John Janaro's Blog, page 95

Happy Father's Day, Dad.

Father's Day, 2021. [The picture is of "Papa" reading to two of his granddaughters in 2012.] 

Today is the third Father's Day since my father died in 2019. I felt like "writing to him" nevertheless, not to be weird or anything, but trusting that in the great unity of Christ's body, the Church, some kind of "communication" remains possible and real - perhaps more real, more intimate, than we know:

Dear Dad/"Papa" - we miss you so much, but we know you are still close to us and continue to care for us. We continue to pray for you and carry you in our hearts with firm hope in Jesus Christ's victory, and His promise of eternal life to those who trust in Him and follow Him.

Please help Mom as her condition continues to weaken. Be with us as we try to accompany her in the time to come.

Dad, I feel so helpless, sometimes. I feel so confused. "Growing old" once seemed like a gentle thing, but it has its own mysterious inner pain and strangeness. Elders endure in silence so much traumatic change in their own capabilities and sometimes in their living environment. And their (50+ year-old) "children" are thrown into confusion, too. 

We "kids" don't know how to respond well to the sudden "neediness" you display. You were always there, always sources of love, attentiveness, and giving that we took for granted (like the sky and the earth). We did not know how much we had failed (in many ways) to love you and be grateful for you in all the days of our lives. In the end, in front of your most dramatic expression of your own "need" - your own fragile humanity - we prove to be weak companions. We try to "solve your problems," but we are afraid to suffer-with-you in the silence of that which is beyond all solutions of this world.

We don't even know "how" to suffer with you. We don't know "from within" these last steps of the human experience (probably because we are not yet "ready" for them), but still we want to stay with you even if it's awkward, inadequate, apparently "useless." Perhaps it is by embracing our own sense of inadequacy - by suffering it - that we draw closer to you. In this kind of suffering, prayer becomes very real - prayer becomes like breathing.

Now, I don't know "how" to help my mother, how to love her, how to accept that there is so little that I can do for her. I'll do what I can ... and offer everything to God (though I'm a mess). I go to Jesus and beg Him to lift us all up in His mercy (and to keep me from falling apart).

Dad, I love you. Our Mom was the light of your life. Help us to care for her now.

May the Lord bring us all together forever, at the end of all our journeys and labors and suffering, when every tear will be wiped away and there will be no more separations, no more agony and incomprehension, no more grief, no more sorrow, no more death.

Life and Death and Everything in Between

My 82-year-old mother's physical health has begun to decline more precipitously in the last several weeks. Though there doesn't seem to be any unusually imminent cause for concern that she is dying, she has been considerably weakened since being hospitalized for an infection last month.
After she broke her ankle in October 2019, she moved out of the condo in Arlington, Virginia to an Assisted Living Facility in the same area. It was supposed to be "temporary," until we were able to arrange for her to live with us in Front Royal (some 70 miles West). But Mom - who has long suffered from various chronic illnesses - was unable to recover her mobility after the injury. Then the COVID-19 crisis derailed everyone's plans. Meanwhile, Mom fared pretty well in her private residence at the facility (assisted by its ample staff) and decided she wanted to stay there permanently.
We are used to our mother finding creative ways to adapt her lifestyle in the face of decades of various illnesses. But now - although her mind remains alert when she is awake - her physical condition is much worse than it has ever been. I am trying to prepare myself for her death (which could come in a week or a year or more), and also for whatever she may need between now and then.
I'm trying to "prepare myself," but I don't know how. For the moment, I do what I can, and then I pray. Where else can I go? Without God, the extremity of the end of life would appear absurd. Nihilism would be inevitable. Even with faith (and erudite theological explanations), it can be very hard to avoid becoming deflated and discouraged when the life of someone you love is being stripped away.
Suffering and death drive down to our very bones the tragic aspect of life, even for us who firmly believe that this tragedy is not the end of the story. 
We believe that Something Has Happened, not to take away physical death nor remove suffering but to transform them from within, to fashion out of them the ultimate ways of love, the path through which what is mortal is clothed in immortality.

God did not make death.

God became our brother and suffered death.

He passed through death and beyond death. He rose to eternal life, and we are called to join him "if only we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him" (Romans 8:17).

We will have much grief and many sorrows. It's part of being human in this present world. Hopefully as we grow older we value what is human more, even when we don't understand it.

The Lord didn't say to us, "Do not suffer." He said, "Do not be afraid" (see e.g. Luke 12:7, Rev 1:17, et alia).

In the hard moments, the sorrowful moments, the incomprehensible moments, the desperate moments, the final moments, God is with us.

He is with us in the anguish, the awful solitude, the flesh and blood of all of it.

He is Jesus. He will carry us through.

A Sweet Start to the Day!😉

As Jim Gaffigan says, "No one wants to admit that they had CAKE for breakfast. That's why muffins were invented!"😋

It's Good to See the Steeple of Our Church...

Happy Sunday! Summer is in the air. ⛅️🌳

The future is in God's hands. At the present moment, I am grateful to see the steeple of our church regularly again. 

Circumstances still vary significantly in different places in the world regarding the status of COVID-19 and the continuation of public health restrictions, but in our mid-Atlantic region in the USA most of them have been lifted. We have been able to go with our whole physical persons to Sunday Mass, to worship together, to sing the responses in the liturgy, and to receive Jesus in the Eucharist in the "fullness" of the sacrament of His love. 

He has sustained us through our trials, remains with us, and gives us hope that the future - whatever it may bring - is the road that takes us to our Father's house.

A Pearl of Splendor

Just as the Mother of God is the unique human companion of her Son Jesus in His earthly mission and in her share in His glory, so also His particular feasts in the liturgical calendar are usually followed by days dedicated to Mary and her singular participation in His saving love. For the Saturday, June 12 celebration of the "Immaculate Heart of Mary," the Pope had another brief, beautiful reflection posted on Twitter and Instagram in various languages.

Here is what we read in English: “Mary’s heart is like a pearl of incomparable splendor, formed and smoothed by patient acceptance of God’s will through the mysteries of Jesus meditated in prayer” (Pope Francis).

The Boundless Love of the Heart of Jesus

The Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus allows us to dwell with particular focus on the ineffable love of the Second Person of the Trinity, God the Son, that He offers to the Father and to us through His humanity. The Son loves us with His human Heart so as to accomplish our redemption and to "incorporate" us into His love for the Father.
The love of the Heart of Jesus saves us and empowers us as "adopted" sons and daughters in God's kingdom. .The foundation of Christian life is God Incarnate, who touches our humanity concretely with His love. The Gospel text for the day (John 19:31-37) presents the love of Christ's Heart as the radical source of the sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist. Indeed, through the Eucharist, He Himself reaches us here and now as the One who loves us and gives Himself wholly to us.

The boundless love of the Heart of Jesus "surpasses knowledge," and 'pours out' all through history to accomplish the Divine plan. He draws us, frees us from our sins, renews us, incorporates us into His Mystical Body, and engenders a new kind of love in us for God our Father and for one another as brothers and sisters.

Here are some texts from the liturgy that struck me especially:

In the SECOND READING, Saint Paul speaks to the Ephesians: “I kneel before the Father, whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that he may grant you in accord with the riches of his glory to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inner self, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the holy ones what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:14-19).

The PREFACE to the Eucharistic Prayer bears the title: THE BOUNDLESS CHARITY OF CHRIST. "It is truly right and just, our duty and our salvation, always and everywhere to give you thanks, Lord, holy Father, almighty and eternal God, through Christ our Lord. For raised up high on the Cross, he gave himself up for us with a wonderful love and poured out blood and water from his pierced side, the wellspring of the Church's Sacraments, so that, won over to the open heart of the Savior, all might draw water joyfully from the springs of salvation."

Both options for the COMMUNION ANTIPHON allude to Christ's life-changing, transforming love as incarnate and sacramental:

"Thus says the Lord: Let whoever is thirsty come to me and drink. Streams of living water will flow from within the one who believes in me" (Cf. John 7:37-38). 

Or: "One of the soldiers opened his side with a lance, and at once there came forth blood and water" (John 19:34).

The PRAYER AFTER COMMUNION expresses our desire that Jesus's love might change the way we see all of reality, the way we love the persons through whom He calls us to grow and move forward in this life's journey toward fulfillment in Him: 

"May this sacrament of charity, O Lord, 

make us fervent with the fire of holy love, 

so that, drawn always to your Son, 

we may learn to see him in our neighbor. 

Through Christ our Lord."

The COLLECT for the day invokes the "overflowing measure of grace" that comes from this open, total gift of this human heart - the Heart of Jesus - and "the wonders of his love for us."

On social media, Pope Francis encourages us to have confidence in Him: “I invite each one of you to look with confidence to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and to repeat often, especially during this month of June: Jesus, meek and humble of heart, transform our hearts and teach us to love God and our neighbor with generosity” (Pope Francis).

Christina Grimmie After Five Years: An Indestructible Love

💚After five years, Christina Victoria Grimmie's light shines on, gently and discretely, growing brighter, bringing warmth and strength to many wounded hearts, and still "reaching" new people, "meeting them" and touching their lives. 

The love that animated her life, through which she gave herself in the moments of all her days, right up to the end, is an indestructible love. It is the love that "bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things" - the love that "never ends" (1 Corinthians 13:7-8).💚💚

Bugs, Bugs, Bugs!

If you're from our area of the mid-Atlantic region in USA, I know you've seen too much of the "17 Year Cicada Invasion." I apologize. Others may have heard that these bugs are everywhere! After 17 years of preparation, they finally emerge from shells like this one (it's pretty cool for a picture, I think). They are swarming all over the place during these brief weeks of their adult life, presumably mating, while they make noise and generally annoy human beings (otherwise they are harmless). Soon they will start dying everywhere. It will be a feast for Reepicheep if she has a taste for 17-year cicadas. 

I remember them from 1987 (when I was a grad student) and 2004 (when I was still an active teaching professor and father of a bunch of little kids who must have been spooked out - I don't recall any particular kid crises but they do😉). Now it's 2021. The next generation of this breed of cicadas will appear in 2038. 

I hope I'm still around in 2038, but NOT because I have any particular desire to see these bugs again!😝

Can We Build a "Plastic Paradise"?

We are passing through the end of an epoch, a time in history which has for several hundred years self-consciously called itself "the modern world." By this was meant not simply the "most recent" period of history, but in fact the decisive period of history, the period by which all events of prior history were to be measured and valued. The modern epoch saw history as a progression that was fulfilled in itself, in particular, in the rationalist, self-sufficient human being of the post-Enlightenment Western world.
Here, it seemed, humans had finally become conscious of themselves in a fully adult way, at the center of a world divested of all mystery, penetrated by human knowledge and rendered malleable to the benevolent energy of human creativity. We appeared destined to create a thoroughly "anthropocentric" milieu, a world entirely subject to our power to master its resources and shape them in the service of our ideas about humanity's advancement and our conception of what it takes to satisfy human needs and desires. We were prepared to construct a "plastic paradise" from the raw material of an otherwise meaningless reality. We considered it our responsibility to organize the stuff of the material universe in a rational, meaningful, and satisfying way.
Hmm, well... it's becoming clear to everyone that things are a bit more complicated than all that.
In these days, we have lived through the sudden chaotic spread of COVID-19 and the only partially successful, tenuous efforts to stop it. We also see the continual uncovering of political and social tensions that modernity naively thought had been resolved: the persistence of racism, militant forms of nationalism and other versions of partisan divisiveness, brutal wars, genocides, millions of refugees in desperate conditions, human trafficking on an enormous scale, and - among the affluent and "comfortable" - an ongoing dissatifaction with life in general, increasing isolation, and an ever-more-complicated obscurity regarding what it means to be human, and what constitutes the uniqueness of human personal identity. 
These have only been some of the more recent circumstances indicating that the "modern" project (which is in the irreversible process of falling apart) has lacked something essential for an adequate relationship between the human being and reality as a whole. Nevertheless the ideological narrative of modernity, with its promises of inevitable and benevolent "progress," has been enacting the drama of its final death scenes on an epic scale. For more than a century, the dominant pretentions of the modern West have spread throughout the world and have been generalized into a global mentality even as their apparent coherence has been imploding. 
We can recognize all of this without being reactionaries. We must affirm the many wonderful, unprecidented positive achievements of the modern epoch, and their unique contribution to human history. The ideals of human dignity, freedom, and progress - as well as the hope for a better future and a more fraternal, peaceful world - must continue to inspire us. But realism comes first.
We must face the fact that human life as a whole - lived out within the context of a greater reality - is much more profound than our manipulations and our ideological schemes. We have acquired vast amounts of information about the world and learned to subject things to human needs in a way that has genuinely improved life (in certain respects) for countless people. Yet we find that solving problems inevitably creates a new context that contains possibilities for new problems. These new problems rapidly rise up to confront us. Presuming our own mastery over reality, we change some things (for better and for worse), but mostly we rearrange the elements of our environment in a way that is beneficial in some respects but that cannot resolve or eliminate all problems, much less the dramatic, challenging, and arduous nature of human existence. Sometimes we presume to "fix" small problems but in the process we unwittingly create monstrous new problems. Thus we live in a world of technological enhancement thanks to the processes of harnessing energy from the earth's resources. We also live in a world of enhanced warfare, of weapons of mass destruction, of nuclear arsenals - as well as a rapidly corrupting and dangerously damaged natural environment.
We must realize that reality is not simply "plastic," but has an essential givenness and opens up to signify an ever greater Mystery, which we are invited to contemplate and collaborate with. We are called not to the absolute mastery of rationalist domination, but to intelligent, wise, discerning service to the truth, goodness, and beauty in the world.
How are we to carry out this service in the emerging new epoch, in the midst of people (including ourselves) with enormous ambitions wielding all the vast power that has been unleashed? There are no prepackaged solutions or easy answers to this question. We need to grow in our humanity, in an authentic awareness of our being human persons called to live in communion, and as caretakers and collaborators in the development of the rich potential and manifold fruitfulness of the material universe that has been entrusted to us. We certainly need human reason's practicality and ingenuity - now more than ever - but these must be more fully integrated within the whole scope of our intelligence, with its capacity for wonder, attentiveness to signs of meaning and value, and humility and patience as we journey over the mysterious paths of life. We need to seek wisdom, not as a conquest of the world by our own power and our urge to dominate and control reality, but as integrated personal insight for which we work with discipline and sacrifice, acquiring what we can while also hoping to receive the deeper wisdom that we need for the fulfillment of our lives - to receive it as a gift. 
This is an arduous task, especially for those of us who are accustomed to the illusion of unrestricted dominance over things by the power of our material wealth and our access to what we expect to be easy and infallible technological means to construct our fantasies and solve our problems. Have we ever really trusted this false sense of control? Look at the deep anxiety that gnaws away our insides even as we desperately distract ourselves from it with displays of vanity and false celebrations of our own power and apparent outward success. COVID has given many of us a taste (a reminder) of our own fragility. Perhaps we can set off on a new path.
Let us make a new beginning in the search for a truly adequate wisdom, and if necessary let us begin again and again each day without becoming discouraged. Though we must never give up, we should not be surprised if we are required to endure new difficulties and fresh setbacks in the years ahead.
Indeed, this world that is not "plastic" is also not Paradise. It is a world where the line between good and evil passes through every human heart, which will therefore never be perfected entirely by any human technical activity. It is a world in need of something it cannot give itself. Indeed, we are people in need of something we cannot engender within ourselves by any power we possess or knowledge we acquire.
After all, Paradise has been lost, and in any case was never meant to be the definitive fulfillment of creation. But in the face of mounting dangers and uncertainty, and all the cumulative wreckage of the past, we can still maintain a most firm hope. We know that the way forward passes through great trials and obscurity, but also abundant gifts which bring healing and transformation. We know that our path is the path of redemption.

Remembering "Tank Man"

June 4, 1989. Tiananmen Square, Beijing, China. 

(Never Forget.)