John Janaro's Blog, page 300

Happy Easter Sunday!

Happy Easter from the Janaro family.

We had to take the picture inside because it was too cold out today! Its windy, rainy, and there are only a few brave buds on the trees. I think it may have been warmer on Christmas. But it doesn't matter. Its still Easter. I thank God for this family. We thank God for one another.

Easter Sunday. At the heart of every life, and of all reality, there is a miracle. Love really does win, in the end. We can be free, forever.

Beyond all our dreams, something actually happened.

Mors et vita duello
conflixere mirando:
dux vitae mortuus,
regnat vivus.
Death and life have contended
in that combat stupendous:
the Prince of life, who died,
reigns immortal.
Jesus Christ is Risen, alleluia.He is Risen indeed, alleluia, alleluia.
May He give you all abundant joy, and a hope that cannot be defeated. God bless you!

Holy Saturday 2013

Where are you, Jesus?
I can't see you.
It has all been accomplished.
I know that.
Tomorrow is the great Feast.

Why am I still searching for you?
Is this the greatest pain: wanting?
Why do I still "want"?
I want, I want, I want,
its not enough, its not enough.

I know you,
so why am I still looking for you?

Living, and not being finished, is exhausting.

I believe,
I have seen something....
A glimpse that just makes me want more,
makes me expect more from everything.
And I can't control it.

I am dying of this thirst.
And then there is a lance in my heart
that is turning desire into compassion,
and I don't want anyone to be left alone.
I don't want anyone to be left alone.
Is this the greatest pain?

I must leave my room
and run
and search for the dead.

Now I see you!
I see you
and you show me the wounds,
and they are shining.
And you tell me not to be afraid.

The Hour Has Come

Jesus answered them,
"The hour has come
for the Son of Man to be glorified.
Very truly, I tell you,
unless a grain of wheat
falls into the earth and dies,
it remains alone;
but if it dies, it bears much fruit."

"Now is the judgment of this world;
now the ruler of this world
will be driven out.
And I, when I am lifted up from the earth,
will draw all things to myself."

John 12:23-24; 31-32 

This Tremendous Mystery

The Eucharist is Jesus Himself. In this sacrament, He is really, substantially present. This tremendous mystery—His crucified, risen, and glorified body and blood in His once for all infinitely loving offering of Himself—made present every day by His sacred ministers ordained to act as His instruments, ministers who remain men with personalities and struggles and flaws and who need love just like everyone else.

The Lord of the Universe, Mighty God, Prince of Peace; His body, blood, soul, and Divinity are really present in the Eucharist. I can visit Him in any Catholic church. I can, even here in my home, turn to Him inwardly and focus my heart on that concrete Presence, offer Him my love and adoration, and pour out my sorrows to Him. And I can receive Him, my food and drink, my sustenance, in holy communion; thus He nourishes me and draws me into His life.

Some Christians find it hard to bear the “physicality” of the mystery of the Eucharist. But we believe that the Infinite, Eternal God became man and gave us His body and blood on the Cross, so why should we shy away from the Eucharist? After all, it was His idea, not ours: “Take this, all of you and eat, this is my body.” “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life.” Those are His words, mysterious but wonderful. They are embraced as He is embraced, with an abandonment of ourselves and our own limited mentality; our own calculations of what is possible and what is not possible for God. Only thus can our human hearts expand to participate in the life of the God who is Love.


--from Never Give Up: My Life and God's Mercy by John Janaro (Servant, 2010).Click the link to learn more about this book!

Oops...forgot about that one, again!

One way to measure one's lack of progress in Christian and human maturity is to keep a blog. Blogs allow one to look back at the past and see that not much has changed. Here is a post of mine from Holy Week, two years ago. I could have written the same thing about this Lent. The same forgetfulness about something I should be seeking all the time. Still, there is sorrow, and the desire to remember, not just during Lent, but all the time. And so I make this sorrow and desire my prayer to Jesus. Here is the text:

So, how was my Lent? Kinda shabby as usual.

I prayed more. I ate less. I gave up a couple of things I like. Then what was that other resolution? To make an effort to be kind to the members of my family. Hmm. I sort of forgot about that one. Not that I was mean to my family. Okay, I barked a few times at whining children. Mostly I was nice, though. I'm a nice guy.

But that wasn't the point of the resolution. Be Kind. It's a very concrete resolution. It means more attention, more readiness to do good to them, more cheerfulness in the little stuff. "Make an effort" doesn't necessarily require success, but it does require...well...to try, sometimes.

I don't think I tried much at all. I think I pretty much forgot all about it.

Kindness is something different from just "being nice." One can build a wall between one's self and another person by being nice. Although it doesn't have to, "being nice" can degenerate into a way of pretending to be involved in another person's life. One can use "niceness" as a way of touching another person superficially so as to distract one's self and the other from the need for a deeper engagement.

Kindness implies involvement with another person. Kindness is a gift of one's self, in a gentle and simple way, which seeks to affirm the goodness of the other person and make him or her aware of that goodness. Kindness is companionship with the other person in simple words and gestures. Often, kindness is refraining from the assumed familiarity that tends to absorb the other person into the environment of "things" that need to be manipulated for one's own purposes. It means refraining from being sarcastic, curt, bossy, or dismissive.

In families, it's easy to forget courtesy. It's easy to just push one another around. It's easy to forget that one's spouse and children are something more than mobile furniture in the house. It's especially easy for the husband and father to fall into this rut.

Intent on my own (important) purposes, I blow through the house, into the kitchen where I practically run over my wife. "Excuse me," I say (nicely), but at that moment she is just an object in my way. Then there are so many impatient utterances: "I'm in the bathroom!" - "Put that thing away!" - "Get out of there!" - "Clean up this mess!" I'm not the only one who speaks this way. We all do it to each other.

Then there are the countless opportunities to show attention and concern that just pass by, because I am too busy, too self-absorbed, or just don't feel like bothering. Love is diminished.

Okay, I don't want to beat this to death. After all, we are a normal family. We love each other very much, and we are often kind to one another. But, of course, we need more kindness. We need more generosity of spirit toward one another, more affirmation, more gentleness, more attention. Lent is a time to remember this need. It was a simple resolution.

But, for the most part, I forgot.

Jesus was kind to those who crucified Him. He prayed that they might be forgiven. "Love is patient, love is kind...." Simple, authentic kindness. It seems like a little virtue, but in the end it is a form of mercy.

I have a few days left. As we commemorate the gift of Christ's love for the whole world, and as we strive to love Him and to imitate Him, and to receive His mercy, I pray for the grace to remember, even once, to make an effort to be kind to the people in my life that I love most and so easily take for granted.

Oscar Romero: Stop the Repression...of Any Human Life!

The Servant of God Oscar RomeroOn the evening of March 24, 1980, Archbishop Oscar Romero was shot and killed as he began the offertory of the Mass in the chapel of Divine Providence hospital in San Salvador. For three years he had preached fearlessly against the growing violence in his archdiocese and in his homeland of El Salvador.

There is a bravery about the basic story line of Romero that is deeply inspiring, that resonates powerfully in the human soul. In the years after his death his heroic image has been used to promote all sorts of political agendas. He is widely admired in the affluent secularized Western culture, which nevertheless keeps his true figure at a safe distance. But the poor still love him, and have an instinctive sense of the real value of his life.

Oscar Romero always said that his desire was to do God's will in the particular circumstances that had been entrusted to him. He wanted to follow Christ. He was a Catholic bishop immersed in what was the beginning of a long and horrible civil war. He was a Latin American bishop. His lifelong commitment was to be faithful to Christ and to the Church. He defended the dignity of every human person, not simply for the sake of "civil rights" or as the leader of an NGO, but because he loved Jesus Christ.

He served the poor and the defenseless, recognizing that Jesus gives transcendent value to every effort to relieve suffering and render the conditions of life more human, even as He transforms from within the inescapable suffering that must be borne. In loving the poor Romero loved Jesus, incarnate, God made man at the center of history, Jesus living, transfigured, crucified and risen forever.

He truly loved human dignity and fought for real justice against real forces of evil, and it was precisely his recognition of Christ's humanity that empowered him to do so. It was not his own courage, or his sentiments, or his ideology. It was Christ. This is why he could hear the voice of Christ in the cries of his people and in the teaching authority of the Church to which he adhered with unwavering fidelity.

It is also what made him prophetic. For those who want to listen, his voice speaks with consistency about all kinds of human repression. Romero had a clear and simple vision, because it was the Church's vision, which sees that the commitment to real social justice and the defense of the preciousness of human life cannot be separated.

He remains relevant for post-modern Latin America, where the dictators of old are gone but the dictatorship of relativism is growing stronger. He remains relevant for bishops in Latin America and throughout the world, who are still called to defend with their very lives the dignity of every human person, created by God, redeemed by Christ, and destined to be transfigured by His glory.

In this 33rd anniversary of his heroic death, I want to present a few texts of Archbishop Romero. The final text is familiar (along with so much of his great testimony), but the others are not so well known. But they too are the words of a courageous man of faith, a man of the Church, and a man who really loved his people.


I. Notes from the day of his priestly ordination, April 4, 1942:

Yes, Christ!
By your Sacred Heart
I promise to give myself entirely for your glory ...
I want to die this way:
in the middle of work,
fatigued by the journey
 tired and weary ...
I will recall your toils
and they will be the price of redemption.

II. Life, Marriage, and Family:

One of evils of public life in El Salvador was the "discreditable propaganda for, and imposition of, anti-birth policies that are practically castrating our people and are undermining their reserves of morality" (Fourth Pastoral Letter, 1979 #19).

From a sermon: "As one medical student said and, forgive me for saying this: they are castrating our people. There is massive sterilization of women and men. Contraception materials are freely and shamelessly distributed with no fear of punishment. I implore you to reflect seriously on this matter because the source of life is as sacred as life itself and the relationship between woman and man, sanctified in matrimony, has a dual objective: to love one another and to enter into full and complete intimacy with one another not only for pleasure but also for procreation. Therefore the principle of the Church states that every conjugal act has to remain open to life and anything that disrupts life at its very source is a sin against nature" (Sermon, June 17, 1979).

Regarding abortion: "My sisters and brothers, this is a crime. If we experience repression when young women and men as well as adults are killed, then the same must also occur when life is removed from the womb of a woman. The life that is destroyed in a woman’s womb is the same that occurs when a person is assassinated or when the Minister of Education is assassinated. When the child is aborted from the mother’s womb, that child is also assassinated [emphasis mine]. If life is deprived of coming into existence because one is simply seeking pleasure, then this is also an assault on nature (Sermon, June 17, 1979).

III. Stop the Repression:

A direct appeal to the military and the police: "No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God. No one has to obey an immoral law. It is high time you recovered your consciences and obeyed your consciences rather than a sinful order. The Church, the defender of the rights of God, of the law of God, of human dignity, of the person, cannot remain silent before such an abomination. We want the government to face the fact that reforms are valueless if they are to be carried out at the cost of so much blood. In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression" (Homily, March 23, 1980).

The following evening, on the Vigil of the Feast of the Annunciation, a single bullet pierced his heart as he began the offertory prayer of the Mass. His journals and other evidence show clearly that he had offered his life to Christ, although he considered himself unworthy of it. But he died as he had prayed from the beginning, as a priest:

I want to die this way:
in the middle of work.... 

Life!

Jesus says, “whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.” And in this passage, the word “life” implies the whole of one’s “self,” one’s very person insofar as one feels a satisfaction in mere self-possession.

Why does God require this of us? There is always some part of us that feels that this is just asking too much. I don't even know what it means to "lose myself."

But this is not simply a moral exhortation that Jesus pronounces. Indeed, it is crucial for us to realize that this is not an external mandate that is merely imposed upon us.

It is not as if we could have been happy as human persons by living a life of rational and courteous self-interest, if only the omnipotent God had not decreed this alien and seemingly unnatural requirement of total self-sacrifice as a “condition” for earning some future happiness.

At some level, I am continually tempted to view it in this way. God wants "all of me" but I don't want to give "all of me...yet." This is where the bargaining starts. I want to find some way to give God "enough" for the day so that I can just keep the rest of myself and seek the things I want.

I am afraid to abandon myself completely to God, because I don't trust Him enough. But life is a school in self-abandonment, and God teaches us by His grace to give ourselves. It is original sin, and our own sins, that cause us to fear “losing” ourselves and to perceive this as a suffering that diminishes us.

God teaches us that the need to "lose ourselves" is not an external, imposed command of some capricious omnipotence. Rather, it is at the very heart of what it means "to exist," because existing is a participation in the mystery of Infinite Love.

What we must begin to learn that “going beyond ourselves” and becoming, continually, a self-gift is the only way that we can truly exist as persons. Persons are created to exist in relationship. Our spiritual intelligence and freedom are the capacities to adhere to reality and “go out of ourselves” in the affirmation of our relation to reality, and in free, loving communion with other persons and God. We lose ourselves, we give ourselves away...not to oppression and slavery, but to the mystery of love, of a fulfillment of existing.

This is “life”!

How is it Possible to Live This Way?

I found some words in the archives of this blog, in March of 2012. They were taken from a reflection posted in March of 2011. Now, I am moved to present them again, with numerous revisions in the continuing search for greater clarity. Behind these words are many particular stories, and they continue to happen in new ways. But this is still true, even as these friendships continue and new friendships are born.
Indeed, this is what has opened my life to the world, engendering in me a surprising courage and a greater openness to all kinds of people. I know that this life that has been given to me is worth sharing. This is why I am online, pouring out my reflections and my sufferings and my struggle with temptations to discouragement. I hope, in the midst of all of this stuff, that you might catch a glimpse of the Pearl of Great Price.

I did not begin to take Jesus Christ seriously in my life because I had a mystical vision, or some kind of paranormal experience. I discovered, in a new way, that Christ was real when I met a group of friends who really followed Him, and who also lived life with exuberance, vitality, interest, freedom, and joy.

I met people who were able to be themselves without constraint, who were glad to be alive, who were ready to give and sacrifice themselves and also to have fun, whenever having fun was the appropriate way to respond to the reality at hand. And it is often appropriate, because real human life is full of so much that is ironic, so much that is beyond our control, unexpected, petty, burdensome, so much that is a little bit ridiculous.

In front of real human life, some people are cynical, while others are distracted, detached, or sad. The miracle in front of real human life is cheerfulness, an innocent spirit that is not dislodged by life because it knows the place of everything. It is a playful wisdom. It is joy. It is more than resilient in the face of suffering; it reaches out to others with tenderness; it endures great pain and sorrow with an intrepid patience, with a radiant hope.

I met some people. They were not perfect people. Far from it. They often forgot about this life, betrayed it, and failed, miserably, to live it. They were sinners, but they had a place to bring their guilt and be healed and changed, again and again.

It was a miracle that they lived this life at all, but it was even more amazing that this life continued to be restored, renewed, and to grow deeper. It was stronger than the sins and all the ambiguity of these people. It was continually changing them, drawing them on, building them up. It was a new life, transforming the very real and very human lives of these ordinary people.

And it stirred a question in my soul: "How is it possible to live this way?" What I saw was not an illusion or a dream. It was a fact. And I wanted to live this way too. I wanted this implacable, unconquerable joy and hope at the center of my own life, but I couldn't give it to myself; I couldn't make myself this way.

It was clear that this life was a gift, and that it was only made possible by Someone Else.

This is what converted me to Christ. Not scrupulous religious intensity. Not intellectual brilliance. Not the desire for a safe place to hide. What converted me was meeting a group of people who believed that it might be possible for life to be wonderfully happy after all, even with all its mysterious burdens and suffering. I saw with my own eyes that the life that had been given to us was good and beautiful. I saw that the laughter of children was not a deception destined to end in disappointment. Not because life is easy, but because there is Someone that makes every minute of it worth living, and even embracing with joy.

This is what converted me to Christ: the miracle of human beings who were glad to be alive, who were full of hope, who had found something greater than their fears.

The Pope, St. Joseph, and Us: Tenderness and Gratitude

It has been quite a ride this year, from Our Lady of Lourdes Day to St. Joseph's Day. Who would have thought that all of this would happen?
But its no different than anything else in life. We have frequent upheavals that change everything in a short space of time. And there are many more ordinary sorrows and joys, surprises, routines, work and rest, changes, expectations, disappointments. Life will not allow us to stand still. In every circumstance, we find ourselves called forth, summoned. Life points us toward a destination, and places us on the road.
As Christians we know that we are challenged every day to grow in the grace and love of God, to become the person that the Lord wills each of us to be. We are called to be His children, and ultimately to be fulfilled by sharing in His glory. The mercy of Jesus is there to sustain us--His mercy is moved especially by our frailty and poverty--and therefore hope must illuminate every step of the journey.
This year we have arrived at St. Joseph's Day at the end of an ecclesial adventure (and, I suspect, the beginning of another).
But every year, this day is a special celebration of a very personal relationship for me. St. Joseph has been my father-in-faith, my friend, my benefactor for many, many years. He has taken care of me from my student day to marriage, and thereafter, he has taken care of us, the Janaro family. He is just like the Joseph of Sacred Scripture: silent, in the background, ready to take us up in the midst of change and even danger and quietly see to it that we have what we need.
We were determined to name a child after him, as a way of acknowledging his great care for us in the communion of saints. But we kept having girls. We finally got tired of his humble attempts to "hide," and thus our youngest became Josefina. He responded by taking very special care of her.
I talk to St. Joseph every day. I ask him to obtain for me the grace to be the man, the husband, and the father that God wills me to be. I thank him for always being there for us. Ever since the angel came to assure him that he really did have a role in the mystery of the redemption, he has been there to protect and care for Jesus and Mary and the whole world of Mary's children, Jesus's brothers and sisters.
My own fatherly heart is full of gratitude to him. Of course this is truly and fundamentally gratitude to God who is the giver of every gift. But God doesn't just give some abstract or magical kind of help. God makes us "gifts" to one another. God's love generates relationships of persons who share in His love, a communion of persons, a real family.
Grazie San Giuseppe! And, of course, Viva il Papa Francesco!

Saint Joseph appears as a strong and courageous man,
a working man, yet in his heart we see great tenderness, which is not the virtue of the weak but rather a sign of strength of spirit and a capacity for concern, for compassion, for genuine openness to others, for love. We must not be afraid of goodness, of tenderness!
Pope Francis(Homily of Installation Mass, March 19, 2013)

Happy St. Patrick's Day From the O'Janaros!

"A wee bit Irish (note the shamrock) e tutti Italiano!" A wee bit Irish and all Italian? Is it possible to be "a wee bit" Irish? I don't know.

I am "tutti Italiano"... although Italians don't accept that. They want to know about the regions of my ancestors. Napoli, Potenza, places near Bari, and even Catania in Sicily (there is some dispute about whether Sicily is "really" part of Italy). Some of my ancestors immigrated first to Uruguay. I want to run with that: South American Italian immigrants have, for some reason, suddenly become the coolest people on earth! ;)

I'm not Irish. But I am "Irish-in-law" because Eileen is more than half Irish. The kids, I think, are 31.5% Irish. That seems like more than a "wee bit." Nevertheless, I vote for pasta today over boiled beef and potatoes!

Anyway, this wee bit of a part-Irish lass wishes you all a happy St. Paddy's Day:

Which side of the family does the "ham" come from? ;)