This weekend we kick start Catholic School week. I have been part of catholic schools for the past ten years as a priest. But prior to that iIwas educated in a catholic school up until my fifth year of elementary school. I also spent 7 years in higher education under the Catholic school umbrella.
It is a part of my blood and sprit.
What makes Catholics schools so instrumental and valuable especially to a society that is so secular and self-centered?
This is often the discussion raised when catholic schools' week comes around as it does every year this time: what and why catholic education.
I have thought about it much. It was yesterday in the midst of my pondering that a thought surged to the frontal lobe of my brain, or whatever part of the brain that is engaged in such activity.
The thought was the following: children learn the best where they are loved the most. Only in Jesus is love fully realized. So in Him we both learn to love and love to learn. This is the reality that is at the heart of Catholic education. It is not about the best tools or the best tech. It is not about the latest greatest gadget or teaching enterprise. It is about love. And each day at Catholic Schools we get to make visible God's love in Jesus both verbally and physically by our actions. And if our catholic schools fail, it is because we have lost sight of His love and have forsaken His love for gadgets and gizmo's of secular society.
No! A child learns best where He is loved most. In Him, Jesus, do they learn to love and love to learn.
Now on to our second reading for this weekend
Here is phrase that is a translation of a Latin colloquialism: A man is not where he lives but where he loves.
A man is not where he lives but where he loves.
Where do we love? Where is our love? What is the state or quality of the love we bring to the front daily?
Is it a childish love or have we allowed our love to grow and mature?
A man is not where he lives but where he loves and where he loves he surely lives.
Love precedes life.
At least St Paul thinks so as we encounter the beauty of today's second reading.
He lays down the foundation of what true and authentic love is.
Too often we are lazy in love. We don't labor sufficiently so that our life can become what it is created to be by our Father. In case we have lost our way in love and found ourselves lost in life, St Paul gives us an opportunity to revaluate our life in regards to love, which makes our present place known.
"Love is: patient, kind, it is not jealous, it is not pompous, it is not inflated, it is not rude, it does not seek its own interest, it is not quick tempered, it does not brood over injury, it does not rejoice in wrong doing but rejoices in the truth. it bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love does not fail."
A man is not where he lives but where he loves.
"When I was a child , I used to talk as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when i became a man, I put aside childish things."
It is time to put aside our childish ways. Love is not child's play but it is in loving that we become like children. It is a strange world we live in. It is strange spiritual physics. Loving demands to be mature but in loving maturely we awaken the child within who is unhindered in loving. We then become the child God created us to be and are able to love unhindered and unencumbered as I see daily with my encounter with the little children at school.
A man is not where he lives but where he loves. And where he loves he finds life to its full.
Just a thought for this Sunday
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