care for her children during the hike and to be able to attend events restored her. Smiles on the faces of a group of people new to the charism of CL and their enthusiastic participation in the gestures were a great sign of the presence of Christ among us. Moments of friendship and affection abounded in the recognition of a companionship, from the freedom of a child to make an unlikely friend to the recognition of the friendships grown at the vacation year after year.

Despite the friendship offered to us at the vacation, sometimes we still found ourselves wondering, “Am I good enough to do this, to offer this? Do I belong?” Yet we found ourselves resting in a dependence upon the love of our friends, offered in all the gestures of the vacation. This was something that was given to us by Amparito, who gave the first testimony of the Vacation, and who, in the seemingly tragic story of loss, tragedy and pain, kept insisting to us that we live life, “as a dialogue with someone who loves you.” To try and live this dialogue in our friendship helped us to realize again that our value is in our personhood, and that this doesn’t depend on what we do or what happens to us but who we are.

Many different testimonies over the course of the weekend became threads woven into the same cloth that revealed a truly beautiful image of our community life and the hope we have been given. These experiences have produced in us a gratitude for what the Movement has given – for friendship, belonging, the encounter with Christ – and generates the desire to reciprocate, to become a protagonist in life and to pursue the companionship we have met.

The Mountains and Plains Community