Like many of you, I think I watched every Charlie Brown TV special and read as many of the Peanuts comic strips I could get my hands on as a young boy growing up in Northern New Jersey. We had our favorite characters for sure – Lucy Van Pelt, Linus, Pig-Pen, Schroeder, and Peppermint Patty. My favorite was Snoopy, a foreshadowing of my great affinity for dogs as I moved into adulthood. My 8th grade grammar school class at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel even staged a production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown to rave reviews.
Well if truth be told, I hadn’t done much thinking about Charlie and the Peanuts gang since those earlier days of my youth. Every now and then, I would come across an occasional comic strip or find myself watching a repeat of one of those earlier TV shows I had enjoyed so much as a young boy like A Charlie Brown Christmas and It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. And then last weekend, Charlie and Lucy Van Pelt came back to me in the most unusual and unexpected way at a Men’s retreat I attended last weekend at St. Rose Parish in Belmar, NJ. More on Charlie and Lucy in a moment, but first the backstory to this inspiring journey for me. The Men’s Cornerstone Retreat was an incredibly energizing and captivating experience for not just myself, but for 35 other adult men, many of whom I had never met before. It was an opportunity to probe more deeply into our relationship with God and our Catholic faith but to also share some of our life and career experiences with each other in a safe and supportive environment and one free of judgement. An opportunity to reflect deeply and in the spirit of fellowship our fears, our struggles, and all of the things that often get in the way of being that person we would like to be and not the one others expect us to be or what the author Michael Kelly calls Becoming the Best Version of Yourself. A mens retreat designed to help us explore and find meaning and purpose at this moment in our lives and to answer those age-old questions of “Who am I” and “Why am I here”?
My New Friend Bill
I had never attended a Men’s retreat before, only the ones of the corporate variety when I was working in the financial services industry. I’ve had plenty of opportunities to attend a Men’s Retreat over the past 30 years but I always seemed to come up with a long list of excuses as to why I didn’t have time for one. I would imagine many of you can relate to my list – I am too busy with work; I have a report that I need to finish on the weekend; I am too tired from all of the travel my job requires and I need the weekend to recharge my batteries; Who is going to cover for me in coaching my children’s soccer, basketball, and softball teams? How can anyone with these heavy work/life balance issues possibly fit a 27-hour, intensely personal experience into any weekend where there’s just so much else to do?
Well, you can call it whatever you want — the hand of God, fate, happenstance, even the randomness that sometimes permeates life itself but whatever you’d like to call it, it seems as if the moon, the sun and the stars were perfectly aligned for yours truly to attend The Men’s Cornerstone Group retreat on February 19-20th at St. Rose Parish in Belmar, NJ. This incredible experience had its genesis several months ago. You see I love going to my favorite deli several times a week in Spring Lake, NJ – Joseph’s Delicatessen — where Joe and his awesome crew make the area’s best sandwiches. Joe’s Deli even has a Sandwich Chalk Board listing all of their hot and cold creative offerings just like that famous Curb Your Enthusiasm episode from Season 5 where the show’s main character Larry David does everything he can to change The Ted Danson sandwich to the The Larry David sandwich.
Anyway, one morning back in November 2015, I decided to introduce myself to a gentleman named Bill who I had seen around town and in Church on many occasions. He was wearing a green Manhattan College baseball hat that morning and being a Fordham alum, I just couldn’t resist reaching out to him. After all, the Rams and Jaspers have been archrivals over the years so our conversation naturally turned to the college basketball season (BTW – this is a painful topic for us Rams fans since we haven’t fielded a really good team since Tom Penders was the coach back in the early 1980s).
Soon Bill and I found ourselves talking about some of the different Men’s support groups we were affiliated with, including The Men’s Cornerstone Group that Bill had been involved with for many years at St. Joseph’s Parish in Oradell, NJ. Bill then explained to me that he had recently launched a new chapter of The Men’s Cornerstone Group in nearby St. Rose Parish in Belmar, NJ. We exchanged our contact information and Bill promised to send me some additional information on their next retreat that scheduled to be held in February 2016.
Later that day as I sifted through my mail, I found a handwritten personal note from Bill along with a brochure for the retreat. I studied it for several minutes and it really got me thinking what’s my excuse now? As the next few weeks ensued, I received several emails and phone calls from Bill, always very positive in tone and encouraging me to take a chance on attending the retreat. I was amazed at Bill’s passion, his core beliefs and his persistence in “working the order” as we used to say when I worked in the financial services industry. I kept the brochure on my desk and I can’t tell you how many times I read it and would find myself asking that same question — “If not now, when Jack”?
As a professional coach, I have been amazed at some of the really difficult issues my clients have to contend with in their daily lives and careers. Letting me inside their world and having an opportunity to engage with them and helping them seek clarity in setting specific goals and action steps, is the most rewarding experience I have ever had in my career. So putting the coaching lens back on myself, I soon realized that I had run out of excuses for not attending a retreat. If anything, I reasoned, a retreat would be an opportunity to not only share my own journey with others, but to also hear from my fellow compatriots about their own experiences and in the process we could each delve more deeply into our faith and look more closely for that sense of a life purpose, especially at this stage of our lives.
Charlie Brown Makes a Grand Reappearance
So on Friday, February 19th at 7pm, with sleeping bag and toiletries in tow, I walked into the Parish Center at St. Rose not really knowing what to expect. Hoping for some inspiration for sure, but ever mindful of the lyrics from that 1987 U2 classic I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For. The retreat was organized into specific modules where one of the men would share their specific spiritual journey with the entire group, complete with a selected spiritual reading and a song for inspiration. We would then break up into smaller discussion groups with each group sharing their observations with the broader group on the specific questions we had been asked to address. Over the ensuing 27 hours, there were lots of tears, laughs, hugs and genuine caring for each other all in the spirit of fellowship. There was the sound of grown men singing loudly with joy and more than enough food and beverage to last us for the rest of the Lenten season. The retreat concluded on Saturday evening with a Mass of celebration where we were joined by members of our own families and had an opportunity to share with the entire community what the experience had meant to each of us.
When it was my turn to share what I had learned, I told my new friends and their families that I knew it was going to be a great experience as we walked into the church on Friday evening to prepare for the sacrament of reconciliation. I talked about how the power of something visual and auditory in nature had consumed me in the most powerful way on that special evening. Bill — my new friend and facilitator for the retreat — had begun our night of intensive self examination by relaying the story from an old Charlie Brown comic strip that many of us remembered when we were youngsters. In this particular story, Charlie and Lucy walk down the same dirt path every day on their way to school but Charlie keeps tripping over the same rock in his path and falls down. This pattern of Charlie tripping over the same rock continued for several more days until Lucy finally turns to Charlie and says to him “Charlie Brown, why don’t you just move the rock out of your way”?
After our moderator Bill echoed those words, we had about 5 minutes of silence to reflect on Lucy’s words. I found myself consumed with recollections of some of the songs I had grown up with that had the word “rock” in the title of the song – classics like Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock, Simon and Garfunkel’s I am a Rock, Paul Simon’s Love Me Like a Rock, and even Elton John’s Crocodile Rock. Then Bill asked several additional questions that I will remember for the rest of my life:
“What rocks in your life keep getting in your way”?
“What rocks in your life do you keep stumbling over”?
“What rocks in your life would you like to move out of the way”?
“What rocks in your life would you like God’s help to move them out of the way”?
In that precious moment where Bill asked those simple, yet powerful questions I found a real clarity that I had been searching for during these past few years but hadn’t yet been able to find. All of a sudden in that moment, some of my rocks, the ones I have repeatedly stumbled on, didn’t seem so insurmountable anymore – all the things that I keep doing that I don’t want to do anymore; all of the things I need to face up to, but have yet to do so; the people in my life that I need to forgive unconditionally, but for whom I still hold too many conditions to be truly meaningful; and all of the the things I need to forgive myself for but have been reluctant to do. Somehow in that moment on Friday, February 19th at approximately 10:15pm, all of my rocks that seemed too heavy to move out of the way suddenly didn’t seem so heavy anymore.
That clarity for me became even clearer when we were given an actual rock and asked to write down on that rock the one thing in our life that we keep stumbling on and would like God’s help in moving out of the way. It was incredibly moving to to see many of my new friends taking their individual rocks up to the foot of the altar and then placing them in a basket, symbolic of where we found ourselves in our own life journey, what rocks each of us needed to move out of the way, and how each of us could find support from God and 35 new friends.
As we retired for the night to the 6 classrooms we would affectionately refer to as The Hotel St. Rose complete with our air mattresses and sleeping bags, I think we all knew that we probably were not going to get much sleep. But again, truth be told, my air mattress and sleeping bag were quite cozy but I didn’t get one wink of sleep that night because I was too excited about what had just happened. My tossing and turning that night was over the joy I felt in finally having real clarity on what rocks I needed to move out of the way. My rocks weren’t so heavy and immovable after all. I could actually picture myself moving them out of the way. Even my feet seemed a little lighter on Saturday morning and every day since. How lucky am I to have been a part of that experience and one that brings to mind one of my favorite quotes from Matthew 7:7-8 “Ask and it will be given to you; Seek, and you will find; Knock, and it will be opened for you. For everyone who asks, receives; He who seeks, finds; To him who knocks, it will be opened”.
Here’s wishing all of my friends and colleagues that inner strength and clarity you deserve to move your own rocks out of the way. You can do it; I know you can! Oh yeah and before I forget, You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. Thanks for finding me after all of these years.
Warm regards, Dr. K
