Until the beginning of high school, I had never really talked to any of my peers about their religious beliefs. I went to a public middle school, and up to the end of eighth grade the most spiritual conversation I had with a friend was him trying to guess his family’s religion, since they didn’t practice much: “I think my family’s Protestant, but I honestly don’t pay enough attention to know” was all he said, and that was that.
Over the course of middle school, like many others, I began to explore and engage with my family’s religion on a deeper level. We had always gone to our local Catholic church, but I hadn’t separated attending Mass on Sunday from any other life routine; it didn’t feel religious or spiritual in nature for me before then. Once I started understanding what being a Catholic actually meant, for the first time I believed I could have a fulfilling life. Being an altar server and genuinely enjoying Mass brought me more happiness than almost anything had. However, it also made me realize how spiritually empty I had been at public school. Public schools are supposed to be secular, but are they really supposed to provide no spiritual fulfillment at all?
At my Catholic high school, I felt like I was finally, spiritually, at home. Being involved with school-wide Mass and finding friends that also shared my faith made me much happier and more comfortable with my school life; for four years, it no longer felt like school. I went on retreats, talked about my faith with others, and took Bible and theology classes for the first time. While it is not unheard of for public high schools to offer classes teaching the Bible as a work of literature alongside other religious works like the Qur’an and Buddhist spiritual texts, that is typically the extent of their “spirituality.” There is no spiritual formation for the students like I found at my Catholic high school.
I have a friend that works at Loomis Chaffee, a secular private high school in Connecticut; he originally taught theology classes at my high school. Most boarding schools in New England are religiously-affiliated, but Loomis Chaffee is completely secular. However, as one of the faculty, he leads generally-spiritual retreats that aren’t explicitly religious or with any specific institution. They could be an entire day, or they could take only an hour or two, usually consisting of a talk from one of their peers followed by small-group discussion. They are very similar to the retreats he used to run at my high school, and yet they are still fully compatible with the secular population at Loomis Chaffee. His students took to it very well, and many of them had fantastic spiritual and emotional experiences on his short retreats.
While it’s expected that a significant portion of any given U.S. population will be Christian of some type, you don’t have to be Christian to be spiritual. Spiritual fulfillment in high school doesn’t have to be restricted to Catholic or generally Christian experiences; anyone, regardless of their religion—or lack thereof—can stand to benefit from this necessary spiritual development. Secularism doesn’t mean anti-spiritual, and I think public schools should offer retreats like this to their students more often—where regardless of religion, all students can take a moment to reflect with their peers and to themselves on all of the questions, big and small.
Grant is a senior studying Information Systems at the Carroll School of Management. He keeps busy by studying and writing for The Torch.
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