John Janaro's Blog, page 257

Light

Fists and Flames: Baltimore's Agony is Ours

The fires of Baltimore's street violence (from BBC)Baltimore, Maryland has flared up in recent days with multiple expressions of conflict, from protests to riots, looting, and physical destruction. The media present the latest American "city in flames" that has caught the camera eyes of the world (who do their best to show as much fire as possible).

The Baltimore Sun: fists and flames.I share in the common concern. How can we begin to take the steps needed to make healing possible for these deep wounds in our society? This is an urgent question, even though I fear that the road to healing is a long and difficult one.

This time, these events have also struck me in another way: Baltimore is not so far away from my home.

It's a couple of hours' drive east and arching north. Much of it is a very pretty country drive on old Route 340, passing Berryville and through Harper's Ferry where the Shenandoah River empties into the Potomac.

We are connected, at least remotely, by water to the Chesapeake Bay area with its history and its world of life. Nevertheless the Blue Ridge sets us apart. Even though it poses no physical barrier for travel today (and multitudes make the trip daily), the ridge is still there like a mysterious boundary that carves out this region as a distinctive place from America's East Coast.

The Blue Ridge and the Shenandoah Valley are the beginning of Appalachia. We cannot entirely feel like "the East" in these mountains, because there was a time when we were "the West." Two and a half centuries ago, Appalachia was the English frontier.

Perhaps that is why Baltimore (and even Washington DC and the "Northern Virginia" suburbs) seem remote to our quiet life out here. It is not hard to feel like we are in a kind of shelter. Indeed, this might not be the worst place to be if all heck breaks loose in the sweeping population centers of this country.

Still, I think we are in danger of forgetting that the violence in the news is showing us a picture of our own lives. How often is rural life a realm where poverty remains unnoticed, where indifference pushes aside any effort to understand our neighbors?

This is, indeed, the long and old story of life in Appalachia.

There is no real escape from confronting the cycle of violence. All the burning cars should not obscure that fact that even many peaceful protests in Baltimore's streets are heavy with frustration. And we don't have the luxury of hiding away under the shade of the leafy trees of western Virginia.

Rural life and city life: we are closer than we think.
There is no escape from the cycle of violence or the
search for justice, peace, and healing for all of us.The streets and dirt roads and backwoods of Appalachia are heavy with frustration.

My life is heavy with frustration. How am I dealing with that?

Does the lack of struggle and turmoil in my own heart indicate the healing presence of grace and virtue, or rather does it signify that I have made a truce with mediocrity, that I have allowed myself to stop wanting the fullness of life?

Open violence and human conflict certainly stem in part from the devolution of our society to the fringes of civility, the opportunistic predation of bandits and demagogues, and even the sensationalist provocation of media attention.

But sometimes thrashing and screaming are expressions of pain and the desperate struggle for a tenuous life that is nearly lost. Sometimes... in Baltimore, in the Shenandoah Valley, in my own heart.

The cries of the wounded are piercing and disturbing, but they are driven by the wild strength of desperate hope. They make us afraid, but we have the responsibility to listen and to try to understand and share in the awful pain.

No one wants riots, or anger, or a troubled soul. But real peace comes from commitment and humility, work and suffering.

The alternative stands before us: we can embrace the hard and messy struggle for a peaceful people who journey together upon the road of life, or we can resign ourselves to the silence of corpses.

Closeness to Our Suffering

Mother Mary, Why Am I Afraid?

Belonging to Him

A Spring Evening in Pictures

Most of these pictures have been posted already on the social media circuit. I have been able to get out a little, do some walking, and try to take pictures around the neighborhood.
I'm not feeling well lately, and the small strength of the day is easily spent. It's frustrating, but I've written enough about this problem-which-isn't-going-away. It is a long road that has to be taken up again and again, trusting in Jesus day after day, hour after hour. Often failing, and beginning again. Praying and begging to keep going all the way to the end.

Meanwhile there are many beautiful things to see in these days and I am grateful for that.


Happy Creek road in the evening, with young green all over the trees. Maple with "baby" leaves.

Blooming dogwood...


...on this neighborhood tree. White dogwood too... ...everywhere, it seems. Cratered, crescent moon. Gray and yellow, orange and red, blue and green -- all the colors that paint the canvas of the sunset.

Christian Life is "Real Life"

The rest of the world often views Christianity as a collection of external rules that more or less interfere with real life, that is, with the part of life that interests and engages me as a person.

What a grim business! No wonder people are not attracted to it.

But how easy it can be to allow this kind of moralism to become my own view of Christianity. I must remember that Christianity is a new life, a supernatural life, a life of communion with God.

Through baptism, I have been given a participation in the Divine life, and through grace this life grows within me and transforms me.

God gives Himself to me; He draws me into a personal relationship with Himself; He leads me to my destiny which is to share forever in His glory, to behold and to love forever the One who is the fullness of all goodness, to belong to Him forever.

Eternal glory has already begun, secretly, in the very heart of this ordinary life, because Jesus has embraced all human life and defined it according to the measure of His love. Through Jesus and in the Holy Spirit, the Father pours out this love in the depths of my heart, empowering me to exist and act in a new way.

God dwells in me, engendering within me a new life through the death and resurrection of Jesus. He calls me to cooperate with His extraordinary, transforming grace right now, whether I am praying or eating chicken, listening to a friend or watching a baseball game, teaching Josefina about the Eucharist or drawing doodles with her.

The Risen Jesus is shaping my whole humanity: my eating and drinking, waking and sleeping, living and dying.

Christianity is not external to the real concerns of my life. Rather, it illuminates them and opens me up to their true meaning.

Love is the Light

The words of Benedict XVI:



Window in the Primary Atrium, John XXIII Montessori Children's Center.

Looking at Things, Truly...

Since I am 52 years old, I suppose this is my 53rd Spring season. My 53rd Easter season.
I have seen many Winters, indeed. This past Winter was, perhaps, the most beautiful one that I can remember. It was a long and contemplative time, full of unexpected surprises of beauty. No doubt taking pictures helped me to pay more attention, but it was more than that.
I spent a lot of time looking at things.
Now Spring is here with its brief, brilliant displays and waves of color. Our Valley has become a garden. And in this natural season of changes and growth in the temperate region of the north, Easter comes, proclaiming the victory of Love, the coming forth of the One who remains forever among us.
I am still determined to take pictures, and more importantly, to continue to look at all these things.

Spring
Whether it be blossom,or budding twig,or dark drippy patch of moss on rain soaked stone,when we look at things,truly,even for a moment,we are thrown into wonder,and woundedby the widening space of longingthat only grows deeper as the seasons pass.Life runs everywherelike flood waters washing over our thirstand filling usand bursting holes in our hearts so that we die.But we are also remindedthat time's tomb cannot hold us.For we have heard the promise.It is the promisethat the wonder in the brief gloryof feathery flower petalsis worth seeing again and again,even when we are old,when the heart holes of longing are achingand frail and beautiful,burning open with soft fire as everything speaks,in its singular simple way,of the promise long held, and drawing near.

Death, Taxes, God, and Caesar

And so, it's April 15th. Happy American Tax Day. Blah! Boooo! Help!!!

Of course, not everyone waits until the last minute. Maybe you filed weeks ago. Maybe you're getting a refund.

Still, today is a day that we all must remember the fragility of our lives at the hands of the powers of this world. Even those who benefit from the system know that it is a ponderous, ambivalent, and sometimes capricious patron.

They say that there are two things that cannot be avoided in this life: Death and Taxes. It seems to me not insignificant that the One who embraced death for us all began His life by being enrolled in the census.

The Savior of the world was born in Bethlehem with the help of the Roman imperial bureaucracy and its tax system.

Joseph the Builder paid taxes. Jesus paid them too, in the many years of His quiet labor. When God took human nature, He became one of the multitude in the empire of Caesar. He Himself bid us to pay lawful taxes, to "render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's" (Mark 12:17).

So today, even as we recognize Caesar's authority to tax our money, we remember also that we must render to God what belongs to God, our consciences. Yet God seems so far away when the forces of the world loom over us. It would seem like nothing for worldly power to crush the human conscience if it runs out of ideas for how to corrupt it.

And if there were nothing but worldly power and then death, what hope would we have? Where would we, who sin for the sake of convenience, find the strength to adhere to truth at all costs?

Only Jesus has defeated death, and in so doing has affirmed that the relationship of the human person to God is greater than every earthly power.

Our strength is in Him.