Written by Nancy L. Roberts, Catholic News Service Friday, 27 April 2012 10:01
"The Boy Who Met Jesus: Segatashya of Kibeho" by Immaculee Ilibagiza with Steve Erwin. Hay House (Carlsbad, Calif., 2011). 216 pp., $24.95.
This is the cover of "The Boy Who Met Jesus: Segatashya of Kibeho" by Immaculee Ilibagiza with Steve Erwin. The book is reviewed by Agostino Bono. (CNS)
Some skeptics might call the religious visions detailed by author Immaculee Ilibagiza in "The Boy Who Met Jesus: Segatashya of Kibeho" nothing but the hallmark hallucinations of temporal lobe epilepsy. Others will see them as direct manifestations of the divine in everyday life. In any case, this story of a poor, illiterate Rwandan shepherd boy's spiritual journey is absorbing and sometimes inspiring.
Segatashya came from a pagan family and never had the opportunity to attend school or church or read a Bible. On a summer day in 1982, under a shade tree, the teenager experienced an apparition of Jesus. As he explained, "I saw him (Jesus) and he spoke to me. ... He said he chose me as a sign to show people who don't believe in him – like pagans and any other nonbelievers – that he is not forgetting them. He sees them, he cares about them, he loves them, and he hopes that they invite him into their hearts."
Eventually Segatashya set off on a profound spiritual mission. For eight years before he was murdered in the Rwandan genocide in 1994, he traveled and bore witness to life's purpose: to love Jesus and one's fellow humans, to strive to reach heaven.
