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A couple of weeks ago I once again took my life in my hands and joined our confirmation teenagers as they gathered up in Occidental for their Confirmation retreat. Thankfully no major pranks were pulled on me and I did manage a few hours sleep. The theme of their retreat was "Awakening." So the challenge for them was to reflect on who they really are and where exactly they are on their faith journey in life. It certainly seemed to me that they truly entered into this search over the weekend. I found this particularly so on the Saturday evening when, after dinner and mass, Sean, our new youth minister facilitated with them an open-mike, fireside sharing time. This was a time for them to share on family and their experience of the retreat.

As I listened to speaker after speaker, I was most impressed with their honest, open and sometimes moving reflections. Some shared on their gratitude for the many ways God has blessed them, for example, the blessing of loving parents, loyal friendships and so on. Others chose to share more poignant experiences of loss, death, abuse and insecurity in their young lives.

When they had concluded their reflections I was left wondering: what is it that will sustain these young people as they continue their journey in life? What will be their anchor? Will it be their Christian faith? Will it be the families they belong to? Will it be the positions they take up in society?

In his closing homily at World Youth Day in August 2000, the pope told his hearers: "It is important to realize that among the many questions surfacing in your minds, the decisive ones are not about 'what.' The basic question is 'who': to whom am I to go? Who am I to follow? To whom should I entrust my life? In another message to youth he declared: "Christianity is not an opinion and does not consist of empty words. Christianity is Christ! It is a Person."

When I gather with and minister to young people, I always like to stress two important things to them: Firstly, I encourage them to never stop developing a personal relationship with Jesus Christ; to never stop listening to the stirrings of God's spirit within. In a world filled with so many noises and distractions vying for our attention, how can we ever distinguish the voice of God guiding and directing us, if we do not give time to silence, or some from of prayer and contemplation in our busy, busy lives.

And secondly, I always encourage young people to think critically. I say to them: do not become passive and mindless spectators in a culture of shifting values; do not let your beautiful minds be manipulated or your tender spirits defiled by an electronic media that cares little for your spiritual well being.

A fairly recent editorial in the British medical journal, The Lancet, claims that smoking in movies is responsible for addicting 1,080 U.S. adolescents to tobacco every day, 340 of whom will die prematurely as a result. Watching popular movies is the No.1 factor leading nonsmoking teens to light up, say researchers from New Hampshire's Dartmouth Medical School in a landmark 2003 study published in The Lancet. They found film character smoking more persuasive that traditional advertising, peer pressure or parents.

I came across some interesting statistics recently on TV commercial time. Twenty years ago for every three hours of TV programming, twenty-eight minutes were given over to commercials. Ten years ago that had jumped to thirty-eight minutes in every three hours. Now for every three hours of TV viewing, fifty-two minutes are allotted to commercials. So in general we have 60% more ads coming at us than twenty years ago. Not only that, but now our ads are much faster paced and presented in a jerked and jolted manner. Years ago ads lasted 2-3mins; now we are bombarded with 10, 15, 20 second sound bites coming at us relentlessly, spinning us around and into a media trance.

The theme of our teens' confirmation retreat was "Awakening." I think we all need to wake up. We need to wake up to who we are as a Christian people; to whom and what really matters in our lives and to whom and what, as the prophet Jeremiah says in our first reading, we put our trust in.

Gabriel Marcel, a French writer and philosopher who converted to Catholicism at age 40, was once asked to sum up everything he believed in as a Christian in the form of a personal creed. Well Marcel did just that in six words: "I hope, in you, for us."