John Bosco and the Boy Who Juggled
A bedtime story about Saint John Bosco as a farm boy who taught himself to juggle and walk a rope, and used his show to gather the children of the hills for a prayer. Told from his own Memoirs of the Oratory, with a note for grown-ups on what is his account and what is ours. For ages 3 to 8, about ten minutes read aloud. His feast day is the 31st of January.
A long time ago, on a green hill in the north of Italy, there was a farm so small you could walk around it before breakfast. On the farm lived a boy called Giovanni. In English that is John, and his mother called him Johnny.
Johnny's father had died when he was very little, so his mother worked the fields, and Johnny and his brothers worked beside her. They fed the animals. They carried water. They pulled weeds. At the end of the day they were tired and their hands were rough.
Johnny was good at hard work. But he had a different kind of gift, too, and he did not know yet what it was for.
He was good at making other children want to come close.
Here is how he found out.
Once or twice a year, a fair came to the villages near the hill. There were jugglers there, and men who turned somersaults, and one who could walk across a rope tied high between two poles. Johnny stood at the front of the crowd with his mouth open. He did not want to be rich. He did not want a hat like the juggler's. He wanted to know how it was done.
So he watched, and he watched. Then he went home and tried.
He tried to toss three things in the air and catch them, and he dropped them. He tried again and dropped them again. He tried to stand on his hands, and fell on his nose. He tried to walk a rope that he tied between two trees, and sat down very suddenly in the grass.
But Johnny did not give up. After many days, the things stayed in the air. After many more, he could turn a somersault and land on his feet. And then, one afternoon, he walked the whole length of the rope, with his arms out like wings, and he did not fall.
He told us about it himself, many years later, when he was an old man. He wrote it down in a book. He said, in his own way, that he did all this because he had a plan.
Here was the plan.
On Sundays the children of the hills had nothing to do. Some of them got into mischief. Some of them said rude words. Some of them never went to church at all, because the church was far away and nobody had ever shown them why they should.
Johnny could not make them come to church by telling them to. They were not his children, and he was only a boy himself.
But he could juggle.
So on a Sunday afternoon he went out to the meadow, and he set up his rope between two trees, and he began. First one child came to watch. Then three. Then ten. Then a whole crowd, with their mouths open, just as his had been at the fair.
When the crowd was big, Johnny stopped. He said, "I will show you everything I know. But first, we must pray together. And first of all I want someone to say what the priest talked about at Mass this morning."
The children groaned a little. That was not what they had come for.
But Johnny had listened to the sermon very carefully that morning, because he knew this was coming. He said it again, all of it, in words the little ones could follow. Then everybody knelt on the grass and said a prayer. Then, and only then, he climbed up on the rope.
And do you know, they came back the next Sunday. And the one after.
They did not come only for the juggling, though they loved the juggling. Somewhere in the middle of it, without noticing, they had started to like the other part too. They liked having a place to go. They liked a boy who looked at them as if each one mattered. They liked saying the prayer together, out in the open, with the hills all around and the sky over them like a very big roof.
Johnny was not trying to be a hero. He was trying to be a friend who also happened to know how to stand on his hands.
His mother knew it, and she was glad. She used to say that it is better to be good than to be clever. But she did not mind that he was clever too, as long as he used it for something kind.
When Johnny grew up, he became a priest, and everyone called him Don Bosco, which is how you say Father Bosco in Italian. In the great city of Turin there were many boys with no homes and no school, and nobody to teach them a trade. Don Bosco looked at them and remembered the meadow.
So he gave them a place to play. He gave them a place to learn. He gave them food, and beds, and teachers who laughed, and a chapel where they could pray if they wanted to. And sometimes, when the boys were sad, he still took out his old tricks and made them laugh.
Thousands of boys were taught by Don Bosco and the men who joined him. Today people called Salesians carry on the same work in many countries. His feast day is on the thirty-first of January, in the middle of winter, when it is dark and cold, and a warm laugh is very welcome.
And it all began with a boy on a rope, between two trees, in a meadow, and a prayer afterwards.
Now it is dark, and your own two feet are warm under the blankets. You can stop practising whatever you were practising today. It will keep until the morning.
Goodnight.
A prayer to say together
Saint John Bosco, you were a boy who loved to play
and a friend to every child.
Thank you for the fun you shared, and for the prayers you shared with it.
Help me to be kind to the ones who have no one to play with.
Help me to keep trying, even when I fall on my nose.
Keep me safe tonight, and everyone I love.
Amen.
For grown-ups: what is true in this story
Saint John Bosco (1815 to 1888) was a real person, born at Becchi, a hamlet in the hills of Piedmont, the youngest son of a poor farming family. His father, Francis, died when John was not yet two, and his mother, Margaret, raised the children. He was ordained a priest in 1841, worked among the poor and homeless boys of Turin, and founded the Salesians of Don Bosco. He is the patron saint of young people and apprentices. He died on 31 January 1888, and the Church keeps his memorial on 31 January.
The juggling is from his own pen. In his Memoirs of the Oratory, which he wrote in his sixties at the request of Pope Pius IX, Don Bosco says that as a boy he learned acrobatics and conjuring by watching travelling performers at fairs and practising by himself, including walking on a rope, and that he used the show to gather the neighbouring children. He says he made them pray, and repeat what they remembered of the morning sermon or catechism, before he would perform. The story follows that account closely. It is a saint's own memory of his childhood written fifty years later, so it is the best source we have, but it is one person's memory.
What is ours. The fair at which he first watched, the particular falls and the sore nose, the numbers of children who came, the wording of what he said to them, the picture of his mother's words and the closing comfort are our additions to make a bedtime story. The saying that it is better to be good than to be clever is in the spirit of Mamma Margaret as he describes her but is not quoted from a source. The prayer is not an approved text.
This story was written by Claude, an AI made by Anthropic, for the Little Lamps collection. It is not an official Church text. Parents and catechists are warmly encouraged to read it first and adapt it for their own children.