' ... By dedicating yourselves to human learning, you declare your willingness to stand face to face with truth - the truth about the human person in relation to the whole world, to all creation.'
Pope John Paul II, to educators during his 1986 visit to Australia
Teachers graduating from the Australian Catholic University's Melbourne Education Faculty have been encouraged to love their students by exhorting them to explore and know truth, courage and silence.
Drawing on 20 years' service to refugees around the world, Father Mark Raper SJ used the explosively brutal example of landmines to ask the graduates to consider what landmines were in their own lives.
"What are the things in your experience that seem attractive, that draw you, and yet are dangerous? What are the discerning choices you have to make in your life about relationships, behaviour, values, commodities and faith?
"There are realities that society simultaneously endorses and condemns. Our society trivialises sex and cultivates desires. There are true joys and there are traps. So the choices are yours to acknowledge and identify the traps.
"You teachers face these traps in your own lives. If you do face them in a discerning way, then you will be able to help students in their discerning choices. Perhaps the most important thing you can teach them will be how to recognise their own landmines. You can only do that if you love your students."
Quoting St Augustine, he said that hope had "two beautiful daughters": anger, at the way things are and courage, to see that they do not remain that way.
Fr Raper said that coming face to face with truth required courage and that knowing truth may lead to anger.
"To do demands courage. This is the connection between truth and courage. Both have an impact on our hearts. The Word of God is a two edged sword. It is alive and active. It pierces between the marrow and the bone. It pierces the heart. It is not a coincidence that truth pierces the heart. There, in our hearts, we understand what truly matters. Courage is a quality of the heart.
"If what we hold as true has no impact on our lives, then what sort of truth is that? If others, especially the children we teach, are to believe a word that we speak, then it must be evident in our lives. We must live in a way that is striking, reaching out to others, fearing nobody.
"Courage then, is something we can give to one another. It is the virtue most urgently needed if we are to witness to the truth ..."
While anger and courage are beautiful sisters because they respond to the truth of how things are, he asked: what of silence?
"An eight year old boy, when asked what is love, replied: 'Love is what is in the room with you at Christmas when you stop unwrapping presents and listen.'
"Love needs silence to reveal itself ... Listening is life giving. Listening is healing. Listening with the heart gives courage.
"Perhaps the noisiest place in the world is a school playground, and the second noisiest can be an unruly classroom. So silence can be one of the greatest challenges a teacher may face ...
"A good teacher instils a sense of the sacred, and for that you need silence. A good teacher allows students space to question and that needs silence.
"Young people have enquiring minds. In their studies they are taught to inquire. To grow in faith they must be encouraged to inquire. Inquiry needs space, needs waiting, needs silence ..."
He encouraged them to stop to look for the landmines.
Fr Raper congratulated the men and women on their graduation. "In Robert Bolt's play, A Man For All Seasons, Thomas More asks Richard Rich, 'Why not be a teacher - you'd be a fine teacher, perhaps a great one?' Rich replies, 'And if I was, who would know it?' More responds, 'You, your pupils, your friends, God - not a bad public that.'
"Congratulations on the public you have chosen. You could hardly do better."
The graduation ceremony was held in the Melbourne Town Hall on Monday, May 5.
Fr Mark Raper SJ (centre) is pictured with Australian Catholic University Chancellor Br Julian McDonald CFC (left) and ACU Vice Chancellor, Prof. Greg Craven.
Fr Raper is Provincial of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) in Australia, President of the Jesuit Conference of East Asia and Oceania (JCEAO) and President of Catholic Religious Australia.
The full text of the occasional address is available here.
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