Nightwatch Crossroads

A Night Up in That Sacred Space

Nightwatch Crossroads

Nightwatch Crossroads is a Friday overnight spiritual retreat for middle and high school students and their adult chaperones. Participants unplug from the distractions of daily life to connect with God and one another in the Cathedral. Nightwatch Crossroads offers both a Christian-oriented retreat and an interspiritual retreat for youth of all faiths.

THE REV. CANON PATTI WELCH Nightwatch has been at the Cathedral since 1975, which is a really long time. A lot of our chaperones will say, “I did this when I was a teenager.” There’s one guy who comes with a Nightwatch t-shirt from, like, 1978, and it’s still intact!

We spend the whole night up in that sacred space. I think it has a real impact on these young people’s experiences. I tell people we almost don’t have to do anything—they just need to be in the space— but we do scavenger hunts, we study mystics, and write poetry, we have a drum circle. Every year we mix it up, but we always have an organ demo with the Cathedral organist, Ray Nagem, which is awesome.

We have a labyrinth modeled after the one in Chartres. It’s a portable labyrinth on canvas. When the kids get to the center, they either get out as fast as they can, or they stay to see what comes to them.

We’ve added an Interspiritual Nightwatch so the students get a feel for spiritual practices from different traditions—how we’re different and also how we intersect so that we can all become better neighbors to each other. Many people's favorite part of Nightwatch is the candlelit meditation at the end. Everyone is given a candle that gets lit in the basement. We go up a back stairwell into the dark Cathedral. The kids have been told that this is their opportunity to commune with God. They can go anywhere they want: They go into the bays and the far corners, and sometimes just lie in the middle of the Nave looking up holding those candles, and it’s silent for 20 minutes.

I love to see those opportunities of settling, of going into the inner life, because I don’t think that young people today get as much opportunity to do that with everything that’s bustling around us all the time.