John Janaro's Blog, page 160

Christina Grimmie, Always Grateful...

She was always grateful.

The Mystery Comes Close to Our Flesh and Bones

"The Absolute, the Mystery, is Father.... This truth that Christ has revealed does not diminish the Absolute. Rather, it deepens our knowledge of the mystery: Our Father who art at the depths, who art in heaven, Our Father who art in my profound roots, Thou who art now making me in this instant, who generate my path and guide me to my destiny! You can no longer retract after hearing these words of God. You can no longer go back. But, at the same time, the mystery remains, remains more profound: God is father, but he is father like no other is father. The revealed term carries the mystery further within you, closer to your flesh and bones, and you really feel it in a familiar way, as a son or daughter. There is no one who respects the sense of truth and is as devoted to his father as when the father is an intimate companion" (Luigi Giussani).

Winter Scenes

We've had warm days and cold days, sunny days and snow days, and some brilliant sunsets already in the first six weeks of 2019.

Digital Scriptorum: Secrets Revealed!

Actually, it's more like "a few hints" ... or, rather, a look at the rabbit holes of digital doodling I go down when I'm stretching the right side of my brain. Indeed, this is more like a record for my own reference in the future, since I don't expect that many folks will actually read it.

But you're welcome to read, skim, browse, whatever. This is my workshop, and sometimes more, but in any case I'm happy to keep an "open door."

Yesterday, I posted a setting for some verses from Psalm 17 on my Instagram and such. It wasn't particularly interesting or bold. But such posts often come from within a peculiar experimental process using the very limited tools I have available to me on a Samsung tablet.

It begins with a text and a basic background on a sketch page, some basic fonts, a few lines....

The exercise is one of technological doodling, in which an OCD brain is taken out for "psychological walk" like an excitable puppy on a very long leash. I also learn about continually developing possibilities in digital graphics (cheap ones, anyway). It's not the most efficient way to learn, but if you like even one design or photo art project that I have posted, it comes out of a process like this.

The mood is "chill." I'm listening to some music. I flip the colors and start brushing and smudging, using basic filters, and making a mess, like this:


This is not going anywhere special. (I will "ruminate" on the text a bit; that's one of the reasons why I like to work with Scriptural texts.) Then I take it for a spin through one of the "art applications" that mixes colors and blends in peculiar ways.

Things can start to go in a "psychedelic" direction:

It_looks like graffiti at this point. I feel like going off the text and into geometric patterns, so I paint over the verses with green and blue, and put it into an app that breaks things down to patterns and shapes.

I do want to create patterns that look interesting:


Circles. We always end up with circles. How do I get "out of the circle"? Alter the colors some more, and pull out and manipulate different shapes:


We're NOT going to keep changing colors and running these shapes through the "kaleidoscope" all day. Just a few times (e.g. first picture below). We can also smudge with the "water" simulator, crop, stretch, squeeze, and then "frame it" with a blurred background (second picture):



Okay, hmmm. Well, all this can be filed away; some things might get turned into text-breaking pictures for future ponderous blog posts.

What am I doing? Ah, the verses of the Psalm.

Back to basics. Put a steeple on the left (from a photo of St John's) and the text beside it:


That's nice, after I touch up the background a bit. If all I wanted to do was generate a "meme," I could have done this in a few minutes. But I want to experiment with some other shades and "settings" too:


That works okay. But too much white. This text is powerful and "fiery." Let's try heating things up:


Whoa! That could go somewhere, but I would need other tools (and probably the laptop) to get what I'm aiming for here. Not today.

I actually posted something colorful but not too colorful, just tinged with a rusty red ... "for precious is their blood in His sight" ... in any case a post provides some proximate goal and caps things off. It makes it possible to STOP this exercise, for now:


Enough of this. It's time to get back to my books.

A History of Witnesses from All The World

Paul Miki, baptized at the age of five, was one of the early fruits of Saint Francis Xavier's mid-16th century mission to Japan. He grew up to become the first Japanese to join the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) and he preached and witnessed to the Lord among his own people. Many Japanese became Christians, especially in the southern port city of Nagasaki and the regions surrounding it.

At first the Imperial government permitted the new community to grow, but the situation became complicated when other Europeans arrived who also called themselves Christians but who sought their own interests: material gain, cultural and territorial invasion, robbery, and rivalries fostered to gain their own political power.

As a result, the Japanese authorities turned against the foreigners and their "foreign god"--thus began the process of expelling Europeans and all their influence, with no distinction between what was evil and what was good. Paul Miki--a native of Japan, full of love, a servant of everyone, a threat to no one--was condemned to be a scapegoat (along with a few other European missionaries and a group of Japanese lay people, including children). They were tortured and crucified on February 6, 1597. As he was dying, Saint Paul Miki urged his countrymen and women to know and love Jesus, and he forgave his executioners.

The impact of this event was shattering but also profound. By the mid-17th century all priests has been driven out or killed, and many more Japanese faithful were martyred or ritually renounced Christianity. But for nearly 300 years, a group of lay people in the Nagasaki area remained faithful to Jesus. Without the priestly ministry, without the sacraments of the Eucharist or Penance (but certainly not without the desire for them), with only Baptism, the Bible, a catechism, and a liturgical calendar, they passed down the heritage of their faith in Jesus and lived the life of His Church as best as they could. When Japan reopened to the West in the 19th century, European Catholic priests were permitted in the country again to minister to other foreigners. The priests did not approach the native population. Nevertheless, to their astonishment, they were sought out by the seventh generation of this Nagasaki community that had kept the faith but also hungered for the fullness of ecclesial life.

There are so many tremendous stories--real stories about persons, communities, families, and generations all through history and all over the world--that are vivified by these otherwise very diverse peoples' conviction about and adherence to one man. Among all the billions of humans who have lived, why is this one man so unique, so compelling, that people love Him more than life, more than everything?

Recall that yesterday was the feast of third century martyr Saint Agatha of Catania. Today celebrates these Nagasaki Martyrs of 1597; twelve hundred years later, over ten thousand miles away, they were brutally tortured and murdered. Their "crime" was the same as Agatha's: they all loved the same man, and knew themselves to be loved by that man, in such a way that all the violence the powers of their societies could muster was not able to tear them away from that man.

Jesus.

Who ever heard of such a thing in all the history of the world?

But it's easy enough to ignore it, if we don't want to see it. There is no spectacle here. These are the stories of people, poor people, where encountered Jesus, who were changed, fulfilled, and transformed by Jesus. They were given a share in His love that saves the world: the love that forgives enemies, that endures all things, that bridges the abyss of death: the love that never fails.

The people who follow Jesus in the Church (bearing His promises with all their own weakness and failures and even betrayals) are the means through which He chooses to give Himself in this world, to "extend" His resurrected life and His unconquerable redeeming love to every place and time, through all of history. It is through these people that Jesus meets Agatha, the Japanese Christians, and countless poor and forgotten people in the streets of today.

Love communicates person to person. Love communicates new life to persons who share that life with other persons. The sacraments are the gestures through which Jesus guarantees the concreteness of the the foundation and continuity of the encounter with Him. But the living of this new life penetrates the whole story of each person and their relationships with others. This is what gives us the great story of God's People journeying to fulfillment in Him, the remarkable "history of the Church"--all the more amazing in the endurance and continual renewal of Jesus Christ's presence and the power of His love in these fragile vessels of people who follow Him (and in spite of the malice, violence, and manipulation of those who pretend to follow Him while actually betraying Him).

Jesus is here. He stays with us.

The history of these martyrs--these men and women in whom His love was fulfilled to the end--is our history. It is the heritage of all humanity, of every person. It has been entrusted to us in the Church so that we might share it with all the world.

That's what love does. It shares. It gives itself away. It generates life. It brings new life. We who have been so much loved... do we not long to be poured out and given to others so that this love will abound? We're hindered by many things, by our preoccupations, by fear. The field of our own lives seems small. Let us not think this means our love should be small.

These stories inspire us to trust in Jesus, to let His love be the measure, to begin to live a little more His love as a gift and witness to one another and the spaces of our world.

Brave Young Agatha of Sicily

For all the time that has passed, humans haven't changed very much. When men in positions of power want to abuse women, they have the means to cause them great suffering.

The traditional stories about the third century virgin martyr Saint Agatha of Catania emphasize the brutality of the abuse visited upon her by lustful, dominating, and idolatrous men. But these men of blood did not understand her singular dedication, soul and body, to the true God and true Man, Jesus Christ.

Just as in the past, so also now and in the future, human violence and fury will pass away. The Love of the Lord will endure forever. 

Feast of the Presentation

Happy Feast Day: Forty Days after Christmas, Jesus comes to the temple and reveals Himself to those who awaited Him with great longing.
"Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother,'Behold, this child is destinedfor the fall and rise of many in Israel,and to be a sign that will be contradicted—and you yourself a sword will pierce—so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed'"(Luke 2:34-35).

Above, a traditional Byzantine icon. Below, details from Mosaic of the Presentation in the Temple, by Marko Rupnik. I LOVE his work!❤➕   .

Every Good Thing Will Be Fulfilled

Almighty, all good, all merciful God,
Our Father who loves us,
send your Holy Spirit into our hearts
with his creative and transforming love.
Come Holy Spirit,
work within me, and every person.
Come with your all-powerful gentleness
to touch,
to open up,
to heal and liberate
those deep, dark, unacknowledged spaces
in my heart,
and in the hearts of so many people,
where we are afraid of the Father's love,
afraid that we will lose ourselves
if we let God love us "too much."

Give us greater trust in you right here,
right in these places where we try to resist you
because we fear you will just overwhelm and annihilate us,
because we fear losing ourselves and finding nothing,
because we are terrified and don't know why,
because we are just anxious in the dark
and know not what we are doing or where we are going,
or because we are simply too attached to our own ideas about life:
our own measure,
our own narrow,
small,
"secure"
definition of who we are.

O Lord, you search for our hearts,
but we try to hide from you their most secret places
where we store away the lamentations and difficulties of believing:
all the incomprehensible losses of people we loved,
the begging of prayers that seemed swallowed
by a vast emptiness and never heard or returned,
and all the hard obscure perplexity of faith's winding path.

Here too we secretly keep our troubles
with the whole mess of our stunted human heritage
as children of Adam's dysfunctional family,
still sinning, struggling against stupid sin,
and the lingering impulses toward vanity, conceit, envy, lust;
the craving of easy satisfactions of mind and body;
the downward pull of comfortable negligence, and mediocrity
covered over in endless diversions and distractions.
We are Adam's kin down to the bone:
broken, burdened, limping, dull-minded,
weak, sick, hungry, off-balance, crazy -- even we,
who are members of your Son's body, washed,
initiated into new life,
and tasting the promise, in hope,
often thinly stretched weary hope
with so many burdens, so long the journey,
so slow the healing,
and the growing as your children,
through Jesus (a joy indeed, and a mystery,
for which we do not yet have eyes).

We don't even see these darkest spaces in our hearts.
We are afraid, Lord, to let you enter the places
where we are hidden from ourselves.
Here are hardened scars of deep wounds:
the lacerations of our own failures
and the stabs of betrayal by others,
the vestiges of resentment,
all the disappointments,
disappointments,
disappointments,
the few hollow successes,
the persons we loved who fell short,
somehow,
but only because they were weak, like us;
the sorrow over the fleeting years of life,
the long bittersweet ghosts of so many memories.

Then there is strange death, approaching,
no longer appearing to me like the remote end of past generations,
or the rare, odd, accidental tragedy of youth.
Death is on the threshold of my house of many years.
I am in the infancy of old age
when weary heartbeats can stop suddenly in a moment,
or beat and beat on 20, 30, 40 more years...

Lord, you alone know this mystery,
this disjointed and jarring ending of life
that is happening for some of us now,
for others soon,
for others later.
Death is entirely mundane and scarcely noticed in the world,
but supremely significant and utterly personal
for each one of us.
Lord, this event that will finally establish who I am, forever...
its coming seems like a rolling of the dice!
Perhaps I shall die before I finish typing this sentence.
...Only now can I be sure that I'm still breathing.
Perhaps I shall die tonight, tomorrow, next month.
Perhaps years of new, great, and arduous work are still ahead of me,
or a terminal illness to break my nerves,
or a slow decline, new unremarkable infirmities,
quiet suffering, powerlessness, humiliation.
One way or another, however, I will have to face the end.
I will die.

Dear God, my poor faith tells me that I am in your loving hands,
that your mercy shapes (especially) this last moment for me,
with infinite wisdom and utterly personal love.
Still, death is strange. I don't know what it is like,
when it will happen,
what trials it will require me to endure,
what temptations might rise up in that unparalleled last second
(Lord grant me perseverance to the end!)
or what period of purgation,
what intensity of ultimate refining fire I must pass through
to reach you, my Father,
when you come rushing forth lovingly to meet me.
I host fast to you, God, in firm hope,
I entrust everything to your goodness and mercy.
I pray for the grace of a good death, through your Son Jesus.

And God forgive me, your foolish child,
but I still love this life.
I love it too much.
I cling to it anxiously even now
because I am a weak and sinful man (Jesus, save me!),
but also because there is so much good here,
even though it's always changing and passing away.
There is so much that remains to be accomplished.
My wife by my side to love and cherish,
children still to raise and help,
then later to encourage and counsel,
and make a special grand-place in our hearts
for the new generation (Lord, grant us this gift).
There are my tenderly beloved, utterly frail father and mother
to care for and comfort and suffer with,
and my brother, our kids' terrific uncle,
lifelong comrade and friend,
the only person who really knows how to tell me
when I'm being stupid.
There are the seasons, the trees, the wonder of a green leaf,
sunrise and sunset, magnificent stars, rivers and creeks
and ancient hills.
Good food, and wine,
friends and conversation;
friendship, indeed, that grows deeper with the years.
Then there are these talents of my soul: there is
music
music
music
and images, patterns and shapes and colors
to craft together in so many ways,
and words to build poems,
poems.
There is this mind, my searching mind,
finally beginning to see pieces of wisdom,
beginning to see what is worth passing on, worth teaching...
"Be a teacher!
Be a teacher!
You will be a great teacher!" (L.G.)

Yet none of this guarantees a single hour more of this life,
and I know that in whatever comes there will also be mixed
more disappointment and pain,
more failures together with the good.
O God, I know that in you (and only in you) every good thing
will be fulfilled,
that nothing will be lost,
that these good seeds sown in life will bear fruit.
But have pity on me, Lord,
for seeds are all that my eyes know.
I trust in you, and I hope to live forever in this fruition.
Please sustain me, O God, in my weakness
and work according to your wisdom and mercy
to open the depths in my heart where I still worry,
where there is still fear, irrational, foolish fear,
as if you who are Goodness and Love itself
could oppose all the good and loving realities of my poor little life.
God, you are always good.
Take my whole heart,
take my fears,
and take my sins away.
Never let me run after anything in this world in such a way
that I would crave attachment to it rather than you.
Never let me be separated from you.
Have mercy on me now and at the hour of my death.

Come Holy Spirit,
come with your goodness and love
to the deep dark places of my heart,
where I hide from you with my sins and my wounds,
my lack of trust in you, my disappointments,
my fear of death.
Come Holy Spirit to these places
to heal and transform me,
to make me new and whole.

Jesus, you are the One who truly knows the mystery of "me."
I have been created through you and for you,
the Word,
the Only Son of the Father through whom all things were made.
Jesus, Lord and God, you give me my very existence in this moment.
You love me more than I love myself.
You have taken hold of my life.
Never let me be separated from you.
I don't know myself,
but you know me.
On the cross you understood me.
You suffered the whole depth and measure of me.
You knew my sins and sacrificed yourself for them
and for all the sins of the world.
You knew and you embraced my terrifying fragility, my weakness, my fear.
You know the road of conversion and freedom for me.
You are that road.
You have died on the cross that is me,
and you are rising in me in a love that heals and transforms,
a love that wants with infinite ardor to bring my life
to fulfillment and fruition,
to make me the person you have always willed me to be.

What else matters? I can only be grateful,
and allow gratitude to spring up in me,
gratitude for everything:
beyond all that I do not understand,
all that troubles me in the present moment,
gratitude.

Lord Jesus, have mercy on me, a sinner.
Make of my heart all gratitude and love for you forever.
Jesus I trust in you.

Christina Grimmie Passes Four Million YouTube Subscribers

POSTED EARLIER TODAY: 
Dear friends, the late Christina Grimmie's original YouTube channel needs only 124 more subscribers to reach 4,000,000.❗.

Go to her channel and SUBSCRIBE. 

It doesn't cost anything, ever. It's a chance to be part of history, and to support one of the truly bright lights in the crazy world of YouTube. 

SUBSCRIBE!

Why is It So Hard to Just "Be Together"?

There is a great and very necessary mode of loving in which people discover the value of just be-ing together.

Too often we think the only reason to actually be with others is to accomplish a common work. We get together in order to do things, and then we go back to being (more-or-less) solitary individuals.

We feel awkward and inadequate just "being around" a person if we don't see any way of being useful to them. This feeling is especially acute when we find ourselves with people who have problems or are suffering. What can we do for them? This question might raise intense, complex, even frightening emotions.

Of course, many of us have some sense of "just being together" through the fullness we experience in the company of a spouse, family members, and very intimate friends. When we are with these persons, things we do together and ways we help one another are "built-in" to the dynamic of being together. In a healthy companionship many interactions become almost "natural"—which doesn't mean mechanical and meaningless but quite the opposite: it means the habitual realization of freedom in integrally human gestures of self-giving full of personal vitality.

Suffering, however, raises a distinctive kind of challenge even for these relationships. When someone we love endures a great and debilitating suffering, we may find ourselves running out of ideas for how to "help" them. We suddenly feel incompetent, and might think we are "letting down" our friend or loved one. This is most difficult when we really can't do anything (or anything more) to resolve their problem or help them.

Here we need to see the value of "just be-ing together." We can remain with them, and recognize that our sense of being powerless is linked to their own utter vulnerability in suffering. The bond of love and friendship that unites us means that their pain is going to affect us. Just by staying with them, we can live the very precious gift of friendship, and affirm its reality. A true friend can "share" and accompany the pain and struggles, anxiety and suffering of their friend by an empathy that draws on the bond of the relationship itself.

This can mean just being with a friend even when there is no immediate thing we can do or say, because there is no "solution" and there are no words for what is happening. Still, we can be together, we can be with them, we can be present in solidarity and love.

This is more difficult than we might think. We have a kind of natural inclination to distance ourselves from another person who is suffering, especially when we feel like we can't fix their problem, ultimately because it forces us to face the deeper levels of our own radical "helplessness," the fundamental limits of our resources as finite persons. That's very hard, because we tend toward wanting to possess and control the circumstances of reality (even in relationships). Deep down, we live with the assumption that we are self-sufficient.

This is what makes us tend toward a hyperprotectiveness of the total environment of ourselves and those we care about. We want to build a fortress out of life so we can be safe. Why?

Because we are afraid.

The more we are fixated on "keeping our lives," i.e. measuring their meaning according to our own limited measure, the greater our fear.

Too often in our society today, people know only their own measure. They don't want to see their limits, beyond which their interpretation of reality loses coherence, and (so it seems) all meaning and value slip away. People distance themselves from anything or anyone that interrupts their distracted preoccupation with the apparently controllable aspects of reality and makes them face those radical limits.

People are very afraid.

And it is terrifying to be helpless and alone and losing something (or someone) into the void of an ultimately meaningless universe that is not held in the hands of Infinite Love. People are secretly afraid that life has no permanent meaning, that love doesn't win in the end, that everything is swallowed up by nothingness.

Those of us who believe in Jesus and worship God also feel this fear and sense of helplessness, because ultimately we walk by faith in the One who is true, good, and beautiful, but who is also the Infinite Mystery. Faith does not "resolve" the mystery of God or of reality; it brings it close to us and gives us a path and a reason to hope even in the valley of the shadow of death.

The Mystery has entered our history and made the path for us. Jesus didn't say He had come to explain the often difficult ways and obscure challenges of our lives. He said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." He says, "follow me" not to form an exclusive club, but (among other things) to draw us more intensely into the experience of being human, all the way to the Cross.

So even in faith we feel this great fragility of being human, this sense of "helplessness"—but we learn that it is rooted in our need to live in dependence on something greater than ourselves (on the One who lovingly holds our destiny and accompanies us and every human being). Even in the anguish of our lives and the intense feeling of fear and loss, He is opening a path for us and a "space" inside us so He can lead us and shape for us a good and beautiful fulfillment that we cannot yet "understand."

We live in the world with a HOPE for a transcendent fulfillment in which everything that is real and good is transformed, and therefore "nothing is lost." Often we can't see what this means for our concrete aspirations, circumstances, and relationships, or why there is still so much experience of frustration and loss (so much of the incomprehensible element of "sacrifice" that we don't grasp even when we know it's necessary).

We don't see the whole meaning of it; indeed, we see very little in the obscurity of faith. But Jesus sees. He has endured it all and He is risen. He lives (indeed He is) the fullness of being human and He stays with us... even in the unbearable silence of our incapacity to fathom our own weakness.

Jesus knows that we will forget and fail, become afraid and run away, just like the disciples in the Gospels. He will seek us and find us, like the Good Shepherd that He is, and approach us with His open heart full of forgiveness and renewal.

But how beautiful it is to remember Him, and find courage in Him to love and be a companion to another human person, to be with that person with their inexpressible pain.

Life is an immense, beautiful, mysterious gift. We must do our best to be good stewards of the wonders entrusted to us, to act prudently and responsibly to improve our own lives, our families, our communities. We must recognize and build up the good.

But we are not the source of goodness and meaning. We do not control reality. We are not masters, but servants.

We don't need the power to build the world to our own measure, to grasp what we determine to be good for us and flee from (or make war against) what we think threatens our self-asserted power. God alone is good. What we do need is the experience of being loved by Him.

Jesus has come to give us God's love.

And when we know we are loved by Him, we become instruments through which He can bring the experience of being loved to others.

The giving and receiving of love through helping one another is especially needed in these tumultuous times. We need to offer a true attentive love for the particular person, the way we know God loves us. There is much of just "being-with" others in this love, unabtrusive accompanying, listening, being present—with the remembrance of God's love and our destiny of being transformed in Him, Jesus.

For this we must pray a lot, from the heart, worship, love Him, bring everything to Him. From prayer, we can shape all of life into prayer, into loving Jesus. And we need the Church and the sacraments (the concrete "moments" in which the Lord breaks in, even physically, to touch the history of our lives). We need to insert our lives within the time of the Church and walk the incarnate path of ecclesial life, patiently, because learning to love takes time.

We forget Jesus. I forget Him 99.9 percent of the day. But in the Church we are reminded, and we can open our hearts and allow His grace to transforms us, in His time and according to His goodness and love.