For whatever reason, I haven't felt the urge to write for the blog in a long time. Perhaps it is because I have been using my journal much less during my prayer time. Regardless, a lot has been going on in my formation journey this semester.

First up, I am now an instituted acolyte! On February 20th, I was instituted into the Ministry of Acolyte by Bishop Woost with 7 of my classmates and one gentleman in our permanent deaconate program.

Practically speaking, I am given more responsibilities at Mass. The Church's documents aren't very specific when describing the role of a typical altar server compared to an instituted one, but they do mention that the instituted acolyte should have more prominent roles in the liturgy when serving alongside other servers.

There are three concrete things that I am now able to do that I wasn't before

1) I am the least extraordinary of Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion (I should still defer to clergy, but I am now a first among equals with other EHMC's)

2) I can now purify vessels for the priest. At the seminary, all of the Eucharistic Ministers purify their own vessel, so it isn't that chaotic. For my first Mass back at my home parish, I had to purify 10 ciboria in the matter of a few minutes. I try to give each vessel a reverent amount of time and attention, but I can't help but feel like I am against the clock when I am left to do 10 of them myself. Now, whenever I can tell it will take a while, I just ask the servers to bring them to the credence table so I can purify properly after Mass.

3) I am encouraged to help bring communion to the homebound. I haven't been able to do any communion calls yet, but a few of my classmates have and have come back with great stories.

Next, I was able to get a lot of good experience learning how to be a teacher! I was asked to teach three weeks of lessons for kindergarten, fourth grade, and seventh grade. I would have to say that my favorite of the groups was fourth grade, but it is always possible that I just had a particularly great set of students. I was quite bored when I took religion classes in elementary school and middle school, so I was impressed to find that religion was the 4th graders' favorite subject!

I made a lot of mistakes during this whole experience, but I became more comfortable with making lesson plans and finding ways to draw interaction from the students. For example, my 4th graders loved the Bible. They were all fighting for who could read or answer my questions. However, my 7th graders did not enjoy reading from the Bible. At the beginning of my last lesson, I said we wouldn't need to get our Bibles out, and there were visible celebrations in the room. As much as I want them to have an encounter with God in Sacred Scripture, if they aren't open-minded, it is probably best to find other tools to present the Gospel to them.

Regardless of how much I felt like I wasn't able to connect with my 7th graders, I had 4-5 of them individually come up to me after class to thank me for sharing with them. They also wished me luck on my path towards the priesthood. I was flattered because I definitely wouldn't have done that at their age. Heck, even right now, I would be more focused on getting to my next class since my attention span would probably have been drained.

Over spring break, I was fortunate to drive 22 straight hours with 4 of my brothers to the Rocky Mountains for a ski trip. We stayed with a wonderful Catholic couple who own a house with an abundance of beds. Rather than just leaving us to ourselves, they joined us for dinner on a couple of occasions. We were even able to pray lauds with them one morning, which was wonderful. The husband is a permanent deacon, so it was interesting to hear about his experience of seminary formation in Denver compared to our own in Cleveland.

I hadn't been able to ski out West in a few years, so I forgot how fun it is. In my mind, I thought that I had moved on from skiing since it is expensive and a bit time-consuming with travel. This trip scratched the itch that I had forgotten about, and now I think I need to befriend some of our Cleveland priests who take skiing quite seriously. I am not a typical tourist who just enjoys being in the mountains. When I ski, I like to go from first chair to last chair with minimal stopping for breaks. From what I hear, I am in good company with some of our younger priests in our diocese.

The rest of the semester was pretty smooth sailing. I worked on my final papers in advance, so I actually was able to get them done on time without much stress. I did still have a big push during finals week to get all my work done, but I was able to refrain from sacrificing sleep or asking for extensions on my assignments. I am pretty proud of how my final papers turned out. I will post PDF copies of them in another blog post for your intellectual enjoyment. I was able to write on topics that I am genuinely curious about, so I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

I know that this is more of a surface-level view of my life compared to my normal posts. A lot of my spiritual life recently has been fueled by action rather than intellectually satisfying, profound insights that stir my soul. I am getting around to this post in the middle of June, so it is hard to recall the specific things that were rushing through my head. In a future post, I will share about the busy summer that I have planned. I am only one month in so far, but it is quite different from any set of experiences that I have ever had.