God Wants To Create Me Anew

What is mercy? Mercy goes out to the one who is in need, and gives what is necessary. Mercy shines especially when it is gratuitous, when it is extended to someone who doesn't deserve it, or even to someone who is trying to resist it. Mercy is solidarity with the need of another; it is a love that calls out to the other in his solitude, that invites him to healing, that touches his solitude from within with the desire and the promise of freedom and transformation. Mercy is the origin, and the energy, and the fulfillment of hope.

God is Infinite Mercy.

And our relation to God is one of pure need. We depend on Him for our very existence; outside of God's creative and sustaining action, we are literally nothing. And each of us exists gratuitously. We exist as "gift," as continually receiving our being from God. So we are totally dependent on Him, but not as slaves, for He gives us to ourselves in such a way that we really belong to ourselves. Only inside of His gift do we find our true selves. Only God can create a person. Each of us is a mystery, existing by that creative power that is beyond anything we can understand.

Each of us is a work of Mercy.

The God who gives us being, out of nothingness, can bring new life to restore us from all the violence we have done to ourselves. He can create anew, overcoming the "voluntary nothingness" of our sins.

If I am a sinner, I must remember this. If I have willingly alienated myself from God by denying Him or doing violence to His wise and loving plan for the world and for the truth of the human person, I do not need to be broken and destroyed forever. I do not need to live in my self-made abyss of separation from God and from my own true identity.

God wants to create me anew. He has made the way, and His grace is already stirring up in me the desire and the hope for healing.

I can choose to wallow in my own abyss, or I can cry out to Him, I can beg Him that the mercy He has already given might take hold of me and change me. I can trust in Him. Trust reaches out to a Presence that I recognize. It adheres to that Presence, and follows Him. It surrenders itself to the ways of God's mercy and love. Trust never gives up.

If I trust in Him, He will really change me, He will give me a new heart, He will work miracles. There is no evil in me so great that He cannot heal, and He wants to awaken, change, and give me a new energy of love beyond anything I can imagine. I must trust in Him. I must adhere to Him. I must follow Him. He is Mercy.

On the Cross, He has revealed and given His Mercy, to me, to each one of us. And He remains with us in the Church, in the miracle of the sacraments, and in the faces of those people who have shown us that it is possible to be changed, to live in a new way.

I must go to Him in trust, to let Him heal me and transform me. I trust in Him to make me into the person He has created me to be.

"O blood and water, which have poured forth from the Heart of Jesus as a fount of Mercy for us, I trust in You."

God Has Come To The Place Where I Am

There is no Easter without the Cross.

We sometimes hear these words spoken as a kind of exhortation and warning, as if to say, "Don't think it's gonna be so easy. Joy comes through sacrifices. You have to sacrifice. You have to suffer." Fair enough. That's certainly true.

But let's not reduce the mystery of the Resurrection to an ethical reflection. The Resurrection, before anything else, is an event. Indeed, the Cross and Resurrection together are the real event in the world that gives hope to our lives.

Most of us know very little about real joy, but we know a great deal about suffering. Our lives are open wounds. We are all suffering. The horizon of all our human hopes is frustration. So many human projects are designed to distract us from this fact with temporary satisfactions, or evade it with subtle ideologies. It's the survival instinct: we can't bear to look our own suffering in the face, and yet--sooner or later--it will impose itself upon us, and we will withdraw into resentment and bitterness, or perhaps yield to it with a dignified resignation.

If someone says to us, "God loves you," we might be inclined to reply (not without reason) "What does that mean?"

Easter, without the Cross, is just someone else's triumph. It's just another distracting dream about a happiness that doesn't exist.

My desire is for the fullness of life. My experience so often seems to suggest that there is no way to get there, that I am trapped in suffering and frustration, and that the best that life can offer is distractions.

Easter, however, proclaims that God has done something in history, and that He is doing something in my life. He was crucified and died and rose from the dead to begin a New Creation.

The Cross is good news, because the Cross means that God has come to the place where I am. That place is suffering, and above all the suffering caused by the fact that I have made choices that have irrevocably screwed up my life: I have sinned! He has united Himself to me in that place of solitude, and from there He has Risen. This is what it means to say, "God loves you." It means He has united Himself with my whole life, He has taken all the depths of me, and is even now working to awaken my heart and penetrate inside my sorrow and my misery and the guilt that I don't want to face. He is here, creating a new possibility for my freedom, a new possibility for love.

And He's not an abstract God, or some purely interior divine force. He has a human face. He is Jesus, a man. He lives through a people in history, who He has "assembled"--the ekklesia. I don't have to make it up. It's real. It's here. It's a gift. It's a path that can be followed, and I can begin now, because He is present in the place where I am; He has penetrated the depths of my suffering and my guilt and by His love He is creating in me the power to change and be transformed...by Love.

He is Risen from the dead. Alleluia!

Trust in God, Don't Be Afraid, Be Ready to Say Yes

Easter Week is Divine Mercy Week.

We have prayed the Divine Mercy Novena from St. Faustina's diary every Easter Week of our married life (and me also the year before, in a way that was very significant).

In the Spring of 1995, I was nearing the end of my first year of teaching at Christendom College. I had been through a lot of discernment, spent a year in Rome, and was following the path that Msgr. Guissani and others who were guiding me in my life had indicated. Now, I had a teaching position. It seemed like the time to give my life in a deeper way.

I had once been comfortable as a footloose graduate student, dreaming about great intellectual projects, collecting experiences of life, and generally evading responsibility as much as possible.

That changed when I went to continue my studies in Rome. There I spent a year living at the house of the Fraternity of San Carlo Borromeo, the missionary society of priests (and now religious sisters too) associated with the ecclesial movement Communion and Liberation. I lived with men who were preparing to be missionaries, and I watched them closely. They amazed me.

They were ordinary, down to earth men, and several of them became my good friends. I saw their readiness to commit themselves radically to the mission of the Church. I saw them preparing their hearts to go anywhere in the world they were sent. Africa. South America. Siberia. The Holy Land. And the desolate places of the developed world, to begin anew the mission of evangelization.

I could not watch them live without becoming convinced that I too was called to give my life, in some form. I was not called to be a missionary, although I allowed myself to be shocked and terrified by the possibility of this ideal. But the head of the Society, a priest of great personal sensitivity and deep prayer, assured me that this was not my vocation. I was called to live as a layman and a professor in the world.

But I learned that my vocation was also a Christian vocation, and that in order to carry it out I must give myself, commit myself, take responsibility for something greater than myself. I needed in my own life the kind of "readiness" that these men were cultivating.

I also began to realize that I might really be able to do this, with God's grace. And in my life and circumstances, that grace might very well take the form of "another person." I began to discover that marriage is really a vocation.

And so I kept my eyes and my heart open, during that first year of teaching. I prayed for God's will to be done. I began to become convinced that my vocation was joined to that of another person. But who?

I prayed the Novena of the Divine Mercy that Easter Week, asking God to send me the woman he wanted me to marry, and to send her "soon"! Rather demanding and impatient of me, eh?

About a week later, I got a phone call from my old friend Eileen Balajadia. I hadn't talked to her in some years, although we had kept up a regular correspondence. But as far as I knew, she had put down her roots in Texas, and I was in the process of planting myself in Front Royal.

We talked for a long time. She revealed that she wasn't happy with her teaching position in Texas, and was thinking of moving back to the Northern Virginia area, where we had met five years ago.

Of course, I was sure Eileen just wanted to be my friend....

But something inside me said, in a very simple way, "Trust in God. Be ready. Be open. Pay attention. Don't be afraid. Follow the signs. Be ready to say yes."

We didn't know, when we were talking on the phone in April 1995, that 14 months later we would be married. (I've told that story elsewhere on this blog.) But God knew. God brought us together in His Mercy.

Today we have five children, two of them adolescents. When I fell ill, my wife's work as a teacher blossomed in new ways. Now I am being healed and God is opening up new directions for me. Still, I worry about the future in hundreds of ways. Why? God has promised us that He will take care of us in His Mercy. He has never failed us. He hasn't promised that it will be easy, of course. I think that trust in God is the great and difficult and necessary thing that all of life is trying to teach us.

Eileen and I have to help each other to sustain and deepen that same attitude of heart:

Trust in God.
Be ready.
Be open.
Pay attention.
Don't be afraid.
Follow the signs.
Be ready to say yes.

Trust: Walking in the Hope of the Resurrection

Easter Tuesday. Today I present one of my favorite poems from my book Never Give Up (http://t.co/ddwYeqX). Those of you who know the book are aware of the way in which its narrative is interspersed with poetic prayer reflections, not unlike those I've posted on this blog. I thought this text was appropriate during Easter week, as our daily toil is touched by the glory of a great hope. At the heart of this "Divine Mercy Week" is the aspiration and the prayer for the virtue of trust. We hardly even know what it means to trust. Even this we must ask of Jesus: "Teach me how to trust in You completely." For if we do not know, what else can we do besides ask? But He will answer. He will form that awareness, that simplicity, that spiritual childhood within us.


Trust

Jesus, I trust in You
even in the turmoil of this night:
O let me feel in its wild winds
the breath of Your eternal lips
        enlivening, expanding,
        spiriting dull flecks of my ashy ground
        into form, flesh, body
        of my New Eden everlasting.

For it is You who speak me,
You who call me by name in each moment,
You who penetrate
the spaces within me that I do not know,
the moments of me
        not yet birthed by time,
        nor conceived in the tiny gaps and crevices of my mind,
        nor even beginning to trace dim shadows
               before my near-blind eyes.

It is You who see me.
You who grasp my hand and guide me
in the valley of shadows.
For You have taken every hollow trench
and scaled every slope,
to stand in the fiery sun that has burned me.
You have won the victory
that You proclaim and celebrate each moment,
each day,
when You call my name,
when You call me to awaken
        to the frail pieces of light
        and gray dust of earth’s every morning.

Save me!
For only You know me.
Shut my eyes and stop my ears
from phantom shades who cry out:
        “your name is slave,
         your name is fear,
         blackness is your life.”

Jesus
You call my name.
O open my ear that I may hear Your voice,
clear.
For You carry, whole, within Your Living Light,
the only “me” that will ever glimmer and shine—
        pool of light,
like splendid diamond
clean and cut
with the lines of Your Face.
My real name:
sounding like song, and gushing—
        fresh, cold, sweet water of life,
        that rises up from the deep
        deep well
                of Mercy’s hidden spring.
You call me by a name never spoken before
and never to be uttered again.
Let me live, O Lord, by faith—near blind, near deaf,
        straining the ear of earth to hear the echo of my name
        in gifted speech of hinted truth,
        though shallow like shells:
                Child, Beloved, Likeness, Your Glory
                                              Your Glory.

Lead me,
by the Glory that slips between the crack
of faith’s eye,
        to trust in You,
        to spy the promise of all made new.
Grant me that glimpse,
faint,
firm,
of all earth’s pain and weight.
Of my fighting, faltering,
fumbling heart’s hope
        washed in White Wonder.

                from Never Give Up: My Life and God's Mercy (http://t.co/ddwYeqX)
                [click link to order, hard copy or Kindle available]

Christ is Risen: Happy Easter From The Janaros

"This is the day the Lord has made,
Let us rejoice and be glad."
Happy Easter from the Janaro family.
God bless you!

"It Is Finished"

I do not trust myself. I trust Jesus. Jesus I trust in You. Jesus, save me. Jesus, draw me to Yourself. Jesus, convert me, change what needs changing in me, penetrate the depths of my weakness, heal me and raise me up.

At the center of the event of our redemption there is an ineffable mystery. The grace of the Cross is something we receive in faith, hope, and love. It reaches us in our misery and transforms us from within. And the Cross makes it clear that Jesus has truly loved every human person, from the foundation of the world until the end of time. Somehow, this love makes itself present, in all of its greatness and ineffable generosity, to the freedom of every person.

What a blessing and what a responsibility it is to be entrusted with the task of bearing witness to this love, of offering ourselves in union with it, of praying to the Father that His mercy will prevail, that the human person will say "yes" to this love: For the sake of His sorrowful passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world. He seeks our hearts, and no sin--no matter how horrible--is beyond His reach. Let us say "yes" to Him, trust in Him, and pray that His saving love will break through and change the hearts of others. Let us struggle to make Him known and loved by those He has entrusted to us, and by those He wills us to seek out in the circumstances of our lives. Let us not be afraid of all the opposition of the world, for He has overcome the world. Never give up.

In his unforgettable Apostolic Letter On Human Suffering (1984), Blessed John Paul II goes to the very heart of the redemption, not to explain it but to set it forth in all of its mystery and glory. On Holy Saturday, as we feel with special keenness the whole Paschal Mystery, this stunning passage (from section 18) is worth citing at length, and worth reading:

Jesus's words "attest to this unique and incomparable depth and intensity of suffering which only the man who is the only-begotten Son could experience.... Not of course completely (for this we would have to penetrate the divine-human mystery of the subject), but at least they help us to understand that difference (and at the same time the similarity) which exists between every possible form of human suffering and the suffering of the God-man.... When Christ says: "My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?", his words are not only an expression of that abandonment which many times found expression in the Old Testament, especially in the Psalms and in particular in that Psalm 22 from which come the words quoted. One can say that these words on abandonment are born at the level of that inseparable union of the Son with the Father, and are born because the Father "laid on him the iniquity of us all". They also foreshadow the words of Saint Paul: "For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin". Together with this horrible weight, encompassing the "entire" evil of the turning away from God which is contained in sin, Christ, through the divine depth of his filial union with the Father, perceives in a humanly inexpressible way this suffering which is the separation, the rejection by the Father, the estrangement from God. But precisely through this suffering he accomplishes the Redemption, and can say as he breathes his last: "It is finished".

The Wood of the Cross Has Brought Joy to the World

Olive wood, hand carved crucifix from Assisi, on the wall next to the front door of our house.

"We worship your cross, O Lord, and we praise and glorify your holy resurrection, for the wood of the cross has brought joy to the world" (Antiphon from Morning Prayer, Good Friday).

"...the wood of the cross has brought joy to the world." Let us not forget the joy that is born from the event of this day. Salvation is accomplished. Blood and water flow forth from the Heart of Jesus. The Church is born. Man is reconciled to God. The mystery of the depth of Divine Love is revealed and given to us. It is the beginning and the foundation of the New Creation.

By faith, we recognize in Jesus Crucified the Glory of the God who is Love. We must not brood in an artificial gloom. Let us instead embrace our own sufferings and the sufferings of others who are in our lives, and offer them together with Jesus. On the Cross we receive that love of God that heals and fulfills the deepest desire of our being, the heart's desire to love and to be loved by the Infinite.

But it is more than this. We are given the possibility of sharing in God's love, of a participation in the Divine life. On the Cross, God the Son marries our hearts, and makes us children of the Father in the gift of the Holy Spirit.

The human person, wounded and broken, but still searching for meaning, for the Infinite, for truth and goodness and beauty and love, encounters an unimaginable joy: the love of God penetrating the depths of every sin and pain and sorrow, taking it all up, transforming, healing, and drawing all things to Himself.

Christ Lives in Me

"We see Jesus crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death, that through God’s gracious will he might taste death for the sake of all men. Indeed, it was fitting that when bringing many sons to glory God, for whom and through whom all things exist, should make their leader in the work of salvation perfect through suffering" (Hebrews 2:9-10).

Jesus embraces the great mystery of His Passion; he "taste[s] death for the sake of all men." Jesus becomes the companion of all our sufferings, and He unites Himself to every person's death.

None of us knows when we will die. We receive every moment of every day as a gift from God for the fulfillment of our own vocations. Each of us is a unique person, a mystery whose life is held by the wisdom and goodness and mercy of God. The moment of death--that final moment in the history of our becoming "who we are"--is also God's gift, designed to correspond to the fulfillment of the unique calling that each of us has received. It is the passage to the whole encounter with the Destiny that defines every moment of our lives.

In Jesus that Destiny embraces our death from within, becomes a presence within its solitude, and transforms it into a moment of hope and self-abandoning love. What might otherwise seem like the loss of "myself" becomes, in union with Jesus, a moment to give myself over wholly to the Father in complete trust. The inevitable horizon of death encourages me to live every moment in trusting self-abandonment, in union with the One who said, "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit."

Being a Christian means that even now "I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. And the life I live in the flesh I live in faith in the Son of God who loved me, and gave Himself for me" (Galatians 2:20).

The Message of Love

"I was offered high government positions and asked to quit my struggle but I always refused to give up, even at the cost of my life. I do not want popularity; I do not want any position. I just want a place at Jesus' feet. I want my life, my character, my actions to speak for me and indicate that I am following Jesus Christ. Because of this desire, I will consider myself most fortunate if -- in this effort and struggle to help the needy and the poor, to help the persecuted and victimized Christians of Pakistan -- Jesus Christ will accept the sacrifice of my life. I want to live for Christ and I want to die for Him."

These are the words of Shahbaz Bhatti, the well known Catholic Christian defender of minority religious rights in Pakistan. Indeed, he made that supreme sacrifice on March 2, 2011, when he was shot and killed by men who called themselves the "warriors of Islam." They issued a statement which included these words: 

"...you put a cursed Christian infidel Shahbaz Bhatti in charge of [the blasphemy laws review] committee. This is the fate of that cursed man." 

Though it is not my task to make the definitive judgment, it is certainly my opinion that these words express clearly the motivation that brought about his death. The Roman rite uses this term: "in odium fidei". It means "in hatred of the faith".

Bhatti was killed because he was considered a "cursed Christian infidel" who sought to defend the freedom of Christians to practice their faith, and also to defend the religious freedom of other non-Muslim minorities in Pakistan. He died defending the Church, and also the principles of justice, charity, and humanity.

And what was his response to this hatred and violence? He saw his destiny. He may be the first martyr to leave us a "video icon," a statement he made in this brief message, and that he wished to be made public in the event of his assassination, because "it is with the Muslim world I want to share the message of love. That is the only message that can bring the Muslim world out of the circle of hate and killings." During Holy Week, it is fitting to remember that in today's world, those who try to break the "circle of hate" are also being judged, condemned, murdered, and reviled as "cursed men." The victory of the Cross is visible in them today.

They bear "the message of love...."

Click the link to see the video, not the picture:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBTBqUJomRE

A New Form Of Worship

We await in hope what we have already begun to live:

     With Easter

     Jesus initiates 

     a new form of worship, 

     the worship performed by love, 

     and a new temple

     which He is Himself, 

     the Risen Christ, 

     through whom every believer 

     can worship God 

     “in spirit and truth" 

     (Benedict XVI).

Adventures of a Freshman

Who is that guy?

That's the dashing "Captain Denny" from a stage version of Pride and Prejudice.

That's the kid who got straight A's in his third quarter as a high school freshman.

That's the new Chelsea varsity tennis player (they had no baseball team this year, can you believe it?).

That's the kid who is old enough to be within months of getting his Learner's Permit...you know, as in "to drive A CAR!"

He is all of this and more. John Paul is well launched on his adolescent journey. I keep waiting for the walls to come falling down on us, but they haven't...yet.

Certainly, he is a growing boy. The grocery budget has gone through the roof. When he was little it was so cheap to feed him. "Another mouth to feed" just sounded like one of those cliches. In fact, we had to force the kid to eat. Ha! I can't imagine what that was like (but thanks to technology, I don't have to--we have a video of baby John Paul eating his first bowl of hot cereal).

Obviously, he's growing in many ways. A lot of credit is due to the remarkable school he has been attending this past year. John Paul really seems to be blossoming at Chelsea Academy, where he is not only learning plenty of math and science, but also...gosh!...real humanities. The kid is reading Plato. In ninth grade.

I don't think I even knew who Plato was in ninth grade. And I went to a pretty good high school.

He is learning to expand his imagination and developing a more structured approach to logic and abstract concepts. He is encountering great minds and great ideas, and he is gaining a deeper awareness of the horizons of art and philosophy, as well as the profound correspondence between reason and Christian faith.

Of course, we've been trying to give him that since the day he was born. And given his natural gifts and his nerdy parents, no one is surprised to hear that John Paul is "smart." What makes us especially happy, however, is to be able to work with a school that shares our commitment to Christ and the Church, to building a solid and balanced Christian and human environment, to opening up opportunities for sports and other formative experiences, and to real friendships. It has been a good transition from the Montessori educational experience that has already formed him and helped prepare him to be an engaged, interested, and self-motivated person.

It was a year ago that I wrote a blog post about taking John Paul to a hockey game. Already, a year has gone by.

It's been a good year, thanks be to God.

The Bunny

There's the Bunny.

"Daddy, stop!"

You're eating a carrot. You're a Bunny.

"No, I'm a girl."

A girl Bunny?

"No just a girl. Girls eat carrots."

Bunnies eat carrots.

"Stop."

Okay, but I am going to be thinking of you as a Bunny.

[and I just look at her with raised eyebrows and she looks back at me, and then she starts to smile...]

"...stop Daddy!"

The Dawn of a New World

The Church, the living body of Christ, has the mission of prolonging on earth the salvific presence of God, of opening the world to something greater than itself, to the love and the light of God. It is worth the effort, dear brothers and sisters, to devote your entire life to Christ, to grow in his friendship each day and to feel called to proclaim the beauty and the goodness of his life to every person, to all our brothers and sisters. I encourage you in this task of sowing the word of God in the world and offering to everyone the true nourishment of the body of Christ. Easter is already approaching; let us determine to follow Jesus without fear or doubts on his journey to the Cross. May we accept with patience and faith whatever opposition or affliction may come, with the conviction that, in his Resurrection, he has crushed the power of evil which darkens everything, and has brought the dawn of a new world, the world of God, of light, of truth and happiness.                                                                                               

                                                                    Benedict XVI

Crosses At Every Turn

Someone posted a quotation today from St. Francis de Sales. At first it felt like a punch in the stomach. How can I ever have a perspective on life like this?

"I see crosses at every turn. My flesh shudders over it, but my heart adores them. Yes, I hail you, crosses little and great, I hail you, and kiss your feet, unworthy of the honor of your shadow."

And the saints are not kidding. They see it. They really do. Even as they feel the pain, they see the glory. How? Of course I know the answer to that question. It’s God’s grace, and also the freedom that His grace awakens within them, the freedom to love, which means–in this life–the freedom to suffer. I can’t look at the face of Blessed Chiara Badano every day without remembering that this is really true. But how can this become an experience for me. Do I even want it, really?

Do I "adore" the crosses in my own life with "my heart"? Wow. I see crosses at every turn, and I pray, "can you take this one away, please?" At best I manage a "Sigh. Okay, here we go again!" That’s my best...which is not very often.

Most of the time, when I see the cross (which really means when I hear that call–all throughout the day– to love, to give of myself), I try to evade it, sneak away from it, or if necessary just run, run, run. I know I’m not alone in this. Let’s face it: the Gospel verse that describes the way we Christians usually live is the one that tells us what the disciples did when Jesus was arrested: “And they all forsook Him and fled” (Mark 14:50).

I spend a good part of the day running away from my life.

And there are so many places to escape. Of course there are the distractions of technology, the media, and the consumer culture. But there are even better ones: the distractions of my ideas and plans, which are so good and important, after all. It is so much easier to talk or write about Jesus with beautiful words than it is to face that moment when my child needs the presence and the love of her father, even to do something very simple, like make a sandwich!

And I am actually called to raise these children. I am called to witness to them about the love of God. I hide from this in a thousand ways. To look upon it is overwhelming.

And then there is all the pain in life that can’t be avoided, that just digs into me and tries to engender bitterness.

But God does not leave me alone.

I run from the cross and I hide, but He passes through my walls and my locked doors and shows Himself again as the Risen One. He responds to my failure with His mercy. He shows me myself, but He also shows me Himself, and He says, “Do not be afraid. It is I.”

Do not be afraid.

In the end we all must suffer. To find His glory in the midst of our suffering: this is the “narrow road.”

I hardly understand what it means, concretely, for me. So I must pray, I must beg Him to make me more the person He wills me to be. And I must struggle to do good, to continually begin again, to cry out again and again to see the face of God and be changed by Him because I know that He is here. He is Jesus.

 I still marvel and gasp at St. Francis de Sales, but there is, I think, a tiny bit of that “heart” here, a beginning of something new.

In the end, we all must suffer. Is there anyone, really, who is not suffering right now?

And what would I have without Jesus? Just a jungle of suffering and no response except, "Go away, I hate you" as it devours me. Or perhaps, a desperate cry for help lifted to the mute heavens.

Jesus makes all the difference. Jesus is everything

Through The Darkest Places

I hear much about different people's sufferings. How do people endure living in this world? The impetus to keep going says something tremendous about the human person. But the capacity to love from out of the midst of deep personal pain: this is a mystery and a miracle. It is a witness. There is something greater in this world than the implacable misery that wants to suffocate us.

When we pray at 3:00, let us remember that it was at that hour that Jesus cried out to the Father, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" This is very mysterious, but we know that on the Cross, He has taken to Himself and borne for us and is present within every suffering that we endure, even and especially the suffering of feeling abandoned and alone, of the great open wound that is our anguish and that can do nothing but cry out.

Trusting in Him even as we cry out may bring no comfort, but the truth is that Jesus is here, that there is Love, that there is healing, that He has made a way through the darkest places. The very fact that we believe this, even with the smallest glimmer of faith, is a sign that we are already beginning to be transformed.

The Thinker and the Call of Love

There he is. The "Thinker"!

There is a lot to be said for him (or her, of course--but I will use the masculine pronoun here since our exemplar is Rodin's statue).

The thinker is reflective. He tries to understand the world and himself. He looks at the way things are, how they are structured, how they are distinct and how they go together. He tries to understand himself. He reflects on his own experience and he tries also to understand and appreciate from within the experience of others.

The thinker is often not the same as "the debater"...the thinker can get frustrated with arguing, especially in the combative contemporary forum in which it takes place. It is not that he lacks appreciation for disagreement, or for challenges to his own ideas. It is rather the opposite: he values them too much. If he encounters a coherent challenge to his understanding, he wants time to examine it and if necessary alter his own thinking. In the face of a bad argument, he is often more interested in what the "opponent" is really trying to get at, or what genuine insight might lie behind a poorly formulated position.

This means that the most gifted and articulate thinkers can sometimes be the best debaters. They are able to distinguish and clarify. They are not so much interested in "winning an argument" as they are in joining with their interlocutor in a search for the truth. They don't "beat" their opponent; they "win him over"--and in the process often find their own positions clarified.

Such persons are rare, however. Most thinkers are like Rodin's fellow up there. They are plodders. They are often insecure in their own ideas, and find that grappling with intellectual challenges is a painful psychological process of struggling with doubt, with feelings of weakness and incompetence, and with frustration at the sheer murkiness and dimness of the human intellect. Step by step, with many mistakes, and only with a great deal of time does the thinker begin to grasp truths that are really worth knowing.

The thinker is often a peacemaker rather than a warrior. But he has his own kind of courage: he is courageous in his willingness to suffer the long human journey to truth. There is a secret fire that sustains him.

The thinker, however, considers things in the shadow of a great temptation. It is a subtle, but devastating temptation. The thinker wants to understand everything. He craves intellectual synthesis.

He can even have it, up to a point....

If he is willing to yield his mind to the way of similitude and difference, the way of analogy, where knowledge humbly gives way before a certain darkness, where he adheres and affirms a reality whose secrets are too great for him. What he sees is only in a mirror, and what he does not see is always the greater.

To be humble before reality is his greatest challenge. The thinker has a quiet, often unacknowledged, but fiercely stubborn pride.

Perhaps this is why Rodin's fellow is looking down.

The hardest thing for the thinker is to look at reality, at the actual life that greets him every day. The real things in life are given their deepest meaning by an absolutely gratuitious Love that has freely chosen to take up and give itself from within the whole business.

Shocked by this Love, the thinker is tempted to withdraw into himself. He struggles with all his mental energy to incorporate this Love into his synthetic project. There must be categories in which this can be contained.

St. Paul spoke to the thinkers of Athens. He intrigued them with his appeal to the "Unknown," but then a strange thing happened. He pointed to an event, to gratuitous Love, to a man who has risen from the dead. Some of the philosophers just laughed at him, but I have always wondered about those who said to him, "we will hear you on this another day" (see Acts 17:32).

How typical of the thinker.

In front of the explosion of Love, he says, "can we talk about this some more? Perhaps you can explain yourself?"

But Love does not explain itself. It says, "follow Me."

There is a story about Thomas Aquinas. Once he was deep in thought and working on his manuscripts (which of course have so much value for the history of philosophy and theology). The Prior told a young novice to find one of the friars and to tell him that the Prior wants him to go to town and buy fish for the community.

Aquinas was the first friar that the ignorant novice saw. The great scholar, the Magister of the University of Paris, one of the great geniuses of all time, was approached by a novice, who told him that the Prior had ordered him to go to town and buy fish.

Without a moment's hesitation or question, Thomas put down his pen and headed for the fish market.

The Woman

The marriage of heaven and earth,
of eternity and history,
began in silence,
invisible,
under the heart of a girl.

It is the day of the Annunciation. The Father sent His Only Son into the world through a girl. The Holy Spirit came upon her, the Power of the Most High overshadowed her, and the Son of God became the Son of Mary.

Because she said, "yes."

She stood there, on behalf of the whole of the vast universe of creation, holding in her own heart creation's most awesome mystery: Freedom.

Perfect Freedom.

She was a created person. The marvel of the cosmos. And she was truly and perfectly free: attuned to the Mystery of Being, open to cooperation from her very own self with the ineffable wisdom of that Mystery, capable of giving herself as a person, of adhering as a person, a human person, a woman, to the Mystery.

She was a woman.

She surrendered herself in her perfect freedom to Him, so that He might entrust Himself to her virginal womb, taking human flesh and human nature as His own, making each of us His brothers and sisters.

God who creates and sustains the being and the vitality of every human person has united Himself in a new way with every human person. He has begun the great drama by which He will identify Himself with every person and share the burden and the suffering and the death of every human person.

At this Wondrous Intersection of God and man--the foundation of the taking up by God of the destiny of each human person who has ever lived and ever will live--there is the Woman and her freedom.

Her love.
Her maternal love.

At the center of God's glory, of His revelation of Himself, of His giving of Himself in Love:
it is there
that we find
the Woman.

Courage to the End: The Example of a Bishop

God's reign is already present on our earth in mystery. When the Lord comes, it will be brought to perfection. 

That is the hope that inspires Christians. We know that every effort to better society, especially when injustice and sin are so ingrained, is an effort that God blesses, that God wants, that God demands of us. 

May this Body immolated and this Blood sacrificed for mankind nourish us also, that we may give our body and our blood over to suffering and pain, like Christ--not for self, but to give harvests of peace and justice to our people.

These are the final words of the homily of Archbishop Oscar Romero, March 24, 1980.

Moments later, a shot rang out and the bullet pierced his chest as he stood at the altar. Before falling unconscious, he uttered his last words:

"May God have mercy on the assassins." 

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Only a month before, Archbishop Romero wrote these words in his retreat notes:

“I must be ready to give my life for God, no matter what kind of death awaits me. Unknown circumstances will be faced with the grace of God. He was present to the martyrs, and if it should be necessary I will feel Him very close to me as I render Him my last breath. But more valuable than the moment of dying is giving Him my whole life and living for Him.” 

Embraced By Christ

Two weeks until Good Friday. This Lent for me has been marked with a different kind of experience of suffering. It is the stark wonder that I have found in recognizing the depths of Christ's suffering in the life of another person. A window has been opened for me to the realization of how profoundly the Cross impresses itself upon every person's life.

We just don't see it. We don't look at each other and recognize "Jesus suffering." We don't look at each other's pain, limitations, and faults, and see Jesus suffering. We don't look at the way we disappoint one another, abuse one another, and hurt one another, and recognize Jesus suffering in our very broken and scarred humanity.

We don't look at the way we are divided from one another, at the way we make war on one another--whether it's war that spans the continents, or war between peoples, or war in the community, or the workplace, or war in the household--and recognize Jesus, suffering, right there, taking it all up on His Cross.

And we don't recognize Jesus suffering in the center of our own hearts, right inside our own ugly, paltry selfishness and weakness--the very place where we don't want to look.

That is where He is.

This is the lesson that Blessed Chiara Badano is teaching me. The depths of suffering are unfathomable, because they have been embraced by Christ.

In the midst of the body-crushing, bone-piercing pain of her cancer, she says, "I am not asking Jesus to come and get me to bring me to Heaven anymore, because I still want to offer Him my pain, to share His Cross with Him."

What could possibly make someone say this?

Can God's Love really enter into and thus transform a human heart?

It is beautiful, but it is also...gosh...so overwhelming! I admit that I can't breathe here. But it certainly clarifies the reality that everyone of us must face. Either pain is a tragic waste, or Jesus is true, and suffering really has been transformed into love. And this is not just words. It's a real challenge.

How can I even begin to live like this? How can I find this love? How, O Lord?

I believe He makes it possible. He changes us. But we have to keep asking for the grace. We have to pray. God is merciful, and He helps us to walk in His mysterious ways. And there is no other way except God's love. Jesus I trust in You.

So What Happens Next?

I have on this blog more than a year's worth of pondering my life in public, through the medium of words. The blog format encourages the writing of "vignettes" -- presenting a slice of life, or launching a proposal, or uttering a prayer, or outlining an idea that has the potential for extensive development.

So what happens next?

Why do I ask such a question? A blog is becoming a kind of literary genre in itself. In the world of electronic media, this is something very strange for a person like me who has spent his lifetime dealing with print. The fact is that the writings on my blog are already "published" - sort of. Right?

This is kind of like an e-magazine, or at least it's a regular e-column. I originally started it for my friends and former students, and as a kind of "writing project" that could help my recovery. But of course, I immediately began expressing myself in a public "preachy-teachy" persona. Here is my life! Learn something from it! Alas, this is how I am. When I think things through on my own, I find that I am "teaching the air." My mind is moved by the desire to discover the truth about reality and communicate it.

I seem to think that even my spiritual incoherence can serve as a foundation for learning and teaching about God and the mystery of life.

So what happens next?

I've been involved in publishing for over thirty years. I worked on the high school newspaper back in 1980. I published my first book in 1986. I was an editor and publisher of academic journals and books, and the director of an academic press, during the 1990s. Then I managed to publish two books of my own in the past ten years, in spite of the illness and the disability and all that stuff.

I still think in terms of books.

I could collect the prayer-poems I've written here, organize them, and upload them to Amazon Kindle right now, as an e-book. I could probably have a e-book put together by next Monday.

Wow. Strange.

But no. I'm going to hold out for a "real book" - I am going to work, if possible, through my current publisher and, yes, the editors that I so desperately need.

Or, should I put together an e-book? Why not?

It's not like print publishing is making me a lot of money.

According to Blogger, there are people in Russia who are reading this blog. Really? Maybe I should just keep blogging. Or maybe all of the above.

Have you learned anything from these ruminations? (Ha!)