John Janaro's Blog, page 200

Full of Grace

"You shall be called by a new name pronounced by the mouth of the Lord" (Isaiah 62:3).

Hail Mary, Full of Grace,
The Lord is with you....

"I am the Immaculate Conception" (the Blessed Virgin Mary to St Bernadette at Lourdes, 1858).

Grace can do anything. Thank you, Jesus, for the wonderful gift of your Mother Mary, for the love of her all-holy immaculate heart. She carries us all and keeps us close to you.

"Behold, your Mother..." (John 19:27).

Grief, Sorrow, and Longing for Home

This is a time of year when people prepare for celebrations. But we must not forget that, for many people, this is also a time of year when loved ones are missed, when grief flows afresh in the wake of cherished and bittersweet memories of those who are no longer with them in this world.

As Christians we know that death is not the end. The One whose coming we await in this season is the One who gives eternal life. We are people of radical hope.

Yet we experience grief in all its poignant human and mysterious senses. And I don't think we ever overcome in this life the suffering of our deepest and most intimate griefs.

Rather, as we grieve over time the loss (from this earthly life) of those we love the most, we "grow into" our grief. It takes shape as a kind of "peace," but not the quietude of forgetfulness or satisfaction. Rather, it is a peace in which sorrow grows into longing. Perhaps grief is one of the great struggles of life that leads us to the beginning of a deeper sense that eternity is our true home.

Thus we begin to recognize that even now we are invested in that eternity, that what we are living now only comes to fruition in eternity, in the resurrection, in Jesus where all of God's mysterious wisdom is revealed.

Eternity is the measure of His plan for us and for our loved ones. It has the whole of His unique love for each one of us as unique human persons, and it unveils how through this uniqueness we are brought together in a communion of love with God who is Love, who is Communion (Father, Son, Holy Spirit - One, but not "solitary," not alone). Thus also we are brought together in perfect communion with one another.

Eternal life is where the meaning of everything in this present life finally comes into focus. At most we get glimpses of it during our journey here, enough (I believe) to keep us going, to take the next step of this present moment in the journey with a more ardent awareness of our destiny.

Enough to press onward with longing and with hope that we will all finally come to our true home.

The Earth Shall Be Filled with Knowledge of the Lord

"The wolf shall be a guest of the lamb,
and the leopard shall lie down with the kid;
The calf and the young lion shall browse together,
with a little child to guide them.
"The cow and the bear shall be neighbors,
together their young shall rest;
the lion shall eat hay like the ox.
The baby shall play by the cobra's den,
and the child lay his hand on the adder's lair.
"There shall be no harm or ruin on all my holy mountain;
for the earth shall be filled with knowledge of the Lord,
as water covers the sea."

~Isaiah 11:6-9

Darkness in the Prison of My Mind

I feel like my mind is in prison. In a closed cell. In solitary confinement.

We lay it all out here on this blog. This is a place where people can see the utter poverty and personal brokenness of a man who "looks pretty good on paper," who speaks and writes in an articulate way about history, about the lives of heroic men and women, about God and conversion and faith, theology, philosophy, and literature and all that stuff.

For those new to the blog, I have chronic illness. I suffered a physical and mental breakdown ten years ago which led to my "retirement" from active teaching (you can read more about it in this BOOK from 2010). I am now a writer when I can be. I am just one wounded person trying to help others with what I can still give. If that frightens you away, I can't do anything to keep you from running. It can be a frightening thing.

I believe all the things I write, and I draw on my own experience with its more or less obscure indicators as well as its occasionally vivid signs. These things are at least in my memory, even if right now I find myself in the dark.

This year has just been so very, very hard.

I am oversensitive. I think too much. I am too often alone. Often I don't mind being alone, and I want to think and be sensitive. So I make the best of it.

But it's out of control. I'm trapped. I have this small strand of myself on which I can live in a human way. So I try to write and communicate with people, and read and think and pray. I try to love my family, though I feel useless and frustrated for being useless.

As I get older, the space gets smaller. Everything slowly gets harder. The paralysis of the rest of me seems to grow. Even when I wrote Never Give Up (the book) I didn't really see how the passage of time would affect me in this way.

But I am fighting against it, at least in some ways. I am trying to learn new things, and to be open to reality which has so much mysterious richness for me even after nearly five and a half decades. I am trying to live in empathy and solidarity with others who are suffering and to encourage and rejoice in the fresh energy of the coming generation (including my own children).

I'm fighting, except in those places where I'm still too proud to admit I'm poor and in need.

I'm fighting and I'm losing sometimes and maybe winning a little. Still, my "center cannot hold. Things fall apart." I know where this all leads, ultimately, and I am afraid.

I am scared of death.

Mostly, I am scared of death because of my weak faith. But also, death is a strange and incomprehensible and mysterious thing. It's a plunge into the dark. Even though it may yet be years away, I feel scared. I feel the darkness of it even now, as time slowly diminishes me.

I know Jesus is here in this darkness. He is here all the way to the end. He accompanies me and asks me to entrust myself to Him. It doesn't really comfort me right now, but that doesn't change the fact that He is still here! 

I need Him to hold onto me.

Advent 2017

Advent 2017 is only 22 days long.

O Come, O Come, Emmanuel...

Fire in the Desert

Blessed Charles de Foucauld was a man of tremendous passion and energy. 

As a wealthy youth in France at the end of the 19th century, he poured his energy into a playboy lifestyle. He tried to saturate himself with the pleasures of life, but they left him empty.

When he tired of dissipation, he turned to more serious worldly pursuits: he joined the French foreign legion in Morocco, then returned on his own to explore the region extensively, draw up detailed maps, and publish an acclaimed book. 

None of this adventurous activity satisfied Charles. But then he returned to the Catholic faith of his childhood.

He met Jesus Christ, who set his life on fire.

Charles tried joining a monastery in France, but this did not prove to be his vocation. So he went to the Holy Land, and worked for a while as a gardener to a community of nuns. Then—drawn by the Holy Spirit and helped in his discernment by others in the Church—he returned to Morocco as a new kind of "missionary," living a monastic life of prayer, presence, and service deep in the Islamic world, among those who knew nothing of Christ.

But even this was not enough. For the love of Jesus, Charles sought to live among the poorest and most forgotten people, and he made his hermitage deep in the Sahara desert among the Tuareg, a Muslim nomadic people who called him "marabout" (holy man). He did not preach. He spent his days in contemplation and caring for the people.

The French abandoned this "colonial frontier" to fight the Great War, but Charles remained. Finally, he found fulfillment on December 1, 1916 when he was shot and killed by a local militia group.

After his death, others were moved to follow his path. His inspiration led to the founding of the institute of the Little Brothers of Jesus (and soon after that, the Little Sisters of Jesus) who live today not only in the Sahara desert, but in many environments as "contemplatives on the roads of the world."

In simplicity and poverty, their life is devoted to worshipping God and loving the people around them, because in the heart of Jesus Christ they have discovered that every human person is worthy of love.

"We are all children of the Most High. All of us: the poorest, the most outcast, a newborn child, a decrepit old person, the least intelligent human being, the most abject, an idiot, a fool, a sometimes sinner, the greatest sinner, the most ignorant, the last of the last, the one most physically and morally repugnant - all children of God and sons and daughters of the Most High. We should hold all human beings in high esteem. We should love all humankind, for they are all children of God."

-- Blessed Charles de Foucauld 

Dorothy Day: Loving One Another in the "Here-and-Now"

Dorothy Day's long labors came to an end on November 29, 1980. After her conversion, she spent half a century bearing witness to Christ and serving Him in the poor.

Dorothy was a radical in every sense: she was rooted in prayer, penance, and fidelity to the Church, while also recognizing that a living faith has radical implications for the way human persons regard and interact with one another.

Her extensive writings are a dimension of her whole personal witness, and her voice was prophetic in that it pointed to a way of looking at the world—the demiurgic, tumultuous, explosive world of the twentieth century (that continues today). She endeavored to give a voice to the poor, to the dignity of the human person and the mysterious workings of God's grace, and to the deep passion and hard realism of loving our neighbor, of loving one another in the here-and-now.

Before she began her powerful apostolate and founded The Catholic Worker, however, Dorothy Day underwent her own long and often difficult conversion experience. The hand of the Lord was upon her from childhood, but she ran from Him in the days of her youth. She ran down desperate roads and into dark places only to encounter the love of God again and again, until she finally surrendered to Him.

Her story is, indeed, a "Great Conversion Story," and though I cannot do justice to this remarkable story in two small pages of a magazine article, I gave it my best shot in last month's MAGNIFICAT. 

I have been writing this monthly series called Great Conversion Stories for four years in this excellent magazine, and there's much more to come in 2018 and beyond. And my column is only one of many reasons to subscribe to MAGNIFICAT and benefit from it every month.

The Servant of God Dorothy Day died 37 years ago. In marking this anniversary today, I can only provide the most brief of introductions to the early years of this great and unique, holy and challenging woman of faith:

The Joy and Sorrow of Our Longing for the Infinite

All of our life is related to our destiny. This is what makes reality attractive. The more we become aware of this, however, the more vulnerable we often feel.

Why is this?

The "taste" of eternity that life awakens in us fascinates us and draws us on, but it also brings a kind of sorrow because the fulfillment is not yet here, because we must wait. We must endure.

Nothing we do in this world can take this sorrow away, because we long for the Infinite—we really do! There really is a relationship between every event in our lives and eternity, and it is the secret behind every true joy.  But even the joys of this life are permeated with the ache of longing, with the "not yet," as well as the apparently frustrating limits of our lives, which so often fall short of the mark of our destiny and bring us face to face with the obscurity of death.

In the end, only the Jesus on the Cross makes this bearable: Jesus who makes the way through the pain of sin and death into that unconquerable joy to which each one of us is called by our Father.

Thus, in this life, even our deepest joy still has a note of longing. We share in the mystery of the Cross, and sometimes this "sorrow-in-the-midst-of-joy" seems sweeter than any regular satisfaction.

Other times it is as dark and lonely as death. Still the joy remains, as a (perhaps) impalpable but firm trust in God's promise. It hopes in the Resurrection.

The Kingdom of Christ

"Christ has been raised from the dead,
the firstfruits of those
who have fallen asleep. 
For since death came through man,
the resurrection of the dead came also
through man.
For just as in Adam all die,
so too in Christ shall all be brought to life,
but each one in proper order:
Christ the firstfruits;
then, at his coming,
those who belong to Christ;
then comes the end,
when he hands over the kingdom
to his God and Father,
when he has destroyed
every sovereignty
and every authority 
and power.

"For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. 
The last enemy to be destroyed is death.
When everything is subjected to him,
then the Son himself will also be subjected
to the one who subjected everything to him,
so that God may be all in all"
(1 Corinthians 15:20-26, 28).

Happy Thanksgiving Weekend

We had our Thanksgiving with "everybody," with all the kids home (there won't be too many more holidays like this--life is changing in many ways).

Indeed, we had a nice celebration together with some very good friends, another local family with a similar situation regarding the in-college-and-growing-up status of their kids. They've all been growing up together, friends since they were all little (which was not that long ago, really).

It was a lovely day.

I was tired, as usual for no "normal" reason. Writing keeps getting more difficult and more exhausting. I keep up the blog by revising old posts, finishing drafts (there's still a lot in the draft bin), and doing more with pictures.

Sometimes I'll just let the musings roll out and see what happens (like I'm doing tonight).

Yesterday was the famous Black Friday, which seems a bit more tame than it used to be. For one thing, the stores tend to stretch it all through the month (it's been Black "Friday" since Halloween in the retail business).

Also, internet shopping has changed the whole game. Bargain hunting is always in season. The global village has an ongoing global flea-market all day, all night, all year.

In any case, I'm too tired to shop.

Music and art (with my photography and digital graphics) and reading are still accessible. The energy to write comes and goes, so I'm not giving up.

And I'm truly full of gratitude. But it's not like some great emotional surge of good-feelings about life. Life is perplexing these days, and I am not very patient. But I have the desire to embrace it all, or at least to bear whatever comes with perseverance. I know I cannot do this without Christ's love, the Holy Spirit, the life of the Church.

I have much to be glad about in the here-and-now, too. My heart goes out to everyone suffering this Thanksgiving, especially those who are in pain and distress, and those who find grief reawakened or stirred up by the absence of loved ones who have died. May the Lord draw us all into the embrace of His steadfast love that endures forever.