Hearts on Fire in Dallas
The first Hearts on Fire retreat was last weekend. It's taken me this long to blog about it, since we needed some time to rest and get photos back, and basically let the experience settle in. Dallas has proved to be a hospitable first stop, from the Jesuit communities at Jesuit Prep High School and Montserrat Retreat Centre at Lake Dallas where we stayed, various families, and the parishioners at St. Ann's Parish which hosted our retreat. St. Ann's is the fifth largest parish in the United States, with 30,000 members. It is a campus. The parish complex literally includes a former strip mall with clock-tower and parking lot, a massive gold-domed church, a plaza with fountain, and halls and auditoria galore. The church employs four full-time youth ministers. I had never seen a Catholic mega-church before, but this was it!