EVERYTHING BELONGS: A CATHOLIC EDUCATION WEEK REFLECTION

It seems appropriate that the muse of my reflection in this Catholic Education Week is a quote from the most recent book of my favourite Catholic author, Fr Richard Rohr (The Tears of things, 2025):

“Secular freedom is having to do what you want to do. Religious freedom is wanting to do, what you have to do.”

I am able to write and share with full honesty, conviction, and faith that my vocation in Catholic educational leadership is 'wanting to do, what I have to do'. Such revelations and conversations always lead us to grapple with the nature of faith.

Faith is not knowing or proving or clinging. Faith is letting go. Faith is total surrender. Faith is complete trust in God. The pure fact of understanding is not the point. The point is the journey, the inner journey, toward understanding - a destination at which we never fully and completely arrive.

If you understand it, things are just as they are. If you don’t understand it, things are just as they are. The mystery is to be ready to receive things just as they are and be ready to let them teach us. Life does not care what I like and don’t like. It doesn’t matter a bit. If we stay in the world of preference and choice, we keep ourselves as the reference point. As if it matters what colour I like, who cares what I look good in, or what movie is pleasing to me. It all changes from moment to moment. No wonder people have identity crises. No wonder people have a fragile self-image. They have nothing solid to build on beyond changing opinions and feelings. Those who are totally converted come to every experience and ask not whether or not they liked it, but what does it have to teach them. What’s the message in this for me? What’s the gift in this for me? How is God in this event?

That’s why Jesus said to go into the closet. That’s where we stop living out of other people’s response to us. We can then say: ‘I am not whom you think I am. Nor am I whom you need me to be. I’m not even who I need myself to be. I must be nothing in order to be open to all of reality and new reality.’ The Zen master calls this state: who you are before you were born. Paul calls it who you are: “In Christ, hidden in God” (Col 3:3).

What a terrible tragedy, that people should be seduced into imitating and desiring what we are not, and can never be.

The soul doesn’t know itself by comparison and differentiation, the soul just is. The soul knows itself through what is now and everything that is - both the dark and the light. The soul triumphs over nothing and therefore cannot be defeated because it is not in the game of succeeding or failing. It does not need to separate the dark from the light - everything belongs!

And so, in the spirit of Catholic Education Week and in the deeper spirit that everything belongs, I want to share a piece of myself. Thrice is the band I have listened to more than any other in my life, and their song Everything Belongs feels like a fitting close to this reflection. The lyrics speak deeply to the mystery of faith, the ties that bind us, and the hope that lives in the unfolding: “There’s a web and every thread ties you to me; and we are here and now, the future’s yet to be.” I invite you to listen, not just with ears, but with the heart - for after all - that is business of Catholic education.

Mr Casimir Douglas

Monday 4th August, 2025