FROM OUR CHAPLAIN

This week we have been setting the goals for next year, what we will learn in our spiritual development and how those learnings may be integrated into our whole Scotch Oakburn experience as well as our daily lives.

I look forward to 2023 with much vigour and joy as we journey and connect together to explore what we can experience as a living, loving, liberated community, where we understand and engage with ourselves, and the world, internally and externally.

This was really brought home to me yesterday as I witnessed our Year 4s in their Leadership Program explain how they didn’t want war anymore, and it reminded me of an address I was privileged to hear this week by Archbishop Michael Curry, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in America (Anglican in Australia) during the Global Joy Summit that emanated from the late Archbishop Tutu (Archbishop of South Africa during the apartheid years) and the Dalai Lama.

I share it here for your joy to be realised too:

To the question, “in these troubled, troubled and beautiful times what do you pray for?”

He said….

“That we would learn to love each other, it is that simple.

I hope and pray and long for us to love each other for real – across all our differences, across all of our wonderous diversity – that we learn to love each other and that that love becomes the law of our hearts, in our lives, in our societies and in our global community.

And when that happens,

no child will go to bed hungry,

and when that happens,

as the African Slaves used to say,

we lay down our sword and shields,

down by the riverside,

and study war no more.”

May you all experience, a world without war, and peace be at your side, in your hearts and all around you.  Amen.

Grace Reynolds
College Chaplain