Dear Parents and Carers,

Easter has now come and gone - we have had our celebrations, caught up with our friends and families, enjoyed the holidays with the children and now life goes back to normal. Children are back at school, parents are back at work and Easter is over, it’s finished for another year. Or is it?

Easter is only over if we allow it to be. How often do we take that period of Lent - that period of preparation for the Resurrection of Jesus - beyond the season of Lent and into the season of Easter? How often do we reflect on the events of Holy Thursday, Good Friday and the Resurrection of Easter Sunday after the event? In all likelihood many of us don’t think too much about it until the next year - until the next Easter.

Just before Jesus dies on the cross he utters the words, ‘It is finished!’ However, Jesus didn’t mean that it’s over for yet another year; his intent was something more like, ‘I’ve done it! I’ve succeeded! I’ve held out!’ Jesus wasn’t defeated as he hung on the cross - he had in fact succeeded beyond our wildest imagination - triumphant in his death.

This triumph left him precisely in blood, tears, and helplessness. He’s won, but it’s cost him his life, tested his faith to the limit, lost him his popularity, scattered his friends, shrouded his life in misunderstanding, left him looking compromised, and isolated him in an unspeakable loneliness.

Each of us experience our own ‘Good Fridays’ throughout the year. These may be periods of loneliness, grief, despair, anger or misunderstanding. We have to experience the Good Friday so that we are able to rejoice in the Easter Sunday - the beauty of life, love and above all faith. The important part is remembering that we can’t stay within our Good Fridays; we have to move to those times of resurrection. But how do we do that? Everything inside of Jesus believed that, in the end, always, it is better to give yourself over to love than to hatred, to affirmation than to jealousy, to gentleness of heart than to bitterness, to honesty than to lying, to fidelity than to compromise, to forgiveness than to revenge. 

As we enter this new term at Good Samaritan, it is important that we remember to acknowledge that not only will we as adults experience Good Fridays, but our children will too. What we need to assist them with is recognising when their moment of resurrection is because they were able to forgive, they were able to affirm someone else, they became gentle in their friendships, they were honest in their actions and they acted unselfishly in their work and their play.

Together we will work towards another successful term for the children - one where we finish knowing that we have listened to the Easter call that Jesus has spoken to each and every one of us.

Enjoy the term ahead, as we journey together, with Jesus,

Toni Sillis

Principal