I Cor 12:31-13:1-13; Mt 5:13-19

My dear confreres,

All good things come to an end, except Paradise, so this Team Visit also must come to an end.

During the Visit we have carried out an evaluation of our provinces in the South Asia Region, focussed on guidelines given by GC25, and have planned our Salesian life for the coming years. The material, as well as being useful to you, will also be very useful for an overview of the Congregation in view of the next General Chapter.

There are some positive elements to highlight, and some others needing improvement, as well as some items for the future. We give thanks to the Lord for all the good things in our Provinces. We ask pardon for those areas where we have been found lacking, and renew our commitment to live with ever grater fidelity to God and to the young. We offer our ideas so the Lord will give us the graces to bring them to life.

And there could be nothing better for this Eucharist than to celebrate the Mass in honour of Don Bosco, the father and model of our spiritual life and our apostolic project. In him we find our brightest memory and our bravest hope for the future.

The Word of God becomes quite illuminating from this perspective because it helps us to see what was Don Bosco’s greatness and how we can imitate him even in contexts of such a different kind.

Don Bosco was a single-minded person. It is in this that we discover the secret of his inexhaustible energy with which he was able to push on despite all the problems he had to face. In the wonderful unity he forged between his being a man of his people and a man of God, we find the source of the fascination that made him, and continues to make him, attractive to everyone. The central cause in his life was the happiness of the young, seeing them happy in this life and in the next. Here is the profound meaning of the dream at nine ears of age that marked out his life, made him discover his vocation, gave him a mission to carry out, showed him the field of action and the pedagogy to develop. And gave him a teacher.

Once he was a priest, he chose for his programme in life: “Da mihi animas, caetera tolle”, and he began his apostolate amongst the poorest of young people by founding the Oratory, and placing it under the protection of St Francis de Sales. With his educational style and pastoral practice, based on reason, religion and loving-kindness (Preventive System), he brought adolescents and young men to reflection, to an encounter with Christ and with their brothers and sisters, to education to faith and to sacramental celebration, to an apostolic commitment and a commitment in working life. Amongst the most beautiful fruits of his pedagogy was the 15-year-old St Dominic Savio.

Don Bosco was not a social worker but a saintly teacher. He became a saint through education, meaning to say that education can produce the most wonderful personalities and form saints.

The source of his indefatigable activity and the effectiveness of his action was a constant union with God and unlimited trust in Mary Help of Christians, whom he knew as the one who inspired him and supported him in all his work. And to us, his sons, he left the inheritance of a simple but solid spirituality based on Christian virtues.

From a mystical point of view he expressed this in the motto: “Da mihi animas…”

From an ascetic point of view he wrapped it up in the trinomial: “work, temperance, prayer.”

From a pedagogical point of view, in the Preventive System: “Loving-kindness, reason, religion.”

From a popular point of view in the trinomial: “Love for the Eucharist, devotion to the Madonna, and fidelity to the Pope.”

To the boys, too, he gave three words: “Health, Wisdom, Holiness”.

But where and from whom did John Bosco learn this school of spirituality and holiness? There is no doubt that Mamma Margaret was his first great teacher, but it was the wise and motherly guidance of the Virgin Mary that accompanied him throughout his life. Both, at different levels, intervened in his life to open him to the gospel message and to make him a good disciple of Jesus, and incomparable worker for the Kingdom on behalf of the young, especially those most poor and in difficulty.

The first reading in fact offers us one of the great spiritual and pedagogical intuitions of Don Bosco, which is that the love of God and for God is the source of joy, such that he could say to the boys at the Oratory: “Here we make holiness consist in always being cheerful.”

The brief sentence Mamma Margaret used to educate John to the fear of the Lord and which Don Bosco knew how to make use of, “God sees you”, is in perfect harmony with what the first chapter of Sirach says: “the fear of the Lord is glory, and pride, and happiness and a crown of joyfulness. The fear of the Lord will gladden the heart, giving happiness and joy and long life.” This wisdom was very important in John Bosco’s life, even in his first apostolic encounters with his peers where he mixed in games and prayer. Perhaps we ourselves should learn not to think of God as a threat to our happiness, but as the source of happiness and life. Perhaps we should learn from Don Bosco to have a smiling face and a clam, optimistic forward-looking gaze which lets people know that we are believers in a Crucified God, yes, but in a Risen one too, who has filled our human existence with hope and happiness. Perhaps we should help young people to experience how happy we can be while we are serving God.

The reason for this truth or that “the law of the Lord is perfect, refreshes the soul, gives joy to the heart, and light to the eyes,” as the responsorial psalm puts it, can be found in the fact that, deep down, the law is at the service of man, to make him ever more human, not to put him down.

This is possible when we can discover that laws and orders are to bring about values and so they are, then, an expression of love. St Paul refers to that in his first letter to the Corinthians, in the text we have just heard. Without love the greatest gifts of nature and grace serve no purpose. The primacy of love comes especially form the fact that it matures us to the point of perfection, that it makes us divine because it makes us like God himself (God is love. So charity is patient, kind, not jealous, does not take advantage, does not swell with pride, is not lacking in respect does not seek its own interests, is not given to anger, does not take account of evil, does not rejoice in injustice but in truth. Charity covers all things, believes all things, hopes all things, puts up with all things). Especially because it has the immense power of transforming people from within, it also has the energy to overcome death. Therefore, says Paul, even if now “three things remain: faith, hope and charity, the greatest of all is charity”, the only thing that remains forever.

To live in friendship with God means living in communion with him, being united through the observance of his commandment of love.

To live in happiness means to release all the best energies in our heart from which comes all that is good.

To live this way is ultimately to be the salt of the earth, the light of the world, the city on the hilltop, or the doers of good, as Jesus wanted his disciples to be.

This passage form Matthew’s Gospel seems to have been Don Bosco’s programme; he was aware of the responsibility that we Christians have in the sight of other human beings.

The salt of the earth, the hope of the world, are those who preserve human and religious values, who do not let the world destroy them and who maintain a reserve of humanity.

We are also the salt of the earth, when we live the spirit of the Beatitudes, when we let the Sermon of the Mount be our identikit and act as an alternative society of people who, faced with a society that favours success, temporary and passing things, money, enjoyment, power, vengeance, conflict, war, choose peace instead, beginning from a more direct seeking of the family or community kind, but which looks to the broader social dimension.

Jesus warns us however that it is possible for the slat to lose its flavour, for his disciples to be inauthentic, and he does not doubt that he should point out the disastrous effects of this: “it is of no use to anyone and will be thrown out and cast under foot.” We are either disciples with a clear gospel identity, and so meaningful and useful to the world, or we are to be thrown out, disregarded, unhappy, displaced nothings.

We are the light of the world, as He is light, if we live the Gospel Beatitudes; we are the city on a hilltop if we accept the public responsibility we have and do not seek to make faith or discipleship a private issue without a social dimension, without public involvement; we are a lamp on the lamp stand if we live according to the Gospel and give light to everyone, believers or not, disciples or not, near or far; in short, a light for the whole world.

Christianity, Faith, the Gospel, the Salesian vocation have a social worth and a public responsibility for the simple reason that all of vocation is mission, because identity is made true in life, because being does not exist unless it is evident, and these values then cannot be understood and seen ‘in private use only.’

This is the meaning of the exhortation that Jesus concludes with and which also particularly has to do with the metaphor of light, obviously referring also to the idea of salt and city. “So let your light shine before men”. Jesus wants us to do good for its own sake, without seeking gratification, satisfaction, compensation. Nevertheless, the good which is done, cannot just resound internally. We have the responsibility to do good for love’s sake and not just to be seen. Here we are dealing with three gradual moments: being light for others by living the Gospel, by being truly disciples; expressing our faith in practical charity, doing gospel works; being a reasons for giving glory to God when these works are acknowledged by others.

Jesus wanted his disciples to make the Sermon on the Mount a programme of life: meekness, poverty, freely giving, mercy, pardon, giving ourselves to God, trust, doing to others what we would have done to ourselves – here are the Gospel works that should shine out, that enable us to become salt and light, that help create an alternative society which does not allow humanity to become corrupted through and through.

Don Bosco sought nothing else for his boys but this through his works, whose purpose was precisely that of making them “honest citizens and good Christians.” Education, encounter with Christ, being part of the life of the Church, and discovering their own vocation. Here is the journey of faith as seen by Don Bosco and made into an educational programme for his boys. This is our inheritance also here in Asia.

Fr. Pascual Chavez V.

New Delhi, 5 March 2005