Homily. Mass for the New Academic Year, Aquinas University College, Adelaide

Transcription

1 Homily Mass for the New Academic Year, Aquinas University College, Adelaide Sunday, 22 nd February 2015 My dear young brothers and sisters. This is an exciting day for those commencing university life, exciting for you and your parents. Your parents have loved you into life, have nurtured you, and now with great pride see you about to embark on this next stage of your growth. Any society worth its salt cherishes university students. In your youth and brimming life you are both celebrators of the present, and architects of the future. Society says that it is crucial that you put aside the next four years or so to prepare yourselves as celebrators of the present and architects of the future. You are on the next stage of your journey in which you are to develop your mind, grow your heart, and deepen your soul. We are in Lent, and a recent Sunday reading spoke of Noah and the ark. We can tend to joke more about Noah s ark, than look at it seriously, all sorts of jokes about who cleans up the mess etc. The film Noah starring Russell Crowe recently did nothing to lift up the image! But there is something about the ark, a place of life and protection. Not something defensive against a hostile world, but the ark being a place in which humanity might grow, to strengthen itself until ready not to be traduced by whatever of the inhumane there is in our world. Jean Vanier the Canadian lay Catholic very holy man, founded L Arche, and there are communities of L Arche all around the world. They are communities of people with serious handicaps, often intellectual, living with people who care for them, people blessed with full health. They have been described as places of salvation for people with disabilities who might otherwise be swept away by the floods of social unconcern. 1

2 There is the other ark that Thomas Kennealy wrote of in his book Schindler s Ark, which in the film became Schindler s List. Oscar Schindler was a German entrepreneur who used his factory sheds as places of refuge for Jewish people; he gave them employment papers and passes to disguise them from the Nazis, and saved several thousand Jewish people from extermination. His factory sheds became arks. We know of the role of zoos like Monato, where endangered species can be preserved. In some way our universities are arks of humanity, holding together all that is precious in humanity, all that can come out of the growth of the mind, the imagination of the heart, and the life of the soul. Like the monasteries of old, the universities have played a role of being beacons of light against the darkness of intolerance or totalitarian ideologies. And we certainly need these arks of humanity. Henry Kissinger once wrote it is not often that nations learn from the past. So despite the horror and lessons of the twentieth century, peace remains as elusive as the rainbow pot of gold. We think of our present times, with ISIS and its atrocities, Ukraine, Boko Haram, Gaza. For so many of our societies in our world, it still appears that for the leaders of the various factions, it is devastation that is the solution. The Roman historian Tacitus, writing of the Roman wars in Britain, said they made a desert, and they called it peace. It is not simply the damage that human beings do to each other. It is the savagery they perpetrate within their own hearts when they do these deeds. How can the leaders of a civilized society enact the cold-blooded judicial murder of two young men before a firing squad? How can one human being, claiming religious motivation, deliberately burn to death a man trapped in a cage? And closer to home, how can family men with children of their own permit other people s children to be kept in detention? Innocence is part of the description of childhood; how can one possibly condone putting innocents into what effectively are prison camps? 2

3 We bring to this the message of Jesus My peace I leave you, my peace I give to you, a peace the world cannot give. Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid. Like prayer, the place of peace is the heart. We Christians have a relatively simple criterion against which we are to assess ourselves. Jesus said, Blessed are the peacemakers. We can assess ourselves as disciples was there anything of a note of compassion in what I have just said, or the action I have just undertaken? Think of it the virtue of compassion would eradicate all violence. Malice simply cannot exist if compassion is present. There does seem to be a crisis of non-compassion in our world. Ask any number of asylum seekers on Manus Island. Be compassionate as your Heavenly Father is compassionate. We Christians are called to bring into the world this most precious Christian virtue, a virtue not restricted to Christians but enhanced so greatly by the teachings of Jesus, to ameliorate this world of harshness. When Pope Francis visited Lampedusa, the small island of the coast of Africa, on a journey to which thousands of African asylum seekers have perished, and Lampedusa is the Christmas Island of Italy, Pope Francis exclaimed, Who weeps for this? We have forgotten how to weep. Poignancy and compassion need to be enhanced through educated young people like yourself. Note here in our Adelaide Art Gallery the works by Alex Seton, showing poignancy and compassion in art. The role of a place like Aquinas is to carry on the strong Christian tradition of recognizing that virtue must be joined to learning. Learning and virtue, learning and morality, must go together. That message was conveyed in the very first Catholic boys secondary school founded in the colony in South Australia at Sevenhill, with its Virtus Et Doctrina in Socrates believed that learning would lead to virtue, that knowing what is right, a man would do that. We thought that the twentieth century had given enough evidence to the contrary, but now our twenty-first era continues the same. Learning by itself is not enough. You can know the right thing, but do the opposite. Morality must be joined to learning. 3

4 On 20 th January 1942 Reinhard Heydrich called together a conference in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. There were fifteen men present with about eight of them having doctorates, seven of them lawyers, three of them had been judges, one of them was the son of a Lutheran pastor, one was an interior decorator, one was named Martin Luther, and numbers were musically gifted. Heydrich s parents were opera singers, and Heydrich himself was an accomplished violinist. The purpose of the meeting of those fifteen highly educated men was to prepare the Final Solution, the extermination of the Jews in Europe not those just in Nazi held territory, but in the areas beyond when Germany would assume control of all Europe. The meeting took one and a half hours only and devised that Final Solution which resulted in the extermination of six million Jews, a statistic that can be easy to say, but when one picks up a detail such as that one million of those exterminated were children aged twelve and under. Children. What perversion of evil is it possible for humanity to have to destroy one million children under twelve? To foster the mind, to grow the heart, to deepen the soul. Pope Francis described the Church as the mother educator. The educational outlook of the Church has always been that to be fully human one must develop on all fronts, the mind, the heart, the imagination, the soul. The mind weighs and assesses, the heart gives passion, the imagination the dreams that create visions, the soul the touchstone for the humane. The lesson of the Cro-Magnon caves in France is still pertinent for us, the oldest relics of cavemen in France, going back thirty or forty thousand years. You are familiar with the pictures, the ochre coloured buffalo on the walls of the cave. There are signs of the intellect, cross hatchings and calculations on the wall. Man the thinker. There are tools depicted, being used as weapons. Man the maker. There is the pollen of flowers sprinkled around the bones of a deceased. Man the lover. The painting themselves are religious. Man the worshipper. Unless we develop on all fronts, including our morality and interior life, we will never be fully human. 4

5 Morality and compassion are hard to sustain in any life, as surrounded as we are by prejudices, both within and without ourselves. Those virtues are hard to sustain without Jesus playing a role in our life, without us deepening that relationship as adults. My exhortation to you is to use the Gospels as something like a Facebook or Twitter. You all spend some time a day looking at your Facebook or Twitter, or other forms of social media. Treat the Gospel as Facebook, read two or three verses each day, deepening that relationship with Christ. In the First Letter to Peter it is written, Christ suffered for sins once, that He lead you to God. That is a real and basic question for any university student. Do you want to be led to God? Christ proposes, and never imposes. Respecting our freedom, the question is truly ours; do we want Him to lead us to God, and so know the truth that will set us free. Bishop Greg O Kelly SJ 5