Catholic Schools Week 2026 and the call of normal lives to holiness

I was ‘today’ years old when I discovered what the trending hashtag #YOHO stands for.

For those, like me, not fluent in the constantly evolving language of social media, #YOHO stands for awe and wonder — moments when something interrupts our momentum, catches our attention, and gently reminds us that life is deeper and richer than our routines and screens allow. The discovery prompted me to stop and reflect, and ultimately write this. Awe and wonder are hardly new to the Christian imagination. They are among the most ancient and essential dispositions of faith, recognised not as fleeting emotions but as a gift of the Holy Spirit.

The poet Patrick Kavanagh captured the fragility of wonder with characteristic precision when he wrote, “through a chink too wide there come through no wonder.” It is a line that speaks powerfully into our cultural moment. Wonder does not thrive in excess. When everything is exposed, explained and consumed at speed, awe quietly slips away. It requires restraint, attentiveness and space – just enough opening for mystery to enter.

Saturation

This insight matters deeply today. We live in an age of saturation: saturated with information, images, opinions and noise. Many young people name this exhaustion themselves, speaking candidly about distraction and overload. In such a climate, moments of awe – a night sky, a piece of music, a shared silence, an unexpected kindness – become quietly counter-cultural. They stop us. They steady us. They remind us that not everything exists to be rushed past or used.

Christian faith has always recognised these moments as more than pleasant pauses. Awe and wonder belong to what tradition has long called ‘Fear of the Lord’ – a phrase better understood as reverence, humility and loving attentiveness to God’s presence. Awe is not fear that diminishes us, but wonder that places us rightly in the world: not at the centre, yet never insignificant. It is the soil in which holiness grows. It is the quiet work of the Holy Spirit. Not dramatic or forceful, but persistent and gentle – loosening our grip on control, widening our horizons, reawakening gratitude. Awe interrupts the illusion that life is something we master. Wonder reminds us that life is received.

Without formal theological language, students were learning a profoundly spiritual posture: how to pause, how to notice, how to receive life as gift”

That same attentiveness shaped a simple but powerful practice in the early days of Le Chéile Secondary School. Students were invited to use their iPads to record moments of awe and wonder in their daily lives and to share them with the wider school community through Schoology. These were not curated projects or assessed tasks. They were acts of noticing: light through trees, a flower growing through a crack in concrete, a shaft of light in a quiet corridor, a changing sky, the fingers of a baby brother or sister.

What emerged was not content, but communion. Wonder became something shared rather than consumed. Technology, so often criticised for flattening attention, became a tool for deepening it. Without formal theological language, students were learning a profoundly spiritual posture: how to pause, how to notice, how to receive life as gift.

Holiness

This is where Catholic education continues to offer something distinctive. Catholic schools have long understood that learning does not begin with achievement or analysis, but with attentiveness. Before young people can question, critique or commit, they must first learn to wonder. Awe is not childish; it is foundational. It is how meaning begins.

In Confirmation classrooms especially, this matters. The Holy Spirit is often spoken about in abstract terms, yet awe and wonder provide a language young people already recognise. They know what it is to be stopped by beauty, silence or goodness. When these experiences are named and reflected upon, faith becomes less about importing something foreign and more about recognising a presence already at work.

In a culture that prizes speed and certainty, Catholic schools quietly insist on something else”.

The life of St Carlo Acutis, canonised in September, gives this insight flesh and bone. Carlo lived an ordinary teenage life – school, friends, football, technology – yet he lived it with remarkable attentiveness. His holiness was not marked by extraordinary feats, but by a deep capacity for wonder: before the Eucharist, before creation, before the dignity of others. He noticed what many rush past.

Catholic Schools Week 2026, with its focus on normal lives called to holiness, provides an opportunity to reclaim awe and wonder not as optional extras, but as essential elements of education and faith formation. In a culture that prizes speed and certainty, Catholic schools quietly insist on something else: that life is not fully grasped by rushing through it, but by learning how to see.

Hashtags will fade and trends will move on, but the human hunger they reveal remains. Perhaps #YOHO is simply our contemporary way of naming an ancient truth: that awe and wonder are not distractions from faith, but doorways into it – gentle invitations of the Holy Spirit, reminding us that holiness often begins not with doing more, but with noticing what is already before us.

(i) Dr Áine Moran is Co-Founder of Folláine Catholic Education Leadership Services.