Pots, pans and belonging

This is Mr. Weber's address to the student body on Monday, April 20, 2009.

What a weekend--the Taylor Swift "You Belong with Me" video, ball games, pre-Prom dinners, the Prom itself, post-Prom parties, and the Societas induction ceremony on Sunday! All of us, I suspect, are a little tired this morning. I’d like to publicly thank Ms. Champlin for working so hard to make Prom a success, all the teachers who volunteered for duty on Friday night to help the video go smoothly, Dr. Caron for organizing the induction ceremony, and all of the JPII student body for making the weekend worth the effort. At 11:30 on Friday night, having worked with you for over 8 hours, the director of the video told me, “This is an awesome student body. We definitely chose the right school to make this video. They’re first class, all the way.” I told him I agreed with him—you’re amazing!

One final note about the weekend: They told me it would take in the neighborhood of 3 weeks or so to finish the editing and release the video. If that occurs before we’re out of school, I asked them if we could watch the video here at JPII in a school assembly the day it’s released, and they agreed. Let’s hope that happens. It will be fun to watch it together.

So, we’re back to the ordinary again, but that’s a good thing. Many people go through their lives a thrill at a time, always looking forward to the “next big thing”, while not paying enough attention to their daily lives, which, in the case of a high school means attending class, studying, and appreciating our friends.

St. Teresa of Avila once said: “God dwells among the pots and pans”. She means that people too often look for God in lofty places—in grand cathedrals, perhaps, or some deeply moving religious service—and fail to notice that God speaks to us more often within the routine of our lives—through our friends, our teachers, our family and through the ordinary.

We have about a month of school left. As we complete our year together, let us remember the words of St. Teresa, so that we can appreciate all the ways in which God daily speaks to us and blesses us. We are attracted to so many things, but he wants us, ultimately to be close to him. The message of this Easter season is that despite our deepest pessimism about the human condition, ultimately, God’s love reigns. We may veer away, we may sin, we may forget who we are, but ultimately, God tells us something we know deep down in our hearts. He tells us: “You belong with me.”