THE MESSAGE OF THE RECTOR MAJOR
Fr. Angel Fernandez Artime, SDB
CHILDREN IN A
FAMILY
Rediscover the great value of closeness, friendship, and simple joy in everyday life, and the value of sharing, talking, and communicating.
I’m writing these lines, dear friends of Don Bosco and of his precious charism, as I read the draft of the Salesian Bulletin for September. My greeting is the last thing inserted: I’m the last to write – just as Don Bosco used to do – so as to be in step with the content of the forthcoming issue.
This month, as we begin a new academic year in our schools and youth
centers, I’m pleased to see that the articles have a great missionary flavor (about
the Philippines and Papua New Guinea) and, at the same time, the simplicity of
a “Salesian mission” in our house in Saluzzo, with its “local flavor.”
Reading this Bulletin makes me
appreciate something that is very much ours, very Salesian, and which I’m sure is
very pleasing to many of you: I’m referring to the great value of closeness,
friendship, and simple joy in everyday life, and the value of sharing, speaking,
and communicating. This is the great gift of having friends, of knowing that
you are not alone, and of feeling loved by so many good people in our lives.
While thinking about all this, I was reminded of a sincere and very
honest testimony of a young woman who wrote to Fr. Luigi Maria Epicoco, which
he published in his book The Light in the
Distance (“La
luce in fondo: attraversare i passaggi difficili della vita”). It’s a
testimony that I’d like you to know about because I consider it to be the
antithesis of what we try to create every day in every Salesian house. This
young woman realizes, in a certain sense, that there is no success or
fulfillment if the most human of encounters or beautiful human relationships
are lacking. The beginning of this school year brings us back to all this.
This young woman writes about herself: “Dear Father, I’m writing to you
because I’d like you to help me understand whether the longing I’ve been
experiencing in recent months tells me that I’m strange or that something
important to me has changed. Maybe it will help you if I tell you a little
about myself. I decided to leave home when I was just eighteen. It was a way to
escape from an environment that seemed so oppressive to me, one that was suffocating
my dreams. I went to Milan to look for work. My family was unable to give me
financial support for my studies. I was angry with them for this, too. All my
friends were looking forward to choosing a major. I had no choice to make
because I had no monetary support. I looked for a job to make a living; for
years, I dreamed of being able to study. I succeeded and, at the cost of great
sacrifices, earned my degree. On my graduation day, I didn’t want my family to
attend. I thought that farmers who had attained only an eighth grade education
wouldn’t understand anything about my studies. I told my mother only that everything
had gone well. Her tears momentarily awakened in me a sense of guilt that I’d
never felt before. But it was of little account. I became who I am by myself; I
was never able to count on anyone nor did I want to do so. Even where work was
concerned, I made my own career because I chose to ‘join forces’ with myself.
“I have been this way for years. And I don’t understand why only now, in
the heart of the lockdown of this pandemic, a longing for my family has erupted
inside me. I dream of telling them everything I’ve never told them. I dream of
hugging my father. At night, I wake up and wonder whether it’s possible to emancipate
oneself from such significant relationships. I’ve never even allowed the
stories I’ve had over the years to cross the threshold to true intimacy. But
now everything seems so different to me. Now that I’m barred even from deciding
for myself to step out of my house, or from going to meet with someone whom I consider
important to me, the awareness of the great lie that I’ve been living all this
time has awakened in me.
“Who are we without relationships? Maybe just unhappy people looking for
affirmation. Now I understand that, in reality, I did everything I did because
I was hoping that someone would tell me who I really was. But I cut off the
only ones who could have helped me answer that question by shutting down
relationships. Now their lives are at risk, hundreds of miles away from me. If
I should die, I’d like it to be among them and not among my successes.”
A joy shared
I appreciate the honesty and courage of this young woman who made me
think a lot about our reality today. It made me reflect on the lifestyle that
so many families pursue – one in which the important thing is to achieve
success, make a good salary, and fill our days with things to do so that
everything turns a profit, etc. But we pay a very high price in order to live –
not outside our houses but, more and more – outside ourselves. There’s a danger
of living without being centered, i.e., of “missing the mark.” Believe me, dear
friends, you can’t imagine how noticeable this is in the boys and girls of our houses,
our playgrounds, and our youth centers.
Don Bosco’s second successor, Fr. Paul Albera, recalled: “Don Bosco educated by loving, attracting, conquering, and transforming. He enveloped us all – and almost entirely – in an atmosphere of contentment and happiness, from which pain, sadness, and melancholy were banished.... He listened to the boys with the greatest attention as if the things they were saying were all very important.”
The first joy in life is to be happy along with others: “A shared joy is
a double joy.” The “password” for an educator is, “I feel at home with you.” His
or hers is a presence that has the intensity of life.
One of Don Bosco’s biographers, Fr. Eugene Ceria, recounts that after a
visit to Valdocco, a high-ranking member of the clergy declared: “You have a
great treasure in your house which no one else in Turin or in any other religious
community has. You have a room which anyone who is filled with affliction enters
and then comes out radiant with joy.” He was referring to Don Bosco’s room. Another
biographer, Fr. John Baptist Lemoyne, noted in pencil, “And a thousand of us
have experienced this.”
One day Don Bosco said: “The young among us now seem to be like so many
children in a family, all little proprietors of the house; they make the
interests of the Congregation their own. They say ‘our’ church, ‘our’ school,
and call ‘our’ concerns whatever concerns the Salesians.”
So this is why this new academic and pastoral year is an occasion to
take care of ourselves in what is most essential and most important – for our family.
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