Principals Academy 2014: Lessons From the Saints
Blessed Basil Moreau’s Lessons
onChristian Education
Opening Hymn
I Want to Walk as a Child of the Light (GIA, Thomerson)
Opening Prayer
Loving God,
As we begin in earnest this week,
We give thanks for all of your abundant blessings:
safe travels, meaningful service, supportive communities, and deep faith.
May our time together in prayer deepen our desire
to be open to your call
as we serve the apostolate of Catholic education.
We make this prayer through Christ, our Teacher and our Lord.
Amen.
Reading
A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Mark
And people were bringing children to him that he might touch them, but the disciples rebuked them.
When Jesus saw this he became indignant and said to them, “Let the children come to me; do not prevent them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.
Amen, I say to you, whoever does not accept the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it.”
Then he embraced them and blessed them, placing his hands on them.
The Gospel of the Lord Praise to you, Lord, Jesus Christ.
Reflection
Throughout the week, we will pair readings from the Gospels with reflections from the saints. We are reminded of their friendship as we continue their work in the faith. As we pray with their words, we give thanks to God for these holy men and women intercede for us and for all those in our schools, which bear their names.
Today, we hear from the founder of the Congregation of Holy Cross, the congregation which began and still serves the University of Notre Dame: Blessed Basil Moreau.
Blessed Basil wrote frequently on Christian education, educating minds and hearts.
And, in a famous quotation that animates our work in ACE and our vision of Catholic education: The art of Christian education is bringing the young to wholeness in the person of Jesus Christ.
No single day in the school year is more exciting than that very first encounter with a new class. Looking out on the unfamiliar faces, we see in the expressions the mystery of knowledge not yet exchanged and the friendships not yet formed.
This past summer, a friend of mine was privileged to visit Florence. He recalled the experience of gazing for the first time upon Michelangelo’s David. The experience made him wonder what it must have been like for that master craftsman to imagine a grace-filled form hidden within a gigantic, unformed block of marble. To recognize and bring to light the hidden possibility, the potential of such sheer and utter beauty is the gift of the artist.
For Basil Moreau, this is the vocation of the teacher: To sense the mystery at hand and to coax out of the somewhat inchoate the loveliness and grace that lies hidden. Teaching requires a radical act of imagination to accomplish this. One must trust that within each student “there lies the dearest freshness deep down things” (G.M. Hopkins). And one must be utterly
relentless in engaging our students in a personal and even sacramental encounter.
The invitation to “wholeness in the person of Jesus Christ” is an invitation to full human flourishing; whole- ness becomes holiness. It is an invitation to come to know and experience fully the freedom and joy of the children of God.
Intercessions
We pray, Christ our Teacher, hear our prayer.
- Lord, help us to hear your invitation to holiness, to see your grace in our students, who are an expression of your love for the world.
- Help us to turn to you in our struggles and in our joys.
- Give us the grace of childlike faith, of wholehearted devotion to you.
- For what else shall we pray?
We offer these prayers to our loving Father, as we pray,
Our Father…
Sign of the Cross
Principals Academy 2014: Lessons From the Saints
Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton’s Lessons
on Daily Prayer
Opening Hymn
We Gather Together (tune: Kremser)
Opening Prayer
Loving God,
As we gather this morning, we give thanks for your abundant gifts,
Especially the gift of faith.
May our time together in prayer
Draw us ever nearer to you, source of every good gift.
Through Christ, our Lord. Amen.
Reading
A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Luke
He was praying in a certain place, and when he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray just as John taught his disciples.” He said to them, “When you pray, say:
Father, hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come.
Give us each day our daily bread
and forgive us our sins
for we ourselves forgive everyone in debt to us,
and do not subject us to the final test.”
The Gospel of the Lord. Praise to You, Lord Jesus Christ.
Reflection
In this Gospel passage, we heard the disciples implore Jesus: Lord, teach us to pray.
Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton lived in the 1800s, and she, too asked for the grace to turn to God every day.
Instead of the metaphor of our daily bread in today’s Gospel, she used the metaphor of a garden to describe the interior life of prayer:
Give some time every day, she writes, if it is only half an hour, to devotional reading, which is as necessary to the well-ordering of the mind as the hand of the gardener is to prevent the weeds from destroying your favorite plants.
When I was a child, my mother would often ask me to help with the weeding in her garden. Begrudgingly, I performed the mundane and tedious task that resulted in sore muscles, grass-stained clothing, and bug bites. Why do we have to do this every day? Surely there’s an easier way. Why can’t Mom’s plants just cohabitate with the weeds?
Even though my assistance was inconsistent, Mom made it a point to care for her garden on a daily basis, and it showed. Mom’s dedication taught me that for a garden to be beautiful, it must be tended to every day. Could there have been any better preparation for the vocation of teaching? Like a garden, or like our students, our minds need constant attention and care. In order to remain focused, we must dedicate time for daily devotional reading and reflection.
As I begin each day, I have every intention of spending some quiet time with God. In our work at Catholic schools, however, our daily agenda is
quickly filled with a hundred “more urgent” tasks. I need to return a parent’s phone call. I have to meet with a family. There is an upcoming event that requires planning.
If we allow ourselves to become consumed with duties, deadlines, and commitments, weeds of negativity, frustration, and disappointment can take root. We may begin to focus on our shortcomings, failures, and fatigue rather than on the miracles God works through us.
Elizabeth Ann Seton, the founder of Catholic education in the United States, provides this beautiful advice to re-center our minds on God. Devotional reading helps us focus on God’s agenda rather than our own. When we dedicate daily time to it, we can dig up the weeds that threaten our day-to-day mission to serve and nurture the beauty of God’s presence within and around us.
Intercessions
We pray, Christ our Teacher, hear our prayer.
•That our ears will be open to the words God speaks in our lives.
•For the grace to come to the Father in prayer to nourish and cultivate our ministry in Catholic education.
•For the fortitude to remain steadfast in faith.
•For what else shall we pray?
We offer these prayers to our loving Father, as we pray,
Our Father…
Sign of the Cross
Principals Academy 2014: Lessons From the Saints
Saint Francis De Sales’ Lessons on Love
Opening Hymn
Set Your Heart on the Higher Gifts (WLP, Warner)
Opening Prayer
Heavenly Father, You have called us here this week,
placing before us a challenge and a mission,
toteach and to love the children you call your own.
Open our eyes to new opportunities
to offer these children the gift of an excellent Catholic education,
that together we may make you known, loved, and served. Amen.
Reading
A reading from the Holy Gospel according to John
Jesus said, “As the Father loves me, so I also love you. Remain in my love.
If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and remain in his love.
“I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete.
This is my commandment: love one another as I love you.
No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
You are my friends if you do what I command you.
I no longer call you slaves, because a slave does not know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father.
It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name he may give you.
This I command you: love one another.
The Gospel of the Lord.Praise to you, Lord, Jesus Christ.
Reflection
Throughout this week, we have turned to Christ Jesus, our Teacher, in the Gospels, and to the holy men and women, the saints, who live out and proclaim his teachings. St. Francis deSales is our instructor today. St. Francis offers these words on teaching to love:
You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working, and just so, you learn to love by loving. All those who think to learn in any other way deceive themselves.
As Catholic school educators, we assign daily practice problems and review questions to help reinforce what students have learned. What is the equivalent in the spiritual life? We pray every day and teach our students to do the same.
When Jesus and saints like Francis de Sales speak about love, they are not referring solely to emotions. When we love or are loved by others we feel good inside, but we shouldn’t mistake the feelings for love itself. No, love—caritas or charity—is a virtue; it is a habit, a daily practice that becomes a part of us.
The practice of prayer leads us to experience love as we recognize, accept, and remember God’s love for us. There are many prayer disciplines that help us do that: lectiodivina, the profession of faith, the Angelus, the Liturgy of the Hours, the Rosary. They are practices. We do them again and again, regardless of how we feel, because they help us recall and celebrate God’s infinite love for us.
The practice of prayer also leads us to share our experience of God’s love with others. It isn’t always easy to be generous with students who ignore us or are disrespectful. We often don’t feel like loving them the way Christ loves them, but with prayerful practice we start to love them anyway. Grounded in God’s caritas, we are able to share God’s caritas.
Francis de Sales teaches us that we “learn to love by loving.” As disciples, the best way we learn how to love is to remind ourselves—through the practice of prayer—how much God loves us. As educators, the best way we teach our students how to love is to teach them the daily practice of prayer. It’s a habit that blossoms into virtue.
Intercessions
We pray, Christ our Teacher, hear our prayer.
- That our schools and our lives may reflect the glory of the resurrection and the depth of God’s love.
- For any members of our communities who are in need of healing; may they know the comfort and peace of the risen Lord.
- For the grace to see the constant work of the Father: wholeness made from brokenness, redemption from errors, new life from death.
- For what else shall we pray?
We offer these prayers to our loving Father, as we pray, Our Father…
Sign of the Cross
Principals Academy 2014: Lessons From the Saints
Saint Ambrose’s Lessons on “Whatever it Takes”
Opening Hymn
Make Us True Servants (tune: Slane)
Opening Prayer
Heavenly Father,
Send us forth today, renewed in our zeal and recommitted to our vocation
as educators in this apostolate of Catholic education.
With each passing day,
may we become more dedicated students of Christ the Teacher.
May we seek you in earnest,
witness your presence in abundance,
and come to know you in spirit and in truth.
We make this prayer in your holy name.
Amen.
Reading
A reading from the holy Gospel according to Matthew.
Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits to drive them out and to cure every disease and every illness.
The names of the twelve apostles are these: first, Simon called Peter, and his brother Andrew; James, the son of Zebedee, and his brother John;
Philip and Bartholomew, Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James, the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddeus;Simon the Cananean, and Judas Iscariot who betrayed him.
Jesus sent out these twelve after instructing them thus, “Do not go into pagan territory or enter a Samaritan town.
Go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
As you go, make this proclamation: ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’
Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, drive out demons.
Without cost you have received; without cost you are to give.
The Gospel of the Lord. Praise to You, Lord Jesus Christ.
Reflection
Today, we hear from St. Ambrose, who must have been considering this Gospel, commissioning of the 12, when he wrote, “In the Gospel, we are taught to have faith and not draw back from doing those things which are above our human strength. Hope is incentive to labor.”
As governor of a territory in northern Italy, Ambrose was sent to broker a peace between two groups feuding over the election of the next bishop of Milan. He so impressed the rival groups that they unanimously demanded that he become the bishop. There were just a few problems: He wasn’t a priest. He had never studied theology. And he hadn’t even been baptized yet.
The emperor, however, accepted the will of the crowd and, in just one week, Ambrose was baptized, ordained, and consecrated as the bishop of Milan. Seventeen centuries later, we celebrate him as a Doctor of the Church, a holy hero whose teaching and understanding of God have shaped the faith ever since that remarkable, whirlwind week.
Perhaps Ambrose’s experience of being thrust into leadership led to his prayer. Hope gave him reason to strive, and the hope we find in the gospel likewise gives us the strength to do work that seems otherwise impossible.
Saint Ambrose Catholic School in Tucson, Arizona, is a Notre Dame ACE Academy where children and teachers wear T-shirts that read, “Whatever it takes IS what it takes.” This motto reflects the same bold faith and courageous hope that inspired Ambrose’s own leap of faith centuries ago. For the teachers at Saint Ambrose, sometimes it seems that the gospel demands an impossible task—to provide a Catholic education of the highest quality to children in a community crippled by poverty. However, that same gospel, the living Word of God, offers the strength, zeal, and tenacity needed to do whatever it takes to put each child on the path to college and heaven.
This simple mantra—”Whatever it takes”—reminds us of the promise of Ambrose’s prayer: that if we act in ways that spread the hope of the gospel every day, not only will we be able to accomplish feats above our human strength but we will inspire others to do the same.
Intercessions
We pray, Christ our Teacher, hear our prayer.
- That we, and all Catholic educators, may be mindful that we are first and foremost students of Christ, and that we may never tire of spreading the Gospel, so others may come to know and love God.
- That the classrooms and our schools will always be places where the love of God is learned, lived, and powerfully proclaimed.
- That we will continue to grow in our capacity to make God known, loved, and served through our shared vocation as Catholic educators.
- For what else shall we pray?
We offer these prayers to our loving Father, as we pray, Our Father…
Sign of the Cross
Principals Academy 2014: Lessons From the Saints
Acknowledgments
Gospel passages
Scripture texts for Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday prayer services are taken from theNew American Bible, revised edition© 2010, 1991, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Washington, D.C. and are used by permission of the copyright owner. All Rights Reserved. No part of the New American Biblemay be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
Scripture quotations for Thursday and Friday prayer services are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1993 and 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.