The Ignatian - December 2016 Vol 26 December 2017 Vol 28 | Page 4

From the Rector
Beginnings – Audacity
and Discernment
Beginnings characterise the cycle of any
school. Begin a class with a prayer. Start
a new topic. Learn a new defensive move
in the basketball team. Commission
the year’s school leaders. Devise a fresh
student motto. A sixth-grader is promoted
to the senior campus. Blazers are put away
for the summer season. Pack a bag and
find a second home in the boarding house.
We know beginnings.
“Our audacity can
go even further and
seek not only the
improbable, but the
impossible, because
nothing is impossible
for God.”
FR GENERAL ARTURO SOSA S J
4 | I G N ATI A N | D EC E M B E R 2 0 1 7
Half a century ago now, the charismatic
General of the Society of Jesus, Pedro
Arrupe, addressed a band of educators,
telling them, “If our schools are to perform
as they should, they will live in a continual
tension between the old and the new, the
comfortable past and the uneasy present.”
He was right to caution us about resting on
our laurels. One of the key characteristics
of what the early Jesuits used to
describe as “our way of proceeding” was
accommodation. That is, the ability to read
the signs