152. The Humble slave of the Lord, 1887
On the night of January 4, 1887, I seemed to see a person full of immense radiance who said to me: “I am the slave of the Lord. I have been sent to cure your sick Ludovico Olive. The Lord has looked at the humiliation of His slave and the Mighty One has done great works for Me.
Then She added: - I have my dwelling place in the highest of the heavens and I can make spiritually rich those who love Me and fill them with heavenly treasures. For the young people their best treasures will be that their words are pure and their actions are chaste. Ministers of God: never get tired of insisting that we must flee from those who are contrary to purity and from bad conversations.
Bad conversations corrupt good manners. Those who speak bad conversations will hardly be able to convert from their impurity. If you want to please me, try to have good conversations and give each other examples of good deeds. Many promise flowers of good works and only offer my Son thorns of sins.
And She continued: “Why confessing so often, their heart remains so far from Me? Dedicate yourselves to say and do what is good and not what is bad. I am a Mother who loves my spiritual children but I abhor all that is sin. I am coming soon to take some of them to eternal rest. I take care of my devotees as a hen takes care of her chicks.
Devote yourselves to do good deeds and not evil deeds. Bad conversations are like a contagious disease.
Superiors should never get tired of warning about these dangers, because the one will come who will take account of the way they have instructed others. The time they have left is short. Therefore, while there is still time, work with an earnest spirit”.
Note: The clergyman Ludovico Olive was dying and was given up by the doctors. Don Bosco, after this dream-vision said that Olive would not die for now. And indeed a few days later he began to improve and became a missionary in China where he lived until 1921 (35 years after this dream).
The day after he had this dream, Don Bosco called Father Lemoyne and told him: “The doctors say that Olive is dying now. And Our Lady tells me that he will live much longer. What do you advise me? To tell him that he is going to be cured? Father Lemoyne replied, “Don Bosco, what you dream are visions from Heaven, and they always come true.
- That's right - said the Saint - Then you can spread the news that Don Bosco has dreamed that Olive will not die for now.
And that night the dying Olive dreamed that Don Bosco appeared to him and said: “In ten days you will come to my room, completely cured and you will visit me”. And so it happened.
153. Cherries, 1887
On March 4, 1887, Don Bosco narrated the following: Last night I dreamed that I was running through land in my country, which was uncultivated, and a voice said to me: - Beware, lest by cultivating land in distant countries (on the Black Sea) the land in your own country be left uncultivated.
I answered: - These lands seem uncultivated, but I am allowing pastures to grow so that the herds can be fed here. [I remember reading that it was for animal fodder].
Then I saw a tree full of cherries and asked the farmer to pick them. But when I opened them I saw with sadness that they were rotten inside.
Perhaps this is the answer to those who asked why he sent so many missionaries to other countries, having so much work to do in their own country. Those pastures, to feed the flocks, were his houses of formation, his seminaries, and from there many pastors came out well prepared to go on mission in other places.
As for the cherries, it could be the fulfillment of that old saying: “All that glitters is not gold”, so that the Apostles do not fill themselves with vanity, because many times what on the outside seem to be marvelous fruits, on the inside turn out to be fruits full of rottenness.