John Janaro's Blog, page 241

Forward to What Lies Ahead

The Church Fathers ... they really 'get it.' Here Gregory Nazianzen ("the Theologian") preaches around the year 390 on Christian community. He nails it.

"Let each one of us, no matter what his walk of life or circumstances, offer to God all that he can on every occasion according to the measure of his capacity, according to the gift bestowed upon him.... Let one contribute his riches, another his abject poverty;...one a commendable deed, another a perceptive thought; one a timely remark, another eloquent silence;...one virginity that is pure and severs all contact with the world, another a marriage that is devout and in no way divorced from God; one fasting that is not tainted with pride; another feast tempered by restraint; one unbroken prayers and spiritual hymns, another the care of the poor; all of us our tears, all of us our purification, all of us our upliftment and a straining forward to what lies ahead" (Saint Gregory Nazianzen).

Roberto Clemente: Grace in the Flesh of the Moment

New Year's Day.

It means many things, but to a group of people from my generation who happened to be sports-crazy kids growing up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania or Puerto Rico, this day will forever be associated with El Magnifico, "the Great One," Roberto Clemente.
We had witnessed his passion and courage on the baseball field, and it was clear even to a ten year old boy like me that this was something more than just playing a game for Roberto Clemente. This was a way of living life, of going out into the day and putting forth everything, risking everything for the possibility of finding beauty and grace in the flesh of the moment.
January 1, 1973 is as clear in my mind as yesterday. My Dad was doing something (shaving?) in the bathroom with the door open, and he had turned on his transistor radio.

It was a news report. An urgent news report. And we couldn't believe what we were hearing. We just couldn't believe it....

Roberto Clemente and a plane loaded with relief supplies for earthquake-stricken Nicaragua had disappeared over the ocean off the coast of Puerto Rico.

The Coast Guard.... Search parties, divers.... What were they looking for? Was there still hope? Maybe he survived and swam to a little island somewhere!
I kept hoping, we all kept hoping... for awhile.
But then reality dawned upon us.


Roberto Clemente died in a plane crash, on a mission of mercy to people in desperate need. It was clear to us even then that he had taken the ultimate risk, that he had offered his life on that day.
And we mourned the loss of him. At the same time, the whole thing was somehow "not surprising." We watched Roberto Clemente "offer his life" over and over, in every at-bat, every time he ran the bases, and in right field... Oh yes! He was always pouring himself out: the way he played baseball gave the impression of a man with a singular passion, a very specific destiny that was worth dying for.
I didn't have these words when I was ten years old, but it is that ten-year-old who lives in me today who is speaking from an indelible memory.
As the years went by I learned the details of the event. The earthquake of December 23, 1972 in Nicaragua was a humanitarian catastrophe of epic scale. It was comparable to what happened in Haiti in 2010. We all remember how difficult the Haitian relief effort was, especially in the first days. And in 1972 coordinated humanitarian aid for natural disasters in third world countries was in its pioneer days.
There wasn't much of a "script" to follow (there still isn't, really). But Clemente, who has just returned from a month of coaching a youth sports camp in Nicaragua, rolled up his sleeves and got to work. He was one of the most well known and well respected figures in the Caribbean and Central America. He summoned his fellow Puerto Ricans to give whatever resources they could. Food and medical supplies were desperately needed.
But Nicaragua's government and military were corrupt, and were looting the supply planes that came into the country. Clemente had no troops to accompany and secure his relief effort. He had only one "political" asset on hand that could command the respect of everyone and ensure the safe delivery of needed supplies: himself. In the midst of such an emergency, El Magnifico thought his own stature in the region would be sufficient to put local government looters to shame and focus the work of everyone on the ground.
In any case, he thought it was worth the risk.
There has been much discussion about the faulty aircraft, its excessive load, and its unqualified crew. It appears that Clemente himself was aware of the dangers, as he refused the offers of several friends who wanted to accompany him on the night of January 31, 1972. For the chance of helping thousands of people, he took the risk only for himself.
Roberto Clemente often acknowledged that God holds the life and death of every person in His hands. It was his simple trust in God that gave him strength to take risks--not out of recklessness but in the service of building up the good. He knew that "greatness" is nothing if it does not spend itself in service and fulfill itself by being given away. Clemente was a flawed man, certainly, but he was a man of faith, and in the end he really was a hero.
All these things I learned later.
But I can still feel the sorrow I felt as a child on New Year's Day. It is a sorrow mixed with awe and something like gratitude. Roberto Clemente defined an aspiration in me that still remains (though I nearly always fall short): the desire to be courageous in responding to the needs of the moment, to risk everything to find beauty and grace in the flesh of the moment.
Roberto Clemente, acknowledging cheers after his 3,000th (and last) hit, Sept 30, 1972. Rest in peace, brother. And thank you.

We're Awkward, Clumsy, Blundering, but We Move Forward

Well well, 2015. Goodbye.

You have been a hard year for many people. A year of sorrow and pain. You are ending, however, with the promise of mercy. The Jubilee Year of Mercy is about so much more than we realize.

The Infinite Mystery, who gives us our being and draws our hope, wants us to know that He is with us. He is with us.

Mercy is more than just "helping those in need." It is a solidarity of the heart. Ultimately we are truly merciful when we turn to one another and say, "Your suffering is my suffering... your need is my need." That is why the "works of mercy" are not only benevolent acts we do for others. They are also a school in which we learn the depths of our own poverty, our hunger, and how these depths are transformed into the great spaces for giving and receiving love.

In this way, we can begin to understand that God is Mercy.

We will also begin to see the only possible foundation for peace in our families, our communities, our nations, and among the peoples of the world. It is not "tolerance." It is not mere "coexistence." It is solidarity.

Yes, it means that we will have to suffer. But we are all suffering anyway. We can suffer alone, or we can suffer together. We can remain isolated, holding onto our pain like a grudge, refusing to let go of the rage, the bitterness, the cynicism that we use to cover over our own humiliation. Or we can open ourselves, in a real way, to the mystery of mercy, to the discovery of our own aching need and the needs of others.

Only if we open up our own vulnerability will we find the One who has taken our weakness upon Himself, who is bringing forth from our nothingness a new existence, a new healing, a new capacity to love and to be loved.

And this openness takes place in relation to the persons who have been given to us, our "neighbors," our brothers and sisters.

This takes time. Suffering together in solidarity, coming together in our hearts, is a hard work that we must learn. It is awkward, clumsy, full of mistakes and apparent failures, messy, blundering... but we move forward. We never give up.

We find strength, courage, light, and hope, because He is with us.

A God Who Has Entered Time

"Since the Day of the Lord's Nativity, the fullness of time has reached us.
So there is no more room for anxiety
in the face of time that passes, never to return;
now there is room for unlimited trust in God,
by whom we know we are loved,
for whom we live and to whom our life is directed
as we await His definitive return.
Since the Savior came down from heaven,
man has ceased to be the slave of time that passes to no avail,
marked by toil, sadness and pain.
Man is son of a God who has entered time
so as to redeem it from meaninglessness and negativity,
a God who has redeemed all humanity,
giving it everlasting love as a new perspective of life."

~Benedict XVI

The Hope of the World is Our Hope

Mercy is an incredible thing.

During Christmas we remember Jesus coming among us. He comes for the poor, and for the Gentiles, and for Israel--for the whole world. He comes to seek out and save what is lost. He comes for sinners.

Jesus loves the worst sinners, the people we would consider disgusting. He has not given up on them. He loves them, He goes out in search of them, He gives Himself completely for them.

He wants sinners. He wants the most awful people, the disgraceful people, the people we don't want anything to do with. He wants to change their hearts by His grace, to bring them to repentance and conversion, to heal them, to forgive them, and to enable them to love Him. He wants them to be with Him forever. His heart burns with love for them: the ones we look upon as gross, horrible people--not just "ordinary sinners" but really bad people.

This should be a cause for great hope. For who among us looks in the mirror and sees a face with no cause for shame? The hope of the world is our hope. Jesus wants to awaken in us and draw forth from our hearts a true sorrow for our sins, and then He wants to fill our hearts with His love and transform us and make us beautiful.

On the Cross, in the Church, in the sacraments, and in these beautiful days of Christmas that we celebrate, He shows how He has given Himself to us, and how He longs for us.

He wants us to pray and to open our hearts to Him in trust. We must pray, "Lord, make me the person You will me to be. Shape me, change me, lead me. I believe in Your love for me. I trust in You."

Remember: CHRISTMAS IS NOT OVER YET!

I'll write more about the Janaro family Christmas Day and ongoing celebration when I get the chance. Meanwhile, I'll leave you with a simple message:

Don't forget to KEEP CELEBRATING CHRISTMAS!

The "Christmas Season" is not over. Some think otherwise. In the world of Retail Sales, December 26 is...


...Valentine's Day? SERIOUSLY??? This is a real picture from a real store this morning!!!

No no no no no no no no no no no no! Just... totally... NO!!!

Oh well, sales is a wacky world of its own. But those of us who are Catholic Christians should not shape our lives according to this pattern. We should know better.

Christmas is not over. Indeed, it has just begun.

We are celebrating the fact that God has come to dwell with us. The Infinite Mystery has become a man so that He can walk with us and endure our pain... because He loves us!

Jesus is born. We need more than one day to take in the magnitude and the wonder of this event. Thus, in the great family of Jesus that is the Church, we celebrate Christmas for an entire season.

"Christmas Day" itself is extended into an Octave: like Easter, Christmas properly speaking encompasses the whole of Christmas Week, capped by the "eight day," the feast of the Mother of God in the current Roman calendar.

Then the Christmas Season continues until the feasts of the Epiphany (hence the classic "twelve days of Christmas") and the Baptism of the Lord. This concludes the proper liturgical season in the current Roman rite, but it is traditional (and very nice too in the dark days of January) to extend Christmas season and especially to keep our Nativity scenes and some of our decorations up for 40 days, taking us all the way to February 2, the feast of the Presentation of Jesus in the temple of Jerusalem.

In any case, this is just DAY TWO. You know, "the second day of Christmas..." etc.?

So by all means, continue to have a "Merry Christmas"!

Merry Christmas Day!

Agnese's Birthday: An Adventure in Time and Space!

We had a great day for Agnese's 17th birthday. She had grown so quickly into such a beautiful, intelligent, and talented young lady. So quickly indeed.

In fact, when I went online that morning, I immediately learned a remarkable fact: Facebook cares about me! Wow. And they showed their love by marching me down my own memory lane. Since I began using Facebook in 2009, I have (with the exception of one year) faithfully noted Agnese's birthday, sometimes with pictures.

Meanwhile, Agnese has been growing up.






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Thank you, God. It has been an amazing six years. Eileen and I have "grown" too during this time; we have grown in the adventure of parenthood, which continues to be surprising and challenging and above all gratuitous. These human persons: nothing is more obvious than the fact that we did not make them. They belong to themselves, from the hand of the only One who can give them this fundamental gift.

At the heart of parenthood there is wonder. Astonishment. Gratitude.

Agnese baked her own birthday cake, as she has for several years now. (She also makes my birthday cheesecake.) The theme for this year was from everybody's favorite goofy wacky British space adventure/fantasy, Doctor Who. The reboot beginning in 2005 has been a big success in America even while preserving its silly aliens with their hilarious costumes, and its preposterous plots woven together with baloney-"science" that creates adventures for its occasionally powerful, sometimes brilliant and often bumbling hero.

The contemporary series has benefited from the talented and dashing young Englishmen who have played the role of the Doctor. I think David Tennant remains the favorite around this house. He is the imperiled Doctor in this amazing cake. His blue time/space machine, the TARDIS (disguised as an early 1960s British police phone booth) is here surrounded by the deadly Daleks (and they do look pretty much like this in the show:


Seriously, the most dangerous beings in the universe look like this, but with a bit more "metal." Just see for yourself:


Of course, they shoot death rays while shouting obnoxiously: EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE! Needless to say, however, the Doctor always finds a way to beat them.


Woooosh! The TARDIS escapes through time and space, with one birthday candle representing all seventeen years of Agnese's life (you know, "wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff!").

We promply exterminated those chocolate Daleks with mocha icing and truffle tops. The cake should last a long time, because (as every Whovian knows) it's "bigger on the inside"!

Okay, I'll stop.

Actually, Agnese has many talents besides baking fun cakes. She draws magnificently. I don't hesitate to post this since she has shared it and other drawings on Pinterest and art websites. David Tennant as the Doctor rendered in pencil by my daughter:


Happy Birthday Agnese!

Radiant Dawn

An Open Letter to My Dear Former Students

Dear Former Students,

As Christmas approaches I have a few words especially for you. I speak here not only those of you that I know well, but also the many familiar faces who never had me in class as a professor but saw me every so often on campus. We passed through important years together in the life of a growing school.

I want to say, first of all, "Thank you!"

It's beautiful to watch your lives mature after you graduate from college, to see the adventures, the work, the young families, and to continue on the path of life together as adults in solidarity.

I love your pictures: the places you live, your travels, the food you eat, and--of course--your kids. I can relate directly to kid craziness. Most of mine have gotten older, but it wasn't so long ago when they were all little. And, of course, I still have one that qualifies as a "little kid" and requires the attention of a little kid (though not nearly as much as when I started writing this blog over four years ago).

I also know that some of you are experiencing troubles, sorrows, frustration. Some marriages have led to separation. Children have been a source of many trials. People have grappled with various illnesses, including mental illness.

Some people have left the Church. I know that. You have found that the old inspiring speeches and the charge of "Instaurare Omnia in Christo" and even a solid (but by no means complete) education have been inadequate for the complexity of the world you now live in. And the questions of life are larger than you had realized.

I'm sorry, of course. At a college, we can only do the best we can with educating and building up a constructive environment. We teachers and administrators have our own idiosyncracies and limits. We are sinners. Please forgive us.

But there is nothing in this world that can address the complexities and answer the questions that are not just intellectual but that constitute the depths of you as a person. Only Jesus can do that. The real Jesus: that tremendous Person who loves each of us with a wild and unpredictable love.

Sometimes when people "lose the faith," they are actually going through a phase of life in which what they're really "losing" are their own reductionist ideas. They are finding that it's not enough to know philosophy or theology as a collection of logically connected terms. It's not enough to have ideas about God. They are finding that they cannot live life with a mere conception of God, Christ, and the Church that is devoid of mystery, relationship, and the freedom of love.

We can become disoriented when we are stripped of our illusory images and false self-confidence. But we can also allow a space to open up within us where the Mysterious One who is beyond-all-things can really begin to speak. We can rediscover Jesus and what it means to belong to Him in the Church.

Dear students, we are all suffering in different ways. Maybe in school we teachers didn't appreciate that fact as well as we ought. I'm sorry on my own behalf. I had many sufferings in those days and yet I knew so little about compassion. I think I have learned a bit more since then.

The poor internet is not much. Just pictures and words, often ill-considered words. But I hope it at least reminds us that we are not alone.

You are not alone.

Whatever you're going through--whether things are going well or badly, whether your faith is strong or weak or gone entirely--the journey that you and I began to make together at a little college in Appalachia continues. We can still help each other.

Whatever may be the distractions of the internet, this possibility is one of its great benefits, and it is a special blessing for those of us who are united in Christ. To be able to pray for one another and share one another's joys and sorrows is a real grace.

And for those who have drifted away for whatever reason, or find themselves in darkness, please remember that we are still with you. I'm still here. I'm still your old professor, though I have no plans to lecture you. We're at a different place in life now. It's more important that I listen to you.

That is something I am always ready to do.