Why We Stay with Don Bosco

Fr. Javier has done it again! Here is his third installment!

Why is it that we stay with Don Bosco? Quite simply, Don Bosco leads us to Christ.

We read in the Biographical Memoirs that the boys at the Oratory used to point to Don Bosco and comment: Doesn’t he look like Jesus? There is a direct testimony to this effect in volume three of the Memoirs

The spell of Don Bosco’s holiness seemed to radiate from his eyes and smile. Boys around him were heard to exclaim over and over again: ‘He looks just like Our Lord!’ a phrase that became habitual with them.

But there is an even more telling way of learning about Don Bosco’s way of leading the young to Jesus. Fr. Peter Braido SDB, has made an exhaustive study of his writings. I am transcribing a short statement taken from Don Bosco’s writings in which he spells out the way to follow Christ.

It is a picture of the Christian, who intends to model his own existence on Jesus’ existence in this life, “reassured that one day he will be glorified in Jesus Christ in Heaven, and reign with him…In fact in a Christian’s life and in his actions it must be possible to identify the life and actions of Jesus Christ himself… so that the genuine Christian should be able to say with St. Paul: It is no longer I who live but it’s Jesus Christ who lives in me.” That is why he prays, “as Jesus prayed on top of the mountain recollected, with humility and full of trust in God;” as Jesus Christ he will be “available to serve the poor, the ignorant, the children”, without arrogance; dealing with others he will be “all for all”, inspirational, charitable, tender and simple; in imitation of Jesus who “washed his apostles’ feet…he will consider himself the least, and the servant of all;” as Jesus was subjected in Nazareth and to the Father “even unto a death on the cross,” “he will be obedient to his parents, his employers, his superiors” as “he obeys God, whom they represent;” as Jesus at Cana and Bethany, he will be “sober, temperate, attentive to the needs of others;” as Jesus was with John and Lazarus, he will share with his friends, entrusting his secrets of the heart and working at bringing back to the state of grace those who may have lost it, he will be patient in his spiritual and physical sufferings; he will be “ready to accept with patience every persecution, every sickness and also death just as Jesus did it”.
Don Bosco subsumes the whole project of the following of Christ in these terms: to make the Christian conscious of the precariousness, seriousness, responsibility and dignity of his existence and the grandeur of his destiny:

Remember, oh Christian, that you are a man of eternity. Every instant of your life is one step towards eternity.