It is all very fine to go inwards and explore the inner landscape, but we can never lose sight of the real world and the outer landscape. We often find dissonance between the two and dissonance in the way we live. For example, we talk about ‘regular life’ and in fact we uphold this as a value, especially in formation – encouraging the formation of people who are regular with community practices. I’m not about to suggest we change that. But we live in a post-modern world, the youngsters we deal with are children of different metaphors than those we grew up with. The Web, the internet is not cohesive in any regular way; it is an almost impossible hotchpotch of information and links which no search engine yet devised can control – search for something exact and some 90% of what you get as a result is information you don’t need. But it is a metaphor for the world we live in just the same. We might be trying to live regular lives in regular communities, but the world we live in has very little regard for or even understanding of such regularity at times.

The journey inward also reveals something we cannot avoid admitting – we too are fractured people, and even our attempts to live regular lives in religious communities keeps showing up this feature of fracturedness.

So where do we go for wholeness? To God of course.

THE PRIMACY OF GOD IN OUR LIVES, AND COMMUNITY

We have frequently gone back to the early texts in our Salesian story this week. Now let’s go back to the early texts in our Christian story. How did the early Church, given the felt absence of Jesus, seek the primacy of God in their lives? There were two responses at base. One was a very human response – to begin to build the institution, and set out the discipline, but if this had been all they did, it would have left the Catholic Church of the day guilty of all the criticisms sometimes levelled at this early period. Jesus had reminded his disciples that God was their future, and he gave them precise methods to keep reminding them of this: Do as I have done to you. Love one another (cf Jn 13:15, 15:167).

And yet in this very same community that records these words, the Johannine community, we still see evidence of breakdown and fracture: ‘They went out from us but they were not one of us..’ (1 Jn 2:19). The community was being forced to recognise the mystery of a God who is love behind it all, rather than institution and discipline.

If we turn to the Letters of Paul, we see something else emerging in early Church consciousness. While there’s plenty of evidence of Paul developing structures and administrative scenarios and discipline, we should not overlook the very broad concept of the Christian community that he develops for a new situation, usually outside normal boundaries. His ideal community is a ‘place’ where there is no division between Jew and Greek and so on. It is a place that has to exist in that street, that house, amongst those people. In some ways this is a model of community which is attractive today and especially to young people, who want to live where it’s at, and seek community in that situation. There’s a sense in which the Oratory is meant to be this kind of ‘place’, I am sure.

THE YOUNG

Don Bosco dealt with fractured situations in young people’s lives and experience of community – families broken apart, kids finding dubious community on the street and so forth. But it’s probably true to say that even with their lack of faith knowledge, there must have been some shared cultural underpinnings he could draw on. There was a shared world of Christian culture at the very least that allowed him to immediately introduce religious topics. The children who populate our outer landscapes often do not share much if any of our Christian worldview. So how are we supposed to lead them there?

There is only one way, and you find Fr. Chavez harping on it frequently. We have to show them how OUR response to a God who is love touches OUR lives. Don Bosco was well aware of this too of course. In his addresses to the GC II he insisted on the Salesian community living the Preventive System amongst itself so that the lives of confreres would be attractive to young people. At the time he was lamenting the fall off in vocations. But he was driving at just this point. It’s an even stronger point for us if we live in situations where the young do not share our Christian and Catholic worldview in the first place.

FOLLOW JESUS

So we are brought back to the importance of following Jesus, knowing Jesus, so we can witness to Him. And the Gospel is really clear about how we ought do this – we are called to be with him. Being with him we are then, like the disciples, called to go beyond our experiences; we are formed and challenged by ways and views that maybe we find hard to accept. Mark’s Gospel shows us the ways people reacted to Jesus in their learning…between the stories of 2 blind men are indications of how each came to faith, one coming to slight slowly, the other acting quickly.

Who are we following when we say today that we follow Jesus? Jesus of Nazareth is the only one we can follow. We can’t follow the Eternal Logos. So, scripture daily in hand, we meditate on Jesus of Nazareth. This is the thrust of C. 11 which offers direction on aspects of the ‘figure of the Lord’ – it is the figure of Jesus of Nazareth we reflect on. Here we find 5 expectations of a Salesian community…a community which shows its gratitude for the vocation received by each member, a community which shows predilection for the little ones and the poor, and zeal in preaching, healing and saving. A community which demonstrates the preoccupation of the Good Shepherd in gentleness and self-giving and finally, one which expresses the desire to be gathered together as disciples in brotherly communion.

As we carry out the mission of the Good Shepherd about whom we have learnt in our Gospel reflection, we know that we do not do it alone. Jesus promised that those who undertake mission in his name, will receive help. It is because the disciples would continue to be in need of forgiveness, encouragement, guidance, instruction, that the Spirit is sent. We Salesians too carry out our mission in the same belief, needing all those things, and someone to speak on our behalf from time to time.

CELEBRATE EUCHARIST

The Eucharist is the high point of our spiritual journey each day. Let’s remember that it is Jesus’ gift of self to his failing, betraying group of disciples, and that in the midst of that context, God is made known.

On the Cross everything seems to have fallen apart and Jesus cries out that he is alone and abandoned. The Resurrection changes this, but we note that in the Gospels it is more about what happens to the disciples than anything else. The disciples had almost entirely abandoned Jesus on the Cross and were caught running away afterwards. What we begin to see now is the way Jesus Risen reverses all these situations. God enters the story of fractured human beings in a powerful way. Appearances of Jesus happen to disciples who are locked away, doubtful, fearful.

LIVING THROUGH FAILURE

The vocation to discipleship emerges in our Gospel reflections as a call to live through the mystery of failure, by depending only on the mystery of God. I am sure you can go back to the MO and re-interpret Don Bosco’s early difficulties this way too, but it is the here and now I am speaking of. Us. The Gospels present this picture of a failing group of disciples whose situation is reversed by God’s power after the Resurrection because this is obviously true to what actually happened. But it was also part of the authentic memory of the early Church that finds its way into the Gospels: they were called to be followers of Jesus of Nazareth, but they too experienced failure.

We live in community and we exercise our lives of service, so often marked by failure: we personally, and the men in our communities may variously experience themselves as sinful, weak, obsessive, unprayerful, aged, dissatisfied, unbalanced. C. 71 recognizes this in these words: ‘Sometimes obedience will clash with our own selfish attitudes and desires for independence or may really test our love. This is the moment to look to Christ, who was obedient even unto death..’.

The following of Jesus Christ as portrayed in the Gospels speaks eloquently to the way Salesian life is for most of us (as distinct from the way it ought to be). It helps us come to a due recognition of our failure and sinfulness. Not only does this not reduce the importance of the Christian mystery in the world, but it offers us an approach to it.

Rectors are broken people leading a broken people. The first Christian leader to take up in Jesus’s name was Peter, as broken as any of them, but despite his own protestations of ‘depart from me, Lord for I am a sinful man’, he was still called to follow, and given heart with the words ‘Do not be afraid; henceforth you will be catching people’.

We have read and relived moments when Don Bosco felt that all was about to fail, and we have noted his response, a heartfelt prayer to the only one who could make sense of what made no human sense at all. ‘Lord, show me what I must do’ might sometimes have to be a Rector’s prayer.

I hope we can go forward from this moment knowing that even if we don’t feel adequate to the task, there is a God who deeply loves us, with a Mother who has already intervened so often on behalf of Don Bosco’s mission – our plans might fail, but God’s plans will not.

And it is in this context that I have to ask your forgiveness for not being quite up to your expectations. As I said at the beginning I have no particular qualifications for this task – I’m not a scholar and may make statements that scholars would reject immediately. Peter Stella would not accept my statement that DB must have come across some of Francis de Sales’ writings and allowed them to influence his use of a term like assistance. Stella may be right and I may be wrong, but I work on gut feelings here and a belief that there’s too much coincidence to ignore.

I’ve been a practitioner in my Salesian life, and not always getting it right. I’m an eclectic, which means I draw ideas from here there and everywhere, and may fail to synthesize them adequately. You will have to sift through the material I have given you and throw out the chaff.

And I must say that I am humbled and grateful, because I have spent a week amidst the great leaders of the EAO Region, the living Don Bosco’s of our time. I can now put faces to names I have known for years. May the Lord be praised for his goodness.