Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Marian’s Tenth Anniversary Mass- A Knowledge of Miracle


This was a school that very, very nearly was not… Very, very nearly was not… To those who know the story, and the strange coincidences in history that went into its making for the last 161 years, to walk into that 14 September 2008 Mass which celebrated a decade of actual real existence, was to walk in with a sense of awe, an amazed wonder at miracle. It was proof that humans can be miracle-makers for others.
The cathedral was packed; good-tempered; cheerful; congratulatory.I whispered to another mother, whose child had also been there from the beginning in 1998: “Can you believe this!” She replied she remembered thinking as she walked in on the very first day, “Can we do this- what if we fail…”
But this was a school desired and gifted by a patient God, Himself a Father, and by the Mother of His Son.
I thought of that little boat, coincidentally - coincidentally?- named the Glenmuire (Glen of Mary), with six Ursuline nuns and two young postulants, whose aim was the education of young girls, which still set sail for British Guiana in 1847 from Ireland. Their involvement in education lasted until 1976, and then there was a twenty-two year break. But it were as if that little boat doggedly weathered out the storm- and then stubbornly continued sailing with its mission, right down the ages to dock at another glen, the Marian Academy.
Long dead, those eight women, sometimes near starvation and with cardboard and paper slippers to cover their feet, could not have guessed that 161 years later, a mother would still have been thinking of them and praying for them with gratitude, in a cathedral hung with banners and flowers, as three young girls from a school a mere ten years old sang the Ave Maria.
By Roxana Kawall

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