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The Continual Action of the
Spirit
The peak of the experience of
the Spirit of God is found in
Christ. Jesus invited his
companions to live by the
Spirit and not by the flesh.
Even before the birth of
Christ, the Spirit of God
moved through the creating
Word. All of the events of the
Old Testament led to the
revelation of the Word at
work in the world. Now,
made flesh, the Word is
revealed by the Spirit of God
speaking in Jesus, descends
upon Jesus as the sign of his
favor with the Father,
sustains and guides Jesus
beyond temptation into the
act of immolation for the
salvation of the world. This is
the Spirit that raises Jesus
from the dead and who
descends upon the disciples to
carry the Gospel to the whole
world.
Don Vecchi, in this written
work, makes a bridge
between the early Church
encounters of the Spirit of
God with the encounters of
our times, seeing in them the
continual action of the Spirit.
This action is found in the
teaching of the Church,
through Vatican II, and by
other means. Always the
same action leads to the same
conclusion: for the people of
God to see themselves as
united to the bridegroom of
Christ.
The God or Relationship as
the Spirit Moving in the
Educator
It is that the gift of the Spirit
which moves in the heart of
the educator and Salesian to live
according to this God of
relationship. God continues to be
their God and they continue to be
God’s people. From the dawn of
creation, God’s action is one of
accompaniment and relationship.
The duty of the minister to the
young is to live by this Spirit and
to welcome the young into the
knowledge and experience of their
own lives as places of revelation
and action of the Spirit of God. It
is an invitation into mystery and
not something that can be justified
by scientific evidence. Yet, the
mystery is not a poetic reading of
reality. The mystery is the action
of the Spirit enabling both the
educator and the student to see
the living and acting presence of
God in their lives. Don Vecchi
calls this a “new language” in
which the Spirit of God speaks to
the heart of the believer and by
which the believer communicates
this reality in life. This, he claims,
is the recreation of an entirely new
inner structure within a person
giving that person the ability to
work in the world according to the
way of the Beatitudes.
At this point in the discussion, we
come to familiar terms from the
life of Don Bosco. This growth in
the Spirit leads one to “an
adherence to the truth.”1 This
adhesion to the truth is an
adherence to Christ, who is,
himself, the way, the truth, and
the life. This is the ongoing call to
the believer to conform all things
to Christ: to love as he has loved,
to live in communion with the
Father, to put on the new spiritual
person. This is the transformation
of the heart that comes from the
Spirit in the meeting of believers.
This is the transformation of the
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heart that comes from the Spirit
in the meeting between educator
and student, between spiritual
guide and pilgrim. Don Vecchi
saw implicit in this meeting the
priority of human development as
not only steps in human
progress but as steps toward
communion with God.
The Reality of Sin and the Spirit
Enabling Transformation
There is, however, another
reality that enters into this
meeting, just as this same reality
often loomed over the meetings
with God throughout the history
of salvation—the reality of sin.
The mystery of the gift of the
Spirit that enables humanity to
live in a new way is not parallel
to or distinct from this corrupted
world of sin. This, in fact, was
perhaps the greatest motivation
for Don Bosco to reach out to
the young. He was convinced
that outside of religion, there
was no hope for humanity.
Jacques Schepens underlines
this conviction of Don Bosco:
For Don Bosco ideal humanity
cannot be found either in human
existence itself or in its specific
dimension, nor even in the task
of education or any other purely
earthly concerns. Man cannot be
fully understood on the basis of
his engagement in this world.
The one essential dimension is
to live one’s life in friendship
and peace with God and to
practice one’s religion and the
Commandments. To Don
Bosco’s way of thinking, a
human being without God and
without religion is a stunted or a
crippled being eternally
unhappy. His social and
educative enterprise seems to
have been entirely aimed at this
goal i.e. that good people might
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