My dear Confreres,

I am truly happy to find myself in your midst after a year of so much suffering you have had to endure after the tsunami that struck the nation so severely. I have to say that I feel intensely proud of your immense compassion and solicitude in bringing relief to those who had suffered the dramatic experience of nature’s brutal force and its enormous sequel of death and devastation. At a time of great desperation on the part of the population you made God’s solidarity and tenderness present, visible and effective through your actions. When the first emergency phase was over, you set about collaborating in the reconstruction of that part of the country, with projects offering hope and a future, especially to the children and young people.

We are here to celebrate this Eucharist and raise our song of joy and praise to God for all this, but especially for the 50 years of Salesian presence in Sri Lanka. We have come together to renew our commitment to be “signs and bearers of God’s love to young people who are poor, abandoned and at risk”, and to entrust our future to God. This will be meaningful, bright and attractive, in terms of evangelisation, education and human development, on condition that we are faithful to God, to Don Bosco and to the young and it will be according to the measure of the good that we do for them, the joy we spread around us, our capacity to bring them to encounter Christ and discover their project of life, such that they become “honest citizens, good Christians and future inhabitants of heaven”, as Don Bosco used say.

Just two days ago we celebrated the solemnity of our beloved founder, father and model. We remember him with veneration, gratitude and love. And today the Church gives us the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord, accompanied by the blessing of candles. The feast can be a bridge between Christmas and Easter. The Mother of God is the link between the two events of salvation, both for the words of Simeon, and for her gesture of offering her Son, symbol and prophecy of his priesthood of love and sorrow on Golgotha. The feast, in the East, retains its biblical richness in the title of Encounter: A historical encounter between the divine Infant and old Simeon, the Old and the New Testament, the prophecy and the reality and, in the first official appearance, between God and his people. In symbolic meaning and in its eschatological dimension, 'Ecnounter' also means God’s embrace with redeemed humanity and the Church (Anna and Simeon) or the Heavenly Jerusalem (Temple). In fact, the temple and ancient Jerusalem were surpassed when the divine King came into his house, brought there by Mary, true Gate of heaven, who introduces the one who is heaven, in the new and spiritual temple of redeemed humanity. It is through her that Simeon, expert and devout witness of the divine promise and of human expectations, greets in the Newborn, the “salvation of all peoples” and holds in his arms the “Light of the Nations” and the “Glory of Israel”.

Both the Presentation of the Lord by Mary and the candles that reveal Christ as light of all nations are two gestures with such a symbolic import that Pope John Paul II decided to choose this Feast as the day for consecrated life. This, in fact, is nothing other than the offering of ourselves to God, like Mary’s gesture of offering her Son, like Jesus’ own gesture in offering himself for us in the Last Supper, a prefiguration of his passion and death, continued in the Eucharist. Consecrated Life has no other mission than being light, and it will be this to the degree that it is transfigured life shining its light from within. Here then, my dear brothers, we can see how many matters there are to celebrate, contemplate, and to make into a plan of personal, community and institutional life.

Let us try then to deepen our understanding of these things in the light of the Eucharist we celebrate and the Word of God we have just listened to.

The Eucharist reminds us that our consecrated life is an offering to God of the best that we have, meaning to say, the totality of our being so that it can be transformed like the bread and the wine are transformed into the body and blood of Jesus, and we ourselves become the bread broken for our brothers and for the young, the wine poured out for their happiness and fullness of life. This is the way we complement in our own flesh what is lacking in the passion of Christ. This is how our brothers and sisters can draw on salvation. This is the way one can transform society, not through violence but by a change of heart and mind and through a different organisation of the social fabric. This is the way, in intimate communion with Christ, light of the world, that we ourselves can become light, shining out and spreading the splendour of Truth, Goodness, Beauty. Consecrated life thus becomes a Eucharistic life in the deepest meaning of that term, experienced as celebration and a prolonging of the mystery of Christ in life, as life transfigured and transfiguring.

In its turn, the Word of God reminds us that our role is that of the messenger sent to prepare the way for the One who comes, the Lord, the Christ. Like the Baptist, we are not the Messiah the people are waiting for, we are not the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, we are not the Saviour. Only One is the Redeemer, Christ Jesus, whose precursors we are. How important it is to remember this and to remain faithful to this beautiful task of preparing for the boys’ encounter with Christ, pointing him out in their midst, becoming lesser so that He may grow more in their lives.

Jesus frees us from the power of death, says the author of the Letter to the Hebrews, not just through any form of solidarity with us, but by taking on our humble human condition to the last, except for sin, because in sin there is not solidarity but complicity. Solidarity is given only in Goodness. Complicity is given in what is evil. It is something beautiful and consoling to see a God not distant, not indifferent to our suffering, but a God who wanted to make His own the concrete experience of our weaknesses. Here is God, incarnate, the God made man, in whom we believe. Well then, through his death and resurrection, he has restored us to life, he has freed us from fear of death, and he has allowed us to dispose of our life by putting it at the disposition of others, so that they too may have life in abundance.

Such is the message of the Presentation, which links the joy of Christmas with the sorrow of the Passion. Certainly this Child presented by Mary is the Messiah, the Anointed one, destined for the work of salvation. But needing to carry out this mission by taking on the role of the Suffering Servant, he will transform himself into a “sign of contradiction”. Precisely because He is the Light, Jesus puts all men and women of the world in need of decision: we either accept him or reject him. Each human being is confronted with this decision, faced with him. Simeon, the Elder, reacts to this task of decision with great detachment, leaving aside the “old” and taking up the “new”, with immense freedom of spirit, with purity of heart. For Simeon it is enough to witness that God’s work is being realised, with him or without him. Simeon teaches us to live and work in this spirit, “in the spirit of Easter": with loins girded, stick in hand, sandals on our feet, ready to open up to the Lord when he comes and knocks on the door. To be able to do this, it is necessary that we too, like old Simeon, 'take the infant Jesus in our arms’. With him held to our heart, everything becomes much easier. Simeon looks on his own death so serenely, because he knows that by now, beyond death, he will find the Lord himself who will be with him, in another way”.¹

Let us ask Mary to present each one of us, our communities, and this Vice Province to God as she presented her Son, so we can be filled with passion for God and passion for humanity, so that we can be the transfiguring presence of God, so that we can live totally consecrated to Him and fully vowed for the young.

Fr Pascual Chávez V.

Colombo, 2 February 2006