It’s time to go back to school, not only for the students but for the teachers as well.
But for teachers at Light of Christ School Division, there is also a faith-based aspect of their jobs that they must keep current on.
Thursday’s welcome-back professional development sessions saw teachers focus on that topic.
It started with an opening mass Thursday morning followed by a keynote presentation at John Paul II Collegiate in the afternoon.
That presentation was provided by Leah Perrault, a Saskatoon-based writer and director of pastoral services for the Roman Catholic diocese of Saskatoon.
The focus of her presentation was prayer. “I think a ton of us have hang ups about what prayer is supposed to be and most of us feel guilty that we don’t pray well enough.”
“My goal was to say, prayer is any time you reach outside of yourself to make a connection with God and with others.”
As to how to do that, “we all think that there’s a right way and a wrong way, and there isn’t. We can fit prayer in anywhere that it fits, we can do it in a way that serves us and we can find a way to connect to a way of coping with reality and life’s challenges that allows us to be more grace-filled, more peaceful, more patient. That’s what prayer does for me and what I hope I’m passing on to the teachers who have already started.”
Perrault spoke in the morning about what she believed about prayer, and in the afternoon focused more on the ways to pray. “So I talked about how the scriptures become our story, how God continues to act in our own lives, and how the Scriptures help us to see how God is working in the world we live in today.”
She spoke about how gratitude is a prayer and the idea that everything individuals have is a gift, and how that helps everyone be better equipped to handle the hard moments in life, because “God is still blessing us, even when life is hard.”
Her goal was to give the teachers “lots of options” in terms of expanding what they think of prayer and the ways they practise it. One of the exercises was one of complete silence, which Perrault thought would be interesting because the teachers were “very excited about the new year.”
Perrault said she hoped the presentation to the teachers would help them “deepen their own prayer life,” and also pass it along to their students, “so that prayer is part of how they live and how they respond to the things life throws their way.”
