Mission Report

by Director of Mission, Mr Geoff Brodie

VCE exams continue across a broad range of studies. At the end of next week, we shall celebrate our Annual Valedictory Dinner and our young men become old boys of the College. But for the moment, many students continue preparing for and completing exams.

The criterion for framing the curriculum at SPC is the capacity of a study to offer students some knowledge of God’s creation, for though truth is found in many places and through many different fields of enquiry, it always has one source. In engaging the unrestricted desire to know, each course of study carries the potential to encounter the One source. However, the commitment to Truth requires much effort, endurance and patience.

The Economics exam took place on Thursday. A fundamental concept of the course is relative scarcity: that the limited resources of a community cannot satisfy the unlimited wants and needs of the people and so we need to make choices. Consequently, the ‘scarcer’ an object, the higher its price in the market. This holds true for much of the created world and the satisfaction of our material needs, but our search does not end there. For if we pursue the question of our needs to their ultimate end and give power to our unrestricted desire to know, we come to our need to be loved. This places us in the divine economy where love is the essential ‘good’ that satisfies the deepest desires of our heart. But in God’s economy, love is infinite because love is the very nature of the infinite God. Therefore, in God’s Kingdom, the ‘good’ that is most valued is the very thing that is most abundant, and in fact ‘free’. For God’s ways are not our ways (Isaiah 55:8), and if we live according to God’s ways, we transform creation according to it most fundamental reality. If love allocated the scarce physical resources of our world, then many of the challenges we face as an historical community would be resolved. In fact, any plans that ignore this fundamental reality is doomed to fail.

Let us unite in prayer, that teaching and learning at St Patrick’s College may invite every student into the search for the truth that is love, the love that is truth, and the revelation that God gives all this freely and abundantly. We only have to say ‘yes’ to God.