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By Lara Pickford-Gordon
snrwriter.camsel@catholictt.org
It was 25 years ago, in a Jubilee Year of the Church, celebrating the 2000th anniversary of the birth of Christ that Kyle Dardaine, Mikkel Trestrail, and Shad Seaton joined together in prayer and support.
The day was August 6, the Feast of the Transfiguration and the ecclesial community that emerged became known as the Companions of the Transfigured Christ (CTC).
The CTC is commemorating their silver anniversary in another Jubilee Year, with the theme Pilgrims of Hope. Looking back, Fr Mikkel Trestrail said, “It wasn’t that the date shaped anything; it’s things were shaped and looking back we saw the significance of it.”
He believes it has been 25 years of faithfulness. “Many different times in our history we’ve had the thought of ‘let’s just pack this up; pack up shop’ but we’re still here and still enjoying being here now and experiencing God’s graces and blessings and still feel very privileged to companion the transfigured Christ that really is our call. We never planned it,” he said in an early July interview with The Catholic News.
Fr Trestrail said Jesus took three young men up the mountain and they experienced glory, but the experience does not stay on the mountaintop but continues in the valley. He is grateful to the people of the past and present who have helped the CTC along the way.
“It is a time of openness to see what more,” Fr Trestrail stated. Three words emerge for him in the silver jubilee: honour, celebration, and deepening. He added, “honouring the past, celebrating where we are, but deepening in our journey”.
Building community
Starting an ecclesial community was never in the minds of the founders and Fr Trestrail joked, “If God had asked us that on day one, we might have said ‘no!’.”
Dardaine and Seaton were involved in youth ministry in the San Juan parish in the COOL [Christ Our Only Lord] ministry and Trestrail met Dardaine at a Christ Our Redeemer (COR) Retreat in his parish of St Anthony’s, Petit Valley.
A week later, Dardaine invited him to be part of the prayer partnership with Seaton. “We used to pray with each other, support each other and that was all we felt this would turn out to be. Then there were some other guys around the Church that I knew, who they knew, who started to come around and join us in that journey,” Fr Trestrail said. They called themselves God’s Anointed New Generation (GANG) to CTC.
Within the first year, Fatima College asked COOL youth to form an all-male team to run a retreat. They invited other young men from other parishes to join. Another retreat was requested.
“The guys who we called together to run the retreat, they said ‘we love this, we want this, we want some kind of space, we want something more’,” he recalled.
Fr Christian Pineau FMI, in the San Juan parish took them on a retreat on Emancipation Day the following year. Fr Trestrail said at the retreat they had “visions and little things that shaped us”.
One was of a young man beaten up and left in a drain and they helped him. “That kind of shaped our approach to working with other young men, and out of that retreat we started a weekly prayer meeting for men, and it started right there in the FMI chapel,” he said.
In a separate conversation, Seaton said after the prayer meetings began, “more people started to be drawn”. There were other experiences that shaped the formation of the CTC.
Asked about growing pains, Seaton said defining their identity was one, “as more people came in people had visions for us and those didn’t always tie into what we believed God had for us”. Relationships were tried but they emerged stronger.
The CTC established communities in Curaçao (2010) and Barbados (2020). Intake of female members started in 2015. There are presently 28 covenant members in Trinidad, Barbados, and Curacao. The community in Trinidad is based in Robinsonville, Belmont.
Accompanying people
The CTC has hosted workshops on a variety of topics initially at the John Paul II Centre: the father wound (2009), mother wound (2019), Please Understand Me’ for couples, self-esteem (2013).
In the past few years, other topics dealt with difficult emotions, art of accompaniment, conscious healing—the workshops guided by the needs seen.
The objective is “…to help them through the struggles of life, so we feel that that’s why a lot of the workshops we’re doing now deal with all of these things we face on the inside and helping people to find God in all of that,” Fr Trestrail said.
Seaton is the Ag Head of Department, Visual and Performing Arts, and Religion, and Ag Dean Form 5 at Fatima College. Although he stepped away from a leadership role in CTC many years ago, he said the charism of the community is still lived in his heart and as an educator.
He shares the joy of the silver anniversary. “At the end of the day, I’m extremely proud of Mikkel and Kyle and of CTC, of what we’ve grown into, and I’m happy God has done it in Trinidad and Tobago.”
Archbishop Charles Jason Gordon will preside at the CTC’s 25th anniversary Mass on August 9, 3.30 p.m. at Green Meadows, Santa Cruz. Members of the public are invited to support the CTC’s mission in its silver jubilee. Check their Facebook page: www.facebook.com/ctccommunity
