John Janaro's Blog, page 106

For All the Innocents Who Suffer...

It is the Feast of the Holy Innocents. Let us pray for innocent victims of violence throughout the world.

The Family: A Wonderful and Fundamental Community

From homilies of Cardinal Karol Wojtyla (Saint John Paul II), Archbishop of Krakow, Poland, Christmas week 1968 and 1969.

"My dear brothers and sisters, today we are all filled with the Christmas joy which comes from the faith that God has been born into the world. However, our joy must expand and spread, so that each year it embraces new thoughts and events and brings them into the joy of Christmas, in order that the mystery of the Incarnation may grow fuller and fuller each year until the end of time."

"The mystery of the Holy Family concerns each individual family in a specific way, both husband and wife but also that special community which begins with their marriage, in other words, the community of parents and children. Whether this is a community of mature people or of those still in formation, it is a wonderful and fundamental community, and without it the human race would not exist.

"While we can change the parts of an engine, the fundamental human community of the family cannot be substituted. It must be served and helped to develop. It is not licit to destroy it, since it is a work of God."

When God "gave [man and woman] the power to transmit life, he invested them with the divine power of creation. Thus the work of creation continues through the family in every age and generation of human history. As parents, you are partners with God and share in his work in a way in keeping with the dignity of the human person. The Creator wants the work of creation to be manifested in every human family and, through the family, in every people and society and in humanity as a whole."

Jesus comes to redeem and fulfill creation. "The work of redemption shows us the full value of everything human and especially of marriage and the family. It is as if God himself — symbolized in the family by every newborn child — said to every couple: 'See how beautiful it is, and how it is both human and divine!' This is the meaning of today's feast.

"The divine and human beauty that exists in the family can only be gained through constant effort. It is not ready-made, but must be worked for by every couple. We are quite right in saying that marriage is based on love; we find this truth in the gospel. However, we must immediately add that true love makes us capable of taking on the tasks and problems of married and family life and that if it does not give us this capacity it cannot be called love. We should therefore be careful not to debase this wonderful word that was spoken by the Son of God as the greatest commandment.

"Through marriage and the family Christ carries out his work of redemption, which he won for us on the cross. However, just as Christ came to resurrection through the cross, so too, difficulties and hardship bring us to the true values of marital and family love and real formation and development: first and foremost the mutual formation of husband and wife and then the education of their children."

"We are all of us overwhelmed and dumbfounded in the face of the divine love which took on human flesh and entered into the human spirit. We compare our miserable human love with his immeasurable love, and we pray that love may grow within us, that it may never be extinguished despite any difficulties or obstacles, and that it may never dim but always grow stronger. May it never dim or fail, particularly in our families, in our marriages, and in relations between children and parents and between old and young... May it grow ever stronger within our society and withstand every effort to undermine or destroy it. 

"These are our wishes as we gather at this eucharistic table on which in a few moments, as at every Mass, Christ will be born to become our bread and to nourish us. Let us say to him today: 'Welcome! Come to us, be our nourishment, and teach us to love.'"

Merry Christmas 2020

Christ is Born! Come, let us adore Him!

We had a lovely Christmas Day, and look forward to observing with gratitude the coming weeks of this beautiful Christmas season.




The table and food were great as always:



Lovely and great above all was the woman who always makes it happen. Thank you, Eileen!

He Has Come to Dwell With Us

He has come to dwell with us.
He has come, the One who creates and sustains our very being, our intelligence, our freedom. 
He has come, the One who is the ineffable source of the miracle that manifests itself everytime one of these strange little material entities in the universe says, "I am a 'someone'" and when it sees another speck of cosmic dust like itself and says, "You are a 'someone'!"

He has come, the One who makes our mysterious, otherwise inexplicable personhood real, vital, and so intimate that it is truly "our own." He comes to be with us, to be close to us, to fulfill to the end His fidelity, His mercy, His love for us.

He has come: Jesus.

He, the Eternal Word, took flesh in the womb of a woman, the always-and-all-holy woman He chose and prepared to be His mother. Jesus born of the Virgin Mary.

He has come to dwell with us, to make us His brothers and sisters. 
He wants us to be with Him forever, to share with Him the fulllfillment of all things, and above all to share in His own inexhaustible life, His glory, His joy, His love.

He comes, who encompasses and surpasses all our aspirations. Let us take time, in these days, to make room for Him in the center of our hearts, of our lives.

Distance Overcome

Agnese Janaro Turns 22

The birthdays come in thick this time of year for our bunch. Earlier this month was Teresa (as I have already noted). Now Agnese turns 22. Before the end of the year, my mother will be 82. Then just after New Year's comes my 58th birthday.

Thus the seasons change once again. Winter has come and the days will begin to grow longer again.

Happy Birthday, Agnese. We love you! We are so grateful to God for you.⭐

COVID and Society: As 2020 Ends, Cracks Widen in the Ground

Looking back from this late-December vantage point at the wreckage of the past year, I am much troubled and filled with sorrow. Many of my "troubles" are personal and/or pathological (indeed, I have been suffering from a strong bout of depression for the past month), so I generally avoid trying to draw corollaries between my "moods" and the specific problems of our times. I do have some broad observations drawn from the obviously increasing degenerative condition of our technologically hyper-developed society, with its misshapen and haphazardly scattered engines of material power that we grasp more desperately even as our ignorance (our lack of wisdom) grows greater.
Some things are simply puzzling. Certainly, the answer to the larger question "Where do we go from here?" is something we will probably only learn as we stumble through it (and even then only if we're paying attention). But there are plenty of particular puzzles too, in this year when the strangeness of life has inescapably confronted even our ordinary routines.
The resurgence of COVID in these recent weeks and months has hardly been a surprise to anyone. (Did we really even get a “break” since March?) Serious illness continues to burden victims and hospitals everywhere. Meanwhile there seem to be more people in our local region coming down with “mild cases” identified by positive tests or by some of the more peculiar symptoms of the virus. Now, several different versions of the COVID vaccine are beginning to be administered, according to where the need is greatest.
As Christmas approaches and the year nears its end, we are still wondering how this whole global phenomenon will play itself out. In the U.S.A., the situation remains "complicated." Infections are still on the rise of a disease that, for a great many if not most people, manifests itself as a flu-like illness that resolves itself in a couple of weeks, along with some odd, lingering effects like temporary loss of taste and smell.

In the proximate environment in which I live, COVID doesn’t seem to strike people as anything unusually or horribly dangerous, and they and their immediate circle of relatives and friends seem to weather it pretty well.

Thank God for that.

In any given locality, COVID does not look like that big of a problem... UNTIL IT IS!!! Add to your “immediate circle” just one person who is susceptible to grave infection and he or she can become life-threateningly sick. And while age and predisposing conditions have been identified as more likely to bring on the more dangerous forms of COVID, it has also landed serious and even fatal hits on young and otherwise healthy people.

Recommended precautions by public health authorities require some measure of sacrifice, but people are increasingly worn out by all these months of vigilance. Frequently they are not careful, which is like playing Russian roulette with the disease. Just because many people “dodge the bullet” doesn’t mean they are behaving in a responsible way.

Overall, I hope that what I have seen in my own country during this past year is not an example of how we plan to respond habitually to future national emergencies. 
Those in the hospital, along with medical personnel and healthcare workers, have a vivid sense of what is (and will continue to be) at stake in grappling with an unprecedented public health crisis. And it is a crisis, if for no other reason than the fact that we are dealing with the sudden appearance of a new, globally transmitted disease that health experts are still trying to understand. It's the kind of phenomenon where civil action needs to be taken: people who have responsibility for the common good must exercise their authority. We immediately think of legislators and public officials, but a healthy society also has established social institutions that need to serve as reference points in a time when unified action is needed.
Our community has commonly accepted processes whereby experts in medical science are verified, and there are associations that oversee the quality of their work. It's a deeply flawed process, and may well not always produce an "academy" of ideal competence, but in a time of emergency their established social position must be given a measure of credit. Unless they recommend that we do evil in order to obtain a good result, it is entirely reasonable to accept and implement their "guidelines" (individual circumstances allow for prudence and flexibility here, but the common good needs to remain in focus for everyone). 
For many ordinary U.S. citizens during this pandemic, however, maximizing certain recommended practices of self-restraint and minimizing the risk of spreading infection have not been perceived very clearly as civic responsibilities. Instead, there has been a tendency for both “sides” of this nation’s chronically over-politicized and acutely dysfunctional civic culture to interpret adherence to health precautions as a partisan action, a demonstration of allegiance to or rebellion against "government intervention." It has often seemed, too, that public officials have been too ready to hijack the story of the pandemic (from different angles) in support of their own demagoguery.

All of this is very disturbing for someone like me, who experiences his own health as a particular area of vulnerability. I don't mean this in the sense of a personal fear of contracting the disease in a serious and dangerous form. I wouldn't want that to happen, of course, but the "vulnerability" I'm referring to here is broader in scope. To use an analogy, a person who has difficulty walking is more aware of their dependence on the solidity of the ground under their feet. They are more vulnerable to earthquakes. In battles, they are more likely to be "collateral damage."

So many things are troubling, beyond the impact of the COVID pandemic itself and the socioeconomic problems it has occasioned. The U.S.A.’s popular pandemic response has been too much burdened by a dialectic of hypocritical moralism versus individualistic revolt. In my opinion, the capricious and sometimes chaotic behavior of national political leadership has exacerbated the problem, as have those elements in the press and media that have engaged in relentless provocation and their own political grandstanding or pursuit of settling scores.

The U.S.A. has had difficulty in dealing with the pandemic as a unified civil society. What does this indicate? Certainly it would be easy enough to say that we are beginning to "reap the whirlwind," that we are on the threshold of seeing the cracks in our social order widen to the point where they themselves will begin to rupture the most mundane elements of our daily routines.
Ever since I can remember (over 50 years), ominous voices in our society have declared that we are falling apart, that chaos is just around the corner. It has often looked that way before. And yet much has endured, and new worthwhile possibilities have been realized. Even in this darkness, a wonder persists, and grows, and deepens — something greater is being engendered, something with a hidden but inexhaustible solidity.
No matter what, I am grateful for my life. If my perspective is dim at the moment, that doesn't mean I have forgotten what makes it worthwhile to get up every day, and set about living life with the expectation that truth and goodness will always make a way forward, even when the earth shakes and its noise drives people to folly, and everywhere they sharpen the weapons of war.
There are other forces at work in history, beyond our violence and stupidity.

December 2020: The Cracks Widen in the Ground

Looking back from this late-December vantage point at the wreckage of the past year, I am much troubled and filled with sorrow. Many of my "troubles" are personal and/or pathological (indeed, I have been suffering from a strong bout of depression for the past month), so I generally avoid trying to draw corollaries between my "moods" and the specific problems of our times. I do have some broad observations drawn from the obviously increasing degenerative condition of our technologically hyper-developed society, with its misshapen and haphazardly scattered engines of material power that we grasp more desperately even as our ignorance (our lack of wisdom) grows greater.
Some things are simply puzzling. Certainly, the answer to the larger question "Where do we go from here?" is something we will probably only learn as we stumble through it (and even then only if we're paying attention). But there are plenty of particular puzzles too, in this year when the strangeness of life has inescapably confronted even our ordinary routines.
The resurgence of COVID in these recent weeks and months has hardly been a surprise to anyone. (Did we really even get a “break” since March?) Serious illness continues to burden victims and hospitals everywhere. Meanwhile there seem to be more people in our local region coming down with “mild cases” identified by positive tests or by some of the more peculiar symptoms of the virus. Now, several different versions of the COVID vaccine are beginning to be administered, according to where the need is greatest.
As Christmas approaches and the year nears its end, we are still wondering how this whole global phenomenon will play itself out. In the U.S.A., the situation remains "complicated." Infections are still on the rise of a disease that, for a great many if not most people, manifests itself as a flu-like illness that resolves itself in a couple of weeks, along with some odd, lingering effects like temporary loss of taste and smell.

In the proximate environment in which I live, COVID doesn’t seem to strike people as anything unusually or horribly dangerous, and they and their immediate circle of relatives and friends seem to weather it pretty well.

Thank God for that.

In any given locality, COVID does not look like that big of a problem... UNTIL IT IS!!! Add to your “immediate circle” just one person who is susceptible to grave infection and he or she can become life-threateningly sick. And while age and predisposing conditions have been identified as more likely to bring on the more dangerous forms of COVID, it has also landed serious and even fatal hits on young and otherwise healthy people.

Recommended precautions by public health authorities require some measure of sacrifice, but people are increasingly worn out by all these months of vigilance. Frequently they are not careful, which is like playing Russian roulette with the disease. Just because many people “dodge the bullet” doesn’t mean they are behaving in a responsible way.

Overall, I hope that what I have seen in my own country during this past year is not an example of how we plan to respond habitually to future national emergencies. 
Those in the hospital, along with medical personnel and healthcare workers, have a vivid sense of what is (and will continue to be) at stake in grappling with an unprecedented public health crisis. And it is a crisis, if for no other reason than the fact that we are dealing with the sudden appearance of a new, globally transmitted disease that health experts are still trying to understand. It's the kind of phenomenon where civil action needs to be taken: people who have responsibility for the common good must exercise their authority. We immediately think of legislators and public officials, but a healthy society also has established social institutions that need to serve as reference points in a time when unified action is needed.
Our community has commonly accepted processes whereby experts in medical science are verified, and there are associations that oversee the quality of their work. It's a deeply flawed process, and may well not always produce an "academy" of ideal competence, but in a time of emergency their established social position must be given a measure of credit. Unless they recommend that we do evil in order to obtain a good result, it is entirely reasonable to accept and implement their "guidelines" (individual circumstances allow for prudence and flexibility here, but the common good needs to remain in focus for everyone). 
For many ordinary U.S. citizens during this pandemic, however, maximizing certain recommended practices of self-restraint and minimizing the risk of spreading infection have not been perceived very clearly as civic responsibilities. Instead, there has been a tendency for both “sides” of this nation’s chronically over-politicized and acutely dysfunctional civic culture to interpret adherence to health precautions as a partisan action, a demonstration of allegiance to or rebellion against "government intervention." It has often seemed, too, that public officials have been too ready to hijack the story of the pandemic (from different angles) in support of their own demagoguery.

All of this is very disturbing for someone like me, who experiences his own health as a particular area of vulnerability. I don't mean this in the sense of a personal fear of contracting the disease in a serious and dangerous form. I wouldn't want that to happen, of course, but the "vulnerability" I'm referring to here is broader in scope. To use an analogy, a person who has difficulty walking is more aware of their dependence on the solidity of the ground under their feet. They are more vulnerable to earthquakes. In battles, they are more likely to be "collateral damage."

So many things are troubling, beyond the impact of the COVID pandemic itself and the socioeconomic problems it has occasioned. The U.S.A.’s popular pandemic response has been too much burdened by a dialectic of hypocritical moralism versus individualistic revolt. In my opinion, the capricious and sometimes chaotic behavior of national political leadership has exacerbated the problem, as have those elements in the press and media that have engaged in relentless provocation and their own political grandstanding or pursuit of settling scores.

The U.S.A. has had difficulty in dealing with the pandemic as a unified civil society. What does this indicate? Certainly it would be easy enough to say that we are beginning to "reap the whirlwind," that we are on the threshold of seeing the cracks in our social order widen to the point where they themselves will begin to rupture the most mundane elements of our daily routines.
Ever since I can remember (over 50 years), ominous voices in our society have declared that we are falling apart, that chaos is just around the corner. It has often looked that way before. And yet much has endured, and new worthwhile possibilities have been realized. Even in this darkness, a wonder persists, and grows, and deepens — something greater is being engendered, something with a hidden but inexhaustible solidity.
No matter what, I am grateful for my life. If my perspective is dim at the moment, that doesn't mean I have forgotten what makes it worthwhile to get up every day, and set about living life with the expectation that truth and goodness will always make a way forward, even when the earth shakes and its noise drives people to folly, and everywhere they sharpen the weapons of war.
There are other forces at work in history, beyond our violence and stupidity.

Just "One Cup"...

Now THIS is what I call a "CUP" of coffee!

A “Purified Experience” of Christmas

“I would like to invite everyone to ‘quicken their step’ toward Christmas - the real one, the birth of Jesus Christ. This year we are constrained by restrictions and discomfort. But let us consider the Christmas of the Virgin Mary and Saint Joseph: it wasn’t all roses and flowers! They faced many difficulties! So many worries! Yet faith, hope, and love guided and sustained them. May it be so for us as well! These difficulties may even help us to purify somewhat our way of experiencing Christmas, of celebrating by getting away from consumerism. May it be more religious, authentic, and true” (Pope Francis - December 16).