John Janaro's Blog, page 196

Read from the Bible... Even Just a Little Bit

Even the most casual encounter with the Bible can be fruitful. So if you're moving books around on a shelf and you come across a Bible, open it and read something.

I'm not suggesting any sort of superstitious attempt to find your "fortune" or predict the future by random Bible verses. This attitude is foreign to the receptive openness, the quality of listening, the hunger for the truth that we need to have if we want to be nourished by the Word of God.

Find a familiar or much loved text, or one appropriate for the season of the year. In this situation, what text you choose doesn't matter as much as just taking a moment to encounter God speaking to us.

All of God's Word has relevance for our lives, at any and every moment.

Here is the text of Psalm 62:6-11.


Good words to revisit in these times, in the "afterglow" of the Christmas season, in a new year when we do well to consider once again the foundation of our lives, the source of our hope.

Let us remember, then, to set our hearts not on our own power, wealth, comforts, youth, or any other thing that can so easily change: here today, gone tomorrow. Let us set our hearts on God, our refuge and our strength.

Let us set our hearts on God, who has come to dwell with us.

Read from the Bible... Even Just a Little Bit

Even the most casual encounter with the Bible can be fruitful. So if you're moving books around on a shelf and you come across a Bible, open it and read something.

I'm not suggesting any sort of superstitious attempt to find your "fortune" or predict the future by random Bible verses. This attitude is foreign to the receptive openness, the quality of listening, the hunger for the truth that we need to have if we want to be nourished by the Word of God.

Find a familiar or much loved text, or one appropriate for the season of the year. In this situation, what text you choose doesn't matter as much as just taking a moment to encounter God speaking to us.

All of God's Word has relevance for our lives, at any and every moment.

Here is the text of Psalm 62:6-11.


Good words to revisit in these times, in the "afterglow" of the Christmas season, in a new year when we do well to consider once again the foundation of our lives, the source of our hope.

Let us remember, then, to set our hearts not on our own power, wealth, comforts, youth, or any other thing that can so easily change: here today, gone tomorrow. Let us set our hearts on God, our refuge and our strength.

Let us set our hearts on God, who has come to dwell with us.

Read from the Bible... Even Just a Little Bit

Even the most casual encounter with the Bible can be fruitful. So if you're moving books around on a shelf and you come across a Bible, open it and read something.

I'm not suggesting any sort of superstitious attempt to find your "fortune" or predict the future by random Bible verses. This attitude is foreign to the receptive openness, the quality of listening, the hunger for the truth that we need to have if we want to be nourished by the Word of God.

Find a familiar or much loved text, or one appropriate for the season of the year. In this situation, what text you choose doesn't matter as much as just taking a moment to encounter God speaking to us.

All of God's Word has relevance for our lives, at any and every moment.

Here is the text of Psalm 62:6-11.


Good words to revisit in these times, in the "afterglow" of the Christmas season, in a new year when we do well to consider once again the foundation of our lives, the source of our hope.

Let us remember, then, to set our hearts not on our own power, wealth, comforts, youth, or any other thing that can so easily change: here today, gone tomorrow. Let us set our hearts on God, our refuge and our strength.

Let us set our hearts on God, who has come to dwell with us.

Read from the Bible... Even Just a Little Bit

Even the most casual encounter with the Bible can be fruitful. So if you're moving books around on a shelf and you come across a Bible, open it and read something.

I'm not suggesting any sort of superstitious attempt to find your "fortune" or predict the future by random Bible verses. This attitude is foreign to the receptive openness, the quality of listening, the hunger for the truth that we need to have if we want to be nourished by the Word of God.

Find a familiar or much loved text, or one appropriate for the season of the year. In this situation, what text you choose doesn't matter as much as just taking a moment to encounter God speaking to us.

All of God's Word has relevance for our lives, at any and every moment.

Here is the text of Psalm 62:6-11.


Good words to revisit in these times, in the "afterglow" of the Christmas season, in a new year when we do well to consider once again the foundation of our lives, the source of our hope.

Let us remember, then, to set our hearts not on our own power, wealth, comforts, youth, or any other thing that can so easily change: here today, gone tomorrow. Let us set our hearts on God, our refuge and our strength.

Let us set our hearts on God, who has come to dwell with us.

Read from the Bible... Even Just a Little Bit

Even the most casual encounter with the Bible can be fruitful. So if you're moving books around on a shelf and you come across a Bible, open it and read something.

I'm not suggesting any sort of superstitious attempt to find your "fortune" or predict the future by random Bible verses. This attitude is foreign to the receptive openness, the quality of listening, the hunger for the truth that we need to have if we want to be nourished by the Word of God.

Find a familiar or much loved text, or one appropriate for the season of the year. In this situation, what text you choose doesn't matter as much as just taking a moment to encounter God speaking to us.

All of God's Word has relevance for our lives, at any and every moment.

Here is the text of Psalm 62:6-11.


Good words to revisit in these times, in the "afterglow" of the Christmas season, in a new year when we do well to consider once again the foundation of our lives, the source of our hope.

Let us remember, then, to set our hearts not on our own power, wealth, comforts, youth, or any other thing that can so easily change: here today, gone tomorrow. Let us set our hearts on God, our refuge and our strength.

Let us set our hearts on God, who has come to dwell with us.

We Can Have a Relationship with the Truth

We cannot live without truth. Our minds are engaged in a constant search for the meaning of things and the purpose of our existence in this world. The life of a personal being yearns for truth, and demands the freedom to seek the truth and to adhere to it.

The more we come to know the truth--not an ideological scheme or agenda, but the truth about reality--the more we realize that all truth speaks of the Mystery that is the source and meaning of everything, a Mystery that is Personal in the deepest sense, and who calls us into a living, all-fulfilling relationship.

In presenting us with all the wonderful facets of reality, truth whispers to the heart that it is worthy of adherence and affirmation; it discloses all the goodness and beauty of reality, and thereby points to the One who is Good and Beautiful. This disclosure invites a response of our minds and hearts; it summons us to affirm the truth with conviction and joy, and to continue to seek it.

The work of discovering and deepening this adherence to the truth is personal, but this does not mean that it is a solitary endeavor that each person must carry out in isolation from all others. Quite the contrary. This is the common journey of the human race through all of history. It is the source from which peoples are generated, in which natural ties of kinship develop into the network of human relationships that advances through history and transforms genealogy into heritage and culture.

Human beings are born with the capacity to grow in understanding and freedom, but they cannot do this by themselves. Just as babies and children need to be fed, clothed, and sheltered in order to develop physically, so also they need care and mentoring in the life of the spirit. They need education.

The teacher, or educator, has always held a respected place in human communities. In their responsibility to pass on the heritage of communities and peoples, educators hold a kind of authority, and therefore are entitled to respect and a certain measure of trust in different ways, depending on experience, proven wisdom, office, or recognized scholarship. The educator also is very important in serving as a helper and a guide on the path of truth. 

The genuine educator points to the truth, not to his or her self. The truth, ultimately, is the Infinite Mystery who creates and calls the heart of every person.

There have, of course, been people throughout history who have proposed themselves as "the answer" for others. They are the manipulators and insurrectionists, the violent and abusive figures in history and life. In their "purest" form, they are the cult leaders and totalitarian dictators of history. They betray the relationship of persons which ought to exist between teachers and students, leaders and followers. They turn people into slaves, and they destroy families, communities, cultures, and societies.

But there was one man who was different. Once in history, a man came and said, "I am the Truth." Once in history a man said, "come to me, follow me" and that man was not abusive and manipulative and inhuman.

On the contrary, he transformed those who followed him.

They became, not less human, but a hundred times more profoundly human, and more than that, they themselves became reflections of the Mystery; they became--in a unique way--witnesses to the presence of the Mystery dwelling among us in this man. 

And their followers have carried the light of the hope of the human race down through the centuries, bearing witness to all the peoples of the world. This presence and promise remains alive in the communion of these followers, even in the midst of all their human frailty and their repeated forgetfulness and betrayal of that unique man in whom the Transcendent Mystery is given and poured out into the very heart of the world.

Jesus Christ is totally unique in history. He and he alone stands before the human person--with integrity, with spectacular greatness and goodness and beauty--and asks, "Who do you say that I am?"

The answer to this question is a continual source of amazement to me. The Mystery that sustains all of reality became a man.

Thus everyone's "personal journey" to a "relationship with the truth" finds its true path and its fulfillment in him. Billions of human beings don't really know him. Still, if they are searching for the truth, they are searching for him. In fact, it is he who is calling their hearts. He has come for each and all. He loves them. There is much that is mysterious about this, but for Christians it should inspire a great desire to make him known more and more to all the world.

The Infinite Mystery reveals himself by becoming man in order to give himself to us. He comes as loving mercy, to be our path and our sustenance and our fulfillment. He comes for the "personal journey" of each one of us, and he draws close to that personal dignity and the special quality, attractions, capabilities and aspirations that distinguish each of our hearts.

We have been created to give ourselves in love. He knows who we are destined to be by means of that gift of love, and he empowers us in his Spirit to achieve this destiny (which is the fulfillment of the humanity that is common to all of us, and also the complete realization of what is unique to each one of us as persons).

Jesus is the Eternal Word of the Father, who gives to all things their attractiveness and beauty and meaning, and then draws all things to himself.

Jesus draws every human person to himself.

The fact that all things find their fulfillment in him does not mean that we should conceive of created things in a reductive way, as having value only insofar as they are "religious stuff." By this I am referring to "religion" inasmuch as we (inevitably) conceive of it when we forget Jesus Christ, as a collection of merely human rules, customs, taboos, invented rituals, theoretical constructs, and power schemes.

Rather, to say that "all things find their fulfillment in him" means that He really is the Mystery: "All things were created through him; all things were created for him" (see Col 1:16).

His "particularity" in history and in our lives is not meant to suffocate us. On the contrary, it is the promise of freedom. It is the guarantee of God's love for each one of us. Jesus Christ is the truth! In him we really will find the fullness of life; indeed we will find "eternal life."

His particularity, his concrete presence, in the life and worship and ministry of the Church brings the Mystery of God close to us and communicates it to us, so that we might live forever as God's children, and so that we might see the vividness of God's mercy and goodness in every aspect of this earthly life, in its joys and hopes and sufferings.

Christina Grimmie After Nineteen Months

This screenshot reproduces my very brief blog post from January 10, 2017. It marked the seven month anniversary of the murder of Christina Grimmie, the 22 year old singer, songwriter, musician, finalist on Season 6 of The Voice, and pioneering YouTube artist:


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Now it has been one year and seven months.

People who have followed her career since 2009 (as well as others who are only now discovering her) continue to honor her remarkable legacy. Many of the nearly four million subscribers to her YouTube channel from all over the world—and above all the young people who were inspired by her example—still feel a sorrow for her death. It is a different kind of sorrow from the more distant, more nostalgic, and less "personal" sense of loss generally experienced by fans when a celebrity dies.

This, no doubt, is due in part to her youth and the circumstances of her death, and in part to the way new forms of media permit artists and performers to be (or at least seem to be) more accessible to their fans by letting them see more of their lives off-stage.

But there are other factors in play here.
Christina Grimmie really communicated herself through her music and her luminous personality, touching so many hearts even "from a distance" (and still doing so) in ways that can't be adequately explained in terms of her natural talents or of the powerful possibilities of the new communications media.
Thus people find themselves still in mourning for her, still "missing her." This sorrow is felt in various ways and with varying degrees of intensity, and with genuine and at times surprising emotion. Here too people with all kinds of backgrounds and temperaments find it hard to explain the intimacy and power of this sorrow, and why it continues to stand out in their experience.

It may not always be a healthy thing. Certain people who continually revisit their sadness (about this or any other tragedy) can become discouraged, excessively melodramatic, self-absorbed, or self-indulgent. Indeed, people can transfer their struggles and frustrations over many serious problems onto a single tragic event, especially one that has less real consequences for their immediate lives than their own more pressing and direct troubles. They don't want to (or may not know how to) respond to their own circumstances and direct sufferings. This is not to put them down, because suffering is always mysterious and cannot be met except with compassion.

If we know people personally who are stuck in this kind of sadness (wherever it might be focused), we can see that they need encouragement, direction, companionship, and in certain cases mental health care. We must help them in whatever way we can. But there are rarely any easy ways to do this. So many people in the world are burdened by human poverty—living in isolation, surrounded by deeply dysfunctional or broken human relationships, displaced by war or estranged by other more obscure, hidden, and petty forms of human violence.

Christina had a heart for all kinds of suffering people. She wasn't afraid to love them, and affirm them in whatever ways, with whatever simple gestures were possible in a given moment.

Here is Christina sitting on the floor in her room with a guitar,
live-streaming through her iPhone, chatting, taking requests,
picking up the tune or just singing off the cuff, and totally
blowing us away with her renditions and her amazing voice! But this unhealthy sadness is not the experience of most of Christina's frands (a term combining "fan+friend" which she applied to anyone who followed her music). For them, there remains a simple but decidedly human grief. It has not prevented them from going on with their lives, grappling with their own problems, and being grateful for the joys in life. It's not a morbid preoccupation that paralyzes them. Rather it's an ordinary grief that is "settling in" as part of their life-experience, but also an intimate grief with features like that which accompany the loss of a relative or friend.

The difference, of course, is the fact that most of them never met Christina Grimmie. Nevertheless they loved her, and they have no doubt that she loved them back. 

Thus, their sorrow is more and more taking shape as a constructive and creative energy, a desire to remember her and to collaborate in the work of securing her legacy. But here is a wonderful thing: the leaders of this work are precisely the people who knew her best, whose loss was incomparable, whose mourning has been (and continues to be) the most arduous and personal because they knew her best and loved her like no one else could—her family.
In the past 19 months, Christina's parents and brother have given their own outstanding witness. They have grieved openly and honestly, without pretense, without any facile claims to understand why God allowed this terrible evil to happen, but with a faith that continues to trust in Him.

They have also taken up the labor of building and sustaining the vitality of all she gave us in her brief, bright, burning life as an artist and as a human being. They have released more of her music that she had recorded before her death, including an entire album (All is Vanity), which is a vocally stunning, genre-fusing collection of songs that range from pop and electronica to soul and R&B. They also launched a charitable foundation in her name last Fall, and they continue to strengthen the bonds among thousands of Team Grimmie frands across the globe.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that in all this time, they have not spoken an unkind word against any person in any public or social media forum.

They were silent for a while after the televised public memorial service, at which they appeared and spoke and showed all of us their faith and their immense pain and their humble suffering.

They were silent, and who wouldn't respect that? Who would have asked them to do more?

But when they did speak, it was only with words of kindness, gratitude and encouragement, and it was with the desire to continue the presence and the active work of compassion and mercy that Christina had initiated and lived so well.

Along with Christina's closest friends from childhood, and no doubt with the love and support of many other family and friends, the Grimmie family is showing us how a deeply felt, catastrophic, heart-crushing grief can be acknowledged and endured and lived concretely without wrecking the persons afflicted by it. Somehow, with much patience and trust in God, love can begin to generate something new.

Brother and sister Mark and Christina Grimmie from this past year's
Christmas greeting posted on Facebook by the Grimmie family.It may be very fragile and small. There may be setbacks and failures. But there will also be more possibilities. Good things take time and require faithfulness to God's plan. But there is every reason for hope. A seed sown very deep in the earth has started to grow. Something new has begun. 

And here's the thing: the Grimmies are not angels or space aliens or superheroes. They are not inimitable moral giants or great geniuses. Bud and Tina and Mark Grimmie are just regular, down-to-earth people; honest, frank, good New Jersey people. I was born a couple of miles and a bridge away from the New Jersey border. I have relatives descended from Italian immigrants still living in New Jersey. These kind of people are solid people, very real people.

I continue to be struck powerfully by the family and closest friends of Christina Grimmie, the people behind her old social media accounts with the address "@TheRealGrimmie" ... because they are so real.

We live in a world where the standard response to violence is vengeance and fury, or bitterness and cynicism, or discouragement and despair. The Grimmie family has been going through a range of emotions that I can't even imagine, and I'm sure they've had to confront within themselves some of these temptations to respond to violence with more violence, or to just give up on life.

Their hearts have wrestled with these responses. But they have chosen not to be defined by them. Instead they have chosen to respond with love.

This choice, by God's grace, is a light and an inspiration for all of us.

A Two-Edged Sword

"The word of God is living and effective, sharper than any two-edged sword, penetrating even between soul and spirit, joints and marrow, and able to discern reflections and thoughts of the heart. No creature is concealed from him, but everything is naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must render an account" 
~Hebrews 4:12-13

He Comes For Us All

I wish everyone a Blessed and Happy Epiphany!

On this great day of celebration, we remember Jesus coming among us. He comes as a little child, to reveal the immensity of God's mercy. He comes for the poor, and for the Gentiles, and for Israel—for the whole world.

He comes to seek out and save what is lost. He comes for sinners.

Mercy is an incredible thing. From Bethlehem and its Star, through the hidden life of Nazareth, to the manifestation of the Trinity at the Jordan river, Jesus appears in the world as the revelation of God's love, a love that has come conquer sin and death. No person, no sinner, is excluded from this love.

Indeed, Jesus loves the worst sinners, the people who we would consider disgusting. He loves them, He goes out in search of them, He gives Himself completely for them.

He wants sinners. We must recognize the full measure of this desire of the heart of God Incarnate. Jesus wants the most awful people, the creepy people, the people we don't want to touch or even go near. He wants to take away their sins, to change their hearts by His grace, to heal them, to forgive them, and to enable them to love Him. He wants them to be with Him forever. His heart burns with love for them: the gross, ugly, really bad people.

This should be a cause for great hope. For who among us looks in the mirror and sees a face with no cause for shame? The hope of the world is our hope. Jesus wants to awaken in us and draw forth from our hearts a true sorrow for our sins, and then He wants to fill our hearts with His love and transform us and make us beautiful.

On the Cross, in the Church, in the sacraments, and in these beautiful days of the Christmas season that we celebrate, He shows how He has given Himself to us, and how He longs for us.

He wants us to pray, to open our hearts to Him in trust. We must pray. "Lord, make me the person You will me to be. Shape me, change me, lead me. I believe in Your love for me. I trust in You."

The people who are literally disgusting, who have done horrible things, the most horrible things we can imagine—He loves them. He wants them with such a longing; He wants to draw them and convert them and heal them and transform them. He wants us to pray for them.

And He wants each one of us.

He loves us. He has come for us, and He gives Himself for us.

"Jesus make me into the person You have created me to be. I trust in You."

God Became a Child....