Hello!
It has been a rather long time since I have written about my employment adventures.
Not long ago, I was working as a pre-kindergarten teacher. More recently still, I ceased being a pre-kindergarten teacher. They say you do not understand what something is really and truly like, from the inside out, until you do it. So it was with teaching--once I got through student teaching, finding a job, and then running a classroom, it was clear it was not for me, not at this stage of my life. It was not fun having to tell the people I worked for, people I had great respect for, that they would have to find a new pre-kindergarten teacher two months into the school year. It was even less fun saying goodbye to the kiddos.
It's all worked out, though. I got a job at my parish, St. Joseph's. I am there part-time helping with administrative matters, "office-y stuff" as I called it when one of my friends asked recently what exactly I am doing. I started this past week. We sent out a mailing to families of people who had died and who had their funerals at St. Joe's--we wanted to let the families know we will be remembering their loved ones at Mass this weekend. We also sent out our annual appeal letter. So far, this is similar to the sort of activities I was involved in at Our Daily Bread--letting people know what is going on with the parish, providing a means for staying involved.
St. Joe's has been my parish for almost five years now; I started attending there shortly after moving to Cincinnati. It's a lively place where the most amazing gospel music is wedded to the Roman Rite, the Catholic liturgical form I am most familiar with. So it reminds me a teensy bit of Mass at St. Thomas, my old home parish, after it became the center for the Vietnamese Catholic community in St. Louis. It is a place where the soul of the music we sing helps to shape the experience of Eucharist. "The Spirit is alive and well here at St. Joseph," one of our regular announcers is fond of saying.
Before I started the program where I got my Master's in Teaching, I was taking classes towards a Master's in Lay Pastoral Ministry at the Athenaeum of Ohio. So, interestingly, parish work was something I've been long interested in. I just didn't know how to go about getting involved. Funny how things work out, isn't it?
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