Ascension Church Tuesday Grades 7/8 Religious Education

Easter Greetings everyone! Celebrating the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is a glorious occasion on Easter Sunday. And we celebrate it for the 50 Days of the Easter Season, which begins on Easter Sunday and ends on Pentecost Sunday, which is May 28 this year. During class, we focused on the meaning of Easter and the Resurrection. As baptized people, we join with Christ in dying and rising to new life, and we experience this in our own lives.  I shared examples of seeing this Easter reality in my recent road trip to the Missouri River Valley between Iowa and Nebraska. During class, the activity was creating colleagues of the imagery of the Exultet, the chant proclaimed at the start of the Holy Saturday Easter Vigil Mass.  This link contains the full text of it if you'd like to refer to it. There is no submission for this week's activity: Instead, keep your collage in some spot where you'll see it often to remind yourself of the glorious triumph of Christ in the Resurrection. ...

Holy Week Greetings Everyone! Holy Week culminates in the most important days of the liturgical calendar, when we recall the central events of our faith, the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. During our class, we spent time learning about and praying in the spirit of these events and their meaning. Palm Sunday is at the beginning of Holy Week, commemorating when Jesus Christ entered Jerusalem to the crowd's shouts of "Hosanna", which is part of the Sanctus chant each time we gather at Mass, and it was our opening prayer in class. To save us from sins, Christ emptied Himself in coming to earth, becoming human, and then dying a painful death on the Cross, which St. Paul describes in an early Christian hymn in Philippians 2:6-11. Christ offered Himself in a New Covenant, drawing from the Old Covenant that hearkens back to Passover.  Everyone in class tried some matzah crackers, which is a customary Passover food for Jewish people. Christ offered the bread and the cup ...

Greetings everyone! In our most recent class, we looked more at the mission we have as God's people. Toward the beginning of class, we started with an activity that you will do over the course of the next couple of days leading up to the start of Spring Break. Everyone wrote out their school class schedule on an index card and then a prayer intention to offer for each class period.  The activity is to take that card and use it to pray on a regular basis for those intentions throughout the school day.  Remember, it doesn't have to be a long prayer.  It can be a 2-second prayer as you walk into each class period. I also extended the celebration of my birthday from last week to you all, and I hope you enjoyed the treats. I illustrated our sense of mission with this video about Belong Designs, an apparel company that my cousin Mark co-founded 10 years ago. God desires to fill us with a passion for Him, and we are called to follow that passion to grow in relationship with Him...

Greetings everyone! In our most recent class, everyone had the opportunity to participate in the sacrament of reconciliation with Father Rex.   Also during class was an activity to create images representing Who God is using cotton swabs, based on chapters 4, 8, and 12 in the green book, Christ Reveals God's Mystery .  I saw some great images. In reconciliation, we recognize that our sins cut us off from God, Who, in His grace and mercy, provides a way for us to be restored back to our right relationship with Him. I showed the traffic court scene from the movie Cars, my favorite animated movie, with the line, "We are a town worth fixing!"  God looks at each of us and says that we are worth fixing.  And that is truly something to celebrate.  (That's why Father Kevin, who I knew in college, remarked that we should celebrate having gone to reconciliation.) And so I brought out treats to celebrate having gone through reconciliation, as well as for March 16, wh...

Greetings everyone! During our most recent class, we looked at various Lenten-related topics. We continue journeying through the desert of Lent:  Here's the Desert Room at the Oak Park Conservatory. On the 2nd Sunday of Lent, we hear the story of Jesus's transfiguration, which gives us the perspective and encouragement that all our Lenten practices serve the purpose of helping us more fully celebrate the glorious New Life Jesus brings us by His Resurrection. On the 2nd Sunday of Lent each year, we get a view high up above, like here at the top of the Barrie Park Hill. And through the struggles we have in life, God aids us, as we turn to Him in prayer, which I illustrated with my story of participating in a Native American Sweat Lodge ceremony 10 years ago this month when I was on a weeklong mission-service trip in northeast Nebraska. We had a very special guest star in class, Ashraf Amaya.  He grew up attending Ascension School.  He played professional basketball, in the ...

Greetings everyone! In our most recent class, we had two special visitors, Aura Lee and Nathan, two friends of Paul's from Valparaiso University.  They shared about Aura Lee's journey from the Presbyterian Church to the Roman Catholic Church and how they live out faith in their work and as a married couple.  Thanks to Aura Lee and Nathan for visiting us. We also spent time considering what Lent is about, which included some video footage of Paul from when he was in 8th grade. Many centuries ago, those preparing to join the Church went through a long preparation process, which culminated in a 40-day retreat before their initiation on Holy Saturday.  That 40-day period is the basis for our observance of Lent, which is also an opportunity for us, who are already baptized, to renew our relationship with God, which started with our own baptism. Part of what we're doing as a class during Lent is contributing to a collection for Companions Journeying Together.  Each person ...