John Janaro's Blog, page 231

Kateri Tekakwitha: A Girl Who Still Shows Us the Ways of Love

On this feast day of the flower of North America, Saint Kateri Tekakwitha (1656-1680), I'm posting the story I published two years ago in MAGNIFICAT (July 2014).
In every place and time, when the Gospel is preached, courageous young women rise up who follow Jesus with all their hearts. Their beautiful (and often mysteriously brief) lives are a shining witness, and their light brightens the path for those around them and for those who come after.

You Are Precious to Him

"Jesus loves you always,even when you don’t feel worthy.When not accepted by others,[or] even by yourself sometimes,He is the one who always accepts you.Only believe, you are precious to Him.Bring all you are suffering to His feet,only open your heartto be loved by Him as you are.He will do the rest."

~Mother Teresa

Love and Mercy, Today, for the Whole Mess of My Life

We are more than halfway through this year of 2016. And I am already beginning to see the approach of my "mid-50s." There are so many memories to look back upon.

And I must face the truth: I have made a great bungle of my life.

I have failed at nearly everything, and when I have succeeded it has been by the energy of pride and ambition, the self-promotion of vanity and hypocrisy, the desires for what I want, for what pleases me and gives me comfort, for what gratifies my ego and fosters my sentimental illusions.

Illusions. So many illusions. But relentless time begins to make them crumble. I begin to taste the temptations of the later years of life: desperate self-justification, bitterness, envy, cynicism, despair.

However it may look to others or to my own self-deception, there can be no denying that my life has been a mess.

And I cannot use "illness" as an excuse. On the contrary, my greatest failures and (worse) hypocritical, posturing pseudo-"successes" are in the ways I have understood and responded to suffering.

But wait. Stop. Am I not a good man? I pray. I try, at least sometimes. I do believe the advice I have given to others, "Keep praying. Keep trying. Move forward. Never give up!" I haven't given up. Right?

I do try, and when I fail I get up and try again. But so often it's all just tepid. It's half-hearted. It's all tinged, everywhere, with selfishness. Yes, I have loved! But always there is, somewhere, the weight that pulls at least some of that love down from the level of a gift to the level of a transaction. I give of myself, but because I am expecting to get in return.

I have loved, really and honestly, but not with an entire purity of heart. There is always some part of my heart that is calculating and maneuvering so that whatever I good I do, it always ends up being about me.

Too often this selfish tinge is what gives energy to the motivation to love. When I can't see what's in it for me, my love is small and weak and driven by duties that I rationalize away as much as possible.

I look back on 53-and-a-half years of being a proud, irresponsible, vain, lazy, foolish man. It didn't have to be this way. My life could have been so much better!

I suppose it could have been worse, but I can't take credit for that. The grace and the calling and the beauty of God have been so abundantly showered upon me in my life. If I have accomplished anything truly well, if I have loved rightly and truly given myself at all (beyond the murky mixture of my own obscure motives), it is because of the action of this grace in my soul.

Grace and mercy.

What of all the failures of the past? God in His mercy will turn all of it to the good, if only I trust in Him and love Him, now, today.

My love will still be tinged with selfishness, but the miracle is the wonder, the fascination, the recognition and response to God that He begins to engender within my poor love by His healing and transforming grace.

The real story of my life is the mysterious story of what His grace and mercy are accomplishing in me as I beg for His presence, as I seek to adhere to Him and trust in Him and let myself be embraced by Him who has become flesh. Jesus Christ.

I am truly sorry for my foolish life and I am determined to keep trying to do better, to grow as a person, to grow in understanding and love and doing good. But my hope is not in any power that I can give to myself (I should know better by now), much less in an inventory of what I'd like to imagine I've accomplished in my long and mixed up past (God help me!).

My hope is in Him. My hope is in Jesus Christ. By His grace, I hope to adhere to Him whose redeeming love is greater than my weakness, who has loved me from the beginning, who never gives up on me.

A Path in a Park

This image is from a photo that I augmented, edited, and recast in a "painting" style (sort of "impressionistic," perhaps), working with tools from Paint[dot]Net open photo editing software. If nothing else it's an artifact of one of the ways I use to relax my brain.

America: "A Renewed Spirit of Fraternity and Solidarity"

The United States of America turns 240 years old today. Today is a day for Americans to relax and celebrate and watch fireworks. It is also a day to be grateful to God for so many amazing blessings He has bestowed upon us.

I chose as my reflection for today a section of Pope Francis's speech that he gave at the historic convening of a joint session of the United States Congress on September 14, 2015, wherein he addressed crucial issues of our time involving religion and violence, freedom, solidarity, and cooperation in relation to the American experience. 

"A delicate balance is required to combat violence perpetrated in the name of a religion, an ideology or an economic system, while also safeguarding religious freedom, intellectual freedom and individual freedoms.

"But there is another temptation which we must especially guard against: the simplistic reductionism which sees only good or evil; or, if you will, the righteous and sinners. The contemporary world, with its open wounds which affect so many of our brothers and sisters, demands that we confront every form of polarization which would divide it into these two camps.

"We know that in the attempt to be freed of the enemy without, we can be tempted to feed the enemy within. To imitate the hatred and violence of tyrants and murderers is the best way to take their place. That is something which you, as a people, reject.

"Our response must instead be one of hope and healing, of peace and justice.
We are asked to summon the courage and the intelligence to resolve today’s many geopolitical and economic crises. Even in the developed world, the effects of unjust structures and actions are all too apparent.

"Our efforts must aim at restoring hope, righting wrongs, maintaining commitments, and thus promoting the well-being of individuals and of peoples. We must move forward together, as one, in a renewed spirit of fraternity and solidarity, cooperating generously for the common good.

"The challenges facing us today call for a renewal of that spirit of cooperation, which has accomplished so much good throughout the history of the United States. The complexity, the gravity, and the urgency of these challenges demand that we pool our resources and talents, and resolve to support one another, with respect for our differences and our convictions of conscience.

"In this land, the various religious denominations have greatly contributed to building and strengthening society. It is important that today, as in the past, the voice of faith continue to be heard, for it is a voice of fraternity and love, which tries to bring out the best in each person and in each society.

"Such cooperation is a powerful resource in the battle to eliminate new global forms of slavery, born of grave injustices which can be overcome only through new policies and new forms of social consensus.

"Here I think of the political history of the United States, where democracy is deeply rooted in the mind of the American people. All political activity must serve and promote the good of the human person and be based on respect for his or her dignity. 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' (Declaration of Independence, 4 July 1776).

"If politics must truly be at the service of the human person, it follows that it cannot be a slave to the economy and finance. Politics is, instead, an expression of our compelling need to live as one, in order to build as one the greatest common good: that of a community which sacrifices particular interests in order to share, in justice and peace, its goods, its interests, its social life."

The Somme: A New Bloodbath Begins (July 1, 1916)

'Those about to die' head over the trenches.I'm two days late.

I have set myself the gruesome task of noting some key moments in the Centenary of Infamy. Let us return once again to France, in the year 1916.

Recall that the German army had initiated an offensive at Verdun on the Meuse river in February that turned into a six month blood-drenched stalemate. With the hell of Verdun still swallowing the young lives of French and German alike, the allied forces nonetheless decided to go ahead with their plan to open an offensive of their own to the northwest, along the Somme river.

The plan drawn up the previous year had called for the French to lead the offensive with support from the British Expeditionary Force. But since the French were too busy dying at Verdun, the majority of the offensive was given over to the British.

It began on July 1, 1916. Now it was England's turn to plow headlong into the futility of trench warfare, to hurl an entire generation of young men at the unprecedented relentless fire of machine guns far more sophisticated than the Maxim gun first pioneered by the British themselves in their own colonial wars. Now the "devil's paintbrush" turned its deadly strokes on them.

On that first day of July, one hundred years ago, the British suffered nearly 60,000 casualties, a third of them fatal. The "Battle of the Somme" would eventually draw blood from a million men on both sides before the end of the year.

Too often we must note that famous definition of insanity as doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.

Poor mad Europe in the summer of 1916. These were the same people, the same leaders, who -- two years earlier -- prided themselves on being the most advanced civilization in the history of the human race, invested with the responsibility to impose order on the whole world.

And now, a hundred years later. we think we are wiser. We think we know better. We think we are stronger and more humane.

Over what monstrous abyss might we be standing, even now, proud and blind and ready to tumble into new and unimaginable forms of madness?

A generation of unknown soldiers without tombs.

Fifty-Three-and-a-Half!

On July 2, I turn fifty-three-and-a-half years old!

ME: Hey Josefina, tomorrow is my "half-birthday." Whatcha gonna get me?

HER: ...a half of a card.

Whoa! SIZZLE! Fried by Jojo. I deserved it. I asked for that one!

She's still small enough that I can carry her on my back sometimes.

Christina Grimmie: Shine On, Bright Beautiful Star

The goodbye salute, from her room to the screens of millions of people all over the world.I wanted to find a few words before the end of this month to express at least some part of the awful grief that cast such a shadow over America in that bloody second weekend of June 2016. This grief has been something I have shared as it has unfolded over the ensuing weeks. Though it hasn't been immediate for me personally, of course, it has also been something more than remote.

In particular, as a musician and promoter of independent music, a participant in the new media and interactive telecommunications revolution that is happening in our time, and simply as a father, my heart is broken and at the same time deeply, mysteriously touched by the awful events that took place in Orlando the night before the mass-murder at the Pulse nightclub, and the responses from around the world that continue to pour in.

Above all, I want to honor the luminous young person who died that night of June 10, but who, for a few short years, brought a singular gift and an extraordinary personal presence to the world of music and the world of the internet.

Simple beginnings in the summer of 2009Christina Grimmie started to sing covers on YouTube in 2009, when she was 15 years old. She was a girl from New Jersey with an electric piano keyboard and a webcam, making videos in her room and uploading them to her own YouTube channel.

At the time, homemade videos that other people could actually watch were starting to catch on thanks to advances in internet speed and the quality of computer cameras. And other viewers were able to respond in YouTube's own "comments" section, as well as through links with other social media.

Thus young people, who are so often the ones who discover new possibilities, began to post homemade videos and to watch the posts of their contemporaries. Most of the videos that went up were only interesting to their small circles of friends (and this alone was enough to make it great fun). But there were those who used the medium to share some truly high quality creative work in areas like music, comedy, short cinematic productions, etc. Others just had a knack for putting up appealing videos that people watched and shared.

These YouTubers attracted tens of thousands of views and regular subscribers. The "YouTube star" was born at the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century. So was the "YouTube fan." Most of us older folks didn't even notice.

Christina Grimmie didn't set out to become a YouTube star. But she was a girl full of music, bursting with music, and she had a very special, soulful, and mellifluous voice. She also had something else, an indefinable gift, a charisma that enabled her to reach through the screen and connect in a striking and vivid way with viewers.

The views (and soon the subscribers to her channel) multiplied rapidly. Christina was a natural genius for the kind of audiovisual interaction that YouTube had begun to make possible.

She made followers all over the world feel like they belonged to something special, and that they were participating in her aspirations to develop as an artist. In fact, they really did help, with their requests, their comments, and their enthusiasm.

In a couple of years, her singing voice had become something really unique, authoritative, powerful, versatile, wide-ranging, and bold. I'm not especially a fan of mainstream pop-style music. But Christina took banal songs from pop-charts, brought her special vocal and keyboard magic to them, and totally knocked them out of the park. And she just kept getting better and better.

Soon she had over a million subscribers. Other possibilities opened up and she began to make studio recordings of songs she had written herself.

"Rawwk Fingers," the official Team Grimmie hand saluteMeanwhile, when she wasn't singing and expertly playing her keyboard, she was talking to her viewers, making them laugh, inviting them to share in her goofiness and wacky observations. As time went on she became more creative and more hilarious. She named her faithful viewers "Team Grimmie," invented special words, goofy spellings, and hand gestures. She built up a connection between herself and the team, and gave them credit for her own success. And they had a great deal to do with spreading her music through social media and building up the team through their interaction with her and one another.

Christina covered pop hits and sang love songs, but something distinguished her from most of mainstream music. I don't know what to call it other than a straight, upfront, unaffected joy and innocence. She was funny and stylish but never crude or indecent. Her videos were entirely "clean," but not in a laborious or self-conscious way. She was just being herself, and she had all this light shining out of her, and it was this light and its gentle warmth that she shared more than anything. She was so lovably human, but also "different" because her foundation was something greater than herself.

Though she never proselytized, it was no secret to any of her followers that at the center of Christina Grimmie's life was her faith in Jesus Christ. She was throughout her life an Evangelical Christian who lived her faith deeply and intensely but also with joy and humility. She occasionally mentioned her faith as though it were a very natural thing, but people understood that it was everything to her. This is what I perceived, and everything that was said after her death confirmed it: she loved Jesus. She really loved Jesus. This love was her freedom and the deep source of her light, and she sought to shine it even more widely and deeply into the often dark, obscure world of mainstream entertainment.

After her death, Twitter followers went back to this tweet from 2013 and retweeted it all over the world again.This is why she turned to mainstream television in 2014. She was already a YouTube sensation when she tried out for the celebrity-coached talent show The Voice. (Her initial "blind audition" has become one of the legendary moments in the history of the genre of these TV talent shows.) She sang her way through the whole season and made the final round, finishing third and winning the hearts of some of the biggest celebrities in music as well as countless TV fans of all ages.

After The Voice she did more concert tours and recorded more of her own music. But she continued to remain engaged with her YouTube base, which grew to over three and a half million subscribers. She not only kept posting videos and live streaming with her "frands" (as she called her loyal followers), she also dedicated much time to them after live shows so that she could meet them in person, speak to them, and hear their stories.

It was at one of these meet-and-greet sessions after the concert in Orlando, Florida, on June 10, 2016, that a deranged man approached Christina and opened fire from two Glock pistols, then turned a gun on himself after being tackled to the ground by her brother and bandmate Mark Grimmie. Christina died shortly thereafter.

She was 22 years old.

Little is known about the killer, and I cannot bring him out of his own shadows. Some might see this as an example of the dark side of social media, but I think it's much simpler: people with great hearts who love courageously always leave themselves vulnerable to danger. This has been true since the beginning of the world. It's important to take prudent precautions, but when the goal of a person is to give his or herself to others, there will always be a risk. Many questions have been raised once again in our national discourse about what "prudent precautions" can be taken to reduce the violence that killed Christina Grimmie and then, the following night, killed 49 more people and injured many others in a three hour reign of terror at the Pulse nightclub. These are good questions, but I do not want to raise them here.

I only want to note, once again, that love is always a risk. But it's a risk worth taking. Christina knew that risk; she knew that God Himself had taken the risk for her, and for every person, so that love would win the victory, so that love would be marked with the promise of the resurrection.

Christina used to greet her frands with open arms when they approached, and so too on that fatal night she opened her arms to embrace the man who was about to kill her, and thereby rendered herself completely defenseless against him.

It was the defenselessness of love.

I will close on this note, with the beautiful words of one of her own songs, entitled With Love.

You called me out and taught me tough
With love, with love.
You fought my flaws, my teeth, my claws
With love, with love.
Cause every time I'm slipping away from myself,
You're the one that moves me like nobody else.

Cause when I'm down and I'm done,
And I'm coming unplugged
When I'm ready to fall
You're the one always holding me up
With love.

Your tongue won't tie; you'll always find
The truth, yeah you do
But still you smile despite the lines
I drew for you.

Cause every time I'm slipping away from myself,
You're the one that moves me like nobody else.

Cause when I'm down and I'm done,
And I'm coming unplugged
When I'm ready to fall
You're the one always holding me up
With love.

Shine On, Bright Beautiful Star

The goodbye salute, from her room to the screens of millions of people all over the world.I wanted to find a few words before the end of this month to express at least some part of the awful grief that cast such a shadow over America in that bloody second weekend of June 2016. This grief has been something I have shared as it has unfolded over the ensuing weeks. Though it hasn't been immediate for me personally, of course, it has also been something more than remote.

In particular, as a musician and promoter of independent music, a participant in the new media and interactive telecommunications revolution that is happening in our time, and simply as a father, my heart is broken and at the same time deeply, mysteriously touched by the awful events that took place in Orlando the night before the mass-murder at the Pulse nightclub, and the responses from around the world that continue to pour in.

Above all, I want to honor the luminous young person who died that night of June 10, but who, for a few short years, brought a singular gift and an extraordinary personal presence to the world of music and the world of the internet.

Simple beginnings in the summer of 2009Christina Grimmie started to sing covers on YouTube in 2009, when she was 15 years old. She was a girl from New Jersey with a keyboard and a webcam, making videos in her room and uploading them to her own YouTube channel. She was just one of many kids who were making videos and putting them online.

At the time, homemade videos that other people could actually watch were starting to catch on thanks to advances in internet speed and the quality of computer cameras. And other viewers were able to respond in YouTube's own "comments" section, as well as through links with other social media.

Thus young people, who are so often the ones who discover new possibilities, began to post homemade videos and to watch the posts of their contemporaries. Most of the videos that went up were only interesting to their small circles of friends (and this alone was enough to make it great fun). But there were those who used the medium to share some truly high quality creative work in areas like music, comedy, short cinematic productions, etc. Others just had a knack for putting up appealing videos that people watched and shared.

These YouTubers attracted tens of thousands of views and regular subscribers. The "YouTube star" was born at the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century. So was the "YouTube fan." Most of us older folks didn't even notice.

Christina Grimmie didn't set out to become a YouTube star. But she was a girl full of music, bursting with music, and she had a very special, soulful, and mellifluous voice. She also had something else, an indefinable gift, a charisma that enabled her to reach through the screen and connect in a striking and vivid way with viewers.

The views (and soon the subscribers to her channel) multiplied rapidly. Christina was a natural genius for the kind of audiovisual interaction that YouTube had begun to make possible.

She made followers all over the world feel like they belonged to something special, and that they were participating in her aspirations to develop as an artist. In fact, they really did help, with their requests, their comments, and their enthusiasm.

In a couple of years, her singing voice had become something really unique, authoritative, powerful, versatile, wide-ranging, and bold. I'm not especially a fan of mainstream pop-style music. But Christina took banal songs from pop-charts, brought her special vocal and keyboard magic to them, and totally knocked them out of the park. And she just kept getting better and better.

Soon she had over a million subscribers. Other possibilities opened up and she began to make studio recordings of songs she had written herself.

"Rawwk Fingers," the official Team Grimmie hand saluteMeanwhile, when she wasn't singing and expertly playing her keyboard, she was talking to her viewers, making them laugh, inviting them to share in her goofiness and wacky observations. As time went on she became more creative and more hilarious. She named her faithful viewers "Team Grimmie," invented special words, goofy spellings, and hand gestures. She built up a connection between herself and the team, and gave them credit for her own success. And they had a great deal to do with spreading her music through social media and building up the team through their interaction with her and one another.

Christina covered pop hits and sang love songs, but something distinguished her from most of mainstream music. I don't know what to call it other than a straight, upfront, unaffected joy and innocence. She was funny and stylish but never crude or indecent. Her videos were entirely "clean," but not in a laborious or self-conscious way. She was just being herself, and she had all this light shining out of her, and it was this light and its gentle warmth that she shared more than anything. She was so lovably human, but also "different" because her foundation was something greater than herself.

Though she never proselytized, it was no secret to any of her followers that at the center of Christina Grimmie's life was her faith in Jesus Christ. She was throughout her life an Evangelical Christian who lived her faith deeply and intensely but also with joy and humility. She occasionally mentioned her faith as though it were a very natural thing, but people understood that it was everything to her. This is what I perceived, and everything that was said after her death confirmed it: she loved Jesus. She really loved Jesus. This love was her freedom and the deep source of her light, and she sought to shine it even more widely and deeply into the often dark, obscure world of mainstream entertainment.

After her death, Twitter followers went back to this tweet from 2013 and retweeted it all over the world again.This is why she turned to mainstream television in 2014. She was already a YouTube sensation when she tried out for the celebrity-coached talent show The Voice. (Her initial "blind audition" has become one of the legendary moments in the history of the genre of these TV talent shows.) She sang her way through the whole season and made the final round, finishing third and winning the hearts of some of the biggest celebrities in music as well as countless TV fans of all ages.

After The Voice she did more concert tours and recorded more of her own music. But she continued to remain engaged with her YouTube base, which grew to over three and a half million subscribers. She not only kept posting videos and live streaming with her "frands" (as she called her loyal followers), she also dedicated much time to them after live shows so that she could meet them in person, speak to them, and hear their stories.

It was at one of these meet-and-greet sessions after the concert in Orlando, Florida, on June 10, 2016, that a deranged follower opened fire on Christina at close range from two Glock pistols, then turned a gun on himself after being tackled to the ground by her brother and bandmate Mark Grimmie. Christina died shortly thereafter.

She was 22 years old.

Little is known about the killer, and I cannot bring him out of his own shadows. Some might see this as an example of the dark side of social media, but I think it's much simpler: people with great hearts who love courageously always leave themselves vulnerable to danger. This has been true since the beginning of the world. It's important to take prudent precautions, but when the goal of a person is to give his or herself to others, there will always be a risk. Many questions have been raised once again in our national discourse about what "prudent precautions" can be taken to reduce the violence that killed Christina Grimmie and then, the following night, killed 49 more people and injured many others in a three hour reign of terror at the Pulse nightclub. These are good questions, but I do not want to raise them here.

I only want to note, once again, that love is always a risk. But it's a risk worth taking. Christina knew that risk; she knew that God Himself had taken the risk for her, and for every person, so that love would win the victory, so that love would be marked with the promise of the resurrection.

Christina used to greet her frands with open arms when they approached, and so too on that fatal night she opened her arms to embrace the man who was about to kill her, and thereby rendered herself completely defenseless against him.

It was the defenselessness of love.

I will close on this note, with the beautiful words of one of her own songs, entitled With Love.

You called me out and taught me tough
With love, with love.
You fought my flaws, my teeth, my claws
With love, with love.
Cause every time I'm slipping away from myself,
You're the one that moves me like nobody else.

Cause when I'm down and I'm done,
And I'm coming unplugged
When I'm ready to fall
You're the one always holding me up
With love.

Your tongue won't tie; you'll always find
The truth, yeah you do
But still you smile despite the lines
I drew for you.

Cause every time I'm slipping away from myself,
You're the one that moves me like nobody else.

Cause when I'm down and I'm done,
And I'm coming unplugged
When I'm ready to fall
You're the one always holding me up
With love.

Morality and the Face of Mercy

"Christian morality is not the titanic, willful effortof one who decides to be coherent and who succeeds,a sort of solitary challenge in face of the world.No, this isn’t Christian morality;it’s something else.Christian morality is an answer,it is a moved answer in the face of the astonishing mercy,unforeseeable, in fact, “unjust” according to human criteria,of One who knows me,knows my betrayals and loves me anyway,esteems me, embraces me, calls me again,hopes in me, expects from me.Christian morality is not to never fall,but to get up always,thanks to His hand, which takes us."
~Pope Francis