"A fire that kindles other fires"
Australian Catholic University
Melbourne Faculty of Education Graduation Ceremony
Melbourne Town Hall
Monday, May 5, 2008
occasional address by Fr Mark Raper SJ*
Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor, distinguished guests, academic faculty of ACU, graduands, parents and families, ladies and gentlemen: thank you for your invitation to join you in this celebration. A fire has been kindled in your hearts over these years of study. Tonight you are each commissioned to be, in turn, fires that kindle other fires.
Congratulations to you on the choice you have made. You have chosen the highest of callings. 'I hold with certainty,' said St John Chrysostom, 'that no painter, no sculptor, nor any other artist does such excellent work as the one who moulds the mind of youth.'
Tonight we thank all our own teachers who've helped each of us be here today. We praise and thank the staff of the university, librarians, secretaries, cleaners, security workers, on whose shoulders the university goes forward. We congratulate and thank too all parents, family members, partners who have supported our new graduates, enabling them to be here tonight. You all have the right to be proud.
Tonight the title of my address is "A fire that kindles other fires", and I will speak of truth, courage and silence.
St Augustine is said to have remarked that "Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage: anger at the way things are and courage to see that they do not
remain the way they are." Courage teaches us to be angry in ways that are fruitful. Anger prepares us to confront what is wrong.
For some twenty years I was privileged to live and work in refugee camps. This university Australian Catholic University, has in many ways taken refugees seriously. ACU has
entered a partnership with the organisation with which I worked, Jesuit Refugee Service, to bring university level courses to Burmese refugees at the border with Thailand. For that
I give heartfelt thanks to Australian Catholic University, and congratulate you for having the imagination and courage to undertake such a project. Without such programmes these
young people would have no future. They would have no vision outside the confines of a jungle camp, refugee in a conflict that has continued for over 50 years.
Throughout the 1980s I accompanied Cambodian people, first in the refugee camps at the Thailand border, and since their repatriation in 1993 through frequent visits. Cambodia
was a country of conflict and suffering, obviously throughout the Indochina war, through the Pol Pot time from 1975 to 1978, but also from 1979 until Pol Pot died at the end of
the 1990s. In the Cambodian conflict as also in the Burmese war with their own minorities, every side planted land mines. As a result it is estimated that 40,000 Cambodians had
suffered amputations or disabled in some way in the twenty years since 1979, almost 40 per week. The principle victims of landmines are civilians. Typically a landmine, if it does
not kill, and they are intended to maim rather than kill, takes a foot, a leg, hands, or makes its victim blind and often deaf. The destruction of human lives still continues even now
because the landmines lie undetected in forests and paddy fields.
Over the twenty years I served refugees with Jesuit Refugee Service, I met thousands of refugees injured by landmines, in Angola, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Bosnia
and Herzegovina. Their suffering is a truth that leads to anger.
In the Afghan war, the Russians very cleverly put their small landmines in plastic casing in order to avoid metal detectors. These many bomblets, put into larger bomb casing, were
dropped from planes as cluster bombs, and so spread across the ground on or near villages. Because of their shape, colour and size, children would often mistake them for toys,
pick them up as playthings, and of course suffer horrible damage.
The purpose of this chilling story is not to anger you or to urge you to join the campaign against land mines, although I hope you would do so. Rather, I tell it in order to ask you:
what are the land mines in your lives, what are the land mines in your hearts? 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.
During his 1986 visit, Pope John Paul II spoke to Australian educators '…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.'
To come face to face with truth requires courage. Nelson Mandela says "It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us." Strictly speaking we cannot see light. Light enables us to see. The capacity to see clearly may open us to strong emotions. Knowing the truth may lead to anger.
But remember, anger is one of hope's two beautiful daughters: "anger at the way things are and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are."
Confucius famously said: "What I hear, I forget. What I see, I remember. What I do, I understand."
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.
The title of my address, "A fire that kindles other fires", is a phrase of Alberto Hurtado Cruchaga, a Chilean Jesuit canonised in recent years, and famous for helping hundreds of
thousands of the poor around Santiago to find housing, work and schooling. The fire in his heart lit up a large movement of energetic service of others.
Hurtado's personal reflections were stunningly simple. In one he undertakes an exercise that we could easily do tonight. He asks, "who are we to love?" His meditation goes like
this:
"Who are we to love? My parents from whom I have received life, who have given me light and nourishment. Those with whom I have shared a roof and broken bread. Those I knew in my neighborhood, during my school days, at the university, ... during the years of study, in my apostolate ... Those with whom I have fought, whom I have caused pain, bitterness or harm ... All those I have assisted, supported, gotten out of trouble ... All those who have opposed me, despised me or done me harm. All those I have seen in the slums, in the shacks, under the bridges. All those whose unhappiness I have been able to discern, whose unrest I have been able to glimpse. All those pale little children with sunken faces. Those tuberculosis patients ..., the lepers ... All the young I have met in study groups ... Those who have taught me through the books they have written, with the words they have said to me ..."
Just look around this great hall, and realise the people to whom you are indebted and called to love. When you are in your class room, look around at the faces there, and try to find the way to love those children. That will a fire in your own heart, a fire that kindles other fires.
"First we must love them," says Hurtado. "Love the good in them, their simplicity, their roughness, daring, strength, frankness, their tenacity, their human qualities, their joy, themission they carry out in their families ... Love them to the point that you will be unable to support whatever they suffer ... If we love them we will know what we must do forthem ... nothing done in love is ever lost."
Anger and courage are beautiful sisters because they respond to the truth of how things are. But 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. God gave us one mouth and two ears, they say, to remind us that we should listen twice as much as we speak. 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. But abandon the notion that 'nothing is happening' when it is silent. See how much new clarity silence can bring. And learn the techniques to bring it about.
This is a Catholic University. The first obligation of a Catholic university is that it be a good university. Many of you will be teachers in Catholic schools. Similarly your first
obligation is to be good teachers.
Given the identity of this university, I am sure that you have had opportunities at some moment to sense the sacred. 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. Silence means to stop from time to time from doing what is unimportant. Stop to
look for the landmines.
Even God invites us to share his rest. This rest is God's own being. God comes to us with stealth and invisibility. If we spend time seeking to know him, we will indeed come to
know ourselves more deeply, because he is the self within our selves, to reach him, to touch him means going deep within.
Going back to the real landmines for a moment, you may be interested to know that last year the Australian Defence Forces were seeking to acquire cluster munitions. But thanks
to the insistence of many individuals and non-government organisations, this policy is reversed, and now Australia will be at the Dublin Conference on Cluster Munitions next 19
30 May and will lobby for an international humanitarian law banning cluster munitions that cause unacceptable harm to civilians.
Today you graduate as teachers and I congratulate you. 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.
Thank you.
* Fr Mark Raper SJ is the 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.
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