Return to Don Bosco

VITALITY OF

THE BEGINNING

Fr. Alfred Cogliandro SDB, our revered Novice Master, used to speak about the “Vitality of the Beginning.” He said that in the novitiate the novices should be full of life especially because they are at the very start of the religious life. Religious life, like all the rest, will soon wane in its energy. And when that happens, sometimes the only thing that could revive it back to its original zest is thro a return to its beginning – in order to capture once more the vitality of the beginning it one time had.

If that is true of the individual salesian, it is equally and even more true of all the Salesians taken together. The entire Salesian Congregation to get back its lost vigor has to return to Valdocco where it all started - to return to Don Bosco from whom everything originated.

This is not novelle. We have been hearing this clamor since Vatican II. From 1960 all of us were called by Mother Church to renew ourselves. And we were also given the way how: to go back to our origins.

Going back to our beginnings, does not mean to live in the past. It means rather to live in the present situation the spirit originating from the past. When we go back to Don Bosco, more than looking at what he did, we have to know why he did things, so that we can do what he would do now if he were in our place.

What would Don Bosco do here today? This is a question we all have to continually answer – in the 26^th General Chapter in Rome and everyday of our Salesian Life.

But in order to answer this question we would not only have to return to Don Bosco. We would have to contemplate once more the face of Jesus Christ.

Ang hindi marunong lumingon sa kanyang pinanggalingan,

hindi makararating sa kanyang paroroonan.