Thoughts from the Seedbed
A team that is going somewhere!
MANILA June 29, 2014 --One occasionally hears the lament that we
(Salesians) do not have the popular style writers we once had
- a skill and a tradition that goes all the way back to the
Founder himself. Is that really the case? There may be some
truth to it. But it is good to recognise talent when we see
it, and Thoughts from the Seedbed is clear evidence of young Salesian talent
that is going somewhere. It is so for many reasons, but since
it is a relatively short read (46 pages), why not open a copy
here and now at tinyurl.com/pz5l4x9
(really an SDL address) and follow along.
Thoughts from the Seedbed
is the work of a team - a talented writer and at least two,
though possibly more, talented graphic artists; let's just
know them as Donnie (writer) and Jerome and Paul (artists).
They are young Salesians in various stages of formation, Bro.
Donnie Duchin Duya is a theological student while Bros. Jerome
and Paul are in the postnovitiate. They can be 'followed' in
various ways, as is common today for the digitally-minded, and
you pick up the flavour of all three of them, I think, from
how one of them describes himself online: "I write. I read. I design. I
speak. I play. I pray. But there is more than what you see
in me. There is more than what I do ...". And in
keeping with the desire of today's youth to share and share
alike, the author of the text, in a brief note to austraLasia,
says: "We are hoping that
this output will also whet the appetite of confreres in the
region to come up with materials which we could pass around
that enrich and edify." To further this aim
they have chosen to place the work under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence, which means that
they deserve and request appropriate credit but you may remix,
transform or build upon this material, except for commercial
purposes and so long as you put it under the same licence.
But back to Donnie the writer. If Don Bosco made a tradition
out of his mother's nightly practice of a few words, then Bro.
Donnie has turned the Goodnight into a literary genre.
You find umpteen dozen collections of homilies around, but not
so many collections of Goodnights! This brief collection
may be very helpful, mutatis
mutandis, in various parts of the region and indeed
elsewhere.
The genre requires, we know, that one be pithy and succinct,
and these are not easy to maintain in a consistent way in a
literary form, let alone in speech, but Donnie has achieved
this across some 20 Goodnights given to young aspirants and
prenovices (known as 'sems' or 'seminarians' in filippino
Salesian lingo).
We find interesting and thoroughly imbibed doses of
Salesianity - the sense that the author 'knows' his Salesian
story and loves it - in each of these brief items, a handing
on of the tradition that just suits the age and stage of young
people aspiring to Salesian life. One notes, too, that they
fulfil one of the other needs of a Goodnight in a youth
context - the ability to hand out occasional bitter medicine
in a palatable way. The item on New Media delicately prepares
the aspirants for the fact that their internet 'gatekeeping',
while still their responsibility, is also helped along by some
judicious control! But they are left with a clear message: "Two words. Just two words.
Authenticity and Transparency."
Personal testimony has its place in the Goodnight. At one
point Donnie tells his vocation story, describing himself as a
'returnee'. There is some youthful, rueful good humour in the
telling, but one learns a lot about the teller - his earlier
experience in educational publishing for Korea and Japan, but
more importantly, what drew him back to his Salesian senses,
as we might put it: "The warm brand of brotherhood that bonded
us as one batch." There's a hint of the gifted sentence there
too.
There may be a few things yet to do. The 'team' is looking at
publishing opportunities and will almost certainly produce an
epub version, amongst others. There are one or two minor
syntactic issues that can be fixed and a print version would
benefit from a Table of Contents. But this item as it
stands will be of immediate interest and value to anyone who
picks it up. No doubt we will be seeing/hearing more from this
group.
