John Janaro's Blog, page 228

A Few Small Words at a Time of Great Sorrow

My friend, you have been struggling a lot with grief this past summer.

I know about the psychological stages of grief, and I want to stay with you in faith and love, and with all the humanity and friendship I can muster.

But this is a hard grief, a particularly black grief, the grief that follows in the wake of violence.

How can I ever really understand what depths of misery and solitude you have experienced? You are suffering the consequences of a profoundly personal assault that has robbed you of someone you love, that has upended the entire structure of life as you have known it. I want to stand with you, but there are depths of your affliction that are beyond the reach of my poor love.

You feel as if you are having a crisis of faith. Violence seems to have shattered your sense of the goodness of God. A particular human face that matters so much to you has suddenly been ripped out of your universe by a malicious act. How can this be?

It feels like evil has somehow prevailed. There is the terrible and real temptation to reject faith, to doubt by choosing to turn away from the truth, by choosing to withdraw from a vital relationship with God.

Though I will never comprehend the abyss of your personal pain, my friend, I beg you not to make this choice. God alone understands. God is your only hope.

Hold onto your faith, even if it hangs by the barest thread. Right now you are experiencing a psychological turmoil that feels very much like "doubt." Suddenly it seems like everything you thought you knew about God's goodness and His particular providence for your life has been overthrown. Perhaps you try to say that "God is good" and that "He loves you" but these words seem to recede to the furthest edges of meaning. You have no strength. The pulse of life itself is so thin, and it quickens only as a nervous response to the shattering noise that still shakes your awareness to the core.

You are plunged into a particular kind of darkness, a state of spiritual shock.

But you still have faith. You have not abandoned God, and He is in fact so mysteriously close to you, but you may fear that all the turmoil and confusion in your mind indicates a loss of faith. You may think, "I can't pray to God anymore. I've lost all the words. I don't know what to say, and I feel like all my prayers in the past were just talking to myself."

Indeed, when we pray we are often "talking to ourselves" (to our own images of God) more than to God, insofar as the strength of our prayer relies on our own resources. But grace is at work nevertheless. God listens to us when we pray, even though we are much more self-absorbed than we think.

But your whole sense of yourself has been blown to pieces. So much of yourself was invested in relationship with that person (and it was a good investment; it was love). You believe that the relationship still exists, but it seems like all the reference points of connection to that precious person have been annihilated. So much of your love for God was bound up with the face of that person, who was a daily reminder to you of the need to love and to be loved. This unique image, this precious gift, was swept away from your sight by wickedness.

You may wonder if it is still possible to pray. What if you feel like you have nothing to say? Everything has been stripped away from you, and you don't understand why. All you have is "nothing."

But you can pray, my brother.

Honestly, I'm "reading the map" here. I don't know the territory you are travelling through. But here is this map we've been given. I am describing something I don't understand, but I am going to take a chance and do it anyway. Why? Because I love you. I don't really know the weight of those words or where they will lead me, but I'll say them again: "I love you." And I trust the map.

So here I am, looking at Romans 8:18-27: "The Spirit helps us in our weakness." What I want to say to you is this: Pray! Take that emptiness of yourself and "pray it," lift it up, give it over to Him. Or just ache in His presence. Cry the hurt. Beg the hurt. Or just hurt. Don't be afraid to hurt. Don't think that pain distances you from Him. Let Him draw close to the pain in His incomprehensible way.

And He will hear the prayer in your pain. He hears within it the "sighs too deep for words" of the Spirit, who helps us because we don't know how to pray as we ought.

After all, we are dying. In reality you understand this right now a lot more clearly than I do.

What is the Lord doing? He is drawing our relationship with Him more and more into that "hope" for things we do not yet see, the inward groaning which is not doubt, even when we experience it as a psychological and emotional earthquake. Rather, it is God working in us. He is deepening our hope and it feels like it's breaking us apart, but in reality what is being born within us is the longing for the fulfillment of God's plan.

When we talk about "being broken," however, it is not a cheap symbol. You have really been broken, my friend.

Indeed the break is so real that it opens you. You have begun to long for the "things that are not seen" -- because you can no longer see the person you love and yet you know that she is real, you know that beyond all the violence of this world she endures. She has gone before you into the Mystery which we know by promise and by hope, but not by sight.

You miss her, achingly, inconsolably. And she was always a gift from His love and lives in His love. She was the presence of His love in your life. And evil has taken her away. It is as though God has gone away, not forever but for a long long time. God permitted wicked people to take Him away from you....

Of course. This is Christianity. You know about the Cross. And the Resurrection. This is the Cross. This is salvation. Your salvation. And mine.

But still, right now, you miss that person. You miss her love. You miss the way He loved you through her, the way He was present in your life through her. You miss her precisely in the way she was a unique, irreplaceable gesture of His love. You really miss her, and in the awful strangeness of that experience it can be said that in a sense you miss Him.

You miss God.

So your pain is in this longing for her, which is becoming for you a deeper kind of longing for God, a longing that fills your existence and your soul, and also your eyes and your ears and your hands and your heart and your bones and your blood. It is a deeper kind of love. A love deeper than death, and more tenacious than all the evil that tries to destroy it.

Why does it have to be this way? I don't know. I am not God and I do not understand His ways. I know that love is a terrible mystery and an overwhelming beauty and that it's the only thing I really want! That we have in common, my dear violated brother. We know that it ends in the incarnate realization of ineffable wisdom and goodness, and through the Spirit that realization has already begun in us.

So, let us throw ourselves into the arms of this wild loving God who wants to teach us to love the way He loves. Jesus doesn't explain it to us. Instead He comes to accomplish it for us, and then He enables us to do it in Him.

I don't know what this means really, and I'm afraid of what it means. Help me, my friend.

We need to stay together. We both need to trust Jesus, and in the darkest places in life we will have this hope, and the help of the Spirit who enables us to endure, to "wait with patience."

She Will Always Be "Mother Teresa"

Here is the official icon of Saint "Mother Teresa" displayed at St. Peter's Basilica for her canonization.



For all of us who met her, whose lives were changed by her, she will always be "Mother Teresa."

I am grateful to her. And I am grateful to God for her.

There Are No "Coincidences" in Real Life

God is present in this moment.

Whatever the circumstances may be, he is using them as elements of a Person-to-person dialogue with us.

He seeks out each one of us; He has personalized the whole, vast, apparently random and chance-filled universe.

He takes all the multitudes of forces that come together and make up the situation of reality at any given moment, and fashions them--from all eternity--into a love song that He wants to sing to each of us personally.

He calls out to us, and awakens in our hearts the desire to seek Him.

It is not just in a distant, far-off way that we seek God in the midst of an apparently meaningless life. God has chosen to share our lives in a mysterious closeness. He comes to us in every circumstance so as to call us to recognize His presence, to draw us to Himself--even through suffering and weakness--and to evoke from us the response of confidence and love.

There are no "coincidences" in real life. In the ultimate truth of things, which has to do with their place in God's plan, no event is insignificant; no situation we find ourselves in can be called "meaningless," because in Jesus Christ, God has chosen to dwell in this world, and to shape everything into the possibility to discover Him through love, through joy, through suffering freely embraced, through sharing His mercy.

God is present in this moment, in my moment. He has entered into the very flesh and blood, the very humanity of the ordinary moments of my every day, by becoming my companion in Jesus Christ, my friend, my brother.

Meeting Jesus Through a Real Friendship

In_this reflection from Magnificat's companion of meditations for the Year of Mercy, I look back at an experience that I hardly understood when it first happened so many years ago. Yet I now realize how fundamental and decisive it was for the whole shape of my Christian vocation. This was the beginning--in my adult life--of an encounter with the Person of Jesus living in His Church, and of the journey together with Him and my brothers and sisters in a concrete human friendship.

After that visit in October of 1979, my life did not change immediately or obviously. This encounter became fruitful in my life very slowly, as I continued to follow Him even with all my weaknesses and, sometimes, betrayals. It is a friendship that has branched out and has been guided and educated in different ways, but the same fundamental fact has remained true through the years: I belong to Jesus by belonging to "a people," by being entrusted to real human beings. We walk together with Him through life, and thus we learn to be open to new possibilities and new faces, to the whole world of people who are loved by God.

This friendship has woven its way into all the places of my experience, and yet I am far from understanding it. It doesn't fit "the mould" (if there is such a thing). It doesn't appear coherent, nor am I coherent within it. But I know that we all really do belong together in Christ's body. There is a unity that does not come from me, and I only know that I must adhere to the whole mystery of it and beg the Lord for the grace to take the next step on this journey with Him and with my brothers and sisters.

Pictures of a Summer Adventure

I promised more pictures from our trip to South Carolina a couple of weeks ago. Some of these have already appeared on social media sites (I'm milking this trip for all it's worth) but there are some never before seen photos as well.

We spent more time at the beach, but I did take quite a few pictures from the marshy area that we explored one morning, with its striking vistas and diverse wildlife.

The Palmetto is the state tree of South Carolina and they are everywhere to be found. Only "the little kids" (Teresa and Jojo) came with us on this trip. The "big kids" didn't come because their college or school years were already starting up. John XXIII Montessori Center doesn't start until September, so we're still partly in summer mode. It was Jojo's first time EVER at the beach. Did she love it? "This was the best day I ever had!" she said after the first visit. And it only got better. Along with the beach, we visited a swamp... uhh, I mean "wildlife nature preserve." Here are some sticks in the water, but look MORE CLOSELY! Is that a... a... a... ? Yup. ALLIGATOR! Just a little guy. And remember I have a good zoom lens so I was at a safe distance. I ain't no Crocodile Dundee! Dragonfly, zoomed way up close. Another dragonfly, from a different angle. We spent much more time at the beach than in the swamp, trust me. But the swamp just had lots of interesting subjects for the camera. There was beach bumming too, in the bright warm breezes. Tall pines in the woody areas right off the beach. These beautiful inland lakes are found in the southeastern coastal regions. This is the American white ibis, a fishing bird found on the southeastern Atlantic coast. Look at that long beak! Got close to this one with the help of the zoom lens. I love the reflection in the water I was happy to get a good look at this bird (and a good pic too). The anhinga has a neck made for catching fish and spends a lot of its time on the water in the coastal marshlands. This one, however, was in a pine tree next to a lake sunning its wings. Wow, what a bird! The Nature Preserve had these efficient and non-eco-invasive walkways that let us get through the swamp. Great towering magnolias: another basic tree of South Carolina Then we emerge from the trees to long stretches of sandy, sparsely populated beach.


We_had three full days, along with two backbreaking daylong trips in the car. As hard as the trips were, however, it was worth it. And a note to my parents: we drove the Taurus, and it was about as comfortable a ride (or as minimally uncomfortable a ride) as I could hope to have in a car, as far as the contour and mobility of the seat.

We thank God, and all our friends (you know who you are!) who helped make it possible for us to have this little getaway. As Eileen said, the ocean is so large and peaceful that it lets your mind rest. As the busy school year begins for her, the mental rest was most welcome.

"Deep Topics," Episode 2: We Get DEEP About Music...

Inspired by some of the terrific artists on YouTube, Josefina and I decided to make our own a cappella video for the second episode of the hit series, DEEP TOPICS.

The result is, well, interesting. Here it is:

Young Janaro Goes to Rimini, 25 Years Ago

I've seen some of my friends posting from Rimini, Italy in these days.

They are attending the annual Meeting of Friendship Between Peoples, the remarkable festival that has been sustained for some thirty plus years now by the Catholic ecclesial movement Communion and Liberation.

It's been a long time since I last attended the Meeting. I still hope to attend our own annual New York Encounter or one of the other festivals that are popping up in different parts of the USA. Now that I have made a trip and survived, who knows?

It has been 25 years since the first time I went to Rimini, which was before some of the current generation were born. I have vivid memories because I kept a journal in 1991. Below I share some excerpts from those days, texts which evoke rich memories for me but may also give others a sense of the experience of the Meeting a generation ago.

"I'll Pray For You" - Are These Words Really Meaningful?

Yes, of course. Please pray for me anytime you want. Thank you.
But when we say these words to someone, they can mean much more if our hearts are truly invested in them.
As Christians, we have the possibility of offering this transcendent expression, "I'll pray for you." Obviously this is very good, as long as we really mean it, as long as it's more than a "spiritual brush-off" or a cheap excuse to avoid meeting the needs of the person.

This expression is not just something "nice" to say to people. It is a possibility for love that has been opened to us by the death and resurrection of Jesus. Far more important than saying "I'll pray for you" is the actual praying, of which these words form the beginning.

And the vitality of our prayer comes from the love we bring before God for the mystery of that person's life. When we pray as Christians for another person, we recognize and affirm of our unity with that person in Christ's body, in which the fulfillment of all things has "already" been radically achieved and is being carried out in space and time "mystically" (which is to say "really," in the most profound sense).

When we take up another's needs as our own and bring them before God, we in some sense participate in Christ's redemption. The Holy Spirit unites us with Jesus and joins our prayer to His pouring out of Himself in love on the cross which applies to every place and time, every circumstance, every person in the history of the world. It is God's will that we might really share in the love of Christ's heart, in His ardent desire and His particular attention to the person we pray for.

This an essential, though incomprehensible, dimension of how prayer "works" in God's plan for each person and for the whole world. This is the reality of the body of Christ "extended" through all time, the unfolding through history and through our lives together of the victory of His resurrection.

The Weak of the World

"God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise,
and God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong, and God chose the lowly and despised of the world, those who count for nothing, to reduce to nothing those who are something, so that no human being might boast before God. It is due to Him that you are in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, as well as righteousness, sanctification, and redemption."
~1 Corinthians 1:27-30

This Painful and Beautiful Summer

We  had three really lovely days way down south on the Atlantic coast last week. It had been more than ten years since I had last seen the ocean. Josefina had never been to the beach in her entire life. It was a happy, unexpected coincidence of circumstances that opened the possibility (and determined the location) of this last minute trip.

I'm really glad we went, and it was lots of fun.

It was also much too far away, and I'm totally pooped. The traveling really wore me out.

I'm slowly arranging some pictures and I will share them here soon, along with more specific details. Right now I'm just trying to recuperate a little.

It all fits in, I guess, with these recent months, this painful and beautiful summer. The pain of this time seems obvious enough on various levels: my own pain, the pains that are tearing apart my friends and weighing down my country and the world, the bloodshed and the "aftermath" that remains for the afflicted when everyone else has moved on to the next preoccupation.

The beauty, however, is veiled and mysterious. I can't really describe what I mean or even why I mention it at all. But I can't deny it. It's my faith and my hope and the love that they generate, drop by drop from the dry stone of my soul.

It's so hard.

I can't take refuge in sentimentalism or platitudes. They don't hold up. Nothing shields me from this cold, hard, real beauty.