31/03/2024
MY EASTER MESSAGE.
Prior to the pandemic, the world at large was more free, more fair, more safe, and more rich, for more people than at any previous time in human history.
But while the Western world has never been more materially rich, it’s rarely been more spiritually bereft. Relieved of the need to build its strength and assert its values against the old Soviet Union, like a retired sportsman it has become economically, militarily and culturally flabby.
I was lucky enough to be schooled under the Mercy sisters, and then under the Christian Bothers (and good parish priests), and the lay teachers who took inspiration from them: fine, selfless people, who saw teaching as a calling more than a career, encouraging their charges at every turn to be their best selves. Their lives were about our fulfilment, not theirs, to be “a man for others”, because it’s only in giving that we truly receive.
I had teachers who valued their students’ ability to assimilate the authorities and to create strong arguments for a distinctive position, rather that regurgitate lecture notes and conform to some orthodoxy. Indeed, this is the genius of Western civilisation: a respect for the best of what is, combined with a restless curiosity for more; a constant willingness to ask and to learn, because no one has the last word in knowledge and wisdom.
I have few claims to specific expertise and certainly no claims to personal virtue because an inevitably imperfectly and incompletely practised Christianity doesn’t guarantee goodness – but it does make us better than we’d otherwise be, this constant spur to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.
Whatever our individual role, large or small, public or private, sung or unsung, our calling is to be as good as we can be, because even small things, done well or badly, make a difference for better or for worse. Everyone’s duty, indeed, is to strive to leave the world that much better for our time here: our families, our neighbourhoods, our workplaces, our classrooms, our churches, everything we do should be for the better, as best we can make it.
Consider the immortal words of the late Queen Elizabeth, on her 21st birthday, that “my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and to the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong”. No one should be in ignorance of such a life, such an exemplar of the duty and service, the honour and the fealty, by which all should live; yet but for the faithful passing on of such lessons, what will future generations know of our mighty forebears, how they lived and how they died: for family, for country, and for God.
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