Here is a visual chronicle of Easter Week. Some of these pics have already been posted on other social media platforms, but others are exclusively for blog readers!
Food, flowers, family, kids, people-who-were-once-kids who have grown up so fast, sunshine and flowers and snow too! In all things, hope in the One who is Risen and who renews all things, hope in the promise of eternal life with God and a New Creation, the dawning of a Day that will never end.
“We must act like brothers and sisters who share the earth, the common home that God has given us” (Pope Francis).
Maria sat in a high chair with us at her FIRST Easter family dinner on Sunday!
There she is, surrounded by her Daddy and Mommy and Great Uncle Walter (who has been such an important member of our family through the years). It was beautiful to be joined by “the next generation” in our gathering together around the table. We had so many holiday meals with my parents at this same table in the past. As we celebrated Christ’s resurrection last Sunday, it felt like my parents were “with us,” looking upon us with love, happy to see the ongoing fruition of their lifelong labors, and with their souls full of joy…
I thought much of them all through the day, but it was with a sense of immense gratitude, and peace.
I’ll post more pictures during this week.
This girl here.
This image (reconceived artistically) originated in a screenshot from a video posted ten years ago, on Easter Sunday, by Christina Grimmie. Accompanying herself on piano (as she always did), Christina sang the hymn “In Christ Alone.” (See the video HERE.) It was one of those occasional moments - one of those discrete but consistent moments - when Christina proclaimed by words her deep faith and love for Jesus Christ. On Easter 2012, she shared a few words about the One whose redeeming joy permeated every aspect of her life. Christina was “compelled” by the love of Jesus to follow a very special path during her brief time in this world. She brought the joy of the resurrection “to the margins” of popular culture and the struggles and anxieties of today’s young people. She brought Christ’s light into the strange and distorted realm of 21st century entertainment, to many people who were touched in ways known only to the Lord, and to lonely kids on the Internet all over the world. She accompanied people through her own talents and interests, with her amazing voice, her luminous smile, her passion for life and determination to live it to the full, her affirming warmth, her “hospitality” that welcomed especially those who were sick, troubled, confused, or burdened by sorrows.
She was a companion to so many people, even along roads where ardent Christian faith was ordinarily unwelcome, but she stayed with people and walked with them with love, with the gift of herself, her music, and her interest in other people’s desires and dreams and problems - in their humanity. And she risked herself, allowed herself to be vulnerable, goofy, funny, stylish - and if she made mistakes she did not allow them to defeat her. Christina persevered on the path the Lord had entrusted to her, living faithfully her offering of her life to Jesus while walking the roads of the world - of human fragility and ambivalence - and shining the light of His love, His joy.
Christina lived and worked hard to develop and share her artistic genius within the circumstances of the so-often-manipulative music and entertainment world: the world of celebrities and red carpets, of pressure to impress, to measure success according to the opinions of others; the world of “stardom” with the extremity of its superficial adulation, its fickleness and craving for novelty, its illusory promises and inevitable disappointments. She endeavored to be “in” this world as much as possible without compromising herself, or betraying the One to whom she belonged. It was often a razor’s edge, and who knows how many times or in what ways she may have slipped or stumbled, but she knew she could find her feet again through repentance and forgiveness in the embrace of a merciful God.
She also found support, affirmation, and purpose from the group of people who connected with her in special ways, through YouTube (where she was one of the great creative pioneers), her other media accounts, her concerts, and the long meeting-and-greeting sessions after those concerts. She found that the ardent creative vision God had given her - expressed within her gratitude to Him and the “risk” of her adherence to His plan with unconditional love - engendered a unique kind of personal connection with others who were inspired by her and responded to her personally in whatever way they could.
Here Christina encountered God’s merciful embrace in new ways, through the love of others whose hearts were touched (and are still being touched) by her way of being so profoundly human but also “different.” Christina’s “different humanity” - her way of engaging reality, her persistent expectation to find the positivity of everything, the seeds of redemption in everyone and every circumstance - opened the space for the Lord to engender among others (her frands and Team Grimmie) a hope and a love that became very precious to her, far beyond what is ordinarily meant by a “fan base.”
As for the Team Grimmie friendship, it continues to grow. Christina’s unconditional “welcome” - her arms open to every person, all the way to the end - has become a great space to find strength and hope for the resurrection, where we can encounter the incredible depths of Christ’s redeeming love.
Happy Easter Week to everyone!
Christ is Risen!
Here is my prayer: God our Father, in the coming Easter season may we hold fast to Jesus, confident in the light of the Holy Spirit that He is truly the Lord of our lives and the Lord of history, and that His saving love gives meaning to everything, bringing redemption, healing, renewal, and transformation to our hearts, our actions, our sufferings.
As I noted, however, at the beginning of Lent, Eastern Christianity's seasonal feasts follow the pre-Gregorian calendar, which often results in a different date for Christmas and Easter. This year, the celebration of the Resurrection in the East will be a week later (April 24) than in the West.
For Russians and Ukrainians - whether from diverse strands of the Orthodox Church or from the Ukrainian Byzantine Catholic Church in Ukraine - tomorrow is the beginning of Holy Week, of walking the Way of the Cross. Looking at the burned-out ruins of Ukrainian cities and the mass graves of Ukrainian civilians wantonly murdered, we don't have adequate words.
What kind of madness has seized the brain of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin?
He has been Master of Russia for 22 years, and he has had his own way without opposition in a vast country full of people longing for a better life, and with abundant natural resources to be plundered with impunity … and also used for the common good. He is nearly 70 years old but is apparently not satisfied with the scope of his empire. Instead, he has unleashed the terror of a full-scale offensive invasion and shameless indiscriminate slaughter upon a brother Slavic nation, and he doesn’t even have the honesty to call it “war.”
The Ukrainian people - already subjected to so much violence from previous Russian rulers and to the unspeakable brutality of Stalin’s genocidal artificially engineered murder-famine in the early 1930s - are once again under the fist of a Russian dictator who not only crushes them but has the audacity to claim that he is doing it “for their own good”!
Poor young Russian soldiers: they have been told lies, fed illusions, and poured into the sovereign territory of their neighbor country in a cruel and aimless fashion, and not surprisingly they have fought poorly and chaotically, with a disastrous combination of incompetence and destructiveness. Their personal deeds in the war no doubt are various, and we don’t know how many have soiled themselves with rape and murder, how many have followed orders from habitual fear, how many have wept over the confusion of the “special operation” gone horribly different from what they were told, how many have found the courage to resist the unjust orders of their superiors and obey instead the law of God.
We rarely know the stories of the ordinary soldiers in the wars especially over the past century, so many of whom were conscripted by force, armed with weapons more powerful by far than any known to human history, and driven out to play the power games of corrupt rulers. The the leaders of the West have their fair share to answer for also in this “Hundred-Years-(Plus)-War” that has, in part, created the globalized world we all share today for better and for worse. Many good things have been accomplished in the global village, and peoples of the world have come to know, appreciate, and empathize with one another as never before. We are learning new ways of working together.
We must work together, because this same globalized world is full of unprecedented violence, not only with its continual local wars everywhere fed by an international arms trade, but also with all its monstrous structural overreach and inequity, its poisoning of the health of our planet, its sundering of the delicate and gratuitous relationships of families and communities from which cultures arise and history is perpetuated. Let us have no illusions about “the West,” which has little to offer the Ukrainian people beyond a woefully compromised (and yet mysteriously tenacious) awareness of the importance of human dignity, intelligence, freedom, and responsibility. These are the most noble natural gifts with which human persons are endowed, but which contemporary westerners - long accustomed to a cultivated ignorance of the One who gives us these gifts - have twisted toward the unmoored pursuit of our own small, confused, and often contrary urges, impulses, and whims.
Can we respond more adequately to Putin’s unvarnished, unjust brutal war that mocks our pretenses? Right now it costs little to “cheer for Ukraine,” but we have no idea how the ensuing months and years will unfold. This is, after all, a war that began in 2014 with the Russian annexation of Crimea and the fomenting of civil war in the Donbas. Most of us in the West lost the thread of those events when other more novel distractions began to dominate our Twitter feeds. But the war continued and self-appointed Tsar Putin made his plans.
Ukraine as a nation, and the Ukrainian people are Putin’s victims, even as they surprise the world with their justifiable efforts to defend themselves. What will become of them? Pray that the Lord gives them the courage and the mercy to open their hearts to a readiness for reconciliation and forgiveness, so that their suffering hearts might not harden into vindictiveness and a spirit of vengeance that will only perpetuate the cycle of violence.
The Russian nation and people are also Putin’s victims, from his ideological lackeys to his duped soldiers to their parents who worry about them and mourn them, to all the people whose minds are spun by new multimedia forms of vintage KGB propaganda tactics, to ecclesiastical leaders who cannot bring themselves to challenge a temporal ruler who answers to no one - clerics who perhaps unconsciously wish they had a hierarch to appeal to, an Apostle with authority founded on something stronger than the confines of their “national church” or particular heritage - however great and ancient it may be.
Easter Sunday approaches imminently in the West, and soon in the East. Here in the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus is the ultimate victory over death, but let’s pray that this victory can be reflected - however tenuously, with whatever fragility - now, in the circumstances of this temporal historical moment.
Pray for Vladimir Putin. His war of aggression is an offense against God, against humans created in the image of God, against the body of Christ who shares our humanity, and especially Slavic Christians, brothers, who must spend these upcoming Holy Days fighting and killing, brother against brother … and how shall they then approach the Holy Mysteries of the Eucharistic Body and Blood of their Risen Savior on the feast of Great and Glorious Pascha, on Sunday April 24? This coming week, Christ will weep and sweat drops of blood in Gethsemani for them.
Jesus, we trust in you. Convert the heart of Vladimir Putin. Heal his blindness. Move his heart to STOP THIS HORRIBLE WAR! Let him initiate the real penance he must take up for his own and his predecessors’ crimes and outrages against the Ukrainian people, and all the other afflictions imposed on peoples and nations by what the Virgin Mary called at Fatima “the errors of Russia.” Even by the world’s standards, Russia has not yet reckoned with its past hundred years, with the Soviet Communist epoch, with the blindness of its leaders and protagonists. Russia cannot really claim any legitimacy even as a regional leader in the Slavic world until it passes through a period of humility, seeking forgiveness, and what its own great 20th century literary prophet Alexander Solzhenitsyn called “self-limitation” and “inner cultivation.” In the years of his great struggle against the still-intransigent and systemically repressive Soviet Union in the 1970s, Solzhenitsyn insisted that the Russia of the future would not be able to ignore or continue to lie about its ugly 20th century crimes. Yet the lies continue and grow stronger. The mendacious myth of Stalin as a national hero grows in proportion to Putin’s neo-Stalinist consolidation of personal power.
Lord have mercy on Russia. Convert Russia. Free her so that she might share her true and profound gifts with the world.
Lord have mercy on Ukraine and the Ukrainian people. Protect them. Give them grace to bear their sufferings. Reawaken more deeply their religious sense and the depth of their faith.
Lord have mercy on the West, on we who gorge ourselves with excess and ignore those in need, we who have forgotten our souls and are bewildered about our bodies, obsessed with appearances, worn away by envy and self-loathing, or just overwhelmed and broken by a society too fast, too superficially demanding, too invasive of senses and interiority.
Immaculate Heart of Mary, All-Holy Theotokos, pray for us. Virgin of Tenderness, pray for us.
“Jesus worked in the spirit of a great love for every human person, on the basis of the profound solidarity which he had for those created in the image and likeness of God (cf. Gen 1:27; 5:1).
“What is this solidarity? It is the manifestation of the love which has its source in God himself. The Son of God came into the world to reveal this love. He already revealed it by the fact that he himself became man, one of us. This union with us on the part of Jesus Christ, true man, is the fundamental expression of his solidarity with every human person. It speaks eloquently of the love with which God himself has loved each and every person. Love is confirmed here in an entirely special way: one who loves seeks to share everything with the beloved. It is precisely for this reason that the Son of God became man. Isaiah had prophesied of him, ‘Yet it was our infirmities that he bore, our sufferings that he endured’ (cf. Mi 8:17; Is 53:4). Jesus thus shared the same existential condition with every son and daughter of the human race. In this he also revealed the existential dignity of each and every human person. The Incarnation is an ineffable ‘re-evaluation’ of the human person and of humanity!
“This ‘love-solidarity’ stands out in the entire earthly life and mission of the Son of Man, especially in regard to those who suffer under the weight of misery, whether physical or moral. At the end of his journey there will be the ‘giving of m life as a ransom for many’ (cf. Mk 10:45), the redemptive sacrifice of the cross. However, on the way leading to this supreme sacrifice, Jesus' entire earthly life manifested his solidarity with mankind. He summed this up in his own words: ‘The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many’ (Mk 10:45).
“He was a child like every human child. He worked with his hands by him alongside Joseph of Nazareth, just as all people work. He was a son of Israel; he shared in the culture, tradition, hope and suffering of his people. He, too, experienced what often happens in the life of those called to some mission: misunderstanding and betrayal by one of those whom he himself had chosen as his apostles to continue his work. For this he experienced a profound sorrow (cf. Jn 13:21).
“When the moment drew near in which he was ‘to give his life as a ransom for many’ (Mt 20:28), Jesus voluntarily offered himself (cf. Jn 10:18), thus consummating the mystery of his solidarity in the sacrifice. The Roman governor found no other words to describe him before his assembled accusers except ‘Behold the man!’ (Jn 19:5).
“Pilate was unaware of the mystery but not insensitive to the attraction which issued from Jesus even in that moment. His words tell us everything about Christ's human reality. Jesus is the man; a true man who, like us in all things but sin, became a victim for sin and entered into solidarity with all, even to death on a cross.”
~Pope John Paul II (General audience of February 10, 1988)
I’m just sharing some texts here from the Psalms of Holy Week.
War is raging brutally, not only in the world, but above all in each of our hearts. We are afflicted, assailed relentlessly, wounded beyond our own capacities for healing. We cry out to the Lord to deliver us.
Here is another powerful “Collect Prayer” from this Fifth Week of Lent, as we approach the celebration of Christ’s Paschal Mystery. Our plea is raised to a God who is near to us, who is kind, who transforms our hearts, whose mercy sustains our hope.
Dad passed away three years ago today. And what strange, arduous years they have been (though also years of maturing, change, and new life). In some ways, it seems long ago, yet I still miss him so much.
May the Lord bring us all together again, forever in the glory of His Eternal Love.✝️❤️
Welcome to April 2022! Real Spring colors have been a bit slow to develop this year, perhaps due in part to the cool(er) and blustery weather we’ve had.
So I decided to use my imagination, and the tools of “JJ’s (virtual) Studios” to create my own dream of Spring warmth and shimmering colors of tree and field - with the Blue Ridge Mountains standing in their ancient vigilance on the horizon - in this piece titled “Dreaming of a Shenandoah Spring”:
Nature, by contrast, has a wonder-filled givenness and simplicity that have an inexhaustible capacity to inspire and amaze the heart. And Spring is stirring and emerging in nature too, and I’m happen to waken from my dreams to its freshness:
“Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? (Romans 7:24). This cry is the only starting point which enables a man to take the proposal of Christ into serious consideration. If a man cares nothing for this question, how can he understand the answer? To be myself, I need someone else: Without me you can do nothing (John 15:5). Jesus taught us that whoever accepts his message of salvation cannot avoid facing himself with sincerity, cannot avoid being realistic in his consideration of man. Alone, we cannot be ourselves. No one comes to the Father but by me (John 14:6). This is the same as saying, one more time, that man cannot realize himself unless he accepts the love of Another—Another who has a precise name, who independently of your will died for you: Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends (John 15:13). He said this of himself: I am the resurrection and the life (John 11:25).”
We are called to “make room” for Him to live in us and manifest His glory through us within our own aspirations, concerns and struggles, with our talents and gifts and also through our poverty, pain, and powerlessness. Every moment of our lives is a gift from the Father to us as we grow in the Spirit as adopted sons and daughters in Jesus Christ. And not only a gift to us, but also - through us - to the world.
These days provide for us a pedagogy of offering everything, so as to remember that the value of our actions consists in Christ consecrating the world through us as we recognize that His glory is the meaning of everything, the meaning of our days, the meaning of all human history. We remember too that this extends beyond all imaginable hopes of this life, to the extremities of our apparent insignificance, failure, “uselessness,” and suffering… for His “power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).
On this March 25, 2022 - which marks the annual celebration of the Annunciation, of Mary's "fiat" to the angel's message and the beginning of God the Word taking flesh in her womb - the Pope and with him the whole Church once again cried out to the Theotokos, the Mother of God and our Mother, appealing to her all holy Immaculate Heart to obtain from her Son the grace of conversion and peace for ourselves, all humanity, and especially Russia and Ukraine.
In these days, Russia's armed forces continue to carry out the brutal invasion of Ukraine ordered by Russian political power, while other political powers seem to give little thought to God even as they puzzle over how to stop Russian military aggression without setting the world on fire. Meanwhile Ukrainians suffer (once again) from the scourge of their neighbor, with those who can doing their best to defend their homeland, while the vulnerable who are not trapped in the wreckage flee by the millions into exile in Poland and other nations offering them refuge.
And this is just one of the many wars that rage throughout the world. We are all complicit in some measure in the global cycle of violence, because of our sins, because of our hypocrisy, because of the smallness of our love. Therefore, this prayer is rightly penitential and offered in the first person plural to Jesus our Redeemer through His Mother whom He redeemed in a preeminent manner by preserving her from all stain of sin, with the love of His Cross transcending the “limits of linear chronology” and making her holy from the first moment of her own conception. Mary was thus enabled by His grace to cooperate wholly and uniquely with her Son's love for us, and become His gift to each of us: "Behold your mother" (John 19:27).
In this prayer we commit ourselves anew to trust in God's mercy, to conversion of heart, to penance and forgiveness. In this tumultuous epoch, the world must turn frequently to the tender maternal love of Mary's Heart so that she can teach us to live as brothers and sisters in peace with one another and with Jesus. How today's consecration will "unfold" in events to come cannot be predicted. Things "may get worse before they get better," but something irrevocable has happened that will bring about much good in God's time. This is a reason to be encouraged.
My memory is long, and today it harkens back to a similar act of Pope Saint John Paul II and the world's bishops on March 25, 1984. I was 21 years old that year, living in a very tense, strange, and dangerous world with a political geography profoundly different from the one most of you have grown up with and taken for granted. In 1984, the Cold War was like solid ice, and there were no signs on the horizon of any melting. If anything, our hopes for some kind of “thaw” had (as far as we could tell) recently been chilled.
The previous year, the Communist government of Poland had declared marshal law and outlawed the independent Solidarity trade union. Lech Walesa and other Solidarity activists were arrested, and later driven underground and constantly harassed by Communist authorities. The intellectual leaders of “Charter 77” had been silenced and Czech dissident Vaclav Havel was in prison. The few glimmers of hope from behind the Iron Curtain were at their lowest point. But countless people, unknown to the world, prayed, did penance, performed works of mercy, and suffered in union with Jesus. The Mother of God sustained them secretly in the darkness of the imposed atheism of Communist states. Ukraine was a “captive nation,” a “Soviet Republic” brutally suppressed, millions of whose people had been murdered by starvation (the Holodomor) in a famine engineered by Stalin in 1929-32, while others were exiled, displaced, or else forced to conform to the Russian language and Russian ways and suppress their own Ukrainian culture.
In 1984, the Russian-dominated Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and its Eastern European satellite nations seemed to have become a permanent fixture on the global map. Moreover, Marxist-Leninist forces had either triumphed or were contending for power in many “hot wars” all over the globe, sustained by Soviet weapons and support, while the USA supported often-repressive dictatorships or violent counter-insurgency groups that covered their own dysfunctions under the cloak of “anti-communism.”
But we who lived in the wealthy “free world” were not much bothered in our daily lives. We used our freedom not to love and serve God, but rather to plunge into a materialist consumer lifestyle and an individualistic moral anarchy the likes of which had never been seen in all of history. Nevertheless, something of our human sensibility endured, and we accomplished many good things too in those days. But we gave little thought to the fact that the “security” of our ideals and our hedonistic lifestyle - their defense against Communist aggression and nuclear war - came at the price of a “deal with the devil” called Mutually Assured Destruction. Both blocs stockpiled and held in readiness staggeringly enormous quantities of nuclear weapons specifically designed to kill innocent civilians indiscriminately and on a massive scale.
After the consecration of March 25, 1984, there was no immediate dramatic change in this perilous world order. People still had to pray and fast, convert, build up the good, care for the poor, forgive those who had injured them, and love God and trust in the mercy of Jesus Christ. We won’t know all the hidden fruits of Mary’s intercession at that time until the end of history. But no one imagined that before the end of the decade, the Iron Curtain would fall, Eastern Europe would be freed, and - two years later - the seemingly impregnable Soviet Union would cease to exist entirely. New nations appeared on the world stage, and old ones re-emerged from darkness - among the most spirited being a newly independent Ukraine.
It was like a miracle. But it was an incomplete miracle (if that makes any sense). Soviet Atheistic Communism vanished by 1991, but “the conversion of Russia” remains a work-in-progress, and new sources of violence, new wars, and old greed continue to afflict the global village. More recent generations in the secularist liberal West are now so rootless and confused about everything that their ignorance manifests itself as a terrible vulnerability, the damaged half-innocence of wounded children, easily manipulated but also perhaps more disposed (however unconsciously) to encounter God. Beneath the noise, the excess, the unprecedented access to technological power, there is immense suffering. They have much to suffer in the years to come. But Jesus and Mary remember them and look upon them with compassion.
The same compassion encompasses the suffering Ukrainian people. It also encompasses the Russian conscripts who have been thrown into this war of aggression without knowing what they were meant to do, as well as those who should know better: those who are prosecuting this offensive war from fear, insecurity, or their own delusions of national greatness. It reaches out to the victims and refugees of wars everywhere, and calls perpetrators of violence to repentance.
May we all be converted from our delusions and arrogance, to the reality of God who loves us and who wants us to live together in freedom, in fraternal love, interpersonal communion, solidarity, and forgiveness. In following Jesus through Mary, we must not be discouraged. Our hope is eternal life, the gift of fellowship forever with the Trinitarian God who is Love, and also the transfigured fruition of all our efforts to do good in this world, all our hopes to make society better, to be peacemakers, to undertake works of mercy so that life on this earth (even if it will never be perfect and always imperiled by evil) will become more worthy of the dignity of human persons created in God’s image, created and called to be brothers and sisters of Jesus.
We must not be discouraged, we must keep our hearts centered on Jesus who calls us in this moment of history and promises that our humanity in its desire and struggles and suffering is destined to be fulfilled. Today, we have the special assurance of the Immaculate Heart of Mary that no effort is in vain that endeavors to respond to the redeeming love of her Son, that we must seek His glory every day, in the time that has been given to us to live our lives and offer ourselves even in the smallest gestures of compassion.
May the Lord bring peace to Russia and Ukraine, and to all places of war and oppression. May He accomplish His will in the world, and give us the grace to recognize in faith His merciful wisdom, to obey Him, to follow Him, and to be His instruments…in union with Mary.
Saint Oscar Romero's teaching and his courageous actions as bishop were true to the gospel of an incarnate, crucified, resurrected, eucharistic Jesus who is Lord of history. Jesus calls us to eternal life, to a transcendent vocation of unending communion with God's ineffable love. This call is not, however, a pretext to escape from created reality, or to ignore the concrete circumstances we face here and now. On the contrary, He who created and who sustains all things upholds all that is true and good in this world, in this moment of history. And in Christ (and always faithful to Him) we find the promise of the fulfillment of all our efforts to build up a society that is more just, more equitable, more united in truth and love, more adequate to the dignity of every human person who is created in the image of God.
Today is the 42nd anniversary of Romero’s martyrdom. He was shot by a “Death Squad” gunman during the offertory of the Mass in the chapel of the Divina Providencia hospital, the chapel where Romero prayed daily to Jesus in the Eucharist and the hospital where—in a simple room—he resided as Archbishop, so he could be close to and minister daily to the sick and the dying.
He was prepared for death and had already offered his life for all the poor and suffering people of El Salvador. He knew the risks he was taking for the truth of God, for the Church, and for the dignity of the human person.“Any human order to kill must be subordinate to the law of God which says, 'Thou shalt not kill.' 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.”Oscar Romero knew that "the Church" must always be "the defender of the rights of God, of the law of God, of human dignity, of the person" and that these rights and realities are inseparable because God became man in order to save every human being and to transfigure human existence according to the measure of God's love. The Church must be for the dignity of every human person in this life and in eternity. Jesus has transformed the meaning of "justice" in this world because He has identified every human person with Himself, especially the least, the poor, the forgotten, the oppressed, and all those who suffer.
Spring is starting to show up, at the end of the crazy week of March 13-20. As you can see, [1] forsythia bushes are blooming late this year, and with some hesitation. [2] A couple of weeks ago, perky buds were stirring, but then [3] WAMMO!🌨💨❄️ The snowstorm of March 12 caught them off their guard. But now they, along with other early buds [4 and 5], have begun opening up after several days of 70+ weather last week. [6] The big trees still remain mostly bare, however, against the light of longer and brighter evenings.☀️
Just a typical Virginia March, I guess.😙
We celebrated the feast of San Giuseppe on Saturday with simple deliciousness from Elena’s cucina (Eileen’s kitchen). The bolognese sauce has fresh mushrooms and onion as well as beef and tomato, with rotini pasta. And salad.
The picture doesn’t do justice… 😋
Pope Francis invites us open our hearts in prayer before the Lord, in solidarity with those who are suffering (especially in the violence of this present war).
So often we connive in our hearts with the arrogance and covetousness that breeds wars; yet we are called to the opposite, to be instruments of love who - even hidden from the world - can engage in this “living prayer,” this spiritual work of mercy which takes up “the plea of all those who suffer” and endeavors to “disarm the aggressor” by begging for healing for all of us, for the conversion of all our hearts to the peace of God.
