Mark Elliott

St Mary’s College Staff Residential

January 2007

Session B

We light a candle.

We say a prayer.

We light a candle in your name.

2007 Workshop Series

Mark ElliottBrisbane Catholic Education

Clairvaux Catholic School

7 Characteristics of 7 Characteristics of a Catholic Schoola Catholic School

3. What keeps you in it?

2. Why Catholic Education?

1. What’s got you into

education ?

Sacred

Stories

Traditions and Teachings

Ritualising Experience

Community and Hospitality

Sacramentality

Spirituality

Seven Core Characteri

stics

Justice

Community and

Hospitality

Where everyone counts and where each

person is seen as made in the

image and likeness of God

Ajar is vulnerable to the incoming of an other

But what of the stranger, one who comes to me without the bonds established in my chains of caring? Is there any sense in which I can be prepared the care for him? In an important sense the stranger has an enormous claim on me, because I do not know where he fits, what requests he has a formal right to make, or what personal needs he will pass on to me. I can meet him only in a state of wary anticipation and rusty grace, for my original innocent grace is gone and, aware of finiteness, I fear a request I cannot meet without hardship. Indeed, the caring person, one who in this way is prepared to care, dreads the proximate stranger, for she cannot easily reject the claim he has on her.

Knowing a guest one cannot ask to know

Protecting the home one must surrender to the guest

Reciprocating outside aParadigm of reciprocity

The test of authenticity for any Catholic School is its capacity to show hospitality to the indiscreet other.

Sacred Stories

To be a person is to have a story to tell.

My StoryOur

StoryThe

Story

We are the first generation bombarded with so many stories from so many authorities, none of which are our own. The parable of the post-modern mind is the person surrounded by a media centre: three television screens in front of them giving three sets of stories; the internet bringing in other stories; newspapers providing still more stories. In a sense, we are saturated with stories; we're saturated with points of view. But the effect of being bombarded with all of these points of view is that we don't have a point of view and we don't have a story. We lose the continuity of our experiences; we become people who are written on from the outside.   Sam Keen

Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, the power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.   Salman Rushdie

Tradition

A total picture of reality.

Gives system and power to the symbolic language.

Ritualising Life

An outer behaviour (Ritual)

with inner intention (faith)

to participate in ‘the other’ (God)

through the world (life)

Sacramentality

God in the everyday

Because you have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is unquiet until it rests in you

St Augustine

Justice

Commutative Justice

Distributive Justice

Social Justice

Restorative Justice

Spirituality

Breath of life

Human creativity inspired by God