THE THOUSAND FACES OF DON BOSCO
AS SEEING HIM WHO IS
INVISIBLE
Now I am
speaking to you about Don
Bosco, reflecting each month on some aspects of his multifaceted personality, as
a man and as a pastor… He appears to us as a splendid
blending of nature and
grace...
A Man, Don
Bosco, rich in the virtues of his people and filled with the gifts of the
Spirit, someone who travelled as seeing him who is
invisible (Heb. 11, 27). I
want to speak about this incomparable father of ours, gazing at him through the
prism of the Word of God. Don Bosco is like a diamond, whose facets show us the
features of an attractive personality, and allow us to discover in their
totality the splendour of holiness.
◙
“What you have learned and
received and heard and seen in me, do” (Phil 4, 9)
Writing to the Christians
in Philippi, his favourite community; Paul dared to present himself as a model:
rather than a teacher to be listened to, he wanted to be an example to be
followed; he knew very well that the apostolic
tradition that he had
received and handed on as an inheritance to the communities that he founded, was
made up of both the teaching that was given and a coherent way of life. For the
words of the apostle to be effective they need to be accompanied by the witness
of the life of the preacher, for the simple reason that the only credible
language in which to speak of God is life itself. It is essential that the
disciple has heard
what he has to learn,
seen
what he has to do, put into practice
what he is going preach; a Christian is a teacher not because he knows but
because he lives what he teaches. In this way the apostle becomes the
“measure” for his followers: his best lesson will be not his instruction but
his own way of living it. A Christian community is well founded when it is
established by an apostle in whom the Gospel and example and perfectly combined.
◙
As Paul was for the
Philippians, Don Bosco is the model for us:
what he said, what he did, his ideas, his life, his view of the world and his
efforts to change it continue to be the source of our gospel inspiration and the
basis of our creative fidelity. The Salesian Family, which in Don Bosco has its
own apostle and founder accepts his teaching because for us he is not simply a
memory from the past but a charismatic presence who is alive, working and
pointing into the future. We are the sons and daughters of a man who has left us
as his testament a “gospel” to preach and an “apostle” – himself! – to imitate.
Our fidelity to this father/apostle is expressed in a heartfelt acceptance of
his teachings and a creative imitation of his preferences, and implies the
implementation of his project and conformity to his way of life. Our task is to
live as his heirs: children trying to identify with their father. My predecessor
Fr Viganņ said:: “The Salesian for these new times was born with Don Bosco”.
◙ The rich mosaic of
salesian holiness is the most eloquent testimony
of what it means to be imitators of Don Bosco as he was of Christ. Our way of
being saints is that of being Salesians. Salesian holiness is a real experience
shaped according to a model that is certain and saves us from either
retreating into the past, that is from nostalgia for times long gone, or being
too easily carried away by the future just because it has yet to come. In
addition, since Don Bosco is – “that genius of holiness”, as Paul VI called him
– the expression of our way of being Christians, salesian holiness, we can find
in him as a programme already tried out, a path already trodden, open, passable,
“The ‘Don Bosco of the Oratory’ full of faith and dynamic, docile and creative,
firm and flexible at the same time, remains the pattern of behaviour for all his
sons.” (GC 20, 197). A hundred and fifteen years have passed since his death,
and Don Bosco continues to be the model of life for those who want to make their
own his experience of God among young people, and his apostolic project on their
behalf. Today, as ever we need to learn from him the way to respond to the
challenges of the present time so as to find solutions. In a word,
Don Bosco lives today through us.
◙
SAINTS...
IT’S NOT DIFFICULT
“The holiness of the sons proves the holiness of the Father”, wrote Blessed
Michael Rua, the first successor of Don Bosco, to the Rectors when he sent them
the Founder’s letter/testament, on 8 February a few days after his death.
A
hundred and fifteen years have not
been able to diminish the force of the challenging statement of Don Rua the
holiness of the sons is the proof of the holiness of the father. The task he
gave the Salesians immediately after the death of Don Bosco continues today for
those who see him as their father, as was reaffirmed by John Paul II at the
recent General Chapter when he invited the Salesians to be “saints and formers
of saints”. The first generation of Salesians, even though they had no doubts
about the holiness of their “father and teacher” were unable to proclaim it with
certainty until the Church recognized it solemnly. In the meantime the holiness
that was being lived in working for boys, putting into practice the
extraordinarily simple but highly effective method used by Don Bosco would be
the strongest argument in favour of the holiness of the founder. And it was a
great success: in the footsteps of the father a great number of his sons made
their own that attractive kind of, almost “homely,” holiness, that is the
holiness of work or of the playground.
¸
Precisely
because we are the heirs of saints,
in so far as we are part of the Salesian Family we are called to show by a
genuine and full Christian life that our patrimony of holiness is still alive.
This will certainly be the best gift we can offer to young people, as Fr Viganņ
insisted in celebrating the conclusion of the centenary year of the death of
Mother Mazzarello: “It’s true that there are many things to be done. But if
we fail in this we won’t be evangelizers of young people today. We mustn’t
deceive ourselves: holiness is the launching pad for everything we can do, for
the effectiveness of our friendship and of our work with young people.. we have
to get back to having holiness as our programme; we have to re-launch our
holiness.”
¸
It has to be
something exciting,
because Don Bosco has left us as his legacy a special kind of holiness, one
based on simplicity and kindness, that makes us good, pleasant, always on hand,
and one that is capable of attracting young people, as a magnet attracts iron.
The Salesian Family is the trustee of this vocation to holiness that Don Bosco
brought to the world: this was his gift to young people and it will be
“the best gift that we can offer to our young people today.” I would go further:
“poor and abandoned youth” have a right to our holiness. Paraphrasing Don Bosco
I would say that it is fascinating to be saints because holiness is luminous, it
has a spiritual ‘charge’, a radiance, a brilliance, an interior joy, a limpid
quality, a transparency, it is love taken to the limit. Vatican II reminded us
that “the whole Church is called to holiness” (LG 39); the extraordinary Synod
that commemorated it twenty years later proposed holiness as the pressing need
of our times; the present Holy Father pointed to it as the priority for the
Church of the new millennium. “It would be a contradiction to settle for a life
of mediocrity, marked by a minimalist ethic and a shallow religiosity…The time
has come to re-propose whole heartedly to everyone this high standard of
ordinary Christian living.”
(NMI, 31)
¸
The word
"holiness" should not frighten us,
as though it meant living at an impossibly heroic level, reserved for a few
privileged souls. Holiness is not something we do, it is rather the free sharing
in the holiness of God, and therefore it is a grace, a gift before being the
result of our efforts. It means that the whole person (mind, heart, hands and
feet) becomes part of the mysterious sphere of the purity, the goodness, the
generosity, the mercy, the love of Jesus. It is a total handing over of
ourselves in faith, in hope and in love to Jesus, to the God of life; a handing
over that takes place day after day with love, serenity, patience, generosity,
accepting the daily trials and joys with the certainty that everything makes
sense in God’s eyes, that for Him, everything has value and is important.
¸
FATHER AND
TEACHER
THE MAN WHO WAS
A GIFT
For everyone Don Bosco was a gift from heaven: for
the Church, for the Salesians he founded, for the countless boys he knew
personally and for the millions who have come after him down until today, and
for all the branches of the Salesian Family...
Everything we want to know about the “salesian spirit” we can find incarnated in
Don Bosco. He is the model, the father the teacher. We all need people on whom
to model our lives. For us he is the way to human completeness and to the
faithful following of Jesus. Even though the actual circumstances in which we
are living are very different from his, his image and his project continue to
have a striking relevance.
• He really was a father for so many boys
who had no one in their lives they could hold on to and so experience the
fatherhood of God. So he was too for the Salesians who at his side had
discovered the meaning of life, and like him had learned to live it devoting
themselves to the young. He continues to be so now as we see him the
incomparable father of a great spiritual family.
If the fatherhood of Don Bosco evokes the divine fatherhood, his image as
teacher recalls some features of the Divine Teacher who was his guide in the
dream he had at nine and subsequently. From him he learned the language to use
with the young: “Not with blows but with kindness”. Only in this way could they
experience the love of God. We know that Don Bosco reflected a great deal on
this, arriving at the point of discovering that “it is not enough to love, it is
necessary that young people know they are loved.” Is it not a stroke of genius
to describe education as “a question of the heart.”?
• We consider him “father and teacher”... but young
people too, especially those who most need to experience God’s
goodness, as well as all those who have the mission to educate them: parents,
teachers, educators, pastors...
Like all great men, he was someone with a single great cause: the young: they
were his mission, his daily concern. For them he developed all his human
resources, for them, under the action of the Spirit, he constantly transformed
himself. It is said that when God sends a great saint into the world he gives
him a mission with which he will sanctify himself. So it was with Don Bosco, who
in educating young people and in seeking their salvation found his own holiness.
And not so much as a reward for his labours and concerns - which were certainly
great, but above all as a result of the unity within himself which led him to be
at one and the same time all for God and all for the young; full of “dreams”,
and at the same time with his feet on the ground to a remarkable degree.
In our days which are marked by the absence of a father figure, Don Bosco still
offers himself as the model of a father with all the loving kindness of the
Preventive System and the challenge of “Da mihi animas”, knowing that the young
need in the first place love, but that this then translates into education, so
that they grow to maturity and successfully face up to a life that is becomng
always more competitive.
• Having Don Bosco as father and teacher
means preserving God’s gift. Allowing him to guide our life, making the effort
so that his spiritual experience can guide ours, will make us live under the
impulse of divine grace, experiencing God’s action within us. Whoever lives in
Don Bosco’s house, learns at his school, lives the gift of God and knows how to
be grateful. God has pointed out to his creatures a path that requires great
effort so as to experience his closeness, and to experience his goodness;
following the teaching of Don Bosco, his fatherhood is the salesian way to feel
oneself in God’s arms. It is here that is to be found the capacity of
cheerfulness -so typical of the salesian system - to lead to holiness.
Recognizing Don Bosco as a gift of God forces us to consider him as an
instrument, a means for us to experience God, compells us to appreciate him much
more and to know him better, to take his teaching seriously and to live his
fatherhood in a radical way. •
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