John Janaro's Blog, page 173

"Rose Study 6"

The "Roberto Clemente Doodle" Brings Back Memories

Roberto Clemente, "El Magnifico," was honored on today's Google Doodle for Hispanic Heritage Month.
I saw him play live a couple of times when I was a boy in Pittsburgh, and followed him day by day on the radio, in the papers, on televised games. He was a splendid player, and it was impossible not to feel his larger-than-life personality.
It was New Years Day 1973 when we heard the news of Roberto Clemente's death on my Dad's radio. One of baseball's best players was personally supervising relief efforts to Nicaraguan earthquake victims because—since he was so admired and loved in the Caribbean—Roberto knew that he (and perhaps only he) could hold back corrupt Nicaraguan government and military agents' greed and guarantee the delivery of emergency supplies to the people.
However, the overloaded and poorly-maintenanced plane that he was accompanying crashed over the Atlantic ocean.
It was so sad and tragic, but also deeply moving and so much like him to give his life for others.
Not bad for a ten year old boy growing up with a man like Roberto Clemente for a hero. None of us where who were kids in Pittsburgh in those days will ever forget him.
He was indeed "The Great One."

Christina Grimmie: "Keep Moving Forward!"

"Team Grimmie, you guys Rawk!"


On_September 18, 2014, Christina Grimmie made a video on her YouTube channel answering questions from frands submitted through Facebook and Twitter.

She was in the midst of a huge period in her career, and there weren't as many "Grimmie Thursday" cover videos as before. But she didn't distance herself from Team Grimmie; on the contrary, even as her circle of frands grew larger, Christina found new ways to use social media to share herself as an artist and a person.

On this video, what we encounter is four minutes of "Christina being Christina" (even though there is some editing). Fame and recognition from her magnificent run on Season 6 of The Voice did not go to her head. She remained her inimitable self, encouraging, kind, ever-wise, full of common sense, goofy, and hilarious (and so she continued to the very end).

Watch the whole video now if you wish. It's not particularly "extraordinary" in comparison to her other videos. I just happened to watch it recently.

It's Christina. "Must Be Love" gets a plug near the end (not one of my favorites of hers --the one and only song she released with Island Records) but she pops in again after that.

There are some special things here: she gets a request to sing "anything" and so she sings... impromptu, no gadgets, no singing mike... and it just shows again, however briefly, that the beauty, versatility, pitch, and tone of her voice are all totally her own. It's a fact that I never get tired of being amazed by.

And it's a video "from home," no frills.


People who don't know Christina might just think, "Oh, she's just promoting her new single." Of course, promoting makes sense (even though most folks watching this video were already going to buy it). But that's not the main point.

Actually, do you know what I love especially about this video?

The garbage can.

There it is, behind her shoulder, jutting half way out, just sitting there. Just like it would be "in real life." Because this was a piece of "real life." It's a sign of openness, I think. She didn't worry about "the set." She just opened up her own environment and shared it.

Christina's videos are endearing because of the "stuff in the background," which is just her stuff, pieces of her life. Starting from 2009 with "Sonic the Hedgehog." Sometimes on the livestream, she would eat popcorn or some other snack. She came at you from right out of her own life.

While she did plenty of posting on short video venues (Vine, Snapchat, Instagram), YouTube and the livestreaming YouNow allowed her to "hang out" with people at greater length. The archives of these videos are more than precious relics of the past. She still communicates through them, just as she does with her music.

People read books by writers who lived hundreds of years ago, and they say, "This book had an impact on my life!" A communication from the past reaches a person and touches his or her life in the present.

I believe that Christina's videos also communicate in this way. It's not just the spectacular singing. It's the simple, humble, ordinary things: her way of carrying herself, her joy, her almost "authoritative" confidence when speaking about life or encouraging people, her genuineness, her sense of humor.

And this communication remains available to us. We can still learn new things from her about being human. Indeed, she has much to teach us.

I do lots of research on communications media and their impact on the psychological environment of human persons. I watch lots of videos and other media posts, and it's common to find them generating a stressful, superficial, cynical, rude, and bullying environment of negativity.

Even with a researcher's "distance," I can get worn down by these kinds of media presentations. When I need to just "clear my mind" a bit, find some human space, some "mental fresh air," I go watch some Christina Grimmie videos. She always comes through. She is a real human being, giving herself and her art.

She is loving. It's an environment of love and encouragement that she generates.

And I believe that her real, individual person lives, now -- taken up into the mystery of God, yes...the God who is Infinite Mystery, and also the God who has revealed Himself as Infinite Goodness and Love. We might dare to think that she is aware of us now (in God, without limitations), that she cares, that these gestures of love "from the past" are still given, even renewed, by her, so that we can know the touch of God's love, and continue to move forward enriched by the gift of her life and of the person she is, now, loving us from God's heart.

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I conclude with this little piece of Grimmie's common sense wisdom. Thanks, Christina!

The Abundance of God's Love is Greater than Our Sins

I am a sinner.

I do not say this as a cliché, but as a simple statement of fact.

I am also a Catholic Christian. I have been baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, renewed by the Holy Spirit, and made a new person in Christ, a child of God, an heir to eternal life. I have been restored by Christ through the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation for those times when I rebelled against my loving Father and went my own way, only to see my proud illusory schemes dissolve into disappointment and misery.

I have learned that by trying to ignore God's creating and redeeming love and his radical outpouring of himself, his giving of himself for me, I do violence to the very foundation of my own person. Adhering to him is the only way I can be true to myself.

I don't trust my own ideas or my own power. I trust in Jesus Christ.

Still, I am a sinner.

There are those sins the Catholic tradition calls "venial sins" which hinder and perhaps even cripple but do not break off our relationship with God.

My daily life is full of these "slight" sins: the facade that I think of as "myself" is largely a construction of vanity, of "benevolent" intrigue, fibbery, excessive love of comfort, the desire to please people, laziness, coldness, negligence and evasion, sharp-edged words, impatience, complaining, sentimentalism, distraction, and--of course--that ill-governed curiosity about events and people into which rash judgment and gossip inevitably creep, wearing a thousand conceptual disguises.

Anticipating Autumn

The Fall season has already begun, but you wouldn't know it from the temperature during the day or the green leaves on the trees.
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The arc of the sun is shorter and is leaning toward the south. The skies are often brilliant at the day's end:
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I have resorted to digital graphics to initiate the Autumn mood with this impressionistic play of light and color. I call it Anticipating Autumn:
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Bishop Guido of Assisi: Mentor and Friend to Saint Francis

Giotto (14th c.) "Francis Gives Up His Possessions" (detail).Happy Feast of Saint Francis of Assisi! So much can be said about the whole life of this singular man, so radical in his witness to Christ and at the same time so deeply human that it is hard for anyone not to love him.

I find it helpful to relate certain details about his conversion and vocation experience that are not so well known. Indeed, my column Great Conversion Stories in Magnificat magazine's May 2015 issue does just that.

Therefore, I will represent that article below. The type is from the original manuscript, from the final draft which is the same as the text published three and a half years ago:

The outlines of St. Francis’s conversion from a rich young man and would-be knight to a great saint are well known. We recall his lavish and frivolous youth, his military misadventures, and his return to Assisi in 1205 after imprisonment, illness, and a mysterious experience that drew him to a greater service.

In these days, at the dawn of one of the greatest vocations in all history, God’s grace worked powerfully but mysteriously to lead the searching young Francis to the awakening of religious devotion. Francis went on a pilgrimage to Rome, and then returned not to his former life of comfort and pleasure, but to a time of solitude in the forests and the mountains outside the city, which led him in the end to the chapel and the now famous cross of San Damiano, where he heard the words of Jesus, to “rebuild My church.”

Christian and non-Christian interpretations of St. Francis often depict him as a man who left worldly life and its distractions so as to commune in a kind of isolation with God (or “nature”). Historians sometimes portray Francis as a spiritual maverick who transcended all institutions including the Church and her human ministers. But the life of St. Francis was not like the wandering of medieval heretical sectarians or today’s uncommitted spiritualists.

Rather, St. Francis was always entirely attached to the Catholic faith and obedience to the Church. In the year 1205, when Francis returned from Rome searching for God’s will, he found a person, a friend, who remained a crucial figure in the development of his vocation, a figure whose significance is seldom given its due weight: the bishop of Assisi. Bishop Guido is known to history as the man who covered the naked Francis with his episcopal cloak after the young man publicly renounced his inheritance and all his property by returning even his clothes to his outraged father. But Francis and the bishop already knew one another by that time.

It was Bishop Guido who probably first advised Francis to seek solitude, not to wander but to pray, following the tradition of the desert fathers. After Francis heard Jesus in a vision from the cross of San Damiano, he probably met again with the bishop. By the time his father came with his lawsuit, Francis appealed to the Church’s protection and the bishop’s judgment. Guido knew well already the young man who shocked so many others by embracing total poverty, and who would later draw them to follow his sanctity.

Some accounts say that Francis, after giving back his clothes to his father, said that henceforth he would call only God his Father. But Francis also knew that God had become man, and that God’s fatherhood would draw close to him through the Church, concretely, through Bishop Guido. The bishop became Francis’s “spiritual father,” advisor, and sponsor as he embraced poverty and gathered his first followers. Guido did not try to manipulate Francis. He supported him as the grace of this new way of life unfolded. He was the ecclesiastical authority, but also a true friend. And it was bishop Guido, in Rome, who first sponsored the ragtag “lesser brothers” to a cardinal of the papal court, where Innocent III met the man sent by God “to rebuild My Church.”

"Where is God?" Love and the Obscurity of Faith

The obscurity of faith is a special challenge for Christians.

This can really "hit home" in our lives when our trust in God is "stretched" (even to depths beyond the reach of natural psychology) by the experience of great trials.

Where is God in the awful grief of losing a loved one, the pain and humiliation of illness, the frustration of worthy goals? Where is God in all the failures of our lives (and we fail so much more often than we succeed), when we try to do good and are thwarted by obstacles beyond our capacity to overcome?

Sometimes in our lives, in our journey toward God, He seems to "disappear." We seek Him in prayer and there is only silence. We beg for His help, but we continue to be crushed and crushed and overwhelmingly crushed. "Where are you, my God?"

In these times, a faith that hopes in God and loves God even through all this terrible, painful obscurity--that holds on to God alone and trusts in Him--enables us to go forward.

Even when circumstances are shrouded in darkness, we believe that Jesus is the Savior of the world. This affirmation is concrete and personal to a vital Christian faith. The Lord leads us in the darkest of dark valleys; He leads us and accompanies us even (and especially) when we feel lost and alone.

The life of faith brings consolation, certainly, because God enters into a relationship with us. He is our loving Father, and all of reality abounds in signs, which are really gestures of His steadfast love and tenderness for each one of us. But the fullness of His love is the giving of His only Son to die for us so that we might rise to eternal life in Him.

Our faith strengthens us especially when we endure suffering, as we look to Christ crucified and suffer in union with Him. Suffering (in ourselves and also "with others"--com-passion) is an aspect of the personal path that each of us is called to walk with Jesus.

He is our light in the darkness. He transforms suffering into love--into His love, and He invites us to share in this love, the inscrutable inexhaustible suffering love from the Cross that saves the world.

By enduring the Cross with Him, we become more like Him. We grow in the likeness of the God who is Absolute, Infinite Love.

Thérèse: Working For His Glory

Thérėse: smallest and therefore greatest of the girls on "God's Girl Squad." She saw the one simple thing, without which nothing else makes sense, and even a self-contained "happiness" is ultimately an imposition and a constraint.
The one simple thing is love. This is what we have been made for: to go beyond ourselves in love. And God is Infinite Love.
She didn't want to suffer just for the sake of suffering. Rather, she experienced suffering as transformed by the love of God in Jesus Christ that triumphs over sin, that becomes the mysterious sign of God's own unreserved gift of Himself. Above all, here is God's revelation and communication of His own "inner life." God is, in His Trinitarian mystery, Absolute unreserved self-giving Love.

"It is a long time since suffering became my paradise on earth, and I find it hard to understand how I shall become acclimated in a land where joy reigns supreme and alone. Jesus must entirely change this soul of mine, otherwise it could not endure eternal bliss. All I desire is God's holy will, and if in Heaven I could no longer work for His glory, I should prefer exile to home" (Saint Thérèse of Lisieux).

Real Superheroes

Let's call on some REAL Superheroes:
Michael, Rafael, Gabriel, we need your help!

The image is from a Copic icon of St Michael the Archangel.

Avril Lavigne: "God Keep My Head Above Water"

Still shot from her new music video released on Thursday.Canadian pop-rocker Avril Lavigne shot to stardom in the first decade of the 21st century, becoming a familiar voice in the lives of late millennials all over the world. In 11 years, she recorded five studio albums with numerous hit songs. She toured relentlessly and became a mainstay of popular culture.

Then, in 2014, she disappeared. Toward the end of the year, she tweeted to her fans that she was ill. Nothing more was known until April 2015, when Avril Lavigne revealed in an interview that she was suffering from Lyme Disease.

I knew very little about Avril in 2015, except that she was a celebrity who had the same disease I had (indeed, all too many of us have it). I wanted to learn more about her story, so I read some interviews and watched some videos.

It didn't take long for me to realize that I knew this story only too well. The systemic pain and exhaustion, the collection of other peculiar symptoms, the incomprehension of doctors, finally finding the right doctor, getting the right diagnosis, going through an extensive treatment, becoming virtually an invalid, starting to improve, having good and bad days, and so on. And so on. ...

Poor kid.

Actually, she just turned 34. She's not a "kid" anymore. Especially considering how hard her past five years have been. Lyme Disease can make people feel "old before their time."

I also checked out her music and her career, and quickly realized that some of it was familiar even to me. My reaction to her catalog was "mixed," though it was clear that she was very different from (and more talented than) the slick combination of makeup, skimpy attire, and autotune that was (and still is) the sad template of the "entertainment industry" for a female pop star.

Indeed, Avril Lavigne became "iconic" (in the media sense of the term) for a different style. She took the "rebellious punk" vibe and reinvented it for the 21st Century. Recall her classic "look":



There was something real about her "in-your-face" presentation (even if it did spin out of control). It resonated with lots of young people who were formed within the confusion, the pressures, the manipulative expectations and unglamorous reality, the questions, impulses, and combustibility of ordinary adolescence in a time of massive technological expansion and confusing social change.

Avril's "alternative" image was ambivalent, and disturbing in its own way. Like many artists, she mirrored the troubles of the times and struggled with them herself. Nevertheless I'm beginning to think that (notwithstanding the gratuitous "f-bombs" she threw around in her lyrics) there was in some of her songs a measure of artful, ironic questioning that challenged the shallow inadequacy and dehumanization of what the culture offered (and still offers) adolescents for the shaping of their identity.

Avril Lavigne in 2018: older, wiser, and recovering her healthThe fact is that Avril is a very skilled singer, songwriter, and musician. And in the past she has shown a deeper and more intense side in some songs, a capacity to probe the complex texture of real human experience.

In 2014 her fast-moving rock star life ran into a "wall"--the debilitating wall of Lyme Disease. This affliction varies in symptomology and degree of severity, but it can be truly frightening, especially during the (often extended) period of time in which doctors are fumbling around trying to figure out what's wrong with you, or misdiagnosing and inadequately treating you, while you keep feeling worse and nobody knows why.

Lyme is transmitted by several common species of ticks who carry its bacteria and a variety of co-infections. These ticks frequently attach to humans in a way that can transmit the disease, but "most people" don't become ill (at least, not in any noticeable way) even in endemic areas.

Those areas are not limited to New England (where the disease was first identified in Lyme, Connecticut), New York State, Pennsylvania, Northern Virginia and my own lovely Shenandoah Valley, although they remain places with a particularly large concentration of reported cases.

Western Ontario across the border front New York, where Avril Lavigne comes from, surely has its share. Lyme Disease is also a problem in many countries in Europe and throughout the world.

These ticks can easily go unnoticed. So why isn't everyone sick? There may be factors of the immune system that enable most people to fight off the infection, but that are lacking or inadequate in those who get ill and are in need of treatment.

Lyme Disease can be treated most successfully with antibiotics if the infection is identified in its early stages. It becomes more complicated if left untreated for a longer period, but options remain for managing the disease and its effects. There is a lot of argument among medical practitioners in the United States about the details of late-stage Lyme Disease, approaches to treatment, and long term effects (I don't know how things stand in Canada).

Everyone agrees, however, that there is much we don't understand. Too many patients fall through the cracks in the system, and must endure not only the strange, painful, energy-draining symptoms of Lyme, but also the often terrifying experience of not knowing the nature of their illness or where it's all going.

Lyme Disease isn't directly fatal, but no one really knows the degree to which it might contribute to or exacerbate other potentially fatal health problems. It certainly doesn't do any good.

Most of us who have fought the long and often obscure battle with Lyme, however, will agree that there are times when you feel like you are dying or going to die. If you don't know what's wrong with you, that only makes things worse.



At_one point, Avril says she was convinced she was dying. I'm quite sure that this is no melodramatic overstatement. As she lay helplessly in bed, held in the arms of her mother (who had moved into her home to care for her), Avril tells us that she prayed to God.

She felt like she was drowning. (I can appreciate the aptness of this metaphor.) So she cried out to God. She begged, "God keep my head above water!" She says she felt the mysterious closeness of God in that moment. That prayer and the sustenance she received in that dire moment also became the inspiration for a new song, and a new album.

Already in 2015 she was speaking about new songs and new music. Now we know that the album will soon appear. She says that many of its songs were written and even recorded from her bed. (With regard to the latter, it's wonderful what technology makes possible for people with disabilities or lengthy illness; this is something I have been very grateful to experience myself.)

Avril says that she feels better now. She made the music video below to accompany her new single, "Head Above Water." When the song was released last week, there was a flurry of excitement in some circles that Avril Lavigne--the former cussing, hard-partying, weirdly dressed rock chick with an attitude--had undergone a conversion experience.

I think she has had a conversion, a very real conversion, though I think people who are expecting instant religious coherence from her now that she has sung about God are going to be disappointed. She is an artist, and artists are often broken in peculiar ways. She is also a human being. We really know practically nothing about her personally, about the deepest issues and problems she faces. The celebrity world is a strange aristocracy. I don't envy those who have had it thrust upon them, nor those who have striven to obtain its rank only to find that it doesn't give them the enduring glory they expected to find.

I am grateful to Avril Lavigne, however, for her willingness to talk publicly about her fight with Lyme Disease. Before she got sick personally, she already had a project devoted to people with serious health problems: the "Avril Lavigne Foundation." Now her foundation includes a special dedication to research on Lyme and assistance for those who suffer from it.

I am grateful to her also for letting the vulnerability of her own suffering shape her musical art. Suffering might be inspiring and dramatic in the abstract. But real suffering is banal, unattractive, humiliating, and strange. When we feel better, there's a natural desire to try to forget it ever happened. Instead, Avril has chosen to give voice to her own suffering through her music, and thereby to give us all a little more courage for whatever suffering we endure.

"Head Above Water" is not a complicated song. It is simple, brief, and powerful. It is a compelling song that grows on me a little more every time I hear it. Avril was raised in an Evangelical Christian home, and, while the song never mentions Jesus by name, it contains biblical images and Christian themes. It is a genuine prayer, full of desperation and hope. It is a prayer that articulates my own cry to God, both in physical sickness and in the darkness of Depression. It is a prayer that will help many people.

Listen to the song and watch the music video below.

So pull me up from down below / 'Cause I'm underneath the undertow / Come dry me off and hold me close / I need you now I need you most // God keep my head above water / Don't let me drown / It gets harder / I'll meet you there at the altar / As I fall down to my knees / Don't let me drown ... God keep my head above water / I lose my breath at the bottom / Come rescue me / I'll be waiting / I'm too young to fall asleep ...