John Janaro's Blog, page 220

Epiphany

In a New Year, the Problems and Possibilities Remain

Late afternoon Winter sunlight in Marlow Heights.We have finished the first week of 2017 already, and I am still debating whether I want to actually make any retrospective remarks on the year that has just past. It was a "remarkable" year for me, this 2016, a painful and profound year.

So much happened. So many processes rooted in last year are still unfolding for me, our family, our growth in faith, our nation (the USA), and the world. I'm not sure I can say much about them yet, because I don't know where they are leading, I don't yet know the shape or the depth of it all.

There's not much point in simply reviewing the all the events in the news: the wars and humanitarian catastrophes, terrorist attacks, racial and social tensions, murders, not to mention the distressing election year in America and all the ways we failed one another in charity, justice, and courtesy. The larger events of the year were personal for many of us, in different ways, and of course we had our own particular dramas and difficulties and burdens to carry.

And though we mark time with numbers, there was nothing magic about midnight on January 1 that made our problems go away. Both the problems and the possibilities remain with us.

What can I say at this point? Like many people, I would have to say that the year 2016 was an exceptionally hard year. Not all of the "hard," however, was "bad." Some of it was clearly very good. Some of it was mysterious and paradoxical. Some of it was just plain crummy, but I am (very slowly) learning to "stay in the crummy" and "walk with it" in hope.

I have good reason for hope, and as I grow older this conviction has only gotten stronger in spite of all my inconsistency and forgetfulness and even my efforts to run away. I am not the source of this confidence; rather it is a stubborn thing that persists beneath my anxieties and problems, an impetus that always urges me to get up off the ground, to go further, inch by inch if necessary. I go on because of the One to whom I belong. In every moment I am held in the hands of that Mystery who makes me and calls me, whose light is greater than all darkness, whose torrents of love water the driest deserts.

There were some pretty dry deserts in 2016. There were new and wonderful discoveries too. I studied quite a bit, researched and wrote my articles and other material, and overall learned a lot. I continued to rediscover music and the arts, photography, and the fascinating details of nature that are accessible to me in the beautiful place where I live.

I also "wrestled with the angel in the night" (see Genesis 32:22-32) yet again, finding myself greatly blessed while also "limping" even worse than before. It has been a very long wrestling match this time, but the broken, crippled man who is emerging from it moves forward and uses all that he has left with a greater urgency. The fire in him is deeper, brighter, more ready to forge anew everything that is drawn into it.

Twelfth Night

"O God, who by the Nativity of your Only Begotten Son
wondrously began for your people the work of redemption,
grant, we pray, to your servants such firmness of faith,
that by his guidance they may attain the glorious prizeyou have promised."

The Christmas Season reaches its high point in the days of the Epiphany, when we remember the wise men of the Gentiles who followed the star to find him, and John the Baptist who drew him up from the waters as the Spirit came upon him and the Father's voice was heard.

It is Twelfth Night. The Magi have arrived and have found the child with Mary his mother.

A New Year For the World, a New Year For Me

The days of Winter are slowly beginning to grow longer again, even as the air grows colder.

It's a new year for the world and a new year for me too. On January 2, I turned 54 years old.
Thank you, God, for my life.
It hasn't been an easy life and certainly not a "normal" life. It is rich with beauty and fragility, hints of joy and wounds of failure, so many rewards and so many changes, and all the love for things and for people that rises up like a flood only to find that it is not enough to fill me, but only to make deeper my cry for "something more"...
That sweet, awful pain. I keep trying to forget it, but I always find it again, growing secretly, inscrutably, slowly making me ready for You.
I thank you, God, for my life. Through all of it, You have been good.

Our family has some big adventures coming up in 2017. The kids have grown so much since I began this blog nearly six years ago. They will be taking up new challenges this year, some of which I will describe in more detail soon.
And our poor world struggles in so many places, in so many ways. We are all mysteriously bound to one another in this journey. We depend on one another. It would be overwhelming, were it not for the fact that Jesus is with us.
Jesus is with us. God became man, took flesh to dwell with us. I pray that we can all know more fully what this really means, or at least that we can know enough to hold onto Him and trust in Him and let Him carry us.
Dear Jesus, open our hearts to your presence in this new year, that we might recognize You and love You in every moment, in everything.
Grant that we might be reconciled to one another.
Console and bring healing to those who are suffering, protect human life and the dignity of the human person, especially among the poor, the displaced, the refugees, the oppressed, the lonely, and the victims of every form of violence.
Bring peace and spare us from the scourge of further war.
Place in our hearts worship, adoration, wonder, and committed love for You, trust in the wisdom and goodness of Your will for our lives, and love for one another.

Light and Darkness

The Best of Times, The Worst of Times

The year comes to an end, finally.

It was a year of unprecedented violence and destruction, with the news and everybody talking about how many people died.

No one expected there to be so much death.

Still, there was much good in the year. Ordinary people went on with their daily lives, grew in so many ways, and overcame all sorts of obstacles. This was a year to treasure the small victories, the resilience of human beings in the face of all kinds of pressure, the vitality of youth, and the blessings of every moment.

People still celebrated Christmas and the holiday season in this year. Take someone like Roy Armstrong, a teenager who sent a message to his Mom saying:

We went "to a party that the ladies had arranged for us. They had quite a spread in the Connaught Hall & afterwards they gave a concert which was sure worth hearing. One of the ladies invited me to her home anytime I wish to go & I sure am going as, well, she has a swell looking daughter."

It was a difficult year for Roy Armstrong, but these are words full of hope.

At the end of every "bad year" there is hope. The next year is a brand new slate, bearing the image of a newborn baby. A new start. Shake off all the dust of old '16 and move on to '17.

Hope for the new year. Right? Hope for the new year, a century ago, the year 1917?

It was hard, very hard, for people to be hopeful on New Year's Eve in the year 1916. A great portion of the world was helplessly mired in a terrible war, far more horrible and destructive and futile than any war that had ever been fought before.

A lot of people died in 1916. One million soldiers died on the battlefields of Europe. In one year, the names of places and things, towns and rivers suddenly became brand new synonyms for hell: trenches, Verdun, the Somme.

And there was no end in sight.

Then came 1917. Was it better or worse than the previous awful year of 1916? In a way, it was both. It brought more destruction, anguish, and futility, and something new beyond all of that: the collapse of Russia into an unprecedented kind of revolution and the dawn of a new system of human power dedicated to fundamentally altering the very structure of human nature, by whatever means necessary.

Yet on the night of New Year's Eve a hundred years ago, Vladimir Lenin was smoking cigars on his terrace in Zurich. He was a balding intellectual living in exile in Switzerland with nothing but notebooks full of scrawl, a head full of dreams, and the mysteriously faithful Nadya Krupskaya to listen to his rantings and sew the holes in his socks.

1917 was destined to be one heck of a year for Lenin.

War dragged on in Europe, while in America the man who was got himself (re)elected President in 1916 by promising to keep the United States out of the war (his slogan, literally, was "He kept us out of war") very promptly brought America into the mess by April of 1917.

Roy Armstrong was killed at the front on October 30. He was 19 years old. He never had the chance to get to know that swell girl. Neither did millions of other men of his generation.

The violence of the war intensified into a holocaust even as Russia fell into chaos. Yet 1917 also gave us a new hope.

Three peasant children in a small town in Portugal saw a woman in white who promised peace. She told them that people must pray the great prayer that ranges over the life of Jesus and the birth of the Church, the prayer that was like the New Testament in a string of beads that the most humble person could hold in their hands, that could awaken the message of the Gospel in the mind of a child.

In the year 1917, the world was given a promise for which they were invited to pray. Pray for peace. Pray for Russia, the land of so many tears, so dear to the heart of the Mother of God. Pray the prayer of the Gospel with Mary. Enter into her way of "dwelling on everything in her heart." Pray the Rosary, pray with Mary the Mother of God, the Mother of hope.

But the invitation was drowned out by the guns of war and the ambitions of men. We know the fruit born of this negligence.

Yet Mary did not forget her children. In time she led God's People into her prayer; she raised up her own heroes in the darkness, especially the man in white who fell in a pool of blood but didn't die, the man who taught us how to pray, how to be Christians--indeed, how to be human beings.

Russia has been relieved but remains in turmoil, and much of the world that the Great War created is now collapsing in ashes and blood. The land we call "the Middle East" is hemorrhaging, its ancient cities in ruins, its peoples driven to wander the roads of the world in desperation.

In the West, we have become more callous to murder and murderers, because "we know not what we do." Love is lost to us in ambivalence, buried beneath our astonishing wealth and comforts and new powers that we don't understand how to use.

Thus we have arrived at the new year of 2017.

We still long for love. We are desperate for love. There are moments of clarity in events, in life and death, when love shows itself to us like burning fire. How can this kind of fire become the light and warmth of our days?

We now stand at the beginning of 2017 wondering whether love will really prevail, wondering where we can place our hope.

The place of our hope remains the same, and the promise of 1917 remains to be fully realized in our historical time.

We need to pray, to enter more into the heart of Mary's prayer, to be drawn into the light that heals us and can help heal the world.

2016 was a difficult year, and yet the promise still lives, the hope stands before us. Now it is the year 2017. Let us pray.

Putting Our Faith in Worldly Order

DECEMBER 29: SAINT THOMAS BECKET, BISHOP AND MARTYR.
The Fifth Day of Christmas also commemorates the bishop and martyr St Thomas Becket, the famous Archbishop of Canterbury in the 12th century who spoke truth to power, who courageously opposed his friend King Henry II on laws that would have hindered the freedom of Christ's Church.
The Church must never allow her witness to the Gospel to be subordinated or her place co-opted by the violence or seductions of the earthly city. As another English Thomas would point out three centuries later, we must truly serve our country and/or any other worthwhile activity in this life only if we serve God first. When we acknowledge God, our own freedom is secured.
"Those who put their faith in worldly order
Not controlled by the order of God,
In confident ignorance, but arrest disorder,
Make it fast, breed fatal disease,
Degrade what they exalt."
~Thomas Becket in T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral 

Thirtieth Anniversary of My First Book, "Fishers of Men"

This book was published in December of 1986. It's hard to believe that it has be thirty years.


Before this month ends, I want to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of my first book, Fishers of Men, by Trinity Communications.

I was a 23 year old graduate student and aspiring writer and research journalist in the Summer and Fall of 1986. Thanks to a grant, I was able to travel to different parts of the country to interview priests about their vocation and ministry, and then publish a collection of "profiles" in a book for Trinity as part of a program geared to fostering vocations to the priesthood.

Are you finished laughing? Okay, the photo is overexposed; thus my "heavily tanned" look. Otherwise, this kid is me!

I have such great memories of this adventure, which really enlarged my horizons and gave me a broad experience of the ministry of the Catholic Church all over the United States.

And, though the book was popular and inspirational in genre, it did stimulate my very young theological reflections about the mystery of the Church in the best way, by bringing me into contact with the flesh of Jesus Christ present and at work in the Church's life and mission in the world.

One can see--for example in these pages--that I have already begun to reflect and write about the themes that still concern me today. Other than having a lot more experience and a lot less energy, I don't feel so different than the young man I was thirty years ago.

Merry Christmas 2016

The Janaro family wishes everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy Christmas Octave and Christmas Season.


We weren't able to get our usual family Christmas picture in our dress outfits after getting home from the Midnight Mass. So instead here is a collage of kids and grownups in pajamas or house comfy clothes opening presents after a good sleep.

The little "atrium" corner is clothed in white for celebration:


And we had a lovely Christmas dinner with the whole family together. It's a blessing for us all to be together for this celebration.


Christ is born. Glory to Him!

O Holy Night

A child was born in a cave one night, long ago.The child was born at the end of a weary journey,to a family cast out from everyone,driven off to a damp cavern in the fields,out into the dark cold ground of rockand sparse stubble,where there was no one to welcome the childexcept for the lowest and most miserable outcasts,the poor burdened with the weight of their sadness,the forgotten, the disdained,who wandered beneath the clouds, searchingpieces of turf among the stones for their hungry beasts.He was born in this wild place,defenseless,barely sheltered from the windy sky,first found by these grizzled ancient forgotten menwho had no reason to thinkthat anybody loved them or cared for themor remembered them.
But it was to them that he came.
And they found him, the child born that nightunder the light of a starthat burned in its core with fire.And the fire was kindled in their hearts, awakening something new,burning with a joy and a hopethey had never known before.
Tonight that fire burns again in hearts all over the world,burns with a life greater than all death,burns with a peace that no violence can take away,burns hot enough to melt our sorrows,burns in the deep darkness of the night,high beyond the reach of our own designs and efforts,bright like a star lighting up the unknown roads ahead,drawing us to walk through the limits of our fears,leading us to the love that risks everythingto give itself as love and love alone.
Tonight I am led back to Christmas 2011, when this 17 year old girl belted out her own soulful arrangement of O Holy Night and set YouTube on fire.

It was a spark of that great fire of utterly defenseless, utterly unconquerable love, and it has become a light in many hearts at the end of 2016, a fire that burns with a life that is greater than death, a peace that prevails over all the horror of violence.
Listen below to O Holy Night, produced, arranged, and performed in 2011 by Christina Victoria Grimmie (March 12, 1994 - June 10, 2016), an ordinary girl full of an amazing music, a spectacular voice, and an extraordinary faith: