Campus Ministry

By Maeve Danek

Ever since starting to serve in 5th grade, altar serving has always held such a special place in my heart. Being up at the altar is something I believe very few people know the true specialness of. By assisting the priest, I am there in the presence of the Eucharist, and it brings me even closer to God. My name is Maeve Danek and I’m one of the altar servers at UD, as well as a Eucharistic minister. 

During my freshman year, I had a falling out in my faith and I made the conscious decision to skip Mass. Through altar serving I started going to Mass again.  Something that I didn’t realize was that you don’t know you’ve fallen out of faith until you’ve come back to it. By losing my faith I became distant from God and by altar serving I was able to start down the path that God has laid out for me. Going to Mass changed my faith life from being absent to practicing it openly. I began to become fully present in my faith. While I only started altar serving to get myself to go to Mass, it eventually shifted from going because I felt I had to, to going because I wanted to be there.

One big push for me, aside from serving, was the people that I encountered each week while serving. By seeing their devotion to Christ and their willingness to serve in the presence of the Eucharist, I was compelled to serve in the same way. I have made many friends and trusted peers through serving and it has allowed me to foster my own devotion to Christ and grow even stronger in my faith.

Assisting in Mass allows me to find a sense of community with my peers at UD and allows my connection to God to remain strong and become stronger each day. I didn’t realize how much of an impact I made on the people of UD until I was a Eucharistic minister for the first time this fall. After mass, a couple came up to me and told me how much they missed seeing me up at the altar as an altar server. Before this, I never realized how important my role as a server was. For many churches altar serving is the precursor to a man becoming a priest but churches like my home parish and UD encourage anyone to serve. Being able to serve during the Mass gives me great joy.

Though people recognize me from serving Mass and tell me they are extremely grateful for my service, I ultimately do it because of my love for God and the Eucharist. Serving allows me to keep God present within my mind throughout the whole Mass, which allows me to leave any distractions or stresses from the day out of my mind and to be fully present to God's graces. If not for altar serving I truly believe my faith life and my journey towards God would be completely different. While it started as a way to get myself to go to Mass, it has changed so much since then.

Looking back I can see the graces that God has granted me and the opportunities I have been given because of serving. I am currently going to daily Mass as well as weekly adoration and compline. None of these would be present in my life without altar serving, not even the many Catholic LIFE events that I have begun attending.

Whether it is assisting the priest or giving Jesus’s blood and body to the people of UD, I am grateful for the opportunity to serve and am overjoyed with the increase of servers this year which allowed me to be a Eucharistic minister. I am so joyful in the service the community of UD is providing, and how people are truly seeing the specialness of serving that I do, in their own acts of service. By serving, we are truly being servants of God, and as Peter states in 1 Peter 4:10, “As each one has received a gift, use it to serve one another as good stewards of God’s varied grace.”