The Church's sacraments

God's saving action works in our lives in a variety of ways. A father and mother who love and want the best for their children do not need help in knowing how to look after others. With great joy we have discovered that daily life is indeed the place where God is present. This means recognizing that God comes close and saves us in our living. This model of presence is not the only way through which God saves us. Christian tradition acknowledges other especially solemn and effective ways of manifesting God's saving presence. They are so special that normally when Christians speak about the ' sacraments" of God's presence they are usually referring to these. These are God's "written" Word. in her seven sacraments the Church becomes the place of union over and above the "flesh and blood" communion as we read in John's gospel (Jn. 1: 13).

We have already talked about the importance of the Word of God and of the ecclesial communion. Let us look a little at the sacraments. Once again we view through the lens of daily life which has helped us to understand the Word of God and the Church.

From this standpoint "Salesian Youth Spirituality" helps us to discover something very wonderful indeed. The sacraments are special moments in our living, pieces of the future running across our present.

A change of viewpoint in religious thinking

Our Salesian tradition reserves a special function for the sacraments. For Don Bosco the sacraments were the strong points (the 'pillars' he called them) of Christian education. To be faithful to Don Bosco and to how we have this far managed to present other Christian existence themes, we need to insert the sacraments into our present culture.

Don Bosco saw the sacraments in the context of the religious thinking of his time. It was a theology which was very different to that which the Church presents to all Christians today. In the logic of Don Bosco's day it was easy to divide daily life from salvation. In this perspective the Sacraments served to bring daily life almost magically into God's saving action.

In the past, faith and the prevailing sense of the sacred pushed people to see salvation in a very dramatic way. Life was seen as a battle between the forces of good and evil. Those on the side of good would use their energies to secure frequent and effective saving action.

Don Bosco's dreams and much of his sermons are full of this awareness.

Today we look at things differently. The incarnation has helped us to discover God's love which is so much stronger than sin. The incarnation has restored our right to love our day to day living. For this reason we do not like to divide God and the world. Neither do we like to think of the sacraments as tearing us away from daily life in order to carry us to the world of the sacred.

The Incarnation has also helped us to discover God's presence "pervading" our daily living. "Salesian Youth Spirituality" speaks very much about daily living as sacrament.

We cannot, however, diminish the importance of the sacraments and their centrality to Christian living by saying that the whole of existence is full of God's saving presence. Instead, what we need to do is begin to look at the sacraments from this new vantage point.

This is a way of showing our fidelity to Don Bosco and his teachings.

It is difficult to wrap words around something which will always be a mystery. At times we think we have found the right words and then we realize that they are nothing more than beautiful sentences which say very little indeed.

Love is what best describes the sacraments and their connection to daily living.

When two people love each other, their whole lives are immersed in that love.

The concrete gestures they use to express their love show something of what that love is like and how it affects their whole existence, permeating all they are and all they do. If it was not like this then the words and the gestures would be false, a sham.

At times people in love have to be apart for some reason. Distance or time do not block the love between them. Love has its own rhythm, logic and measure.

Finally the long awaited meeting arrives. The two are in the arms of one another Love has remained within them, within their lives. The waiting has not extinguished what they feel for one another. Meeting up again allows their love to explode with all its energy.

That lengthy embrace, the tears that come to the eyes are a special expression of an all-pervading and persistent love.

At other times a cloud over-shadows this love. Perhaps a betrayal of some kind has occurred. Something seems to have been shattered. Then the two find each other again. The embrace this time puts paid to the fear and the smile returns. This too is a sacrament, it is a reconciliation demonstrated through a gesture. It expresses the joy of the reconciliation which rebuilds the very fabric of life itself. The sacraments in terms of the sacramental energy which permeates Christian life are like this.

The sacraments are very special events of God's grace. By celebrating God's presence the veil of silence is broken. God's voice resounds as the experience of salvation. Without this event the gift would be rendered useless and ineffective.

Without this celebration people would remain dispersed, sad and lonely, cut off from every personal saving experience.

The sacraments: a special time for salvation

There is another aspect which it is vital to keep in mind. Christian tradition holds strongly to this belief. In the excitement of finding a new way of looking at things. Omitting this would be serious.

Normally the relationship between something and its meaning is a game where we "pretend" to create something new. This way of behaving does not change reality. Whoever is distant, remains distant and silence continues to shroud us. People are trapped by their own limitations and responsibilities.

Christian tradition holds, however, that in the sacraments God is really present and acts effectively.

It is love which pervades the lives of the two lovers. One day the lovers immerse this love in the mystery of God by celebrating the sacrament of matrimony. There is a change in the leading role. God takes the part of the protagonist giving a new dimension to the love which fills the lives of our two lovers. What begins to open up then is an epic love story in which Jesus, the Church and all people figure.

It is true that God is the prime mover in all human love. as he is in the whole human adventure. Usually, however, he is upstaged by our desire to take the leading role. Celebrating the sacraments we acknowledge him, we give him space, we entrust ourselves to him. A piece of the Gospel says this so well, "The servant does not deserve thanks for obeying orders does he? It is the same with you; when you have done all you have been told to do, say, 'We are ordinary servants we have only done our duty"' (Lk. 17:10).

The Eucharist and Reconciliation

All this brings two sacraments to mind. They are the sacraments of the Eucharist and Reconciliation, ones with which we have the most frequent contact. Through Reconciliation and the Eucharist the ecclesial community lays claim to being the 'place' in which God freely works his saving power and witnesses to the fact that it is possible to live in a way that accepts and welcomes this gift. The church rejects on her part the presumption that we can live without God's saving action in our lives. The church reminds us that each of us is in debt, in everything, to God's great love, given to us in Jesus Christ. This puts personal responsibility at the very center of every salvific meeting; it recognizes that life is a result of salvation. It re-assures our timid hope in salvation and lays before us the secure foundation of God's salvific action.

The Eucharist and Reconciliation are two great pillars on which Salesian Spirituality is built.

The Eucharist is at the heart of the community, links it in love and sends it out to follow Christ's way. The Eucharist becomes, as the 23rd General Chapter of the SDB reminds us, "a meaningful moment of the Preventive System. Young people take from the Eucharist a model of how they can organize their lives in the light of the mystery of Christ who gives himself in love. In the Eucharist they learn to put others first as the spirit of communion demands. In it they are enabled to commit themselves to apostolic activity in keeping with their age and Christian development". The FMA Constitutions are more explicit still when they state "and, nourishing ourselves at the table of his Word and his Body, we become like him 'bread' for our sisters and brothers" (FMA Constitutions 40).

Reconciliation saves us in our poverty and restores us in a new way in the spirit.

"Salesian Youth Spirituality" emphasizes this sacrament and points out the need to give it its proper place in the life of the Christian. "Young people, sustained by a love which understands and forgives", declares the 23rd General Chapter, "find the strength to recognize their selfishness and sin, their fragility and their need for support and direction. They learn to resist the temptation to become self-sufficient. They offer pardon to others as an exchange of what they have received from Reconciliation. They are educated to respect others and enabled to form a clear and coherent conscience". These are seen as the educational fruits of the sacrament.

A sense of celebration

The unifying and liberating love of God gives a certain tone of joy and hope and celebration to these two sacraments. Eucharist and Reconciliation in Salesian style cannot be void of that sense of celebration which is born of the on going experience of meeting the Lord of life who has over come evil and sin.

It is impossible to understand life in Valdocco and Mornese, to understand what lay at the very center of these two communities of young people, without the Eucharist.

Don Bosco insisted again and again on the importance of this sacrament in his educational system.

For Don Bosco, the Eucharist was something which touched the depths of his heart. As a priest and teacher he was convinced that the Lord was the model in educating the young. He was concerned that his young people received the Risen Jesus often in the Eucharist. It was a Eucharist which was well prepared for by a good confession.

The same experience and educational preoccupation was present in Mother Mazzarello. In Mornese. the Eucharist was seen as the aim and culmination of the whole day. The "God-with-us" eucharistic presence was seen as a real and active presence. The young people were encouraged to turn to Jesus with faith in moments of difficulty, they grouped around him in joyful community moments and with him they began and ended each day.

The portrait of a Christian called Mary

Living in faith means reproducing in our daily lives the kind of existence which marked the saints as special. Earlier we said that Don Bosco lived his existence as if he saw the invisible.

We are all convinced of this and we continue trying to immerse ourselves more and more deeply in the mystery of God so as to give our lives the tone and style which comes from that mystery. Unfortunately there is more than the problem of coherence to take on board here. It is not easy to evaluate things, people and events from the standpoint of mystery. It is very hard to demonstrate in concrete terms just what this sense of mystery is. Indeed the difficulties arise out of the discovery that God's mystery is so deep that we only ever manage to glean fragments of it.

Often we are unsure about the quality of our living. We are not clear at times as to whether one way of doing things is better than another. The words we use to dream our dreams are becoming poorer and poorer, overburdened by our limitations and our fears.

Mary, our help

We need someone who can give us a hand.

It may seem strange, but it is true. Even though we are pretty secure people and we do not like others to tell us what we have to do and what we have to avoid, it is strange that when things really matter we look for help, someone we can trust. It is this conviction which has enabled "Salesian Youth Spirituality" to re-discover Mary and re-enkindle the great love for her that the Salesian family has inherited from Don Bosco and Mother Mazzarello.

Christians have always had a special place for Mary in their hearts. Don Bosco loved Mary as a son loves his mother. Mother Mazzarello echoed these sentiments with a special enthusiasm. Both of them taught us to recognize Mary as our Help, a strong and powerful helper in times of difficulty.

This way of remembering Mary was linked to an almost physical caring. It was the kind of care a mother shows when she divides herself into four to care for the son or daughter she loves. But it is also an absorption in the serious task of making sense out of life, and trying to live from the heart of the mystery our lives carry within them.

Mary has a very precise name in "Salesian Youth Spirituality". She is called "our help". We run to her when we are in difficulty. Above all we feel she is close to us when we are less than sure about the meaning of our existence.

We live in a time of uncertainty and change, of trepidation and enthusiasm for novelty. Mary, our help, points out the way ahead and inspires us with hope and consolation. We need a help especially at the level of meaning in life and hope. Mary is this help because she shows us the face of a mature and committed Christian; she is the most beautiful portrait we have of a Christian.

Mary's face

In order to discover this portrait we turn to the pages of the gospels. There are but a few which speak of her. Those that are there are very rich and have precious indications regarding Mary. The Magnifcat is the great ecclesial prayer of thanks and acknowledgment of God's work of salvation. Luke has Mary declare these truths because he was certain that they truly expressed her experience of God's action in her life .

The Magnificat is Mary's song, a song which proclaims her faith experience. It is a model for all Christian prayer in Mary it comes about. What is proclaimed is what happened. The Magnificat offers us a kind of ecclesial portrait of the young woman of Nazareth. She is the one who, after Jesus, has penetrated more deeply God's mystery, As we pray this prayer, as we sing this prayer. we feel Mary close to us, as mother and model of true Christian living.

"My heart praises the Lord;

my soul is glad because of God my savior,

for he has remembered me, his lowly servant!

From now on all people will call me happy,

because of the great things the mighty God has done for me...

He has stretched out his power

and scattered the proud with all their plans.

He has brought down mighty Kings from their thrones,

and has lifted up the lowly and the oppressed.

He has filled the hungry and the poor with good things,

and sent the rich away with empty hands (Lk. 1:46-55).

In the Magnificat Mary celebrates the fact that God has drawn close, has become one with his people. He is the faithful God, he has made an agreement with his people and he is faithful to that pact.

Mary feels herself immersed in the power of God's love. When she proclaims to herself and to others who she is in God's plan for human beings she has the courage to cry out, God's power and his presence are true and solemn expressions of his human form. It is for this reason that while she feels small and poor and humble and a servant, she is truly great, so great in fact that all generations speak about her.

Even for Mary the mystery of God's presence is great and often impenetrable and disturbing. At the Annunciation she showed she was anxious and fearful (Lk. 1:29 and 34). The prayer of Simeon breaks through to her and leaves her fearful in the face of something so awesome (Lk. 2:32). She was mortified no doubt at Jesus' reply when Joseph and herself were so anxiously searching for him (Lk. 2:50).

Even through her suffering her words were always words of faith in the mystery of God. She is a good companion to have and she is a source of consolation to us in our struggle to live our lives in faith.

In silence and in prayer Mary manages to penetrate the mystery which lies beyond fact. She transformed by totally and courageously owning the cause of her son. It becomes a passion for her so that all might recognize who God is and experience this God as the God of life.

Mary runs to her cousin Elizabeth before being called because she realizes how much of a help she can be to her. She would not let the celebration at Cana end abruptly because they had run out of wine and urged her son to intervene. In the Magnificat she sides with the poor to point out that they are specially loved by God.

Mary upholds the values of the faithful woman right to the foot of the cross. Such a fidelity to the cross is what Jesus asks of all who have the courage to share his cause. Mary in silent suffering gives her son up to death for the life of all. she accepts having the son she gave birth to violently snatched from her and becomes the mother of all, the source of life for all, with him and in him.

Mary is all of this for us. Because she is all of this she has a very special place in "Salesian Youth Spirituality".