GLENS'I'AL ABBEY SCHOOL

homily give by our School Headmaster, Fr Gregory Collins, o.s.b., to the assembled parents at the beginning of the academic year.

Over forty years ago the great Benedictine scholar Jean Leclerq published a book on medieval monastic culture which became a standard reference work in that field of research. It was called, "The Love of Learning and the Desire for God. " I mention this because the title summarises for me the ethos that I believe should be present in a Benedictine school. The love of learning is already in-built in human nature. We are thirsty for knowledge, like toddlers who pester their parents with the question, "why ?" We want to understand the world and our position in it. Faced with its immensity - its beauties and its joys, its history with all its grandeur and its misery - we are all like toddlers crying, "why ?" to the mystery of being as it spreads itself before us.

A Benedictine educator will stress that learning is not just about acquiring facts, or gaining technical knowledge enabling us to control the world, but is about something infinitely deeper, infinitely more mysterious. It is less about knowledge as facts and data (important as these are), and more about growing in wisdom, in the understanding of the heart.

A Benedictine educator will insist that just knowing facts about Shakespeare (for instance) - and reproducing them in those modern torture chambers our educational departments euphemistically refer to as exam centres - is fairly pointless, if we cannot enter through sympathetic imagination into the human situations depicted in the plays, seeing ourselves reflected in their characters as they struggle to find the meaning of their lives.

Similarly, a mere accumulation of scientific data will be worthless unless it makes us gasp in wonder at the microcosm and the macrocosm, raising the deeper question of why anything is at all. Newman - in a very monastic insight - once suggested that real knowledge entails not just knowing about things, but recognising the connections between them so as to gain access to their meaning and intelligibility. The love of learning is the spur to education, but its goal is not simply knowledge (scientia), but a special kind of knowledge, the wise sensation of the heart (sapientia). Such wisdom is a deep, intuitive awareness of the beauty of creation and especially of our fellow human beings, as it flows unceasingly from the mystery of God, an awareness that gives birth to love.

For God is the Source of this world's beauty, its primal font ; the world and humankind is his reflected image. A Benedictine educator aims to instil the love of learning and to inflame the desire for God, that tiny spark of infinite desire enkindled in us by him, to lead us back to him.

The Benedictine educator (monastic or lay, male or female) hopes to guide the student through the wonderful labyrinth of this world, to the radiant vision of God who waits to answer our desire, fulfilling it in perfect happiness forever.

Perhaps these two key values of our Benedictine ethos - the love of learning and the desire for God - are the ones we most need to keep before us, as we face this exciting, expanding, but often bewildering place which is the modern world in the new millennium. I am certain that the vast majority of those who entrust their children to monastic schools, do so because they believe that there is so much more to education than the race for results, the assured place in University and the promise of prosperity - more than what society calls, "success."

Beyond these things - more important than any of them - there is : the love of learning and the desire for God.