ANZAC memorial

ANZAC Day 2015 was a wonderful memorial to the courage and idealism of thousands of young people who offered, and too often gave, their lives for us over the last hundred years.

On Tuesday I spoke briefly to our students about my memories of ANZAC Day when I was growing up in the 1960s. At that stage of our history I (and all other 18 year old kiwi boys) was subject to a ballot for conscription. 

Viet Nam was the world's first televised war and was a very politically sensitive subject. There were still a lot of veterans from World War 1 and 2 - and they were naturally angry that the loss of their mates was political fodder. So ANZAC Day became a divisive day, and for quarter of a century too many people forgot that the day is not about politics: it is about sacrifice and love.

It may have been my lack of maturity - or maybe our immaturity as a nation - but there seems to have been a lot of glorification of the wars. We were still demonising our former enemies - we were still glorifying effective killing.

At the end of last week there was none of that - it was about the tragedy of war. We were choked by individual stories, stories of sacrifice, mateship, courage, and the values our young men and women died to protect. All of us were moved by stories of young Turkish men, our former enemies, with their own individual stories, stories of sacrifice, mateship, courage, and the values so similar to ours.

The message was the message we have always heard from the veterans themselves: we must never, ever, forget. We must never, ever do that again!

ANZAC Day has become again a day to pray for each of the people who went to war back then and now, to give thanks for their sacrifice, and to pluck up the courage and determination to do all we can to work for peace in the future.

Happy holidays

Holidays provide time for the break - an opportunity to refresh  and to rethink our lives. They are often a time for activity too - the chance to do something quite different. For some people it is a time to think about life - and to decide on changes. So I hope that our families had a good break. (I also hope our senior students did some work - but not too much!)

One word associated with all this holiday activity is recreation - or re-creation.

I guess we are all always involved in the process of developing and growing - but usually we are caught up in the process of work and the expectations of others. When holidays roll around that pressure comes off and we can make more time for ourselves and the things that will make us happy. The things that fulfil us.

The break gives us time for all the "re-words": recreate, re-energise, renew, rejuvenate.

Re-juvenate is another word that means a lot in holidays. The word "juvenile" is from the same base word - so re-juvenate means to make yourself young again. For young people it probably means to do some care-free things. But older people like me see it literally as a chance to reclaim some of our youth.

Holidays should be times to do some of the things that make us happy. Different people have different things that begin to fulfil them - but there are common elements. 

American psychologist Abraham Maslow believed that once we take care of our basic needs for things like food, water and shelter - and once we feel safe - what we then look for is love and belonging. That fits perfectly with holidays.

Maslow wrote that once we have developed settled relationships, we need to develop self-respect by becoming good at things. Only then are we capable of what he called self-actualisation (or self-fulfilment and personal growth) - in other words becoming the person we were created to be.

We work hard to help our young people take seriously the task of becoming the person God created them to be. They can only make a beginning on this life-long task at school - but we each need to start, so now is a good time. 

When Jesus spoke of bringing us life - and the fullness of life - this is what he was talking about. He came to help us become whole people who are mature in all aspects of our humanity: our relationships, our self-knowledge, our intellect, our spirituality. 

Each time we re-create ourselves, we acknowledge steps along that road. And our holidays are an important time for recreation.

Quiet our busy minds

Every culture and most religions have found ways to help people quieten their busy minds. One word that is often used to describe these techniques is the word "meditation".

I find it helpful to see us as having two minds: one is based in our brains, organs evolving over 40 million years to help us all survive - and the other, a deeper mind sometimes linked to our heart, sometimes called our soul.

Where our “survival mind” is frantic and obsessed and out of our control – this deeper mind is quiet, sure and at peace. It does not clamour for our attention. It does not compete with our survival mind. 

The survival mind knows nothing except competition: it evolved winning, foreseeing and defeating threats, eliminating rivals.

For many of us, it is so dominating that we rarely even have the chance to glimpse our deeper minds. And because our survivor mind is so obsessed with destroying rivals, it is possible to think of it deliberately distracting us from knowledge of our deeper mind, maybe because our hearts are not focused on survival.

As I say, all cultures and all long-lived religions have developed ways to help us control our "survival minds". Over the last term I have worked with our students to make sure they had at least one tool when they need to quieten their minds. The method I used was to focus on their breathing (there is more about that in the link above).

I have started this term with another useful method: a particularly Catholic technique, using repeated words. 

Older Catholics might think I am talking about the Rosary - but that is only one way of using repetition. The modern use of the Rosary as meditation only developed about 500 years ago, but the Desert Fathers of the third and fourth centuries used knotted ropes to count brief repetitive prayers (as Orthodox Christians still do in parts of the world).

Another form of repetition is walking, and many people use that to clear their heads. Often they do not think of it as meditation - but often it is - and it can also usefully be combined with other forms of meditation such as breathing and repetition.

The form of meditation we are using this term is based on the repetition of a single word or a short phrase. This was first recorded and outlined by an anonymous monk in the fourteenth century, and has been rediscovered and popularised in the last fifty years as Centring Prayer - a name I don't find that helpful for what is a great way of controlling our survival minds and becoming more aware of our Creator in our lives.