I went to a Catholic High School and had religion class every year since 5th grade. Our senior year of highschool, we went on a senior retreat to a religious camp or something. This is what it consisted of.

1. Get to school at the normal 8am time.

2. Load up on a bus and drive to the camp. (about an hour drive.)

3. Get there and have a group meeting where we did group activities and stuff.

4. Put our stuff in our room and ate lunch.

5. Hid in the forest to smoke a cigg.

6. 2 hours of playing ultimate frisbee or football.

7. More group activites.

8. Dinner

9. More physical activites

10. More group activities

11. At midnight we all went to the chapel for a mass where they offered to pray over us.

Now, I'm sure you have seen on tv where they grab the person's head, yell at them and than the person falls over. That is what this was. It is supposed to allow the holy spirit to flow through your body.

At the time I was really struggling with my faith in God and really wanted to believe, so I agreed to take part in it. I stood up there and had two men behind me while another grabed my head real tight and started talking very loudly in tongues. (gibberish that we don't understand that is supposed to be the secret language of god, it is said that the speaker usually doesn't even understand what he is saying.)

I'm not sure if I spelled that correct but oh well.

Anyway, after about a minute of this I got very weak in the knees and fell to the ground. I started crying, because at the time a viewed it as the answer I was looking for.

But the more I thought about what had happened, the more I realised the tactics they used for the entire process. We had a full day of physical and mental exercise, and didn't go to mass to get prayed over untill midnight when we were all exausted. I couldn't help but wonder why that had to be last thing of the night.

It has always seemed very curious to me that they choose to run the camp in this way. It leads me to believe that the entire process was simply us being tired and mentally exausted while someone grabed our head tight restricting blood flow to our brains. I'm not sure if griping the skull in a tight manner could produce that effect, but the whole process has never led me to change my view on god.

All the experience achieved was making me think the Catholic Church uses tricks to try and make people think they are experiencing a godly experience.
JaggedEdge Reviewed by JaggedEdge on . An experience from senior retreat and a Catholic mind trick...? I went to a Catholic High School and had religion class every year since 5th grade. Our senior year of highschool, we went on a senior retreat to a religious camp or something. This is what it consisted of. 1. Get to school at the normal 8am time. 2. Load up on a bus and drive to the camp. (about an hour drive.) 3. Get there and have a group meeting where we did group activities and stuff. 4. Put our stuff in our room and ate lunch. Rating: 5