Dear Alumni and Alumnae, welcome back to your alma mater LICET. It is nice to see you again here, especially after your work, exposure, and experience in the real work. I am sure your incubation and formation in LICET have helped you surf even on the waves of challenges and through storms of failures. I congratulate you for your success in life and today we welcome you, for LICET is the recharging power house for you. In coming here, you not only think of your student days and you not only meet your friends but also you compare what you wanted to do during your studies in LICET with what you are actually doing now. We want to hear your success stories as well as your challenges so that we could prepare your juniors better. Your experience would shed light on our forming the students.
Building Relationship: You would agree with me that success and achievements are based on the strength and quality of our relationships. It is not mere business collaboration or industrial cooperation but it is one-on-one relationship building with our colleagues and with our bosses and with our customers that matters. Any work of challenge could be easily handled if you have effective, understanding, and lasting relationships. It is not just business partners; it is not even life partners; but it is soul mates who transcend your physical, financial, and power world and who walk with you unconditionally along the road of life.
This relationship would bring home the choice, whether you want to increase the means in life or whether you want to ensure meaning in life. Wealth, positions, and power would come and go as a gentle breeze but what is going to remain with us, whether rain or shine, is meaningful life. Meaning in life cannot be bought by wealth and power but by our satisfaction with what we have. When we realize that we receive when we give, then we are at the threshold of attaining meaning in life. We might offer material and temporary help to others but when they bless us in their hearts, then our life gets enriched and enlivened. Let us continue to build up relationships to make this world a better planet to live in. You may have a goal in life – Your job/work is only a means to reach that goal. Road is not destination.
Enriching Elements: By now you would have had an inkling or taste of enriching elements in work and life. When you put your heart and soul in the work you do and if you do that work with consciousness and commitment, then you live in the present. Our past experience, combined with the future dream, brings out the miracle of the present – Every day is a gift and that is why each day is called the ‘present’.
In addition, you might have grown in confidence, resilience, and courage. The knowledge you gained in studies and the values you imbibed in LICET would have moulded you to be a person of confidence to face life. After plunging into your work, either assumed or assigned, you would have realized that you need resilience. Resilience empowers you to endure hardships and strengthens your shoulders to bear with it. Equipped with confidence and resilience, you put on courage, with calculated risk, to look into the eye of any difficulty or challenge. You would have realized that life is like the waves in the ocean – Each wave rises and falls, but every time it falls down, it rises up again. Falling down is not failure but rising up every time is the success. When you come here with these experience coupled with your expertise, we rejoice and we tell you: Go ahead – We are there for you.
You and Your Alma Mater: I invite you to reflect on this: Your alma mater is proud of you. Are you proud of your alma mater? We sent you out in the world, with the motto: Let your light shine. And today what is the light of human and divine rays you have shed on this world of competition, exploitation, discrimination, and monopoly? I would suggest that you ask yourself often the Ignatian triple questions:
i. What have I done?; ii. What am I doing?; and iii. What shall I do? – And the object of your triple questions is again a triad: you, your work, and the world. If not today, in the days to come, you could ask these questions with reference to yourself and your family, your work place or company, and the world at large, especially the neglected and the needy. Ask yourself about your conviction of your social responsibility. Don’t be a silent spectator but be the voice of the voiceless. Einstein said: “The World will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.” So do not be a silent spectator when injustice or discrimination is done but take up the cause of justice and fairness. Then, LICET would be proud of you. Consider this as your duty and obligation to the wellness of the world.
Make your decision today: Choose between material means and meaning in life; choose between profit and people in work; choose between health and happiness for yourself; and choose between temporary comforts and permanent happiness. Begin to realize that the world you live in is designed and determined mostly by what goes on in your mind, namely your attitude. Happiness is a habit.
Requests: As I greet you, welcome you, and wish you on this day of homecoming I want to put forth two requests for your consideration and perusal:
- Each one of you are invited to play the role of a guardian angel: You have gone through the portals of LICET. And now take care of those who enter the portals anew. Each one of you could adopt a first year student; follow him/her in studies; prepare him/her for job; and if possible get a job later in your company or industry. This would the best way to be a companion on the road to success. Helping one person may not change the entire world but it would definitely change his/her world forever.
- And I request you for a review of LICET and its performance. Evaluation or review is part of the Jesuit pedagogy. In your discussions or interactions today kindly devote sometime to share your opinions and suggestions how LICET could improve her service to the students in the future and how LICET faculty members could shape them up better for life outside of Loyola Campus. This would help your juniors grab the opportunities and to face the challenges.
Once again, I welcome you all to LICET. It is nice seeing you all – We are happy about your growth and let us all build together a better world to live in. Always move forward, upward, and lifeward. Have a nice day. Happy independence day.
Francis P Xavier SJ
15 Aug2022