Sign
Up for Boston College Kairos |
 |
|
BEFORE
YOU SIGN UP FOR KAIROS,
Kairos is the Greek word in Christian scripture for "momentary time," sometimes referred to as "God's time." At BC, Kairos is a weekend retreat from Friday afternoon until Sunday evening that invites students to consider what it means to live intentionally in "God's time." It invites students to closely examine their relationships with God, themselves, and others. The retreat is a student-run, first-level retreat, appropriate particularly for those who may never have been on a retreat before. Kairos is, in format and content, a Catholic and specifically Ignatian retreat. It welcomes students of any religious tradition as well as those from no religious tradition at all. The retreat is sponsored by the Ignatian Society of Boston College and BC Campus Ministry.
WHO SHOULD SIGN UP? Kairos is open to any Boston College undergraduate who has not already been on Kairos or another similar retreat such as Emmaus, Encounter, XLI, Search, or Teens Encounter Christ. If you have made any of these, or another Kairos-type retreat, we ask that you NOT sign up to attend Kairos at BC. This is because the retreats are so similar and there are so many students at BC who haven't done anything like it, and want to. If you have done Kairos or a similar retreat, we hope you will participate in the BC Kairos alumni community and/or apply to lead a retreat here at BC. We encourage you to sign up on the BC Kairos listserve through the Ignatian Society webpage you just visited to get here. If you are an undergraduate student at BC, have not made one of the above-mentioned retreats before, and would like to go on Kairos, you are welcome to sign up after you finish reading this page.
SOME IMPORTANT POINTS ABOUT SIGNING UP 1. Fill out all requested fields. The database needs to have information for all informational fields to select names, and if there are any blank fields, it may not select your name. So, be sure to fill out everything you can on the sign-up page. You will need to give personal and emergency contact information to complete the sign-up, so get that ready if you need to. 2. Sign up only once; signing up more than once will actually hurt, rather than help, your chances of being selected. 3. Please sign up yourself only. We want to keep the already long sign-up list to people who have taken their own initiative to be there and encourage people to take ownership of their decision to go on the retreat. So, if there are people you want to see sign up, in the spirit of Kairos, use the power of positive relationships and do your best to get them to take this step themselves.
WHAT HAPPENS AFTER I SIGN UP? After you sign up, your information is stored in the Kairos database and will stay there - you won't ever need to sign up again. So, if you already signed yourself up, you don't need to sign up again. And remember, signing up more than once will work against you. The database picks each retreatant randomly for each retreat. We balance each retreat equally between men and women, and proportionally between classes. The random selection is balanced to make it as fair as possible; the longer a person’s name has been in the database, the higher that person's chances are of being selected. So, the sooner in your time at BC that you sign up, the more likely it is that you’ll be selected before you graduate.
IF YOUR NAME IS SELECTED . . . . . . Then you will get an email to your BC email account or a phone call to your BC voicemail a few weeks, or in some cases days, before the retreat telling you that you have the opportunity to go on the next Kairos and asking if you accept the invitation. So, after you sign up, make sure you check your BC email and voicemail on a regular basis. If you accept the invitation to go, you will have a few days to reply to secure your spot. If you decline the invitation or do not respond in time, your name will go back into the database with the same chances of being selected – or not being selected – as before. So, if you have been selected once and do not accept, you will be no more likely to be selected again than you were initially.
PAYMENT The program charges each person $75 to go on the retreat. This fee acts as your commitment to go, securing your spot on the retreat. It also helps defer the cost of the retreat expenses (the actual cost to the program for each person is over $200). Any student for whom the retreat fee is an issue can get a scholarship to cover the cost. Anyone who is selected to go on Kairos and wants to go will go; if you get picked, the fee should not prevent you from going. If you decide not to go after accepting and paying, Kairos will not refund your money, so make sure you can definitely commit to going before you say yes.
FINALLY There are many more names in the database than can fit on all the retreats in a year. So, there is a chance that the database may never select your name for a retreat, even if you sign up in your first year. This is something we are working to address so that one day anyone who wants to go on Kairos can go; right now, that is not the case. Because of the high demand and the possibility that you may not get selected soon – and possibly not at all – we would like you to keep two things in mind: 1. If you get called to go, accept, and then drop out from going after accepting, you will be preventing someone else from filling your spot who could have gone. We cannot fill the empty spots of people who accept the invitation to go and later decide not to go, so please take seriously a call to go on the retreat if you are lucky enough to get called to go. 2. We strongly encourage you to seek out other retreats and spiritual opportunities as well as Kairos, rather than avoiding other spiritual experiences because you are waiting for Kairos. If you feel strongly about going on Kairos, this is a sign that another retreat or spiritual outlet would likely benefit you as well – and BC Campus Ministry has several such opportunities. We encourage you to check them out; you can easily do so here. You can also speak with Greg Carpinello in Campus Ministry at 2-8002. Your Kairos experience will only be enriched by any other retreat and spiritual experiences you may have.
|
|