JOURNEYING WITH YOUTH
Fr Quyen Vu SJ, Australian Provincial
We live at a time of hectic change. For young people, through adolescence and into early adulthood, the demands this sense of permanent busyness creates can feel acute.
A new kind of social communication can lead to a disjointed sense of identity and uncertainty about the young person’s place in the world. Where are meaning and purpose amidst all this apparent superficiality?
The privilege of working in education is the accompaniment of students as they find answers to this question, and many others. We live amidst great challenges but in naming them we recognise great hope.
In Jesuit education we look first to the good in our students and their lives and we seek to build on this. We are aware that God’s Spirit is moving in these spaces. We have a profoundly positive vision to share of the human person, in relation with God.
One key aspect of our ministry in education is that we build and sustain communities. Communities that foster faith, give rise to hope and in which people know that they are loved. We won’t always get that right. But the commitment to build communities in our schools is at the heart of how we seek to help make real the Reign of God.
Within communities we can invite conversation and we might be surprised by where they lead. Many of our students spend more time in the mystical and transcendent space than we may recognise. They are open to exploring the tensions that our Jesuit tradition has developed ways to hold together.
Starting conversations offers our students the opportunity to recognise the gift of their own lives and to consider how they might seek God. We desire to give them space to consider how to make good choices, inspired by the Holy Spirit, for a life of loving service lived with depth.