Homily for St Johns Closing Mass 2010

Each year as I have celebrated Mass at the conclusion of a school year I am reminded of how much of different world young people live in today compared to what it was like when I finished Year 12. It is almost like we are living on different planets or even parallel universes! A TV document about social networks recently described two kinds of people, "foxes" and "hedgehogs". People who are at home on social networks are foxes. They dart here and there and build up knowledge in a web of relationships much like the human brain itself. People who are hedgehogs are linear thinkers who are at home reading a book. I don't know how accurate a description that is but it certainly illustrates the kind of changing social landscape we live in.

All that makes it very hard for someone like me to really know and understand the kind of life young people live today. I am certainly more of a hedgehog. I live in a Church environment that is so traditional and structured. The very Mass we celebrate tonight might seem like a foreign language so some. It is hard then to know whether what I say could even be heard or understood. The Church as a whole labours under the same limitation.

But for all that, there is so much we all share from the youngest to the eldest. Part of that is what we are here for tonight. To celebrate another school year that is finished and to farewell the Year 12 students with appreciation for what they have achieved for their future and what they have contributed to the life of the College.

The poetry of the prophet Isaiah, I do believe, does speak across every age. Why settle, he says, for bronze when you can be given gold, iron when you can be given silver, wood when you can be given bronze, stones when you can be given iron. Why settle for less than what God really wants for you!

That assumes we are talking about the same "god". The word "god" is one we use all the time. Now there are many gods I don't believe in: The god who behaves like a school yard bully imposing his will by force. The god who is so pathetic he could not possibly manifest creativity through the workings of evolution. The god of the fundamentalist, terrorist or otherwise, who does not even love all that he created but destroys it. The god, even of some church people, who is an intolerant and petulant taskmaster. That is to but name a few different gods.

We use the word "god" as though we know what we are talking about when we really mean different things by it. Now the god I believe in cannot really be named. I really admire the Hebrew - Jewish tradition which refuses to speak the name of God. Because God is so holy and cannot be easily approached and cannot be comprehended by the limitation of our language.

We can only use metaphor and parable like Isaiah does to speak of God. I am told that fire is only possible because there is life on earth. Light sensitive plants produced oxygen over time and enriched the earth's atmosphere till there was a balanced ecosystem of production and consumption of about 25% oxygen. Much less oxygen and animals could not breathe. Much more and all would be consumed in fire. The light of fire is a powerful image to use of the mystery of life and all it's interrelationships as mirrored by the web of connections of the Internet.

We heard Isaiah say in our first reading tonight that we do not even need the sun and moon for light, instead, "the Lord will be your everlasting light". That is a god I can believe in. Someone who can lighten up the dark places within me and the world. Nothing painful or evil that happens need make us afraid within the depths of our souls. This is a God who can rejoice with us in an occasion such as this. The nearest we Christians can come to naming God is to speak of Jesus. We will use candlelight tonight as we send out the Year 12 students to speak of Jesus as our light.

Because of the light of Christ within us, then, we can be a light ourselves. I pray that the Year 12 will have caught glimpse of that divine Light within themselves as they have worked and played and prayed together in their school years. May they let it shine for others. May the life Jesus shares with us in this Eucharist sustain us in all our futures.

Fr Graham