This week the Province of Meribah has sponsored its annual Saint Joseph's Mission whereby we travel to rebuild and repair homes devastated by hurricanes. For the past several years the Mission has traveled to the New Orleans area to repair hurricane damaged homes. This week the Marianists with the aid of faculty, alumni parents and their high school students travel to Freeport each day to assist in rebuilding one home.
At the end of a long day of sheetrock, insulation, etc. the high school students gathers for meditation, evening prayer and dinner with the Marianist Community. After dinner all watched the film Invictus.
Invictus means 'unconquered'. However, the film's title comes from a poem of 1975 by William Ernest Henley, a poem Nelson Mandela relied on during his 27 years internment on Robben Island, especially its final lines, 'master of my fate, captain of my soul'. Mandela was certainly invictus in his surviving prison and invictus in his election as president of South Africa.
The poem reveals the experience of Mandela on Robben Island.
Invictus
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thanks whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstances
I have not winced or cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how straight the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
