Mission Report – June 9, 2016

We are closing in upon the end of the end of semester one and the focus has shifted to exams. However, this is not to the exclusion of many other adventures. The Year 9 students are also preparing for their Melbourne Experience; Year 10 students are about to undertake a week encountering the routines of the workplace; Year 12 students are -‘suiting-up’ for their Formal; all staff are preparing for their annual formation days; and the extra-curricular opportunities continue to be offered to our students. Few could doubt that the semester break is most welcomed and well deserved.

This is what a Catholic school in the Edmund Rice Tradition looks like, and much more besides. If we were to welcome a visitor to St Patrick’s College and wished to introduce them to a -‘true’ experience of our College, there is much that we want them to see, hear, taste, smell and touch. This is the observable element to the invitation -Come and see-: the same response Jesus gave to his disciples when they asked him -Who are you?-

But there is another dimension to the experience. There is not only what we can observe but also what we feel. The disciples on the road to Emmaus declare of their encounter with Jesus: -Did not our hearts burn within us?- So too, our desire is that the SPC experience is one of joy, friendship, hope, justice, peace and unity. The SPC experience should evoke the love of God that is the source of all.

The combination of the outer and inner dimensions of our community forms a dynamic unity that keeps us on the path to truth and life, love and friendship. We know that there are certain things that we must -‘do’ in the public realm, but these things are both motivated by and a motivation for a personal formation through friendship with Jesus. To keep both dimensions alive stops our actions from being the hollow reflections of a community, or the retreat into the isolation of merely self-satisfying choices.

Our commitment to the Winter Food Drive for the St Vincent de Paul Society is a clearly such a moment.

In this great adventure a rest is always a good and necessary thing. May the semester break and time with families be a moment of renewal and re-creation for all our students.