3 LIVING IMMERSED IN MYSTERY

Christians pondering on the wonderful things that God has done through Jesus often ask, "how do we express our love for God and the gratitude we feel for being loved so incredibly?" The question arises out of an awareness of the mystery that surrounds us.

Contemplating the mystery leads to a new vision of life and a renewed way of living.

I ask myself, "What do I do in concrete terms?"

Don Bosco's response was partly traditional and partly new. He talked about "saving one's soul".

Saving the person was at the heart of all any good Christian tried to do and be. "What does it really matter if a person inherits the whole world and in doing so loses his Or her own soul?" This is the question Christians need to ask themselves when faced with important choices and decisions.

There are some words today that we do not like. We try to avoid using them. The risk we run in rejecting the words of the past is that we lose the substance of the point they are making.

Today we have a tendency to reduce everything to more or less the same level, leaving anxiety about the 'soul' to monks and nuns or, at best, to the older generation.

"Salesian Youth Spirituality", taking its lead from the Church at the Second Vatican Council, makes no division between body and soul.

It affirms, however, that if we want to live in God's love there is something we must not ignore. This is, like the gospel's "pearl of great price" which is to he owned at whatever cost, our decision to make God the Lord of our lives, to the point of giving ourselves totally to him.

In order to understand what this means in everyday life we have to try to penetrate a little that mystery which surrounds God. In trying to do this we are in good company. We have all those who have believed and gone before us to look up to. even though today we use expressions very different from the ones they used.

Living in faith

Don Bosco experienced God's presence in his life as the love with which a father or mother surrounds and protects the children.

For this reason he loved the young he met, and he loved their life.

In the young and in life, Don Bosco continually discovered signs of God's closeness. His words are full of expressions which verify this.

Don Bosco would greet his boys by saying, "be people who save, help save others, save yourself!" And to Dominic Savio, "be a force for good among your friends". To a certain extent this was an echo of the gospel words of Jesus, "I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete" (Jn. 15:8,11).

Dominic Savio read this to mean "here, for us, sanctity consists in being always cheerful".

The incarnation has enabled us to re-discover that our daily living is the place where God is present. "Salesian Youth Spirituality" is a "spirituality of daily living".

The phrase is important. It has become a common reference point bringing to mind a specific model of Christian living.

Not only did Don Bosco believe that there was no need to cut yourself off from life in order to find God. He went beyond this and affirmed that God is found right in the midst of daily living. He is present in our lives, for us and for our happiness.

"In order to understand and love life as a new reality in which God works as a loving Father, we need to assume the ordinariness of daily living, accepting life's challenges, life's questions and the tensions that growing brings. We need to seek to integrate life's fragments into the kind of wholeness which is the Spirit's gift in Baptism. We need to work towards overcoming the ambiguity present in day to day experience and make love the basis of all the choices we make" (CG23).

God's presence in everyday living

These affirmations sound very good, but are extremely challenging.

Often it is so much easier to write this kind of thing than live it in real life.

How can we claim that God is present in our lives when often our experience is that we do not see him directly, and cannot always find him in our personal and community stones? Perhaps Don Bosco had his 'dark' moments.

Surely when oppressed by pain and anguish he would have cried out with the psalmist, "Where are you God?"

It is not enough to say that God is present in our lives, we need to discover the real meaning of this mysterious presence.

We know that there are different models of presence. The friend we are talking to is present with us. Remembering a good friend in moments of difficulty makes that person present in another sense.

The first is a physical presence. The second is wishful thinking.

God's presence within human life is neither this physical presence nor is it a sentimental remembering without any definite shape.

We are talking about an indisputable and genuine presence even if we mean a special kind of presence.

There is a mysterious relationship between what we see and can prove easily and what we cannot see with the instruments at our disposal.

Our lives are often defined by what is seen and can be proven. We have a name, a family and a life story. We live in a particular place.

We work, we have a group of friends, we love and we suffer.

All these things are concrete, felt experiences.

There is, however, something about our life which always manages to elude description, but is very important. Those who reflect on the Jesus mystery begin to discover that God takes human form and becomes the word. This carries us even further to the heart of God's existence which he freely communicated to humanity through the incarnation. In Jesus and through Jesus we too possess this great mystery.

What we experience, what we produce in our lives is truly 'ours', the fruit of our labour.

In all this there is something much greater than anything we know. It enables us to be who we are, to be ourselves.

This mystery, this 'more true than truth' reality of our nature is where we find God's presence bound up in human nature.

For this very reason God's presence includes even the uncertainty involved in seeking something beyond us. It includes our sufferings and our pain, the sadness brought about by our solitude.

Faith: daily life viewed through the filter of mystery

The vision needed to perceive God's presence in the events of daily living is a very special one. It is an inner vision which penetrates the surface to the mystery that lies within.

Christians give the name "faith" to this vision which tears away the veil which masks our human existence.

Faith is the Christian's quality of life. A Christian is distinguishable by his or her faith.

There are many ways of thinking about our faith.

One which appeals to us because it depicts Don Bosco's faith is the description of him found m the SDB Constitutions, "he was profoundly human, rich in the virtues of his people, he was aware of and open to human reality. He was also very powerfully a man of God, rich in the gifts of the Spirit. He lived as if he actually saw what was not visible to the human eye" (Const. SDB 21).

To begin to understand the expression "seeing the invisible" we need to go to the text which first outlines this aspect of faith.

"To have faith", the Letter to the Hebrews explains "is to be sure of the things we hope for, to be certain of the things we cannot see" (Hebrews 11: 1).

The Letter to the Hebrews then goes on to relate the adventures of those famous people who lived their lives as if they were "seeing what was not visible to the human eye".

These situations for them, as for Don Bosco and Mother Mazzarello, were normal, everyday life situations. In these events what was not visible is that which gives meaning and reason to what was seen and experienced.

Living life by faith demands the courage to read what is happening both personally and collectively with a vision which is always penetrating, delving beneath the surface of things to the point of arriving at the threshold of mystery. Believers "live by faith" by seeing the deeper meaning in all that happens.

Believers live life at depth after pondering the mystery of life itself. Love is the tangible way we experience this.

When two people are in love, the existence of one is continually brought to mind by the other. They do not need to be continually in each other's presence. The reciprocal presence is so strong that it changes the meaning of life and commitment for them both.

This is Christian faith, to recognize the mystery which fills life day by day.

The mysterious God at the heart of life's happenings

"What is this mystery?" This is a crucial question.

There is no easy answer. "Salesian Youth Spirituality" recognizes that God is beyond classification in human words. Talking about God even when illumined by his light still leaves us in the dark.

It is Jesus, however, who presents the face and speaks the words of the mystery of God.

The gospel contains an extract which is strange in terms of our logic but illuminating in terms of God's wisdom.

There was once a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a hole for the winepress, and built a watch-tower. Then he let out the vineyard to tenants and went on a journey. When the time came to gather the grapes, he sent his slaves to the tenants to receive his share of the harvest. The tenants seized his slaves, beat one, killed another, and stoned another. Again the man sent other slaves, more than the first time, and the tenants treated them the same way. Last of all he sent his son to them. 'Surely they will respect my son', he said. But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, 'This is the owner's son. Come on let's kill him, and we will get his property!' So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him" (Mt. 21:33-39).

The episode finishes in this way but there is a follow up to the story.

The son is killed and his assassins think they have won the day. God raises him from death however.

The son comes out winner because he decided to give his life for love.

Life is what counts. In Jesus the grain of wheat dies under the ground in order to emerge as strong wheat for the good of all.

This is the way God faces the problems of life and death. God's passion for life is what counts in personal and community events.

The one who recognizes this mystery is the one who lives the sufferings of daily life in faith.

This is the person who transforms his or her existence into a proclamation of hope in the name and the power of the God of Jesus.

God's word penetrating the mystery

For the one who believes, living by faith is about more than accepting something. It is about accepting Someone. It is arriving at the point of no longer living for myself, but living for and in God.

The Word of God is a recognized and special means through which we reach into the mystery, while embracing all the moments of our existence. God is a Father who wants to communicate with his children. God speaks to us through the Scripture. Scripture makes sense of all the other words of God woven into the fabric of daily living. This way of reading into, meditating on and praying with is basic to "Salesian Youth Spirituality".

Don Bosco had a particular way of presenting the Scriptures. His was an invitation to dwell on them. In this he is to be seen as very much ahead of his times.

He recounted the scriptures to his boys, helping them to understand them, meditate on them, pray them and apply them in their lives. In line with Don Bosco we too meditate, pray and try to put the word into practice. We rediscover our roots in the story of salvation, and we learn words we can use to address God. The words connect us within the silence of our inner being.

We allow God, through his word, to suggest to our hearts the choices, actions, words and above all the meaning we give to life.

Within an ecclesial setting we unite with God's people who throughout history in every part of the world raise songs of praise and petition to God. In this way we try to make our words, our thoughts and our actions more and more like the words and thoughts and actions of Jesus Christ himself.

The Church: people who share the cause of Jesus

Christians live by faith, making their lives a real following of Christ.

We do not do this alone. committed as individuals to a desperate cause.

We live and believe and love and hope in the company of our sisters and brothers. those who have gone before us, those who surround us now and those who, after us. will share the same faith. We belong to a people who share a common cause of Jesus. We are the Church.

Learning from the master himself -- Don Bosco

Don Bosco loved the Church very much. He spent his whole life serving the Church. He explained his love for the Church in the language of his own time. He was a nineteenth century man and for him the Church was above all the Pope and the Bishops. He insisted on giving the Church great respect and obedience. His call is important for us too. especially at a time in the church's history when tensions and presumptions seem to erode fidelity.

Today. however, we do have a precious gift to enable us to know the Church better. This gift points out what it means "to love the Church" and how to live as part of the Church. This gift is the Second Vatican Council. In the Council we discover a renewed style of obedience and a much wider and more universal vision of the Church.

The Church of the Council

The Council depicted a face of the Church which placed service of the kingdom of God at center stage as Jesus had asked.

The kingdom of God is the life and hope for all in the name of God. The Church exists to proclaim this kingdom and to bring this kingdom about in the here and now.

We continue Don Bosco's love for the Church by learning to love and live in the Church with that passion for the kingdom which marked the lives of Jesus, Don Bosco, Mother Mazzarello and many other friends before us.

To present this image of Church in service of the kingdom of God, the Council looked for inspiration to the first church community we read about in the acts of the apostles. Those who gathered around the apostles after Easter had a vivid awareness of being a community of people committed to carrying on their Master's cause. They believed in Jesus as Lord and lived this belief in their commitment to be "of one mind and of one heart" and to "share all things in common" according to "what each one needed" (Acts 2:42-45, 4:32-35). This community discovered in "the breaking of the bread" the realization that in Jesus, life had triumphed and continues to triumph over death (Acts 2:42). in the Eucharist they gave thanks to the living God for the Easter that Jesus had already brought about. They saw this Easter victory manifested also, day after day, as they journeyed towards the future everlasting Easter when "death will be no more" (Rev. 21:4). The unity of the community was built around the 'cause' Jesus came to proclaim. The existence of a diversity of viewpoints and activities became even more reason for working at this unity of purpose.

The disciples learnt from Jesus himself to seek unity and communion by accepting and respecting [he differences that existed among them. One episode explains this very well. "John said to Jesus, 'Teacher, we saw a man who was driving out demons in your name, and we told him to stop, because he doesn't belong to our group'. 'Do not try to stop him,' Jesus told them, 'because no one who performs a miracle in my name will be able soon afterwards to say evil things about me. For whoever is not against us is for us. I assure you that anyone who gives you a drink of water because you belong to me will certainly receive his reward" (Mk. 9:38-41). The disciples reasoned as some Christians reason today. They were a little jealous. They wanted to have sole rights with regard to doing all the good possible. It would seem that they were seeking to belong to their group for the joy of finding solutions to the urgent problems at hand. In their minds, unity very easily slips into uniformity. Jesus proposes, instead, a unity which demands much greater commitment, namely, that of being at the service of life by opposing death. Faced with this need one cannot joke or compromise. Diversity is a consequence of the need to serve life to the full. We bring to the task of serving life our sensitivities, our experiences and our reactions to the forms of death which surrounds us.

Let us love and build up the Church

This is the Church we want to serve and love and build up. It is primarily a people we serve and love and build up. We are a people who share Jesus' cause and commit ourselves to bring about that cause in a fellowship which accepts and loves, in a spirit of communion which reaches far beyond differences of race, culture and social structure.

In this unity of faith and commitment we discover the supportive companionship of the "witnesses" to Jesus' resurrection.

Mary was one of these witnesses, indeed she was foremost among the believers and a favorite among the disciples of Jesus. The saints are also among these witnesses. They show God's presence and his 'face' to humanity. Through them God continues to speak to us. We turn to them, looking to their lives for example, praying to them for help, certain of sharing with them the great celebration of life. Our friends are also witnesses. We live day by day the same faith adventure with such friends. We share the same passion for the kingdom of God, working with them, collaborating and planning new strategies to enable us to be at the service of life and hope in our world today. There are many others who do not seem to have a great deal in common with the Church but share a passion for life, for justice and for solidarity with us. We feel they are our friends even if they work in ways very different to our own. This company of committed friends helps us to discover who we are and how we can respond to the God who calls to us. They are like fragments of words which become convincing because they have real faces, the faces of known and unknown friends.