Year 12 Graduation
+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
28 Sep 2003
Year 12 students know how many days remain until liberation, until the H.S.C. exams are over. The pressures of this final test, where everyone is examined under the same conditions (a fairer system than working on projects at home) after a year of steady demands from teaching staff, seem to be greater than they were 20, 30, or 40 years ago.
Certainly the competition for tertiary places is more intense as are, often enough, the calls of social life and part-time work.
However there is more to living than H.S.C. examinations. Life begins after H.S.C. The really important challenges of adult life remain to be faced. Everyone has to decide, over the years and usually through many small decisions, to be a giver or a taker; someone who builds up the community’s social capital or drains and diminishes it. Deciding on a career and later deciding who to marry are crucial personally and cumulatively.
Many Catholic Schools have a Graduation Mass for students, family and teachers. This has become an important rite of passage where God, the source of all blessings, is thanked for the school years and His protection is sought for the more dangerous years which lie ahead.
Many schools have a “Formal”, a dinner or dinner dance, also attended by students, teachers and parents.
Basically this is a good idea, especially for Christians, who believe in hospitality and the importance of celebrating and dining together. One of the favourite Christian images to explain God’s rewards after death for good people, the reality of the afterlife, is the heavenly banquet.
Certainly most of the students and teachers I speak to believe the formal is a good thing. But if it becomes too expensive for a number of families, or another occasion for competition among graduates e.g. in dress or hire cars, or an excuse for wild drinking, especially at the before- or after- party, then such a formal becomes life-diminishing not life enhancing.
Soft and hard “drugs” have only become a public menace in Australia in my life time, but alcohol has been a blessing and a curse for thousands of years.
About 200 years before Christ, the Jewish author of Ecclesiasticus, Ben Sira, had some good advice:
“Wine is life for man if drunk in moderation.
What is life worth without wine?
It was created to make man happy”.
But drinking too much, either from showing off or bad temper, can make men bitter, and get them into fights, when their strength is reduced through drunkenness.
Therefore Ben Sira’s advice is, “Do not rebuke your neighbour at a wine feast, do not slight him when he is enjoying himself, do not reproach him or annoy him by reclaiming money owing.”
This is still good advice for women as well as men and will be useful at the “Formal” and for all the long years ahead.
