John Janaro's Blog, page 212

Our Sorrows Will Be Turned Into Joy

Here we are in the midst of Easter Week, and many among us are facing serious trials. Even in my own local community, people have endured the death of loved ones or the onset of serious illnesses, as well as that vast, ineffable galaxy of sufferings that fills everyone's days.

The proclamation of the resurrection of Jesus does not make our pain go away. Does it really matter to the sorrows we experience right now? Or is it just an abstract religious truth, or something that only has meaning for people who don't care about life here and now?
I went for a walk in the woods and took pictures of the wildflowers (whose appearance is beautiful but brief, fragile, inconsequential). Then I made this video. I put it in the "Front Porch" series, even though it's longer (and not on my porch, obviously).
I believe we have reasons for the hope that is in us:

The Living One

Happy Easter 2017 From the Janaros!

The Janaro Family. Front row: Agnese (18), Teresa (14), Josefina (10). Back row: John Paul (19), John (aka
"Daddy"), Eileen (aka "Mommy"). Insert right bottom corner: Lucia Janaro (16 - currently out of the country
participating in a student exchange program... we miss her this year, but more on her story another time). After Mass, we had a picnic with some friends and their families at the beautiful Virginia Arboretum. We brought with us a hamper full of prosciutto and strawberries and cheeses and olives and wine. Then we came back home and had dinner in the evening: Rigatoni with Corsican beef and more wine.
Christ is risen, alleluia!
He is risen indeed, alleluia, alleluia!

Good Friday

Good Friday 2017.

Outside the context of the Catholic liturgy, Bach gives us some good music for today. The Saint Matthew Passion was first performed on Good Friday in the year 1727. That's 290 years ago, give or take a day! Deep music by a man of deep faith.

It looked like this coming from the composer's own hand:

He Loves Us to the End

In these holy days, Jesus embraces the great mystery of his Passion; he "loves us to the end." He gives himself to us on the Cross, and in the Eucharist, with a love that goes beyond all our ideas and expectations. Jesus becomes the companion of all our sufferings, and he unites himself to every person's death.

None of us knows when we will die. We receive every moment of every day as a gift from God for the fulfillment of our own vocations. Each of us is a unique person, a mystery whose life is held by the wisdom and goodness and mercy of God. The moment of death—that final moment in the history of our becoming "who we are"—is also God's gift, designed to correspond to the fulfillment of the unique calling that each of us has received. It is the passage to the whole encounter with the Destiny that defines every moment of our lives.

In Jesus that Destiny embraces our death from within, becomes a presence within its solitude, and transforms it into a moment of hope and self-abandoning love. What might otherwise seem like the loss of "myself" becomes, in union with Jesus, a moment to give myself over wholly to the Father in complete trust.
The inevitable horizon of death encourages us to live every moment in trusting self-abandonment, in union with the One who said, "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit."

Being a Christian means that even now "I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. And the life I live in the flesh I live in faith in the Son of God who loved me, and gave Himself for me" (Galatians 2:20)

Christ Suffers This Week

Sunday's ISIS sponsored suicide bombings of two Coptic churches in Egypt joined the blood of dozens more men, women, and children with the blood of their Savior whose Passion and Resurrection we are about to remember and celebrate in the next three days.

Pope Francis's plea for an end to terrorist violence and the conversion of the terrorists and those who profit from this state of war was posted on Instagram the next day: 


Meanwhile, in the readings for "Spy Wednesday," as Jesus mourns the coming betrayal of Judas, the Psalms sing of the bitter gall that human beings offer to the Suffering One who thirsts for their love:

Death is an Ordinary Moment

Many of the events of this past year have made me more deeply aware of the mysterious and fragile space that marks the difference between life and death.

Death is a moment like any other moment in time, inescapable in its approach, while it also strips away everything except that which really matters.

More than once I have found a way to speak of these things in poetry (for another poem, see 
So I won't pretend that there's any easy accessibility here. I hope there is something evocative for those willing to be patient with the author's efforts.

This poem is serious, even grave, but it is not sad. It is not sad! On that point of interpretation I must insist.

We Fall

(for C.G.)

We fall, we fall, we fall
with fingers still breathing,
stretching away the air,
or curling tight into knuckles,
burrowing holes down to the skin.

We fall, we fall
in long lush fields thick
with riotous wild green grasses
growing,
growing up
into shivering breezes
or still spikes standing against
the face of the sun.

We fall
and break the warm earth
where roots wind down to the dark,
and worms bend thin throbby bodies
exercising elastic muscle,
and fungi spread slow poison
beneath their pale soft sponge clusters.

We fall
into water,
melting drops of water for the thirst
that burns through our bones.
And the water rushes over us,
the fire fades,
the tension of our fingers yields,
borne away beyond reaching
or grasping.

We are left alone with our thirst
on the river bank,
bare trees soaked in a flood of liquid clay.

Christina Grimmie: "God is STILL HERE!"

"Passion Sunday" - Entering Holy Week

Finally, this year's unusually late observance of the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus approaches.
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●We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you, because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world!●

Detail of mosaic by Mark Rupnik

Georges Rouault, Crucifixion

America, a President, and a War on 04/06/17

Dateline Washington, D.C. The first sentence of this lead article in a well known New York newspaper gives a brutal summary of the day's big event:

Dramatic language from journalists, not surprisingly. But was this rhetoric warranted?
On the sixth day of April, in the latter part of the second decade of a young century that had already provided so many amazing and terrible surprises, the United States of America did something that committed them irrevocably to a war that had already been raging for several years, a war of unthinkable brutality and global scope.
When he ran for election only months before, the President had been touting his commitment to non-intervention. And now?

Those who read this blog know that I have been marking certain moments in the centennial remembrance of what was then known simply as The Great War. The war of 1914-1918 was indeed a horror unlike anything in human history up to that time. But it later acquired the peculiar distinction of being recognized as the initiation of a new genre of belligerence when it was renamed "World War I."
I wasn't planning on any flashy, "click-baity" ambiguity for this day. But it has been difficult for me not to allude to the sometimes creepy irony of how current news can "echo" the news of the past.
On April 6, 1917 -- after overwhelming approval from both houses of Congress -- the President of the United States declared war against the German Empire and America officially entered the still-undecided and seemingly unending slaughter in Europe.
The London Daily Telegraph was happy to herald a new era of cooperation between the Anglo-Saxon "democracies" (England was also an Empire all over the world, but... well, irony and all that).

One could say that April 6 was the centennial of America's stature as an international military power, and the beginning of what has since been known as "the special relationship" between America and Great Britain in international affairs.
As an American, I love and honor the soldiers who served our country in good faith, courageously and honorably risking their own lives and doing what they perceived in good conscience to be their duty. I especially honor those buried much too young in the graveyards of Europe along with larger numbers of their brothers from Europe's lost generation. In this war, as in most ugly wars, the terrible evils must be attributed to a colossal failure of statesmanship, and in a larger sense to all of us, because "war is a punishment for sin." We would do well to remember this today.
Indeed, I did not expect to find any striking ironies regarding the date of this event. I still hope that future historians will have no need to draw morbid parallels between April 6, 1917 and April 6, 2017. After all, the world is very different today in so many ways. The issues it faces are different.
But human nature remains the same. "We" are no better, surely, than our forebears a hundred years ago.
Nevertheless, the fact that America's military intervention in Syria (a solitary event as far as we can tell) occurred on the one hundredth anniversary of America's entry into the conflagration of World War I need not be anything more than an odd coincidence. So we hope and pray.
There are real enemies of the peace in the Middle East today, and it is reasonable to help those who are trying to stop them and to be prepared to contribute to a constructive aftermath. Above all, the millions who are already suffering deserve our solidarity and commitment. There are many ways to help them, but it's hard to see how a dangerous, possibly global escalation of the conflict would help them or anyone else.
By the way, the President in 1917 looked like this: