Deep
Roots, Open Horizons: Beaulieu at 75 Toute de Charité Deep Roots,
Open Horizons: Beaulieu at 75 Toute de Charité Deep Roots, Open
Horizons: Beaulieu at 75 Toute de Charité

Deep Roots, Open Horizons: Beaulieu at 75 Toute de Charité: Friday Thought in a Shifting Culture

Yesterday we celebrated the 75th anniversary of the opening of Beaulieu School on its present site. The Sisters of the Immaculate Conception had been running a school at Saint Matthew’s Convent in Coin Varin since 1937, alongside a smaller school being run out of rented rooms at the convent by Mrs. du Feu.  In 1948, those schools were amalgamated and, 75 years ago yesterday, moved site to a beautiful place on a hill in Saint Helier.  Fittingly, the new location was called Beaulieu and the Sisters liked the name and kept it.  For three-quarters of a century, then, Beaulieu Convent School has tried to serve the island community of Jersey with love.

I mentioned in an email to colleagues yesterday that the great educator St. John Henry Newman famously stated that to live is to change, and to be perfect is to change often. He believed that if something is to stay alive, it has to change.  The paradox is that to remain what it is (to stay the same), the thing has to change!  Newman illustrates this with the example of an animal walking around, changing its location, eating, drinking, breathing, taking things in from its environment - in other words, adapting.  Newman says that what keeps an animal itself is precisely its capacity to change. It needs to take risks. To use an anthropomorphism, there needs to be an element of “the liberal” in the creature!  An animal that can’t engage with its environment and adapt when necessary will pretty soon be a dead animal!  At the same time, however, if that animal simply and uncritically takes in anything and everything that it comes across in the world, well, once again it will soon be dead!  The creature needs to have its guard up, its antennae twitching and its eyes peeled if it wants to remain what it is!  If we are anthropomorphising, we can say it has to have a conservative streak!

The same goes for us and our institutions.  For any of us to stay alive, we have to be amenable to change, committed to ongoing development by staying open and adjusting to what is new, while also hanging on to what has been working.  We have to have both liberal and conservative instincts if we are to flourish.  Beaulieu Convent School, like anything, needs elements of both risk and prudence, liberal and conservative principles, deep roots that open us up to new horizons in a dizzyingly changing world.

Speaking of being open to new horizons, there is a small, easily overlooked but highly significant detail in the GCSE Religious Studies Paper 2 (Judaism) content - it is the name change that occurs in the life of the founder of that tradition, Abraham.  His original name in the narrative is Abram, which means “exalted father” because this man is destined to be the father of all the descendants of the children of Israel.  He is later given the name Abraham, however, because he is told that he is now going to be the father of a much broader, much larger group: he will be the father of all the other nations, too.   In Hebrew, Abraham is Av/Ab hamon goyim, which means the father of all the other nations (the “goyim”). Abraham, as a name change, then, denotes a stretching of Abram’s role in life.  His outlook has to become larger, broader, more encompassing, even as he remains who he is - the father of his own people.  Abraham is no longer supposed to see himself as a merely local figure, the narrower guardian of only his own gang.  He has to adapt, take in something new, be stretched, receive something more universal, a broader and richer reality - father of ALL the nations.  Why?  Because Abraham’s God is the God of all, and not just the God of Abram’s tribe. Abram is now Abraham.

Yesterday, Beaulieu looked back 75 years to the past and a name change, when Saint Matthew’s became Beaulieu.  This new phase in Beaulieu’s story opened up the school founded by the Sisters to a new reality.  While remaining a school rooted in the Catholic educational tradition, the Sisters knew that Catholic means universal and allowed themselves to be stretched to embrace anyone and everyone of any belief, religious or not (and everything in between).  The foundation for this was the fact that their call in life was, as Mère Saint Félix had taught them, toute de charité, rooted entirely in the loving service of others.  Just as Abraham grew to realise that God is the God of all, so too the Sisters realised that their channelling of love to others was to be as expansive and indiscriminate as possible.

When our Year 13 students have left us in summers past, more than once I have given them a line from T. S. Eliot: “Home is where we start from.”  Our families, our local cultural and/or religious roots are key in helping us to form our identity - but they are only a springboard for adventure, a launch pad for the rest of our lives.  Roots are important and we are meant to be nourished by them - but only so that we push on and grow into the fully mature plant or tree we can become.  That’s why Victor Hugo offers the following counsel: “Change your leaves, keep intact your roots.” (When I nip to The White Horse for a pint, I always think of him, forced into exile by his opponents, looking wistfully across to Normandy!) 

Just as Abram started local but became Abraham, just as Saint Matthew’s became Beaulieu, so too our students and all who walk through our doors are invited to start where they are and be stretched, with critical faculties fully functioning, into ever wider circles of belonging in a world that is changing at a bewildering pace - concentric circles, with love at their centre, because life is toute de charité.

Here’s to the next 25 years and a centenary, Beaulieu!