The Risk of Being Vulnerable

So I have presented in two parts the text of Young JJ's "State of the World Address" from September 1990. I have reflected a bit on how Old JJ might talk about the "State of Now" September 2015. It seems a bit overwhelming at this point in my life to issue manifestos like this.

The theme of power, however, is one that I return to often enough in my own reflections. "Power and responsibility" is perhaps one of the defining challenges of the emerging epoch. There is much to say about it, but let me see if I can make a start:

"How can we shape the use of our vast technological power so that it serves the good of the human person, families, communities, society, the environment entrusted to us? I see this question everywhere. Of course we need Jesus, but He will not give us cheap answers. He deepens the question in us, because in Him human persons and all of creation become more dear to us, and we become more "vulnerable" to their suffering. He calls us to live in that vulnerability -- to take the risks of loving those entrusted to us in our lives, those whose needs and anguish cry out to us. He even calls us to seek them out, accompany them, suffer with them, while placing all our hope in Him."

. . . . 

Wait. Stop. Hold it!

That sounds good in words. But honestly, I don't understand what I'm talking about. Or perhaps there is a very small, very fragile place inside me that has begun to understand a little bit. A really, really tiny little bit.

But who am I kidding? I don't really "live love." I live an aesthetic appreciation of the idea of love. Okay, maybe there is a little love in me, but it's nearly always mixed together with self-admiration and fakery. Ah yes, "the ambivalence" of human beings. "Man is an insoluble dilemma to himself," says Young JJ.

Twenty five years later, Old JJ says, "I am ambivalent. I am an insoluble dilemma to myself!"

Am I willing to become more vulnerable, more tender toward others, more honest (really), more willing to "take the risks of loving...?" Risks? Seriously, me take risks? RUN! HIDE!

Dear friends, I am terrified of taking risks. I am afraid to love.

Yes, friends, I am afraid of you.

And so I'm always hiding from you: hiding behind my intelligence, hiding behind humor, hiding behind my illnesses, hiding behind a thousand fibs, hiding behind sentimentality, hiding behind my reputation, hiding behind my writing, hiding and protecting places in myself even as I try to have real empathy and share my life with you.

I'm so sorry. I wish so much to be more, to be courageous, to be honest. I wish with an aching desire but I remain in this bottle of fear. I'm so sorry, friends. I'm struggling and trying, I think, but sometimes it comes out so awkwardly. Forgive me.

Eileen, kids, Mom, Dad, Walter... I'm afraid.... I'm sorry. Forgive me. I'm a poor human being. Poor in love.

So what, then, is this "very small, very fragile place," this "really, really tiny little bit" of understanding and desire in me?

Theologian JJ would like to intervene here and say, "That is God's work in you; the work of His grace. That is the hope that is beginning to transform you, the place from which you pray, the light of His love that leads you and in which you see the faces of others."

But Old JJ replies, "Why, then, is it so small?" Why, O God, is it so small?

And no one has any more words. There are already far too many words.

What I have is silence. And solitude. Sometimes it feels like loneliness, but underneath all of that there is the solitude. And there is the wanting that burns and burns and burns, and bursts through beyond all that I know.

The Work of Shaping My Heart

Let Yourself Be Found

Georges Rouault (1871-1958), Crown of Thorns

Keep going! Keep looking, asking, groping. Cry out for help.

 
The world is full of spiritual con-artists who try to sell people elusive dreams to trick their hearts. Don’t listen to them!

So maybe you’re not young anymore, you’re not satisfied, you’re not good looking, you haven’t gotten what you want, you’re disappointed, you're hurt. But you still have a heart that whispers Truth, Goodness, Beauty. You’re angry and frustrated because you can’t see any truth, or goodness, or beauty. But your heart is not lying.

Listen to it. It is a promise: you will not be cheated. So don’t give up.

The fundamental motivations of the heart cannot be false. They have been given to you, along with your very self and all the world you inhabit. Your heart cannot lie, because it belongs to Someone—the One who made it and who gives it life in this very moment. And that Someone has become human; He has become your brother so that He might draw close to you and embrace you.

Jesus is real, and He loves you—He is right in front of you on the path, even if the fog prevents you from seeing Him. He created your heart. He put the desire for truth, goodness, beauty, justice, love, and dignity within your heart. He is Truth, Goodness, Beauty.

He is the Reality that every genuine impetus of your heart seeks. He is seeking you, and He wants you to let yourself be found.

The Heart Does Not Die

People can ignore their hearts, or try to satisfy them in ways that don't work.

They can pretend to have achieved happiness on their own (inevitably narrow) terms, or they can try to cloud their perspective with apathy, narcissist self-indulgence, or cynical resignation.

Still, the heart does not die.

It wakes up again, sooner or later, and wells up with longing and with that insatiable thirst that dries up every illusion.

The One who sustains you every moment in your life is drawing your heart.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a time to be grateful to God. People often talk about being "grateful" or "thankful" for things, and yet they don't mention God, because they think that they don't believe in God. But their language betrays a deeper awareness underneath whatever explanations they give.

Gratitude is always a response to the gift of a person. And if we are "grateful" for the circumstances and elements of goodness that come to us in life, we are already acknowledging the mysterious One who bestows these blessings upon us with attention and love.

If the material universe is all that exists, then nothing is worthy of our gratitude. There is no one to recognize, no benefactor. When we say we are "thankful," our natural sensibility leads to the spontaneous expectation: "thankful to whom?"

Logically, it would make more sense to just call it "Turkey Day." But it takes more than ideology to separate the human being from his or her essential thirst for God.

We had a beautiful Thanksgiving day. I am grateful to God for the food and all the good things He provides. The turkey was about 19 lbs., and stuffed full of good things:

I 

I am far more grateful to God for this woman who expresses herself with such generosity in making a meal like this, caring for a home, directing a class, and loving a foolish man like me with such gentleness and consistency:

Our table is full and our family comes together, including "Uncle" Walter and "Papa and Grandma." We thank God that He has given us to each other.

And then, of course, those young people who are with us every day. We are grateful to God, and always a bit astonished. He used our love for each other as the instrument to create new persons, and these beautiful new centers of intelligence and love have been entrusted to us in time.

Also, we need them if we're going to finish all this food!

The littlest person even managed to weigh more than the turkey this year (although I think the turkey still had more fat). And she thinks the jokes about her providing extra drumsticks for the meal have really gotten old:

May you all enjoy this Thanksgiving weekend, and may God keep you safe in your travels.

Let us be thankful...not to the blind and unfeeling particles of nature, but to the One who loves us and provides for us.

We Begin When We Say "Yes"

So often we are frantic and busy. We are distracted and, eventually, discouraged. We seem to want anything other than the actual life we have, with its often obscure challenges and demands.

The fact is that we are called to real self-giving love, here and now, in the circumstances of our daily life. Why do we always look for ways to escape?

Lets face it. When we hear about "real loving," we say "yes, of course, that's wonderful," and yet we still try to run away, or else we chafe under the weight of what seems like an imposed task. Why are we burdened? What are we afraid of?

Perhaps we are afraid to love because we think we have to make it happen by ourselves. We find no power within ourselves to love. We want to, but we can't. Everything in us feels bent, distorted, tainted by the monster of our ego. And we think that all we have is our own brokenness.

But this is not true. We are not alone. First and fundamentally, before and within everything else, we are loved. We begin to give ourselves in love when we say "yes" to the love that is being given to us.

There is a Someone, right now, who says to each and every one of us, "I love you. You are precious to me. You are beautiful." We cannot begin to imagine how much we are loved and cherished in this very moment. 

Our hearts are not lying to us. The Other we are seeking is already with us, and begs us to open our hearts.

"You are beautiful."

"But I don't deserve to be loved," you say. "I am full of my own guilt."

But you are loved by Someone who forgives everything. Everything.

Open your heart. Let yourself be loved.

My Hunger Cries Out For You

Lord Jesus,
in the Eucharist You are present
with the whole of the love
that penetrates the depths of our suffering.

Lord Jesus, I am hurting.
I am haunted by my own failure.
I cannot live by myself.
I am dry and shriveling and dying
of hunger.

I turn my heart to You,
O Eucharistic Lord
I need You.
My nothingness cries out
to Your small, hidden, humble love.

O Lord, unite me to Yourself.
Fill this depthless hunger,
this me,
this gigantic longing
that breaks through all my strange pains
and cries out for You. 

How Can We Make The World Better?

We're all so worried about the world, about its evils and injustices. These are evil times, we say. People are full of selfishness and violence, and our political leaders are driven by destructive agendas.

It would not be realistic to deny any of these points. And indeed, we are all called to do what we can to build up the good, and to struggle against the evils that afflict our society, our communities, our families, and our own lives. There are many things we can do.

Here is something all of us can do: Pray the Rosary! Every day.

I'm not "getting pious" here (i.e. I'm not suggesting that "piety" is a substitute for grappling with human problems, or a pretext for hiding from them). We must engage the circumstances of our lives. But as Christians we should know that if we don't pray, we'll be neglecting the most important dimension of our circumstances...and our lives.

Pray the Rosary! Pray to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. This is something Our Lady of Fatima asked us to do. She often asks for simple things: "Build me a church...." "Make this medal...." "Say this prayer...."

"Yes," we reply, "but the Rosary is not simple. It's hard!"

Not really. It's not so hard. What's hard is to be confronted, day after day, with the smallness of our love. We always make a bad job of the Rosary, because we don't love God very much.

So let us ask the Lord, through His loving Mother, to give us the grace to love Him more, and the grace to say the Rosary better. That won't make us perfect tomorrow. But the daily Rosary will teach us to be humble and to be faithful, in one small thing. And thus we take little steps, with trust.

Let us entrust it to Mary's heart. Let us entrust everything to her, and through her, to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. I think Mary asked for the Rosary and devotion to her Immaculate Heart at Fatima because the New Evangelization is all about the faith becoming concrete. It's about the faith being recognized as reality, and adhered to with affection--because what we believe in is the Love of a Person.

Mary makes things concrete. The Rosary is a way of joining with Mary in the "pondering of her heart." If we pray it, we will grow. It is an extraordinary, healing, miracle-working prayer.

What Does Religion Have To Do With Being Happy?

Often when we witness to our faith today, the problem people have is not so much what we believe, but rather why any of it at all should be considered vital and important by a human being.

Our society has room for religious views of all kinds, as long as they remain on the level of abstract theories about things, or irrelevant musings about "what's behind it all." Even many Catholics hold their faith in this way, as a kind of "background" explanation that only needs occasional contact with the real interests of life.

There is a dislocation in our secular culture. Having pushed God to the margins of reality, we have lost the awareness of the fundamentally religious character of human existence.

Religion is not just one part of life; it is the deepest dimension of everything in life. It is much more than an organization, rituals, and a set of ideas to which one nominally adheres. It goes right to the core of the question of the meaning of life in the concrete sense, i.e. the meaning of everything that we actually do in our daily life. 

Why do I get up in the morning? Okay, I have to work, or feed the kids, or whatever. Why? Why work? Why have a family?

At first these may appear to be stupid questions with obvious answers. "I work to get money, you dope!" Why do I need money? "Because I need food and stuff...." Why? "Because I want to have a decent life, a good life, I want to be satisfied, I want to be...." At a certain point, this questioning will lead me to dig up something deep inside me, something that is so close to my soul that at first it might seem like the easiest thing in the world to understand. It is as close to me as the roots of my desires and interests, and so when I assign a word to it, I might think that I know exactly what I'm talking about.

"I want to be HAPPY!!!"

But what is "happiness"? We know that this is what we really want. But what is it? This is not an abstract philosophical question. It's a question about why I got out of bed this morning.

We live in a culture that claims that the "real world" is confined to its material elements, and that the ultimate arbiter of rational human interest is empirical science. Everything that appears to be outside of these confines belongs to the realm of dreams or delusions, or at best to the unknowable and inaccessible (and therefore irrelevant to the serious business of life).

In this context, the question "what is happiness?" becomes almost subversive. The need for happiness, if we confront it truly, will take us beyond this world, beyond everything, toward an Infinite Mystery which is the only reality that truly corresponds to our hearts. It is a religious question, and human cultures throughout history--regardless of how they have attempted to answer it--have always recognized its religious nature.

But if we really believe that there is nothing significant beyond this world, then the need for happiness is desperate, unsettling, even pathological.

It is therefore something to be suppressed. We must not ask this question. We must distract ourselves from it, even though it permeates our being. We must live our lives on the shallow surface of every experience.

The truly religious person, however, is someone who is at least seeking the answer. And the Christian claims that the Answer has come into the world, and is seeking us.

This is a basic reason why our Christian faith doesn't make any sense to people. This is why people can't understand why it matters to us. Indeed, this is why many of us don't understand the place of faith in our own lives.

We have been conditioned to evade ourselves, to suffocate our hearts, to flee from the deep cry within us that cannot be satisfied by anything in this finite world. And this evasion has become a forgetfulness. We have cheapened and falsified all the terms associated with the question of happiness: love, justice, goodness, truth, beauty, freedom. We no longer remember how to ask the question.

No wonder the Christian proposal makes no sense. Fr. Giussani often quotes Reinhold Niebuhr's insight: nothing is more incomprehensible than the answer to a question that has never been asked.

There is, of course, still another possibility. There is the possibility of meeting some real people who have actually begun to be happy. The human person might wake up, remember their heart, and discover that they have been controlled by lies.

Nothing is more subversive to the dominant powers of this world than happy people.

He Draws Us Through Her Heart

Jesus draws close to us through the tender-
ness of the loving heart of His mother Mary, and draws us to share in His joy and peace, even in the midst of suffering.

If we ask God for His peace, it is because He has already begun to work within us.

The Life He Has Given Us

It is good to live, to be affirmed, to be treated with justice, kindness and dignity, to flourish as a human being. The physical and earthly needs of the human person and human society are a concern of the Church because they too are the object of God’s mercy. God wants to comfort us in our afflictions and console us in our sorrows, but above all He wants to teach our hearts that He is with us, always.

He wants to open our hearts to the experience of something that we cannot perceive by ourselves: that the realities of our daily life mean more—not less—than we understand. Suffering must be endured, not because life is less important that we had hoped, but because it is more important that we can imagine. It is the place where God is with us.

Our hearts long for happiness, for “life.” But what is “life”? What is happiness? Do we find it only in that space of time that “belongs to us,” where we imagine that God sits in the background and allows us to play with reality, until He starts taking our toys away because “playtime is over”? No! This is not what life is! Life is God with us, every moment—in every joy (God delights in our joy) and also in the abyss....

In our trials, we may not feel the presence of God, but in our endurance and in our prayer (even our most inarticulate and desperate prayer) He is leading us to the truth that every moment of life has value because He is with us. And so we must open our hearts to Him and allow Him to shape us according to the mystery of His love. We must pray in faith and hope, that we might love God who embraces us within the life He has given us....

God knows how hard it is to suffer. But He has created us to love. Our hearts are made for God. We can only grow in this life by recognizing Him and loving Him more. Do I feel like I cannot love Him more? Do I want Him to draw away, at least a little, and give me back some of my space? Of course I feel that way, but I must pray and beg Him to teach me to love Him more, because His presence and His love are what is real in my life.

When we endure suffering, we are called to do so not with a merely stoic resignation, but with abandonment to His loving presence that is really with us and in us. And so we endure in the conviction that God offers us His love—the only fulfillment of the human heart—here and now, in the midst of our sufferings and the plodding of our daily lives. We are called to put our hearts on the line, to allow ourselves to be wounded by the hope that even in this darkness it is possible to love and to be loved, because He is with us and He loves us now. And we know that love—in the end—is always worth the risk.

The abyss is the hollow of the hands of God.

--excerpt from John Janaro's book Never Give Up: My Life and God's Mercy

To order the entire book, please see this link: http://t.co/ddwYeqX

It's Not Enough! I Want More!

Yosemite National Park, June 2012 (photo John Paul)

Longing, yearning, aching for that "something"--this is the way my heart is made.

Most of the day I smother it, but it is what makes for every authentic engagement of life that I manage in a day, and it makes it possible to perceive things as they really are and to recognize that my relationship with reality consists in a recognition of its beauty and a joy tinged with sadness--things are and yet they are not enough.

Being Christian does not take away this yearning. It intensifies it. It does not remove the sweet pain of my need for the Infinite. It is the revelation that the Infinite One has embraced my life.

Being Christian makes it possible to live life according to its true meaning, without escape or desperation. I don't live this possibility. I flee every day, into my own schemes and vain imaginings and grasping and blindness. But I have moments when I remember that this is what life is really all about.

They are moments of prayer. They generate hope. In hope, I truly begin to live.


[previously posted July 20, 2011]