Practice for the real thing
The following article was published in the Fall 2022 issue of The Missioner. Fr. Flowers recently joined the staff of Nashotah House as campus chaplain.
When the Rev. Thomas Flowers, ‘15, was a student at Nashotah House, he made his way through Practical Liturgics with the help of a practice mass kit.
The former Disney Imagineer, with a background in set design and sword-fight choreography, handcrafted the kit — replete with chalice, paten, linens, and cruets — to use as his own personal study tool.
“I’m kind of a kinesthetic learner,” Flowers said. “Maybe because I have some experience on stage working with props, (I know) that when you get used to manipulating and handling things, you can stop thinking about them self-consciously. And that helped me a lot to learn the manual acts of the Eucharist.”
Flowers remembers fellow students practicing for the senior capstone liturgics final, struggling as they used makeshift supplies — coffee cups, wine glasses — in place of the sacred vessels.
Recognizing that other students might benefit from the tools he used as a student, Flowers recently assembled and donated six practice mass kits to Nashotah House, where they are now available for students to check out on loan from the library.
“My motivation for assembling the kits came from my experiencing what the end of the term looks like for seniors, how much there is to do in such little time,” Flowers said. “I was just hoping to provide them a way to reduce their stress, even if only a bit.”
Following his graduation from Nashotah House in 2015, Flowers went on to serve as Curate and Parish Administrator at All Saints Anglican Cathedral of the Anglican Diocese in New England, located in Amesbury, Massachusetts. He later moved to Asheville, North Carolina, to be near his mother. There he served as a volunteer assisting priest to the Rector of Redeemer Anglican Church and chaplain to the Asheville Police Department.
Recently, he and Kimetra moved to Nashotah to be near their daughter.
While they may be mere “props,” Flowers hopes the practice mass kits allow seminarians to develop muscle memory, preparing aspiring priests for the real thing.
“What makes it feel like a personal gift is just how much the Eucharist means to me,” he said. “And in some ways, it feels like being able to give that same love to somebody else – that unselfconscious entering into and getting lost in wonder and praise.”
Read the e-edition of The Missioner below: