January 2013 Volume Twenty-Two Number 5s
Dear Parents and Guardians, Happy New Year! I thought for my first message of the New Year, I would share with our parent community the last words of the old year, the Christmas message I offered your sons at the Mass we celebrated before recess: You’ll encounter this tidbit sooner or later, whether in History class here at La Salle or in a college Philosophy class on logic. On June 28th, 1914, the chauffeur of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand takes a wrong turn into a Sarajevo side street, realizes his mistake, and backs up. Right into the sights of the Bosnian assassin Gavrilo Princip. The Archduke dies, and World War One soon begins. Did a driver with a bad sense of direction cause 17 million military and civilian deaths? When you think of it, the whole course of history sometimes seems a casual collection of unplanned causes and unforeseen effects. For example: without a random encounter on the steps of a convent in Rheims between someone named Adrien Nyel and the young priest John Baptist de La Salle back in March 1679, none of us would be here at La Salle in this gym today, December 21, 2012. Randomness affects all of our lives, not always with the best outcomes. A random series of cardio-vascular events in an unfortunate location on November 11th plunges our school into mourning for a lost Brother, mentor, colleague, and friend. A random December morning in a stereotypical New England village. Kindergarten children doing what they do at that time of day, reciting things like “Today is Friday. The weather is cold. Christmas is in eleven days.” A random kid, only a few years older than you, suffers a psychotic break, has access to weapons, and goes on a rampage in that classroom, plunging our nation into mourning for lost innocence, squandered potential, and extinguished joy. Nazareth in Palestine over 2,000 years ago, a dump of a town in a dump of a country, Bethlehem scoring only marginally higher on the “world’s most livable cities” rubric. Never could one imagine a more random stage for God to set a key scene in the drama of salvation: 50 cave dwellings huddled on four acres, home to a semi-skilled carpenter and his 15 year-old fiancée. Court magicians from Persia, a cushy job if ever there was one, get inspired to leave a lush oasis and set off across the Arabian Desert in search of a subtle hope that might possibly have been planted in one of those random dusty towns.
How does this all connect? Faced with randomness, the normal human reaction is to ask why…to feel insignificant…vulnerable. Anything, particularly bad stuff, could happen to me at any time. The Christmas story suggests to a scared and scarred world that alternative reactions are possible: Mary’s yes, faith, and trust; Joseph’s adaptability, generosity, and protectiveness; the Magi’s confidence that if we just don’t lose sight of that star, something good may appear right over the next sandy hill. What is faith, after all? It’s nothing more than this: the passionate conviction, sometimes contrary to all evidence, that nothing is random, that every experience, however unwelcome, can be transformed by Grace, that God has a plan for you. In the first Christmas, God revealed that He had a plan for the world. Let this Christmas be the one where you accept that God has a plan for you. You didn’t need the Swedish House Mafia to tell you that. God makes plans for you with the exact same care that He planned for His own Son. Whether you are going home to a picture perfect Christmas, where every gift you want sits meticulously wrapped under the tree and a perfectly roasted turkey appears on the table, or whether you are going home to a household preoccupied by illness, worried about money, troubled by alcohol, led by parents who don’t love each other anymore, with a rejection letter from your number one college on the table: keep faith, believe that God has a plan for you, a plan that has brought you to La Salle today as 2012 comes to an end, a plan that will bring you where you’re meant to be as your journey unfolds. May God bless you as you follow your star, gentlemen, this Christmas, throughout your time at La Salle, and always. A blessed and healthy New Year to you and your families (feel free to Google the Swedish House Mafia if that allusion puzzles you!). Fraternally,
Brother James L. Butler, FSC President