John Janaro's Blog, page 268

A Burden of Love

"Seek me, Lord; I need You.
Seek me, find me,
lift me up, carry me.
You are expert at finding what You search for;
and when You have found the stray
You stoop down,
lift him up,
and place him on Your own shoulders.
To You he is a burden of love,
not an object of revulsion.
It is no irksome task to You
to bring justification to the human race."

~St. Ambrose

Fall Has Fallen

Well, that was fast.

A couple of windy days and cool nights, and... barrroooom! Lots of empty branches. And, suddenly, it's time to get the rakes out:

The Eucharist and Living in Communion

It's easy to forget that less than two years ago, Benedict XVI was still pope. I mention this not out of any desire to indulge in nostalgia. I am quite confident in the continuing work of the Holy Spirit in the Church through the ministry of Pope Francis, and I am learning and being challenged to grow in new ways by his spiritual fatherhood.

It remains true, nevertheless, that Benedict's teaching is still important. Indeed, we have scarcely begun to appreciate its depths.

As Francis has often noted, however, we live in a "throwaway culture," a culture of 24 hour news that pours over information about today's current story only to forget everything about it tomorrow, a culture of tweets and texts and combox verbiage that amplify whatever clamors most for attention and appears most sensational.

The wisdom of Pope Benedict has been forgotten by the information systems that we depend upon and participate in. But it is not thereby diminished in itself.

It is every bit as much food for the poor today.

When I feel weighted with sorrow, I still turn to Benedict XVI. Not surprisingly, a day like today (election day in the United States) leads me to reflect upon being a Catholic Christian in the political and social realms of the early 21st century. As the affluent world expands and casts monstrous shadows everywhere, it is easy to feel alienated, marginalized, and isolated.

I wonder where in the world I belong.

Even some of my brothers and sisters in Christ seem caught up in fevered speculations and preoccupations with current events viewed without adequate perspective. It's easy for me to get caught up in this myself, but not for too long. My mental fragility forces me to recognize that I cannot figure these things out in my own head. I'm overwhelmed.

Overwhelmed in the shadows. And tempted to a kind of morbid loneliness. Am I some kind of a freak in this world?

I am not the only one who suffers from this kind of stress. I know that many find themselves poor in the midst of strange wealth, hungry in front of a glut of indigestible food.

Today, Benedict XVI helped me to focus. These words from a homily in March of 2006 reminded me of where I belong -- where everything belongs -- and where to find the food that satisfies:

"In the Eucharist, Jesus nourishes us,
he unites us with himself,
with his Father,
with the Holy Spirit
and with one another.
This network of unity that embraces the world
is an anticipation
of the future world in our time.
Precisely in this way,
since it is an anticipation of the future world,
communion is also a gift with very real consequences.
It lifts us from our loneliness,
from being closed in on ourselves,
and makes us sharers in the love
that unites us to God and to one another.
It is easy to understand how great this gift is
if we only think of the fragmentation and conflicts
that afflict relations
between individuals, groups and entire peoples.
And if the gift of unity in the Holy Spirit does not exist,
the fragmentation of humanity is inevitable.
'Communion' is truly the Good News,
the remedy given to us by the Lord
to fight the loneliness that threatens everyone today,
the precious gift that makes us feel welcomed
and beloved by God,
in the unity of his People gathered in the name of the Trinity;
it is the light that makes the Church shine forth
like a beacon raised among the peoples."

~Benedict XVI

Open to the Holy Spirit's Grace

Lucia Janaro and parents, on her Confirmation day.This is the first time that I can remember a Confirmation taking place on All Saints Day.

But that's what happened in the parish this year. And so Lucia Janaro received the sacrament today along with more than 60 other young people. This sacrament of royal anointing, this outpouring of the abundance of grace and the gifts of the Holy Spirit, means so much more than we can understand.

It certainly is not intended to be a "graduation ceremony," or a Catholic checking-off-the-box that brings faith education (and faith interest) to an end. Too often that is what happens.

We are blessed, however, to be in an environment where the education continues and deepens. There is some awareness among us that the journey of faith is just beginning for an adolescent who is discovering his or her own identity for the first time.

Still, we must be careful not to think things happen automatically just because we presume that we are such "good Catholics" or that we-are-so-much-better-than-everybody-else. We must remember that it is Jesus who gives the Holy Spirit. It is Jesus who gives grace through the sacraments and in the depths of our hearts, and in the hearts of our children.

Every life is an adventure of grace, a calling from God who draws the person along the secret ways of love. Let us pray for the grace to make room for the working of His love.

Not Very Scary. Just Sweet!

We still have two tricky treaters, but they're not going to scare anybody. Teresa is dressed respectfully in a manner inspired by various traditions of Native American women (and she had a lot of fun putting it all together). And Josefina is a French chef, with a pot to collect treats.

On this All Hallow's Eve, our girls are -- one could say -- presenting themselves as two regular people, like millions and millions who have walked the earth, longed for glory, and found the fulfillment of their hope. But I'm not going to get all theological here and spoil the fun.

May all the holy Native Americans and all the holy cooks watch over them.

October Runs Its Course

As October runs its course, Autumn colors are in the fullness of their flair. Autumn sunsets light up the sky in the early evening, as the days grow brisk and shorter.

Mornings also have their glories along the Blue Ridge, in the Shenandoah Valley, with angles of sun on the mountains and woods of bright leaves:



Full daylight brings out all the variety right here in our neighborhood in town:



It's a glorious celebration of exuberant color:


And bright fire warms the air in the countryside after nightfall:



As the days and weeks near the end of another year, we look forward to our preparations for a beginning that is ever new:

"The Word was made flesh...." Annunciation (from Atrium tracing card)

Remembering Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete, Mentor and Friend

Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete's funeral was celebrated yesterday in New York.

Sadly, I'm in no condition to travel. But thanks to a memorial page on Facebook, I've been able to participate in something like a "virtual wake" with testimonies and pictures and videos from all over the country.

I have read so many moving stories over the past four days. People have recalled the first time they met Lorenzo Albacete and the impact he had upon their lives. They have all remarked upon his love for life, his freedom, his joy, and of course his unparalleled sense of humor. For many, he was instrumental in their encounter with Christ through the charism of the ecclesial movement Communion and Liberation, wherein he had found his spiritual home.
For me it was wonderful over the past twenty years to see his own profound personal charism enlarged and made so abundantly fruitful by being inserted within the charism of CL. It freed him to be a hundred times more himself (if that's possible to imagine) by lifting the profound melancholy burden of what had been his somewhat lonely sensibility and brilliance... or rather, transforming it more and more into an intense compassion.

As I look back over the years, I can't identify the "moment" when I first met this remarkable, unforgettable man. It's all blended into my original encounter thirty five years ago with the whole crazy, big hearted, tireless, exuberant, uncompromisingly Catholic crowd that founded Christendom College.

Lorenzo must have dropped in at some point in those days, or at least he was talked about and loved like an uncle in the family. At that time (the late seventies and early eighties) "the family" was a circle that moved through Washington, DC and the newly established Arlington diocese all the way out to this very Front Royal where I find myself today.
Albacete with Cardinal O'Malley: old friends
This past January, the annual New York Encounter featured a beautiful little "thing" (I don't exactly know what to call it. Lorenzo called it "the two bums"). Basically, it was an excuse for two old friends to shoot the breeze and share memories with the rest of us (I wasn't there, but I watched the video): Lorenzo Albacete and Sean O'Malley, friends for forty-five years.

It was a friendship that formed around the Hispanic Catholic Center in Washington, DC, and it had a place within the larger circle of offbeat Catholics in the city.

"Offbeat" is an understatement.

Lorenzo had cut his own teeth writing and editing for what he recently referred to as "the controversial but irresistible magazine called Triumph." This is a good characterization of a magazine, and a bunch of Catholic writers and social critics, who were outside of every box in that era (and this era too).

It's easy to dismiss Triumph as a little nutty, because, well... they were a little nutty.

Sometimes they were a LOT nutty!

But the Triumph bunch took the conviction that Jesus really is "King" (radically, as in Jesus is the concrete reason for everything), followed it through to even the most outrageous conclusions for politics and society, and tried to put it into practice (with their Summer Institutes in Spain, for example). There was an intuition at the center of it all, a mysterious grace, but it was so easy to forget it and be diverted from it by the upheaval of the times. Christ became rarefied in ideas, some brilliant and prescient, others distracted, confused, or preposterous. It was also too easy to turn Christ's lordship over all things into a moralistic program to be implemented by human efforts. (Nevertheless, years later, after he had joined CL, he said to me with a twinkle in his eye, but not enough to be entirely joking, "Ah, Triumph! Everything they predicted has come true!")

Needless to say, the magazine offended everyone on the American political spectrum, and rather relished doing it (too much, I think). But the wild, irresistible zeal of the Triumph circle was poured out in various ways, and matured into priestly vocations, educational institutions (like Christendom College), and dedication to works of mercy (especially among the Hispanic population).

It cannot be denied that Lorenzo and other young people in the late 1960's got a taste from them of a proposal for a life centered on the Incarnation and a passion for Christ living in the Church.

Cardinal O'Malley, who presided at his funeral yesterday, is one of a group of Lorenzo's oldest friends. There are others from that group, some of whom still have a hand in the workings of Christendom College, who remember him and have many hilarious stories from those early years. They are praying for him now.

I reflect on these old friendships of his not only to do justice to those who will always hold him dear, but also because I know these people. I know these friendships and how they came out of a context that was deeply formative of Albacete's faith, character, and vocation. One of the environments that emerged from this context still forms my daily life, even as I also approach 25 years as a member of Communion and Liberation.

Almost heaven, Virginia, Blue Ridge mountains, Shenandoah river....I belong to the movement of the Servant of God Luigi Giussani. I also live in Front Royal, Virginia, as an emeritus professor of Christendom College, an institution that I helped to build (not only metaphorically but even physically, with hammers and nails). Now I'm helping my wife build another educational institution down the road.

The "Catholic tribe" of the Shenandoah Valley and the CL movement seem like two distinct "realms" that don't intersect, not only because they don't understand each other, but also because no one has the time to shuttle between the two. Each is a phenomenon with its own peculiar history, and nothing would be more artificial than for me to try to force one to "fit" the other, or to try to extricate myself from one for the sake of the other. I don't have to do either, because they are already united. They are really, truly united in Christ, in the Church. They are also united in me. I don't know what this means, other than it being a great reminder of my need to beg Christ for grace and mercy every day. And that is not a pious cop out. That is what I do... what Eileen and I both do together.

I am irenic by temperament and now disabled by circumstances, but I do not think that a lack of boldness or strength is the reason why I haven't caused a provocative ruckus all around. I am convinced that attempts of this kind would be violent. Rather, it is something I am called to suffer. And although I often fail and forget about it all, I am grateful for this call -- because it is a suffering for unity within the Church, among the members of Christ's body.

So why do I bring this up here? Because this is one of the reasons why Lorenzo was so dear to me: he understood the tension that I live. He understood it from within, and he challenged me to live all of its factors, to resist the temptation to reduce or escape from anything. He did this, ironically, by taking me seriously in my life, my work, and its challenges. He gave no grand discourses about this "problem." Rather, he accompanied me, simply, when we had discussions, or on the phone, in making decisions about my lectures, publications, and even taking trips (back when I was able to do that kind of thing).

He also helped guide me through another environment that we both knew well: the realm of academic theology.

Lorenzo and I really became friends during his years at the John Paul II Institute. I was already a graduate student at the Dominican House of Studies, at a time when lay theology students were unusual. The Institute invaded the public space of the Dominican House and set up a coffee lounge. I began to hang around with the other lay students who came. I even cross registered for some courses, thanks to which I had the amazing experience of having Lorenzo as a teacher. His combination of genius, awe inspiring expressiveness, and epic humor have not been exaggerated.

He spoke about the Trinity with such beauty and depth. There were times when I left the classroom thinking my head was going to explode, or rather my entire finite being! 

He would bring his presentation to a very powerful and sublime moment, and then -- with a twinkle in his eye -- break off, deepen the tone of his resonant voice, and utter a thunderous joke that, like all his humor, expressed the truth while also getting us to laugh... at ourselves. He would cry out:

                           Veil your faces before the Mystery!
It was a joke. But we were discussing the Mystery, as He revealed Himself. So it was funny and also, I would have to say, beautiful.

One time we decided to bring tissues or head coverings to the classes until a moment like that came. And when it finally did, we all pulled them out and covered our faces. And Lorenzo laughed. His laugh was funny in itself, and infectious. He loved a joke that turned around on him; indeed, he was ready to turn the humor on himself if no one else offered to do it.

He saw humor as a form of play, the innocent play that needs no justification beyond itself because it is a fundamental aspect of being. In an infinite, transcendent, supereminent way, God plays. He is play.

But I can't reproduce the atmosphere of the classroom here. I can only say that Lorenzo could bring me to a point where I was worshiping the Lord and laughing to the point of tears, simultaneously.

It was like a foretaste of eternal life.

I remember watching the friendship unfold between Lorenzo and "Don Angelo" Scola. He would go on about how "I am scheming for Scola to become Pope so that I can be made a Cardinal and get a cushy job in the Vatican!" Don Angelo was still just a priest at the time.

When Angelo Scola was first made a bishop, Lorenzo was even more mirthful. But I don't think any of us had any idea of how "hair-raisingly close" the papacy would come to poor Don Angelo. Indeed, at age 71 it cannot be said that Cardinal Scola has yet succeeded in escaping the possibility. Cardinal Bergoglio, after all, had already picked out his room in the nursing home in Buenos Aires where he planned on spending a quiet retirement.

In Washington, Lorenzo taught a course that Scola had designed, called Theological Foundations of Interpersonal Communion. This was fun. He would arrive, disheveled, sometimes twenty or more minutes late, with a fistful of scribbled papers. Of course we waited for him, because no one wanted to miss the show.

When he finally arrived, he would stare at his papers on the desk and scratch his head and say, "I know absolutely NOTHING about this course; I've shamelessly plagiarized it all from Angelo Scola!" He claimed that he needed to have long conversations on the phone with Scola the night before class in order to have the slightest clue over the topic to be covered. Of course, he would then put down his notes and embark upon his usual brilliant, riveting, and hilarious exposition.

During all this time, he found himself moving from being a "friend of CL" to being a member of CL without knowing exactly when it happened. Angelo Scola had led him to Giussani, who asked him to "help" the movement in America. I remember one year we had a "Hospitality Room" for CL at the hotel where the Bishops' Conference was having its annual meeting. Lorenzo would go down during the evening reception, and come back a few minutes later arm in arm with a bishop or a cardinal (or two) and of course they were laughing as they entered the room. We met a lot of bishops that weekend. He had am amazing conviction that something was really happening in the still young and fragile Washington CL community.

Then there was the time I introduced my fiancee to him at a dinner gathering. The very first thing he said to Eileen was, "Oh, you must develop a devotion to St. Rita of Cascia. She is the patroness of women with very difficult husbands!" He delivered this in a completely deadpan voice, but I laughed, of course. Only long after, when Eileen had grown to love him too, did she tell me that when he said that she did not get it... at all.... She thought, "who is this strange, insulting man?" I do believe, however, that it became clear to her before the end of dinner.

At the very beginning of this enormous post, I mentioned what had sometimes struck me as the "lonely sensibility and brilliance" that weighed on Lorenzo for a long time, but that grew into a great compassion in his later years. I know that he was a man who suffered much, even though he claimed that the only suffering he ever had to endure was finding a parking space.

We knew how much he loved his family, how he looked after his mother in the illness of her final years, and how he cared for his disabled brother with such love and attention. Though he never told me, I would not be surprised to find that he himself had some measure of interior familiarity with that "dark night" which is not primarily mystical but rather the fruit of a large complex brain and a perceptive spirit, joined together in the human person who can't avoid experiencing the high grandeur and the deep misery of life.

He never told me anything about this, but whatever may be the case, I always felt that he looked upon me in my frailty with immense tenderness.

I could keep going here, but I think Lorenzo wants me to wrap up this gig and get this out before everyone gets tired of his "virtual wake" (after all, there's no food or drink at this thing).

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him. May the soul of Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete and the souls of all the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace.

It's hard just to realize that he is no longer on this earth. No matter how great our faith, we still can't help missing the person. I'm a little surprised by my own grief, but Lorenzo refuses to allow me to "cheat" or evade that experience. I must embrace the whole reality: the sorrow, the hope, the confidence, the prayers, the memories, and the humor that pervades everything like the first light of the dawning resurrection -- which is the hope of us all.


Here are a few of his words about grieving and suffering:

Grief is the crying of the heart, and the human heart will resist being soothed by ideas and abstractions.... I am consoled by the Book of Job, which derides those who tried to explain Job's suffering to him. God does not seek to console him; He just shows up, and this is enough. It was not explanations Job wanted, but solidarity, compassion, love.

I do not want an explanation for why this God allows these tragedies to happen. An explanation would reduce the pain and suffering to an inability to understand, a failure of intelligence so to speak. I can only accept a God who “co-suffers” with me. Such is the God of the Christian faith.

The Eight Year Old Half-Pint

It's hard to believe it was eight years ago that Josefina Janaro was surprisingly born (she wasn't expected until December). She was a tiny preemie who needed surgery (and then more surgery and seven months in the NICU). How grateful to God we are that she made it! Contrast these pictures: Josefina, eight years ago in the NICU (a few weeks old), and then today. She's still tiny, but she's doing great. You've come a long way kiddo! (And so have we all.)
You're old enough to help prepare your own birthday dinner:

And to adapt the recipe of the famous Jacques Pepin for your birthday dessert: Chocolate mousse cakes with apricot jam and whipped cream. [And something that Josefina calls "corn-yak." I think she means cognac.]

As for presents? It looks like Christmas around here!
Josefina has fun with her Uncle Walter... and her presents!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY JOJO!

He Rescued Us

I belong to the generation that spanned the entire pontificate of the man we now know as St. John Paul II. Even now, I speak about "Pope Benedict" and "Pope Francis," but when I say the Pope I mean John Paul II.

In fact, for our generation he was always more than "just a Pope." Through him, Jesus grabbed hold of our minds and hearts. We went from being confused and weak to being convinced and ardent. John Paul II evangelized and catechized us. He showed us the face of Jesus.

It was a face we desperately needed to see.

Growing up in the 1970s was very difficult, and few of us came through unscathed. We were the children of the 60s, of all the upheaval and reevaluation that opened up in those times as the last rotting support beams of what had once been the edifice of the "modern world" gave way in dramatic fashion.

And when those last walls fell we found ourselves surrounded by fascinating and terrifying instruments for exercising power over the material world -- power to communicate and learn, to build and heal in remarkable ways, power to move from one place to another, power to manipulate our own bodies, power to shape our imaginations and those of others and to foster great illusions, power to expand our horizons and also to widen vastly the scope of self-indulgence and self-deception, power that opened up whole new categories of subtle psychological and emotional manipulation and violence, power for greater empathy and solidarity with others and also to destroy ourselves, one another, and our environment. All of this power was within the reach of our emerging personalities and freedom... a freedom that shivered in the winds of this strange new world, seemingly boundless but with no sense of direction, no idea which way to move or where to go.

So we experimented. We played with these powers like toys. We found good things and had beautiful experiences. We also did violence to ourselves and to one another; even as we worried about unspeakable weapons of mass destruction, we committed innumerable micro-atrocities that so many of us are still not ready to face.

Catholic Christians in the developed world in the 70s faced the same disorientation as the wider culture. The Church of Blessed Paul VI was heroic, but she was enduring a kind of martyrdom. She was a seed plunging deep into the earth, destined to bear tremendous fruit, but at that time far below the horizon of those of us who were thrown into the wild, primal seas of the new culture of power. We were desperate for a way to survive.

The amazing new world of possibilities and urges and speed and images was like a great flood. We couldn't direct it. We hardly knew what to do as it engulfed us. We had become lightheaded and out of focus, choking beneath the waves, dizzy from the lack of oxygen.

I can't express what St. John Paul II did not only for me but for our entire generation.

People have to understand: we were drowning, DROWNING, and he rescued us.

He showed us that we were human beings, and that following Jesus was the way to find our true selves. He held up to our gaze the image of Christ, the greatness of Christ. He convinced us that Christ could give meaning to our lives, that Christ was stronger than all the forces raging around us and within us.

With Christ, we could find the way to live in the midst of the flood, and even to walk on the water.

The Lord used St. John Paul II to rescue us. That is why my generation loves him so much, and why we will never forget him.

The Gaze of Love That Makes All Things Possible

I call this "21st Century Still Life."
Anyway, these are my riches, haha!Jesus looked upon the rich young man, and loved him (see Mark 10:21). Then Jesus told him to sell all his riches, and follow Him.

If only the rich young man had not “turned away, sad, because he had many possessions.” If only he had cried out to Jesus: “Lord, how am I going to do that? I really like all of my nice stuff! How?!” That would have been the beginning of everything for him.
Jesus could have worked miracles out of that “how?”
Even a frustrated, confused, angry “how?”—as long as it is a real question and not a put-off or a self justification—carries within it a glimmer of awareness that Jesus is worth giving up whatever He is asking of me, or bearing whatever burden He has laid upon me.
I want to stay with you, Jesus. How? Help! I do not want to turn away from the face that “looks upon me and loves me.”

Of course, we do not know what happened in the end to the rich young man. Maybe he forgot about Jesus and joined the Pharisee party—after all, they claimed to love the commandments that he kept, and he only had to sell ten percent of his stuff and could still impress everybody by dumping sacks of money into the temple treasury.

Or, maybe one day he remembered the face of Jesus, and that look of love, and went out again in search of Him. How could he forget it? Jesus's “look of love” corresponded to the reason for which he was made. It corresponds to God’s gaze within the depths of the hearts of each one of us, which stirs us to enter into the dialogue of prayer, and which is the quiet light and gentle flame of the vocation to eternal glory given to each of us.
The rich man had turned away from Jesus, but Jesus had not turned away from him. “With God all things are possible,” Jesus told His disciples.

Maybe the rich man remembered the face of Jesus. And maybe he found Jesus again, later—during those wondrous days in Jerusalem after Pentecost. Maybe He experienced Jesus's loving gaze again, in the faces of His disciples.