To the community of St Edmund’s College,
At the end of this week a small group of staff members from the College will travel to Melbourne for the 2018 EREA Congress. The purpose of the 2018 Congress is to gather the community of Edmund Rice Education Australia and its partners, reflect upon EREA’s mission as it has been expressed since the last Congress in 2012 and to determine the broad directions of EREA in the next period of its story. Congress delegates will include representatives from all EREA schools, EREA Council, Board, Executive and National Office Teams, Christian Brothers and other Religious Institutes, Catholic Education as well as invited guests from a range of international and local communities and traditions. The EREA Congress is convened once every six years or so. The four EREA Charter Touchstones (Gospel Spirituality, Justice and Solidarity, Inclusive Community and Liberating Education) will be used as a lens through which we will evaluate where we have been and where we are going as an EREA community. Attending the Congress will be myself, Jacob Knowles (Deputy Principal), Michael Monagle (Director of Faith and Mission), Carmela Wilson (Head of Religious Education) and Michael Cooney (Board Chair).
Whilst being involved in such a significant event is exciting and worthwhile, it unfortunately means that I will not be able to attend the grand final games this coming weekend. This is most disappointing for me, especially when we are in an enviable position of having 14 of our 16 rugby union teams in a grand final game, as well as our First XI Football (Soccer) team in a grand final the following week. Congratulations to the players of these grand final teams – they have obviously trained and played to a level where they are at the very best of their field. Congratulations and thanks also to their coaches, their parents and their supporters for being with them along this victorious path. I wish the teams the very best of luck and can only ask that they play a good game. Whilst winning a grand final is an impressive victory, it is a hollow victory if the game has not been played with good sportsmanship.
I subscribe to a theory I call the stewardship of sport. Stewardship, in the Catholic sense, refers to the way of living in which we recognise that everything belongs to God. All we have is used for God’s glory and the common good. “As each one has received a gift, use it to serve one another as good stewards of God’s varied grace”. (1 Peter 4:10). As we often do not hear the terms stewardship and sport in the same context, what does the stewardship of sport look like?
In a 2018 Vatican document called “Give the Best of Yourself”, Pope Francis writes, “Those who are part of the sports world exemplify virtues such as generosity, humility, sacrifice, constancy and cheerfulness. Sport is a very rich source of values and virtues that help us to become better people … Sport can offer us the chance to take part in beautiful moments, or to see these take place. Sport has the potential to remind us that beauty is one of the ways we can encounter God.”
The stewardship of sport means:
- Giving the very best of yourself with the understanding that the gift you have is a gift from God, so giving the best is honouring the gift and honouring God with your special talent. So when we ‘glorify God in our bodies’ we also glorify God in our spirit. Sport is an opportunity to celebrate ourselves as a marvel of divine creation – as unified beings, rejoicing in the opportunity to come closer to God (from 2015 Australian Catholic Bishops Social Justice Statement on Sport).
- An appreciation of teamwork and togetherness – having a real understanding that you and your gift are part of a team, and it is each individual’s responsibility to nurture the gifts of others in that team. Of this Pope Francis writes, “To belong to a (team) means to reject every form of selfishness and isolation, it is an opportunity to encounter and be with others, to help one another, to compete in mutual esteem and to grow in brotherhood.”
- Winning is important, but not winning at all costs. We value a victory when it has been won well, when there has been active and healthy interaction and competition with the other team and their talent and strength has been acknowledged in the struggle to victory. Other teams may be our opponents, but they are not our enemies. We do not raise ourselves up by putting others down, whether this be in the rituals of acknowledgements between teams at the end of a game or by the cheering and chanting of the supporters in the stands. Sport is for building communities – not destroying them, and this is inclusive of our opposing teams. We respect our opposing teams for experiencing the same journey as our teams in reaching the grand final round and being just as good as our teams in arriving at this point of the competition.
- The community environment of sport is covered by Pope Francis in his introductory letter to the document. The Pope highlights the fact that sport is more than the individual and even more than the team – it involves a whole network of significant people and important associations: “The need for others includes not only teammates but also managers, coaches, supporters, the family; in short, all those people who, with commitment and dedication, make it possible to ‘give the best of oneself.’ All this makes sports a catalyst for experiences of community, of the human family…. We reach great results, in sports as in life, together, as a team.”
- Celebrations should occur in an appropriate and acceptable context. Celebrating a win or commiserating a loss does not automatically lead to the right to “write yourself off”, especially for our older students. If there are after-game celebrations, I would expect that all parents know where their sons are and exactly what the celebratory event involves. The stewardship of sport means that we continue to respect our God-given gifts after the game and we do not abuse or exploit these gifts in the excess of inappropriate after-game celebrations.
- For inspiration we turn to our College motto, “Christus Lux Mea” – Christ Is My Light. In sport, as in everything else, Christ is our model. Participation in sport calls for a spirit of generosity, of service, of sacrifice and of humility. These are the very qualities of Christ. This is the stewardship of sport.
My very best wishes to all of our grand final players and teams. Whilst I sincerely hope that we walk away from the fields with victories, my deeper hope is that we walk away knowing that we have demonstrated the best possible form of good sportsmanship, and that we have been good stewards of our sporting gifts and talents.
Lord Jesus Christ,
Help our grand finalists to be your friends and witness to your love.
Help them to achieve a harmonious and cohesive unity of body and soul.
May they be sound models to imitate for all who admire them.
Help them always to be sportsmen of the spirit, to win your inestimable prize:
an imperishable crown that lasts forever.
Amen.
Blessed Edmund Rice, pray for us.
Live Jesus in our Hearts, forever.
Christus Lux Mea
Joe Zavone (College Principal)