A Busy Week!

Hola everyone!
So this week is apparently busy. I think this is a first! And because I can, I’m going to tell you what’s on my plate this week.

So yesterday (start of the week) Rick and I worked with the confirmation crowd on a liturgy session. We had tried doing this generally with the parish, but it didn’t quite work out well. So a couple things that you need to understand about confirmation here. a) the US bishops have highly recommended the age for confirmation to not be before 16 b) the confirmation program here is a two year program. And just to jump on my soapbox for a minute here, I really dislike having the confirmation age so late. Like, really, really. It prolongs the full entry of the person into the church for a friggin’ long time. I mean, they’re not full catholics until they’re at least 16! That is the most ridiculous thing ever, and it has absolutely no basis in our church history and has no scriptural validation and is generally a very stupid thing to do. It looks like they’re saying, ‘Well, at least we can make them stay in the church until they’re at least 16, and who knows after that. We can hold the reigns until then.’ Which irritates me like there’s no tomorrow cause then it’s a power trip, even if they’re trying to scapegoat it saying that it’s a way to confirm their faith and they can’t make that decision until they’re that age. Cause these bishops know darned well that’s not the point of confirmation, and it just promotes the ignorance of the fact that we need some sort of coming-of-age ceremony in our church that validates and celebrates teens becoming adults. < /soapbox>

Okay. c) the confirmation program, as it stands, is not reaching the teens and they really dislike going. So when Rick and I, two strangers to this program’s routine, facilitated this week’s session, they didn’t know how to respond. I started with a couple ice breakers (Bingo and Fruitbasket). And, as most of you know, I used Danny’s Bingo as a basis and changed the little statements to ask others for their signatures. And there’s about 30 or so squares. There were about 55 teens. They were complaining that it was too hard because there were too many squares. I gave them a good 10 minutes for this game. I thought that was rather nuts (they enjoyed it once they started to get into it). Then fruitbasket. I have never had a problem with teens getting into this game before; it was like they had forgotten the concept ‘enjoy’ or ‘have fun’. It was an interesting experience. They did get into it, but it took a lot longer than I would have expected. Gave me some good insight into where these teens were at. So! Lots of socials! Anyway, the session went really rather well (we were asking for their input into different areas of the liturgy in order that we know what their experience is and the things they like and dislike, and where they’re willing to help change things), so we’ll be working on getting that worked into the 5:30 liturgy, which’ll be a great start.

Today and Thursday are my somewhat free days. I’m just working on finishing sorting the office (lots of stack of stacks of junk), Tuesday and Wednesday are my days off, though I have a staff meeting Tueday afternoon and Wednesday I need to get my fingerprinting done so I can work with youth (they’re much more stringent here about this stuff than in Canada) and there’s some sort of youth ministry meeting at the diocesan office (which is odd, as we don’t have a diocesan youth coordinator at the moment) and a san clemente community meeting from the human affairs forum. Topic: Teen employment and training needs and opportunities. I figure that if I can make it back from the diocesan meeting, I’ll go to that too as it might be kinda useful. And Friday I’m taking off and going to LA (for the first time) with Kathy (coworker) cause I worked last Tuesday and I need a day off. So yeah. That’s my busy week!

That’s about all that’s going on. I put up my poster of Captain Jack Sparrow in the office today, so my day’s going pretty good ^_^. And can’t-do-sorrow-boy is facing the wall on the other side of the poster, cause I don’t like him.

Anyway, that’s about it! Congrats to Sharon for getting such an awesome job!! That’s sooo very exciting!

Hope to hear from you soon!
Peace,
Jane