(ANS – Rome) – Easter celebrations in the Year of Faith and in the light of Strenna 2013 strongly encourage us experience joy and renew the enthusiasm that comes from the encounter with Christ died and risen. Fr Pierluigi Cameroni, Postulator General for the Salesian Family, offers some points for reflection.

Jesus attracts us to himself through love and entrusts us with proclaiming the Gospel through an ever-renewed mandate, rediscovering the joy of believing and rediscovering enthusiasm in communicating the faith. All of this grows through an experience of love received and communicated as an experience of grace. The joy of love, response to the experience of suffering and sorrow, the power of forgiveness and victory of life over death – it all finds its fulfilment in the life of Jesus, his becoming man, his sharing in our human weakness to transform it by the power of His resurrection. In Him who died and rose for our salvation, the examples of faith marking two thousand years of Christian faith, find their fulfilment.

For Salesians, the Easter proclamation is testifying to the ‘Gospel of joy’ which was a feature of our father and founder's life and enlivened all his activity. Don Bosco understood how young people sought happiness and 'translated' that into cheerfulness, playground and festivity; he never stopped pointing to God as the source of true happiness.

The Rector Major invites every member of the Salesian Family to nurture certain attitudes within that foster joy and communicate it to others.

1. Trust in the victory of the good: “In every youngster, even the most unfortunate”, Don Bosco wrote, “there is a place accessible to good, and the educator's first duty is to find this place, this sensitive heart-string, and take advantage of it”.
2. Appreciation of human values: Don Bosco's disciple accepts all that is good especially if it appeals to the young (cf. SDB Constitutions 17).
3. Education to daily happiness: it requires a patient effort of education to learn, or learn once more, to taste in all simplicity the many human joys the Creator puts in our path every day.

Given that he totally trusts in the “God of joy” and is witness in word and deed to the “Gospel of joy”, Don Bosco's disciples are always happy. “Be always happy in the Lord, I say again, be happy (Phil 4:4)”.

Published 29/03/2013