Staff Spirituality Day
Last Friday, we held our Staff Spirituality Day at the Broadmeadows Campus in the St Mary of the Cross Mackillop Auditorium. We were very fortunate to have Professor Br David Hall, Dean of the La Salle Academy, Australian Catholic University in North Sydney, to lead us in an exploration of our purpose and mission, as staff members in a Catholic school and as part of the Catholic Church in our contemporary, secular society.
Br David captured the essence of this topic through the delivery of three sessions, commencing with our morning session entitled; Building a Civilisation of Love: the purpose of the Catholic School. In the second session, Br David discussed Education as Relationship: the heart of the matter and in his final session, he explored with us; We’re part of the Church: but what sort of Church?
Br David was thought provoking and engaging and his personal experience of having worked in schools, ensured a real connection to the topic. Many staff commented throughout the day and since, as to how Br David truly resonated with them, challenged them and sparked a flame within their hearts as to what our mission as a Catholic school is and how we all have a shared responsibility in assisting our students and families to come to know God’s infinite love for each of us.
A short Easter reflection from Fr Tony Cox, College Chaplain.
“Liturgically the Easter Season is ending BUT we still wait for the Resurrection.”
Mohandas Gandhi once said:
“When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been murderers and tyrants, and for a time they all seem invincible. But in the end, they always fall. Think of it, always.’
We live in very difficult times. We only have to watch the news on TV, read any paper, magazine or listen to the radio on any given day or evening.
Being as it may we ask ourselves a question, don’t we?
If there is an all-knowing, all-powerful and all loving God who is Lord of the universe, his presence isn’t very evident on or in the News: Violence and wars all over the planet, the Covid Crisis, the war between Russia and Ukraine, fuelled on every side by self-righteous beliefs that sanction hatred, by a self-interest that forces Community to fend for itself and by a socially acceptable greed that forces the poor to fend for themselves in all areas of life.
We wonder: “Just where is the Resurrection in all of this”? Why is God seemingly so inactive? Where is the vindication associated with Easter Sunday?
These, I believe, are really important questions even if they are not new! They are questions that actually taunted Jesus whilst he hung on the cross.
‘If you are the Son of God, come down off the cross! If you are God, prove it! Act now.’
Then and now, it seems, we have never figured out why salvation cannot work like a normal movie where, at the end, a morally superior violence kills off the villain, or all that is bad.
The thing is: God does not work like a Hollywood movie. Never has and never will!
For centuries, the people of the Old Testament prayed for a Messiah, a superman, to come and display a power and a glory that would simply overpower evil. But what they got was a baby lying in straw. When the boy grew up they wanted him to overthrow the Roman Empire and instead he let himself be crucified.
We have not changed much in what we expect of God have we!
But God, as revealed in the death and resurrection of Jesus, doesn’t meet our expectations even as he infinitely exceeds them. What the Resurrection teaches us is that God doesn’t forcibly intervene to stop pain and death. Instead, he redeems the pain and vindicates the death. God rids the world of evil not by using force to blot it out but by vindicating what is good in the eyes of evil so that eventually the good is all that is left. Evil has to forever ‘look upon the one whom it has pierced’.
What the Resurrection of Jesus reveals is that there is a deep moral structure to the universe, that the contours of the universe are love, goodness, and truth and that it’s structure, anchored at the centre by Ultimate Love and Power is non-negotiable:
We live life it’s way OR it simply won’t come out right. More importantly, the reverse is also true. If we respect the structure and live life its way, what is good, true and loving will eventually triumph.
If this is true, and it is, then we don’t have to escape pain and earth to achieve victory. We are only to remain faithful; to be good and true inside of them. However, part of what is revealed here is that we need a great patience and this patience is what we all call Hope.
God’s day will come, but God, it seems, is not in any hurry. He does not have to use coercion or violence to achieve an aim. In many ways, God lets the universe right itself the way a body does when it is attacked by a virus. The immune system eventually does its work, even if, in the short term, there is pain and death. But in the end, the universe does right itself. As Gandhi said: ‘always, without exception, evil is shamed and good triumphs.’ Indeed, the Resurrection works!
