Ascension Church Tuesday Grades 7/8 Religious Education

Once again, Easter Greetings everyone! Recap of our Class This Week It was wonderful to gather together for one final class for this RE year, in which we did a variety of activities to focus on what faith in the Risen Christ means for our lives. We had the opportunity to reflect on what we experienced in class this year, on exit slips and also in notes that you wrote to your future selves. We even did a snowball toss on how we can grow in faith.  And we celebrated with treats.  We explored with elements like holy water and cotton swabs to form a Trinity triangle, to illustrate how we live in the life of the Trinity.  In our Chronos time based on the clock, we experience Kairos time when we have important encounters with God. We rejoice that Christ is Risen, and He continues to live in us through the power of the Holy Spirit:  The Spirit brings us alive in faith, together as One Church. I illustrated this idea by playing the song " I Believe ", which was a promotional...

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 ...