Living with Strength and Kindliness

Greetings everyone!

This week we celebrate our Foundation Day! It is 133 years since we were founded and our Liturgy will reflect on the courage of our forebears and their foresight in forming us as we are today, so long ago.

In the Liturgy we will reflect on what it may have felt like to those four Brigidine sisters to travel all the way from Ireland, to a completely foreign land with its own issues and problems, and arrive in Echuca which is many ways was like the ‘wild west’ with all its pubs and brothels. We rightly tend to focus on how courageous they were but they were also focussed and stoic in the face of the odds. What a weird space they found themselves in!

Before them, Daniel Delany had said:

‘For you holiness will not consist in doing great actions, but in doing your least actions with great purity of intention and a genuine desire to please God.

By performing the ordinary duties of your day well you will perfect yourself, and your day will be full of merit and good works.’

It was prescient that his focus on their daily presence of mind in going about ordinary tasks with purity of intention reaped such spectacular results 133 years later and 272 years after his birth.

Perhaps that’s the thing - we don’t need to be heroes and save the day in spectacular fashion, though after the events of last week with the heinous murders in Christchurch, I am sure we wish we could change it all in a day. Rather, with our purest of intentions, the intensity of desire in levelling so many of our playing fields, we simply go about our day - teaching, learning, working - and never letting our greatest wishes for justice be far from our minds. Maybe this consistency of purpose is the most courageous thing!

In fact, this is our heritage, our birthright as a school as it were. We had founders who were enormously courageous, indefatigable in their pursuit of justice for even the smallest child among us, and whose focus on this justice was intense and unwavering...and in this, they simply got on with the needs of the day at hand. And here we are because of that and because of every teacher, student and parent who since then, has just ‘gotten on with it.’ Let's ‘keep on’.

We have so much to celebrate with joy and gratitude!

Peace and mercy

Renee Oberin

College leader - Catholic Identity