John Janaro's Blog, page 239

Francis's Pilgrimage to Mexico and Mary

Pope Francis spoke by teleconference with Mexicans preparing for his upcoming trip to their country. There are many important elements of this trip, but I want to focus on just one here. The Pope's desire to meet with the Virgin of Guadalupe is absolutely real.
Jorge Bergoglio is no stranger to Guadalupe. He has been to "Mary's house," but this will be his first visit since his dramatic and unexpected transfer from Latin America to Rome three years ago.
I have no doubt that these words of the Pope, and this great desire of his "to visit the maternal house, and to feel the tenderness of her kind presence," are profoundly rooted in his experience, which is the experience of countless Guadalupan pilgrims (myself included).
Through the inexplicable phenomenon of the image on Saint Juan Diego's tilma, Mary "lives there." The whole miracle of Guadalupe has a purpose, and that purpose is the possibility of encountering Mary personally, with a kind of physical "presence," a tenderness, a hospitality, and eyes that look upon you before you think to look at her.
Pope Francis gets it. He knows this place. He knows that she has asked to see him "as one more son," and that he needs to see her, to bring to her all the suffering of our times.
Let us join him in placing our confidence in her.
"Do you want me to confide in you [one] of my greatest desires?To be able to visit the Virgin Mary’s house.As one more son, I will approach our Motherand place at her feet all that I bear in my heart.It is lovely to be able to visit the maternal house,and to feel the tenderness of her kind presence.There, I will look at her in her eyesand implore that she not fail to look at us with mercy,as she is our Heavenly Mother."

Here's How Virginia "Does" Blizzards!

The pictures really say it all:


Mountains of snow have been reduced to ... well, that, along with lots of soggy ground:


Meanwhile the melted snow has turned drainage paths into roaring streams:

Poor Earthen Vessels of His Love

In this Jubilee Year of Mercy, we Catholic Christians are encouraged to meditate especially on the mercy of God, to receive His mercy through Jesus in the Church, and to do the works of mercy.
It is an invitation to rediscover and take up in a fresh way our Christian and human vocation.
The Jubilee is a time to focus once more on what is essential. We are presented with the possibility of remembering and encountering anew the astonishing bond that God has established with us through Jesus Christ. As Christians we place our hope in the mercy of God who has become our companion in Jesus. Jesus wants to be with us, to remind us that we are not alone in front of the enigma of existence. We struggle every day with life, its joys, its suffering, its mysterious and inescapable destiny, but we know that He is here to respond to our poverty with His divine and human compassion.
And as we experience this compassion, we are called to proclaim it, to share it with one another and everyone in need. The call of God's love and mercy extends beyond ourselves; He burns with love for every person, and He longs to enkindle that flame in our hearts. For this reason the Christian is called to live and to manifest something new in the world.
This is our poor world, confused, struggling and seeking, full of human persons who have been created in the image of God and redeemed by Christ, and who travel along broken paths searching for the One who loves them and calls each of them by name.
It is a world in which many do not yet know Him, or do not know Him enough, or perhaps hold onto Him mysteriously in the depths of their hearts but without knowing all of the beautiful ways He wants to help them, strengthen them, and be a light to their steps. It is also a world of many who have rejected God or who ignore God, even as He continues to passionately seek them out and draw them to Himself. God's mercy works secretly in their hearts, but it also works through us and wants to manifest itself and give itself through us.
God wants the beauty and the glory of His mercy to shine through us, so that those who are weary and heavily burdened by the riddle of life's meaning may see that God Himself has brought something new into history that answers and indeed overflows superabundantly all the depths of the human question.

Here we are, poor earthen vessels of His love. We ourselves are so much in need of healing and of experiencing His love and mercy. Our mission is not one of winning over the world to our party, as if the fulfillment of human existence somehow came from our own selves, our ideas, our projects--as if it were the construction of our own brilliance and coherence, the assertion of our own power.
No. Being Christian means knowing that we are weak and broken, that we depend upon His mercy in every moment. We are sinners. We are not called to isolate ourselves and condemn the rest of the world. Our mission is to let Jesus win us, and win the world with us and through us.
The conversion of the hearts of others is linked to our continuing conversion, our growing in love for Him and our solidarity with all our brothers and sisters--our willingness to suffer and share with compassion all the pain and longing of being human, and to bring it all into the merciful heart of Jesus who is our healing and our hope.

A "Light of Revelation" For The World

Byzantine style icon of the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple of Jerusalem forty days after his birth, according to the Law.
Happy Feast of the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple.
Today we celebrate the events that occur at the conclusion of St Luke's account of Christ's birth and epiphany. This feast marks forty days after Christmas (already?!) and a week before Lent begins this year.
Our brothers and sisters of St Nicholas Orthodox Church in U.K. have an explanatory chart for the classic Byzantine icon for this event (indeed, they have beautiful charts for icons of all twelve of the Great Feasts. Click the link above.)
Here is the classic icon for the Presentation and a helpful explanatory overview. (N.B. Westerners, "The Panagia" is an ancient Greek reference to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Here we see it used as a proper name, "The All-Holy One.")

Western sacred painting follows a similar pattern as well. Here is THE PRESENTATION by the great early 14th century Italian painter Giotto Di Bondone.


By the way, bookmark the WEBSITE that I must acknowledge as source of the image above. Really, this site should be one of your "go-to" pages for all things Giotto.
CLICK HERE for Giotto, Giotto, Giotto!Giotto's painting has the same basic iconic form that we saw earlier. Joseph has the doves. In Western tradition Mary has a blue mantle, while East usually clothes her entirely in red. Anna is at the far right. The Temple setting here is in the style of a Christian basilica.
It is significant, however, that here we see the beginning of a more realist style in the West, as Simeon and Anna are both drawn in profile. The Byzantine icon tradition continues to draw saints facing front with both eyes visible. (Note that Giotto still presents Mary and Joseph with both eyes in the classical iconic style.)
All through the world and in the many ancient Christian rites, this "Meeting of the Lord" is celebrated as an epiphany of God incarnate. We have returned one final time to the infant Jesus--the focus of much of our Christmas season meditation--revealed to the humble of Israel who awaited the fulfillment of God's promises with faith. Let us look at how many different traditions testify in images to this revealing event.
A Russian icon of the 15th century, by the incomparable master, Andrei Rublev:

Here is the "Meeting of the Lord" from the Armenian tradition:

The distinctive, almost childlike simplicity of the Egyptian Coptic Orthodox Church:

Finally, a contemporary painting from sub-Saharan Africa:

We can hear the ancient Simeon speaking:

"My eyes have seen Your salvation,

which You prepared in the sight of all the peoples:

a light for revelation to the Gentiles,

and glory for Your people Israel" (Luke 2:30-32).

A light of revelation for the Gentiles. The light still burns brightly in so many places.

Let us celebrate this feast with the light of Jesus in our hearts.

"Love Never Fails," Therefore We Must Never Be Discouraged

The second reading from today's liturgy is the famous chapter 13 of Saint Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. Even Catholic Christians, who are not famous for memorizing Scripture verses, know these words well enough. Some of us like to point out that the "love" here is not just any sort of love. It is "agape" which the venerable Latin of Saint Jerome translates as "caritas" and which we know to be the theological virtue of charity.

So we're not just talking about any sort of love, much less some kind of vague sentimental everybody's-okay-lovey-dovey stuff. We are talking about the supernatural virtue of charity, God's own love in which we are called and empowered to participate through God's grace and His utterly mysterious, free and supernatural gift of Himself.

All of this is true.

Still, look at how Saint Paul describes this "love" -- patient, kind, not pompous, not rude, not grudge-bearing, rejoicing in the truth, enduring all things.

Enduring all things. That certainly seems beyond any sort of limited human love. But also patient, kind, not pompous, not rude, not quick-tempered or self-interested. It rejoices in the truth. It never fails.

This is a close, intimate love. It is a human love, the most human of loves. It is the love that we have been created to give and receive, and which we long for whether we know it or not.

Indeed, this inexhaustible Love corresponds to our whole humanity, because He has entered our history. He has become flesh.

Jesus.

Love has given Himself to us, to each and every one of us, so that we could be touched by Him and respond to Him with faith and hope, with trust, and be transformed into lovers of Him and of one another.

If I look at these verses seriously, I can't help but be struck by the fact that my life is so far from being this way. It causes me sorrow, and sometimes I am tempted to look away, to settle for some lesser kind of love. But I would have to lie to myself (and others too) because I know deep down that this love is the only thing that matters in the end. I was created for this love. You were created for this love.

But we must not lie to one another, and we must never become discouraged. We may stumble again and again in the ways of love, but He is with us, always ready to lift us up and lead us forward if we let Him. We can begin again, every day, because He has come to dwell with us. God became our brother because He wants to be with us.

Let us place our confidence in Him, and begin again.

Love is patient, love is kind.
It is not jealous, it is not pompous,
It is not inflated, it is not rude,
it does not seek its own interests,
it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury,
it does not rejoice over wrongdoing
but rejoices with the truth.
It bears all things, believes all things,
hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never fails.
If there are prophecies, they will be brought to nothing;
if tongues, they will cease;
if knowledge, it will be brought to nothing.
For we know partially and we prophesy partially,
but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.
When I was a child, I used to talk as a child,
think as a child, reason as a child;
when I became a man, I put aside childish things.
At present we see indistinctly, as in a mirror,
but then face to face.
At present I know partially;
then I shall know fully, as I am fully known.
So faith, hope, love remain, these three;
but the greatest of these is love.

Five Years of Never Giving Up!

January 29th marked five years of blogging.

I know that I tend to say the same things over and over again. I've always been repetitive. Sorry about that. I never feel like I've said it well enough.

And, of course, I haven't.

Maybe I come back to these same themes because I need to remember them and go back to them every day.

The first quotation from the very first post on January 29, 2011 is always worth remembering:

"No gesture exists that does not involve the whole world. That's why we get up every morning: to help Christ save the world, with the strength we have, with the light we possess, asking Christ to give us more light and more strength" (Luigi Giussani).

I Follow Jesus. So Why am I Still Such a Big Mess!?

Jesus has come into my life and taken hold of me. He has rescued me from slavery to sin, given me new life, and made me a child of God. Yet I still live mostly for myself, afraid to go beyond my own limits. God has given Himself to me, but where is my love? Why is it so small?

So much of me still sleeps in superficial preoccupations. God's life in me is hidden away, buried, constrained by all my own nonsense. I am alive in Christ, but wounded. Even when I want to walk, I limp badly.

If there is anything—anything at all—that has real value in my life, it comes from the grace of Jesus. He really does act and renew my particular life, in such a way that it is clear to me that I must never let go of Him.

Jesus is building up my humanity. I want to let Him work in me, change me, and empower me to cooperate with His loving plan for me as a human person destined for eternal life.

There is a lot of work to be done.

I am still a mixture of genuine aspirations and hypocrisy, possibilities and failures, faith and love and sin and mediocrity, hope and the struggle against falling back into fear. I have a few poor and fragile intentions to do God's will, to be true, good and beautiful, along with some not-so-good character flaws, a desire to live deeply but also inclinations to pride, stubbornness, vanity, and laziness.

Then there is my overall disposition: I try to be loyal, perceptive, affectionate, and intuitive, but I have a quirky personality that is sometimes overconfident and other times painfully insecure. I have "a beautiful mind" wanting to think deeply but always thinking all over the place and ready to find some problem to worry about, some situation to overthink, or some way to overcomplicate an easy task. I have a lot of education, and I can speak and write with some skill. I also have some poetic insight and some craft when it comes to turning a phrase. I have a sympathetic temperament, an artistic sensibility, and a love for music. I have reached the age where I have a fair amount of life experience, but little wisdom and many rough spots, disappointments, unresolved conflicts, and scars. I still have vast gaps of emotional immaturity, and of course a neurologically dysfunctional brain, other health problems, disability, insomnia, and just the ordinary "weight" the human condition. And I can't even begin to understand all the stuff that is going on in the "subconscious" (or whatever it is), that vast murky underworld beneath my awareness.

What we have here in John Janaro is a big mess! Lord, have mercy on me. Help me! I keep seeking Him and I keep praying. With all of this mess, I still have hope because my hope is in Him, and all the weakness in me reminds me of how much I need to stay with Him.

But then I turn around and judge other people. I judge other people? How preposterous!

We really have to love people.

That doesn't mean we ignore when they are being self-destructive and destructive of others. Of course we must bear witness to the hope that is in us, and the One who has embraced us. We must try to help people, but always we must endeavor to see them as God sees them, with real love.

Here we have to be especially humble, because only God truly knows the depths of any person. Even when we know what's true and real and we see externally the wrong behavior of another, we don't know all that's going on inside that other person.

I gather from my own experience that the inner world of every human being is basically pretty freaky.

Jesus needs our love to touch deep places in the lives of others that we will never understand. This mystery, along with our awareness of our own weakness, should make us humble lovers.

If we have been given some of that bread that is the Word of God, and we see someone hungry, we must share it, not by bending down and offering a few crumbs, but by being with them, and sharing both the gift and our common poverty. If they turn away from us, we still have to stay—as best we can—and share their suffering.

For we are all poor, poor, poor human beings. Whatever our circumstances, we all have hearts made for God. We are poor and hungry and invested with a desire that refuses to die even when it turns to desperation. We are wounded and, somewhere in the midst of all our freakiness, we are longing for healing.

I am a poor Christian. How can I be a witness? Certainly not by pointing to myself and saying, "look how great I am." But Someone Else has come into my life and awakened an unconquerable hope that my poverty might be transformed into humility and love. I don't know how this will reach its fulfillment, but this hope engenders trust in Him, moment by moment, and I begin to find healing.

This is something that can become visible in my poor world.

Janaro Cabin Fever

Things have been a little nutty around here. We've had plenty of indoor time and some silliness has ensued. I wanted to try out some software that might improve my webcam, which, of course, immediately attracted the video bomber.

There's not much depth in this very brief video, but there are a few laughs.

Clearly, we're more than ready to go back to school before the snow makes us kooky!

The Snow Came Tumbling Down

Our mild winter was strangely interrupted by The Snow Monster, or—as it has been variously called—SNOWZILLA, SNOWPOCALYPSE, SNOWMAGEDDON, etcetera, you get the idea.

On Thursday afternoon, it certainly didn't look like a blizzard was coming.

The Janaro Estate on the afternoon of January 21, 2016. Peaceful?--------------------
Nevertheless, I knew the snow was coming, not just because of the forecasts but also because I could feel the damp cold in my bones and joints.

Ouch, ouch, ouch!!! Winter arthritis kicking up.


--------------------
By Friday afternoon the snow was pouring down. By Saturday morning it was a whiteout.


The snow let up a little in the afternoon, and the intrepid explorers ventured out.

Josefina couldn't wait to start digging her snow tunnels.
Teresa measured just over two feet of snow.
Sunday morning was cold, sunny, and blindingly bright. Over thirty inches of snow were on the ground.

Compare this to the same scene two days ago! Reepicheep got to do some sunbathing.School was off today (Monday). Our roads were plowed but there was still lots of work to do in more remote locations. Temperatures grew warmer and a few clouds moved in.
Teresa and Josefina showed me their snow cave. The mix of clouds and light made for a spectacular dusk at the afternoon's end.School is closed again tomorrow. This is turning into a Snow-cation for the kids. It's good having them all around, although I've had more than enough of wintery-winter.

I'm ready for the warm breezes of El Niño to return.

The Practical Force of Love

As the United States of America honors the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr., I present a few texts from many of Dr. King's sermons and speeches that I have seen today.
Again and again we hear in his words the underlying themes of confidence in the dignity of human persons and in love as a practical force for building up good in the world according to the will of God.
The spiritual human person, made for eternity:

"We thank thee, O God, for the spiritual nature of man. We are in nature but live above nature. Help us never to let anyone or any condition pull us so low as to cause us to hate. Give us the strength to love our enemies and to do good to those who despitefully use us and persecute us… Help us to realize that man was created to shine like stars and live on through all eternity" (excerpt from a prayer).

Truth worth dying for:

"Unless you have found something to live for that is more important to you than your own life, you will always be a slave. For all another man needs to do is threaten to take your life to get you to do his bidding. [But if you have found it,] even if they try to kill you, you develop the inner conviction that there are some things so precious, some things so eternally true that they are worth dying for."

Forgiveness and Love of Enemies:

"We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. It is impossible even to begin the act of loving one’s enemies without the prior acceptance of the necessity, over and over again, of forgiving those who inflict evil and injury upon us."

Globalization, Technological Power, and Fraternal Love:

"The world in which we live is geographically one. The challenge that we face today is to make it one in terms of brotherhood.

"Now it is true that the geographical oneness of this age has come into being to a large extent through modern man’s scientific ingenuity. Modern man through his scientific genius has been able to dwarf distance and place time in chains. And our jet planes have compressed into minutes distances that once took weeks and even months. All of this tells us that our world is a neighborhood.

"Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood. But somehow, and in some way, we have got to do this. We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools.

"We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.

"This is the way God’s universe is made; this is the way it is structured."