Pius X College – Founder’s Day Mass – 9 May 2025
In a couple of weeks’ time, our Parish of Chatswood will host again a Youth in Council. A number of students across years 9-12 have already participated in two earlier occasions of such a gathering. The mornings on which we gather senior students from both Pius and Mercy College aim to encourage conversation about some of the most important things. At our first Youth in Council we focussed on what helps us belong. At the second one a few months ago in March we focussed on Hope. And in our third on 22 May, taking the lead from the students themselves, we will focus on mental wellbeing.
I am excited by the event that is coming because we have invited a young man, Matt Caruana to be a part of the morning. Matt is a young guy in his mid-twenties. He is a paraplegic because at the age of 16 he threw himself off a seven-story building. He had constantly said to myself, “I hate you, Matt. You’re worthless, you’re a waste of space. This is it.” So, he jumped. Miraculously, he survived and gained a second chance at life. He could have succumbed to the new reality of being a paraplegic. He didn’t. He began a great new life, and it is this life that he will share with us at our next Youth-in-Council. He continues to be a great sportsman, holding the Guiness Book of Records for the most towel pull ups in one minute. He’s just been nominated to join the Australian National Para Climbing Team, and he has been selected to compete in the upcoming IFSC Para Climbing World Cup at Innsbruck in June 2025. We will be able to meet him before he leaves.
In sharing his story with us, Matt will share with us the importance of hope in our lives. But as he shared with me the other night, “Hope is hopeless without action.” In other words, to grow well in our lives, to have a sense of well-being, we need to have a sense of purpose. We need to develop goals and then leverage everything at the service of those goals. The purpose of life, in fact, is not to be happy. Happiness is a feeling that comes and goes, rises and falls. But purpose and goal endure. Personally, I always get frustrated when people ask if I am happy. Frankly, I don’t know whether I am happy. I mean I don’t think I live my life sad, but my goal is not a feeling. I would much prefer if people asked, Do you have a purpose in your life? And to this, I could answer a resounding, Yes. And I do know that having purpose brings with it happiness. But happiness then is the outcome of something else. This is the paradox: in order to become happy, I have to forget about trying to be happy, and I have to ask to what is my life at the service?
I recall other young persons who exemplify this. I think of Jessica Watson, some years ago now, who three days shy of her 17th birthday, ended a 23,000 nautical mile journey and non-stop solo navigation here in Sydney to become the youngest person to ever sail around the globe. Disagreeing with the Prime Minister of the time, Jessica remarked, “I don’t consider myself a hero. I’m an ordinary girl who believed in her dream,” she said. ”You don’t have to be someone special, or anyone special to achieve something amazing. You’ve just got to have a dream, believe in it and work hard.”
Before her, another young sailor, Jesse Martin had also sailed solo around the world. He, too, spoke of the importance of having a dream, of following one’s dream. I remember him saying at one stage that he had not been afraid of dying on the high seas because if he had died he would have done so in the pursuit of his dream which for him was far better than turning eighty without ever having followed his heart. It was the pursuit of his dream that was of primary significance for him and the result was of secondary importance. In an earlier interview he remarked that if people are not enabled to follow their dream it is then that they turn to things that are destructive. Our dreams are critical for an enlivened life, a happy life, a full life.
Both Jessica and Jesse before him, believed that people can do whatever they like if they are prepared to follow their dream. Perhaps that is somewhat naive, and life is a bit more complicated. Yet, what is not naive about their thinking is the recognition that simply having a dream is not enough. Dreams demand courage, they need risk. As Matt Caruana will share personally with us on 22 May, Hope is hopeless without action.
It is this that separates our dreams, of course, from simple fantasy or daydreaming. True dreams require strategy; they beg a great deal of discipline, preparation and skill. Dreams take us into and through uncomfortable places. They do not promise easy times. Jessica’s dream actually began in failure: In her lowest moment she thought back to how she sailed back into Sydney after colliding with a bulk carrier on the very first leg of her journey. In the end, dreams are actually hard work. Dreams cost. There is a price to pay. As Jessica remarked, ”You’ve just got to believe in it. Anything really is possible if you want it. You’ve just got to put the effort in.”
In celebrating the memory of our Founders of our school community we are recalling their own dreams. We are heirs of their dreams, but we can forget that their dreams did not begin with the end result that we now see all around us – such a wonderful system of education, such an extraordinary educational community, such remarkable educational resources. Their dreams began with nothing of what we see around us today. They began with a risk, with trust, and with commitment.
In recalling the dreams of others‑ Jesse Martin’s, Jessica Watson’s and our own school founders – and in celebrating how their dreams were tested by reality, purified through fear and doubt, and how with strategy, effort and personal cost, their dreams have become realized, we are, of course, invited to wonder about our own dreams. Recalling the dreams of others brings us home to our own dreams.
What dreams animate my own heart? Are they true dreams or just day-dreaming? What price am I prepared to pay to make these dreams become a reality? Am I prepared to follow them even through dark and uncertain places?
God, of course, has a dream for me. In fact, I could go even so far as to suggest, that each of us is a dream of God, born out of his own heart. We are a dream that he is prepared to follow even when it takes him into dark and uncertain places so that the dream might be realised.
Our own dreams are an echo of God’s dream for us. Our true dreams are God dreaming within us, animating our own hearts so that we might become fully the people that God wishes to create. Indeed, if we want to come into the heart of God, uniquely and personally, then we must attend to our dreams, risk our dreams, work with our dreams, rejoice in our dreams.
To follow our dreams with realism, with strategy, even in the midst of fear and doubt, is to live in God’s heart from which all true dreams flow.
