Page 6 - Salesian Bulletin 2014 [01] January-March

Pino Pellegrino says...
The crib isn’t child’s play!
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• The crib brings together families that are more and more split today.
• The crib can school in beauty – no small thing: beauty is the introduc- tion to what is good!
line when he stressed that “man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself!”.
hen you prepare the crib, you are actually producing
an educational master-
Christmas is an invitation to grow: to think more, to love more, to strive for more ...
piece. No exaggeration! Here is how the nativity scene embodies key pil- lars in the art of educating.
• The crib evokes emotion and intense joy. Preparing the crib together, the family experiences emotion and human warmth that you don’t get playing games, or cycling... In an increasingly impersonal society like ours, a surge of feelings is one of the first benefits of the crib!
There you have four valuable con- tributions to education hidden in the crib!
The beauty of the crib lies in that it not only recalls the duty to be born, but also points out the secrets of our true human birth. Everybody knows what the values are that make peo- ple ‘great’ and not just ‘big’. It is enough to visit even the simplest papier mache crib to discover a hand- ful of values:
• the value of simple things,
• the value of the essential,
• the value of silence,
• the value of peace,
• The crib stirs the good asleep in everyone, even the most uncouth! Only the meek, like St Francis, who are at peace with themselves, can really build the crib.
The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1904-73) was right when he said we were “born to be born!”.
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The German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm (1900-80) was on the same
But let’s go deeper. The crib recalls a birth, the absolute birth of Christ. The crib keeps the idea of ‘coming to the light’ alive, an idea too often ignored today, with serious negative consequences.
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