John Janaro's Blog, page 237

Joseph Goes To Egypt

Here's a bit of a "poem" of sorts, for Saint Joseph's Day 2016. We must imagine here that the Holy Family had at least one loyal old servant, one old fool who fancied that he knew how things worked in Bethlehem and Jerusalem in those days, who thought that he knew the ways of kings....

Waxing Moon

Waxing moon as we head toward the first day of Spring (this weekend), and then Holy Week and Easter.

First Stirrings of Spring

The last couple of days have been cloudy, but before that--on a bright sunny afternoon--I got some photographs of the first signs of the real Spring that will begin to bloom all around us in the next few weeks.
This is what we are seeing in mid-March:
The Forsythia bushes have just begun to show their first tentative yellow shoots.

Elsewhere, green buds bathe in the sunshine.

Reepicheep also gets her fair share of afternoon sun. She is glad to see the warmer weather here to stay.

The big maple trees are still bare except for their early red tips. Hard to believe this will be a green canopy soon!


We see and hear lots of birds in the early evening. The starlings are all about in the bare branches.


And the robins are all around, scouting for places to build nests when the trees are green.

Mourning into Dancing

This text of Psalm 30 caught my attention recently:

As for me, I said in my prosperity,
    “I shall never be moved.”

By your favor, O Lord,
    you had established me as a strong mountain;
you hid your face;
    I was dismayed. To you, O Lord, I cried,
    and to the Lord I made supplication:

“What profit is there in my death,
    if I go down to the Pit?
Will the dust praise you?
    Will it tell of your faithfulness?
 Hear, O Lord, and be gracious to me!
    O Lord, be my helper!”
You have turned my mourning into dancing;
    you have taken off my sackcloth
    and clothed me with joy,
 so that my soul may praise you and not be silent.
    O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you forever.
Psalm 30:6-12

Tweets of Mercy

The only way to get Pope Francis and a laptop together is by photoshopping (badly here)

Okay you know that picture is a joke. I don't think the Pope even uses a computer. So I did a sloppy cut-and-paste with PaintNet, and...well... that's my fun for the day!

Seriously, even though the Pope has someone else do the actual posting, he's been giving us plenty to ponder recently on his Twitter account. I wonder what would happen if we took up and prayed about the theme of the daily tweet that Pope Francis sends out in seven languages (including Arabic). What if we allowed it to guide even a few moments of prayerful consideration and comparison with our own lives and priorities?

This brief meditation could bear much fruit.

Here are some of his recent offerings that I have collected in no special order:

Breathe!

Look here: I posted on the BLOG!

I'm bursting with things to say and reflections to articulate and share, and I can't get them out. But here is one small thing for the day--one achievement--and for this I am grateful.

It's important, if possible, to set at least one goal and accomplish it every day. It's part of living with chronic illness. Even if it's a really, really, really small accomplishment. Find one thing you can do, one challenge (tiny, tiny challenge, don't freak out, don't overdo it, a "baby step"). Do that. Or if you try but fail, find something smaller. Make a half step.

When you achieve something during the day, rejoice and be grateful. You have grown as a human being. It's humiliating, I know, but the "measure" for growing as a human person is a mystery to us. The measure is in the hands of Someone Else.

As I said in my book, there were days when my goal was to get from my bed to the chair in the living room so as to be closer to Eileen and the kids.

Of course, I never felt satisfied with that (just as I don't feel satisfied with this blog post right now). But what I'm talking about here is not satisfaction. It's living, growing, moving forward, becoming more human according to the rhythm of the mysterious journey that each of us has been given in this life.

If and when we find ourselves in circumstances where we are immobilized, where all we can do is lay there and breathe, then let's breathe! Breathing, if we think about it, is a living image of so many things. But never mind that now. Breathe. Say "yes" to the gift of existence, go forward from breath to breath with trust in that gift, and let each breath speak its own gratitude.

This is the stuff of which real heroism is made.

The Dawn Will Come

Sometimes I find it helpful to "switch gears" in the brain. So when I'm worn out with writing, I'll shift over to making graphic memes using PaintNet. I'm just a hack at this, learning as I go along, but I enjoy it (until it, too, exhausts me, which is like... now).

So here's what I came up with, from the Psalm in today's Liturgy. It gives me hope as I pass through this long night. Hope, because the dawn will come.

Happy Birthday to My Great Lady

Eileen's birthday was on Saturday. It was a lovely day, especially because John Paul is home on Spring Break.

Here's to my great lady! I can't imagine life without her.

Eileen in her classroom watching her students work.

Hypocrisy and Humility

Here is a short reflection on the Gospel that I wrote for today's MAGNIFICAT Lenten Companion. Please do click on the link to learn more about our monthly magazine and other publications of this excellent resource.

Meanwhile, I'll take advantage of my previous writing by using it for today's blog post:

Let's Not Tear One Another Apart

I haven't been moving around very well lately, and I don't exactly feel inspired to write. But that doesn't mean I have stopped thinking. I wanted to say something about these difficult days in the U.S.A. and our world, to take the approach of addressing the larger context of problems many of us are wrestling with right now.

So I made a video.
The quality is not very good. Except for a few edits, it's just a straight spoken reflection. Anyway, I decided to just post it.
Perhaps there is some value in it.