Our People

Our first reading today is the text from which the theme for next year's World Youth Day is taken.  You will hear it many times as we prepare for the arrival of more than 100,000 young people from around world and a similar number of. young Australians, to celebrate their week-long pilgrimage here in Sydney.  By the end of a week of catechesis and prayer, festival and liturgy, 500,000 or more will celebrate the final Mass with Pope Benedict.

 

This will be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for our Church and community in Australia, for our young people to encounter Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit and the Church, to give them ideals and hope for the future, and through them to touch the  hearts of all Australians.  A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, yet not an entirely singular endeavour.  The fact is that the Church in Australia has long put and still does put enormous energy into its young people.  Congregations such as the Sisters of Mercy, the Josephites, the Christian Brothers, the Marist Brothers and others built an extraordinary network of parish primary schools and regional secondary schools that is one of the jewels in the crown of the Church in Australia and the envy of the Church in many other parts of world.

 

Different congregations of RSMs set up many schools in our area, including the one in my own parish of Watson's Bay.  This parish has been blessed with one of those schools in Holy Cross Primary, now celebrating its 100th birthday (not, as rumour has it among the children, Sr Veronica's 100th birthday!).  Many of us had the privilege of attending these schools (including my Personal Assistant who was here at Holy Cross and myself with the Mercy Sisters at Lane Cove) and so we can all join in the birthday party, even if none of us were there at birth of this school!

 

Since the days when Fr Peter O’Reilly invited the Parramatta Mercy Sisters to set up the school, and Sr Mary Dorothy and Sr Mary Leonard started teaching 30 children in this church, the school has gone through many changes, reflecting the growth and maturing of Australian society and the Church, the changing status of Catholics and the demographic change in Woollahra and surrounding suburbs.  There has been much redevelopment and recent works done at the school, which is a testimony to the determination of the parish, the Mercy Sisters, the Catholic Education Office and the parents to press forward into the future.

 

Why do we bother? Why do the RSMs send a principal all the way to Woollahra (three of whom with us today)?  Why keep extending and improving?  The obvious answer is that we care about our children.  They are our own beloved children and they are also the future of the Church, of Australia and of humanity.  We want to ensure that they have an excellent all round education.  As a Church and as a parish we want to ensure that as a central part of that, that they receive an excellent religious education and formation.  For we are not just preparing them for life - we are preparing them for eternal life! We are not just preparing good future secondary and tertiary students, spouses, parents, workers, professionals, citizens - we are preparing Saints for a new millennium!

 

In our First Reading and Gospel today, Jesus departs.  Children such as those at our school readily imagine Jesus flying through outer space and sometimes ask what star Jesus is now on!  It is hard to explain to them that the Ascension is a metaphor for Jesus resuming his rightful rôle as over and above everything, returning to the Godhead from whence he came.  Yet children, with eyes open with innocence, do not find it hard to believe in Heaven.  Many of you will know the stage musical of Victor Hugo's great tale Les Miserables.  The heroine is the beautiful Cosette.  Early in the tale, as a miserable child, she sings of her dream of Heaven, "a castle on a cloud", a place full of toys and playful girls and boys, a place without hunger, tears or angry words, a place where we are held and told how very much we are loved; a delightful, if not the most theologically sophisticated picture of Heaven.  The fairy-tale Heaven can die as we become adults; when sin and sinned against, as we meet miserables again and again, when we are let down and our hopes are dashed, our dreams disillusioned.  Instead of our final destination, Heaven can seem wishful thinking, not really for us.

 

In Jesus's farewell discourse, there is a  definite note of homesickness, a longing for return.   If every human being knows the ache of incompleteness, the craving for an end to suffering, the longing for the familiar and the secure, the ardour for a true homecoming, the man Jesus certainly did.  And that, we believe, happened for him this day: Jesus went back home.  He transcended this earth and "every sovereignty, authority, power or domination" and was received at last into the company of the eternal Father.  Yet in doing so he was not renouncing us or our earthly state.  The Gospels insist he rose from dead in his body, with his wounds and so he returned to his Father, in his body, in his human nature, in our human nature, wounds and all. 

 

So the Ascension of Christ is not just Christ’s.  It is also our uplifting.  Our human nature is made a sharer in God's throne of glory, raised above the angels.  The re-creation that has begun in the Resurrection continues.  That process of drawing all of former creation, alienated and disintegrated by sin into God’s kingdom,  so that when in a fight between Love and Death, Death sometimes seems to us the stronger force.  The Ascension says otherwise -that we are meant for Heaven, for perfect love.  We too can have our crucified bodies, our broken lives, our abandoned hearts raised up and drawn to God.  The Ascension is a declaration of faith and hope in his body,. born for greatness.  It is a graph of our future.  Our destiny is to share in Christ’s glory.   Today’s retrospect is our prospect.

 

Which brings me back to the question. Why?  Why 100 years of Holy Cross Primary School and hopefully, many more to come?  Above all, for this simple reason: Where Christ has gone this day, we hope to follow.  We believe that the life of Jesus with the Father is a new beginning for all of us:  We now have a new homeland, heaven is our home.

 

In the middle of every Mass, the priest sings or says to us: 'Lift up your hearts' and we respond: 'We lift them up to the Lord': Well, today, more than any other, we lift our hearts up to the Lord, to where he has gone before us.  In doing so, we lift up our young people for whom we reconsecrate this school and all our efforts.  We lift up all our hopes and dreams for them to our Risen and Ascended Lord, and ask that he draw them to himself in this life and the next.  We lift up also all those who built and led and staffed and were students of this school this century past.  We offer up all those of the  Holy Cross School community who have died; and we present not just our present students but our future ones too, that they might join Christ in his trajectory into the future and to Heaven, that after lives richly lived in his His Spirit, they might ascend with Him to the Father!