Saint Agnes Put Jesus First

Saint Agnes and the "Lamb of God"

Agnes of Rome (c. year 304) was a young woman who put Jesus Christ first in everything, and neither the allurements nor the violence of the powers of this world could take Him away from her.

"What I longed for, I now see; what I hoped for, I now possess; in heaven I am espoused to Him whom on earth I loved with all my heart" (antiphon for Saint Agnes, January 21).

Becoming King....

"The order of thought is to begin with ourselves, and with our author and our end.

"Now what does the world think about? Never about that, but about dancing, playing the lute, singing, writing verse, tilting at the ring, etc., and fighting, becoming king, without thinking what it means to be a king or to be a man."

~Blaise Pascal, Pensees 146

If God is With Us, Why is Life So Full of Darkness?

I have been reflecting recently on the theme of "epiphany," which indicates that the Mystery--the infinite, inexhaustible fulfillment of meaning, goodness, justice, beauty, and happiness that our hearts are made for and that all reality points toward--that this Mystery beyond our understanding, beyond the reach of all our striving, has become manifest, has appeared in the world.

He has indeed revealed himself by taking flesh and dwelling among us, by becoming fully human: Jesus of Nazareth. In the coming months we will reflect upon the whole unfolding of God's revelation and communication of himself to us through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

In these events, God, without ceasing to be the Mystery, enters into the depths of human history for the salvation of a world that not only does not fathom him, but that also fears him and rebels against him. God has redeemed the world.

Because of all this, we proclaim that Jesus is Lord. He has all things. He is the meaning of the universe, the meaning of history, the meaning of today, this day, this moment, now.

But that doesn't mean all our problems "go away." The redemption is not magic. It's not a formula for worldly success. It's not a way of escaping the struggles of being human. It's not about protecting us from suffering.

It's about love. God's love, which is the real truth, the real meaning of history, of this moment, this "now."

Jesus's death happens in a moment in time; his resurrection reveals that he has encompassed all of time and embraced the life of every person in his redeeming love. Jesus enters into our "now" and transforms it into an invitation to respond in love to the mystery of his love. His presence empowers our hearts and draws us to respond more and more in love to his love, to abandon ourselves to his love.

The Source of all things, who sustains all things and "saves them from nothingness," is here. He is with us. His presence and his promise touch our hearts. Yet he remains the Mystery and our lives remain mysterious, full of perplexities, tensions and changes, the foretaste of eternal joy, but also (in what can seem contrary to it) our own insoluble problems, our own pain and suffering.

Human beings live in fear of the mystery of life; they flee from it because it appears to them to be a gaping abyss of darkness. The Christian proposal for our lives does not deny this mysterious abyss, or seek to replace it with some ideology or cheap sentiment. True Christian faith lives the mystery of being human all the way to the abyss and suffers its darkness. Christian faith knows that Jesus is here too, and above all.

Jesus has fathomed the abyss of our own mystery, and calls upon us to trust in him because he encompasses it all in the Mystery itself, in the greater abyss that is Eternal Love. This abyss is an infinite Mercy that will finally take us beyond yearning and longing, beyond ourselves and our limits and into the fulfillment for which we have been made.

He is here and we will be saved if we adhere to him and hold onto him and never let go.

Power that is Good

Remembering on this day the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. These simple words have not lost their relevance.

Do I Really Believe in Him?

What does this man Jesus of Nazareth propose to his disciples? And what does he offer to my life, in response to my aspirations, my questions, my struggles with my own limitations, my suffering?

He offers himself. "I am the way and the truth and the life," he says. "Believe in me, follow me."

Do I really believe in him?

Jesus claims that he is the reason why I exist, that I was created so that I might be his brother, the brother of God the Son--the Word made flesh--and thus come to be, in union with him, a child of the Father in the Spirit. This is why I exist; this is the foundation of my identity and destiny as a created person. God made me because he wanted to love me and to give me the power to love him. I was created so that I might be raised up to share in the life of the Trinity.

And this is true for absolutely every human being without exception. It is at the very core of the humanity we all share. Every person is, by the mystery of God's mercy, on a path of life that leads ultimately to an encounter with Jesus, even though so many know nothing about him right now. This is why our lives and words witness to him, Jesus, always, even as we respect people of other religions, engage in dialogue with them, and learn many beautiful things from their stories of seeking truth and longing for goodness and beauty, from the genuine wisdom embodied in their cultures and traditions, and from the mysterious ways God has drawn them and worked in their lives. As we accompany others, collaborate with them, live in friendship with them, and witness to them, we are servants of the grace of God at work in them and in us.

Jesus wants to share his burning love with others, through us. Jesus wants everyone to meet him and to discover that he is the only answer to the search for meaning and the yearning for love that God has fashioned in the depths of every human heart. Only Jesus really knows me; only he can answer for me the question, “Who am I?”

At this point, I feel that I have to ask myself: Is this something I really believe? Is it the concrete, motivating impetus of my daily life? Do I experience the presence of Jesus and his real love for me? How do any of us answer these questions?

If we are Christians, we want to say "yes" in some way, however fragile, however buried beneath distractions, obscured, forgotten, or mysteriously at work in deep places of our darkness. If we do not know this joy, how will we share it with others?

We must grow in this awareness, for our own sakes and for others. We must beg the Lord to deepen the conviction and the ardor of our faith and love, so that we will perceive more concretely that the glory of Christ is the real, superabundant, unimaginable answer to every human misery, every human cry of anguish, every authentic human desire for something more than the limits of this world can give.

We Christians: we need this capacity to see life as it really is. Then we will be able to serve others as witnesses, to give love, to bring healing, to meet human needs with God's mercy.

Going out to the margins, the places of anguish and loneliness, becomes possible and vital as we become more deeply aware of the fact that Jesus himself corresponds to the mystery of the human heart -- my own heart, and the heart of every person I meet. We must beg God to give us the grace to see our world, our circumstances --vividly --in light of this truth.

We must beg God to teach us how to pray, to open our eyes and our hearts to recognize his presence, to be changed by his "humble glory." We must seek him in the life of the Church, drawing strength from the Eucharist and the sacraments, and from one another in the companionship that is born from this new unity we share in his goodness and love.

In this begging, this prayer that adheres to the Lord only to long for him all the more, it becomes clear that every person really is my brother or my sister, that we all stand together in need of his mercy.

Christmas All Through the Year

Detail from Ethiopian icon

Although the great feasts of the Christmas season culminated this past weekend, some of us will keep our lights burning through the rest of the month until February 2. Thus the glow of our Christmas cheer will continue to brighten the often gray wintry days and the long cold nights of January.

Ultimately, however, "Christmas" indicates a fact that shapes all of our days and all of our years: God has come into the world.

From Bethlehem to the Jordan, we have celebrated in these recent weeks God's "opening up of himself," his giving of himself to us. He who is the Mystery that every human person seeks, who is on "the other side" of the More that every person pleads for in front of reality: he has done something beyond all of our dreams and our myths and our philosophy and our striving. He himself--the Infinite Mystery--has come into our reality, into actual human flesh and blood.

God is with us. He had made his dwelling among us and remains with us. He has intervened directly and totally in the story of the human race. God himself dwells among us, in the midst of our human weakness, our self-indulgence, our cruelty, barbarism, blindness, idolatry, and willful ignorance of his compassion and love.

God has given everything; he has poured himself out in love, and in so doing he manifests his ineffable glory, for God is Love. The fullness of the revelation of God is in this love that overcomes sin, that embraces us and saves us, redeems us and heals us. The Infinite Mystery is Infinite Mercy.

And Divine mercy has a human face and a name: Jesus.

"My Faith is My Whole Life"

Seven Months.

"My faith is huge to me. It's not like, 'Oh it's just a section of my life.' No, my faith is my whole life" (Christina Grimmie).

Looking For the Meaning of Life? Listen to Him.

Baptism of Jesus, detail from Ethiopian icon.

"A voice came from the heavens, saying, 'This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased'" (Matthew 3:17). And then again, at the Transfiguration: "From the cloud came a voice that said, 'This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him'" (Matthew 17:5).

“Listen to him.”

Is it not a wonderful thing that there is Someone to whom we can listen?

It means that our lives are not meaningless chaos. All the uncontrollable circumstances, the violence, the disappointments of our lives are understood and taken up by Someone who turns everything to the good, who draws the whole of this crazy life towards a purpose, a fulfillment in wisdom and love.

And if we listen to Him we can enter into that purpose and discover therein redemption and mercy.

Epiphany

In a New Year, the Problems and Possibilities Remain

Late afternoon Winter sunlight in Marlow Heights.

We have finished the first week of 2017 already, and I am still debating whether I want to actually make any retrospective remarks on the year that has just past. It was a "remarkable" year for me, this 2016, a painful and profound year.

So much happened. So many processes rooted in last year are still unfolding for me, our family, our growth in faith, our nation (the USA), and the world. I'm not sure I can say much about them yet, because I don't know where they are leading, I don't yet know the shape or the depth of it all.

There's not much point in simply reviewing the all the events in the news: the wars and humanitarian catastrophes, terrorist attacks, racial and social tensions, murders, not to mention the distressing election year in America and all the ways we failed one another in charity, justice, and courtesy. The larger events of the year were personal for many of us, in different ways, and of course we had our own particular dramas and difficulties and burdens to carry.

And though we mark time with numbers, there was nothing magic about midnight on January 1 that made our problems go away. Both the problems and the possibilities remain with us.

What can I say at this point? Like many people, I would have to say that the year 2016 was an exceptionally hard year. Not all of the "hard," however, was "bad." Some of it was clearly very good. Some of it was mysterious and paradoxical. Some of it was just plain crummy, but I am (very slowly) learning to "stay in the crummy" and "walk with it" in hope.

I have good reason for hope, and as I grow older this conviction has only gotten stronger in spite of all my inconsistency and forgetfulness and even my efforts to run away. I am not the source of this confidence; rather it is a stubborn thing that persists beneath my anxieties and problems, an impetus that always urges me to get up off the ground, to go further, inch by inch if necessary. I go on because of the One to whom I belong. In every moment I am held in the hands of that Mystery who makes me and calls me, whose light is greater than all darkness, whose torrents of love water the driest deserts.

There were some pretty dry deserts in 2016. There were new and wonderful discoveries too. I studied quite a bit, researched and wrote my articles and other material, and overall learned a lot. I continued to rediscover music and the arts, photography, and the fascinating details of nature that are accessible to me in the beautiful place where I live.

I also "wrestled with the angel in the night" (see Genesis 32:22-32) yet again, finding myself greatly blessed while also "limping" even worse than before. It has been a very long wrestling match this time, but the broken, crippled man who is emerging from it moves forward and uses all that he has left with a greater urgency. The fire in him is deeper, brighter, more ready to forge anew everything that is drawn into it.

Twelfth Night

"O God, who by the Nativity of your Only Begotten Son
wondrously began for your people the work of redemption,
grant, we pray, to your servants such firmness of faith,
that by his guidance they may attain the glorious prize

you have promised."

The Christmas Season reaches its high point in the days of the Epiphany, when we remember the wise men of the Gentiles who followed the star to find him, and John the Baptist who drew him up from the waters as the Spirit came upon him and the Father's voice was heard.

It is Twelfth Night. The Magi have arrived and have found the child with Mary his mother.

A New Year For the World, a New Year For Me

The days of Winter are slowly beginning to grow longer again, even as the air grows colder.

It's a new year for the world and a new year for me too. On January 2, I turned 54 years old.

Thank you, God, for my life.

It hasn't been an easy life and certainly not a "normal" life. It is rich with beauty and fragility, hints of joy and wounds of failure, so many rewards and so many changes, and all the love for things and for people that rises up like a flood only to find that it is not enough to fill me, but only to make deeper my cry for "something more"...

That sweet, awful pain. I keep trying to forget it, but I always find it again, growing secretly, inscrutably, slowly making me ready for You.

I thank You, God, for my life. Through all of it, You have been good.

Our family has some big adventures coming up in 2017. The kids have grown so much since I began this blog nearly six years ago. They will be taking up new challenges this year, some of which I will describe in more detail soon.

And our poor world struggles in so many places, in so many ways. We are all mysteriously bound to one another in this journey. We depend on one another. It would be overwhelming, were it not for the fact that Jesus is with us.

Jesus is with us. God became man, took flesh to dwell with us. I pray that we can all know more fully what this really means, or at least that we can know enough to hold onto Him and trust in Him and let Him carry us.

Dear Jesus, open our hearts to Your presence in this new year, that we might recognize You and love You in every moment, in everything.

Grant that we might be reconciled to one another.

Console and bring healing to those who are suffering, protect human life and the dignity of the human person, especially among the poor, the displaced, the refugees, the oppressed, the lonely, and the victims of every form of violence.

Bring peace and spare us from the scourge of further war.

Place in our hearts worship, adoration, wonder, and committed love for You, trust in the wisdom and goodness of Your will for our lives, and love for one another.

Light and Darkness

The Best of Times, The Worst of Times

The year comes to an end, finally.

It was a year of unprecedented violence and destruction, with the news and everybody talking about how many people died.

No one expected there to be so much death.

Still, there was much good in the year. Ordinary people went on with their daily lives, grew in so many ways, and overcame all sorts of obstacles. This was a year to treasure the small victories, the resilience of human beings in the face of all kinds of pressure, the vitality of youth, and the blessings of every moment.

People still celebrated Christmas and the holiday season in this year. Take someone like Roy Armstrong, a teenager who sent a message to his Mom saying:

We went "to a party that the ladies had arranged for us. They had quite a spread in the Connaught Hall & afterwards they gave a concert which was sure worth hearing. One of the ladies invited me to her home anytime I wish to go & I sure am going as, well, she has a swell looking daughter."

It was a difficult year for Roy Armstrong, but these are words full of hope.

At the end of every "bad year" there is hope. The next year is a brand new slate, bearing the image of a newborn baby. A new start. Shake off all the dust of old '16 and move on to '17.

Hope for the new year. Right? Hope for the new year, a century ago, the year 1917?

It was hard, very hard, for people to be hopeful on New Year's Eve in the year 1916. A great portion of the world was helplessly mired in a terrible war, far more horrible and destructive and futile than any war that had ever been fought before.

A lot of people died in 1916. One million soldiers died on the battlefields of Europe. In one year, the names of places and things, towns and rivers suddenly became brand new synonyms for hell: trenches, Verdun, the Somme.

And there was no end in sight.

Then came 1917. Was it better or worse than the previous awful year of 1916? In a way, it was both. It brought more destruction, anguish, and futility, and something new beyond all of that: the collapse of Russia into an unprecedented kind of revolution and the dawn of a new system of human power dedicated to fundamentally altering the very structure of human nature, by whatever means necessary.

Yet on the night of New Year's Eve a hundred years ago, Vladimir Lenin was smoking cigars on his terrace in Zurich. He was a balding intellectual living in exile in Switzerland with nothing but notebooks full of scrawl, a head full of dreams, and the mysteriously faithful Nadya Krupskaya to listen to his rantings and sew the holes in his socks.

1917 was destined to be one heck of a year for Lenin.

War dragged on in Europe, while in America the man who got himself (re)elected President in 1916 by promising to keep the United States out of the war (his slogan, literally, was "He kept us out of war") very promptly brought America into the mess by April of 1917.

Roy Armstrong, after his Christmas in England in 1916, spent the following year on the Western front with the Canadian Expeditionary Force until he was killed in battle on October 30. He was 19 years old. He never had the chance to get to know that swell girl. Neither did millions of other men of his generation.

The violence of the war intensified into a relentless slaughter even as Russia fell into chaos. Yet 1917 also gave us a new hope.

Three peasant children in a small town in Portugal saw a woman in white who promised peace. She told them that people must pray the great prayer that ranges over the life of Jesus and the birth of the Church, the prayer that was like the New Testament in a string of beads that the most humble person could hold in their hands, that could awaken the message of the Gospel in the mind of a child.

In the year 1917, the world was given a promise for which they were invited to pray. Pray for peace. Pray for Russia, the land of so many tears, so dear to the heart of the Mother of God. Pray the prayer of the Gospel with Mary. Enter into her way of "dwelling on everything in her heart." Pray the Rosary, pray with Mary the Mother of God, the Mother of hope.

But the invitation was drowned out by the guns of war and the ambitions of men. We know the fruit born of this negligence.

Yet Mary did not forget her children. In time she led God's People into her prayer; she raised up her own heroes in the darkness, especially the man in white who was felled by a bullet and soaked in his own blood but didn't die, the man who taught us how to pray, how to be Christians--indeed, how to be human beings.

In our time Russia has been relieved of the long horror of totalitarian communism but remains in turmoil, and much of the world that the Great War created a hundred years ago is now collapsing in ashes and blood. The land we call "the Middle East" is hemorrhaging, its ancient cities in ruins, its peoples driven to wander the roads of the world in desperation.

In the West, we have become more callous to murder and murderers, more corrupt, more foolish because "we know not what we do." Love is lost to us in ambivalence, buried beneath our astonishing wealth and comforts and the vast new powers that we don't understand how to use.

Thus we have arrived at the new year of 2017.

We still long for love. We are desperate for love. There are moments of clarity in events, in life and death, when love shows itself to us like burning fire. How can this kind of fire become the light and warmth of our days?

We now stand at the beginning of 2017 wondering whether love will really prevail, wondering where we can place our hope.

The place of our hope remains the same, and the promise of 1917 remains to be fully realized in our historical time.

We need to pray, to enter more into the heart of Mary's prayer, to be drawn into the light that heals us and can help heal the world.

2016 was a difficult year, and yet the promise still lives, the hope stands before us. Now it is the year 2017. Let us pray.

Putting Our Faith in Worldly Order

DECEMBER 29: SAINT THOMAS BECKET, BISHOP AND MARTYR.

The Fifth Day of Christmas also commemorates the bishop and martyr St Thomas Becket, the famous Archbishop of Canterbury in the 12th century who spoke truth to power, who courageously opposed his friend King Henry II on laws that would have hindered the freedom of Christ's Church.

The Church must never allow her witness to the Gospel to be subordinated or her place co-opted by the violence or seductions of the earthly city. As another English Thomas would point out three centuries later, we truly serve our country and/or any other worthwhile cause or political or social movement in this life only if we serve God first. When we acknowledge God, our own freedom is secured.

"Those who put their faith in worldly order
Not controlled by the order of God,
In confident ignorance, but arrest disorder,
Make it fast, breed fatal disease,
Degrade what they exalt."

~Thomas Becket in T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral 

Thirtieth Anniversary of My First Book, "Fishers of Men"

This book was published in December of 1986. It's hard to believe that it has be thirty years.

Before this month ends, I want to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of my first book, Fishers of Men, by Trinity Communications.

I was a 23 year old graduate student and aspiring writer and research journalist in the Summer and Fall of 1986. Thanks to a grant, I was able to travel to different parts of the country to interview priests about their vocation and ministry, and then publish a collection of "profiles" in a book for Trinity as part of a program geared to fostering vocations to the priesthood.

Are you finished laughing? Okay, the photo is overexposed; thus my "heavily tanned" look. Otherwise, this kid is me!

I have such great memories of this adventure, which really enlarged my horizons and gave me a broad experience of the ministry of the Catholic Church all over the United States.

And, though the book was popular and inspirational in genre, it did stimulate my very young theological reflections about the mystery of the Church in the best way, by bringing me into contact with the flesh of Jesus Christ present and at work in the Church's life and mission in the world.

One can see--for example in these pages--that I have already begun to reflect and write about the themes that still concern me today. Other than having a lot more experience and a lot less energy, I don't feel so different than the young man I was thirty years ago.

Merry Christmas 2016

The Janaro family wishes everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy Christmas Octave and Christmas Season.

We weren't able to get our usual family Christmas picture in our dress outfits after getting home from the Midnight Mass. Instead, here (above) is a collage of kids and grownups in pajamas or house comfy clothes opening presents after a good sleep.

The little "atrium" corner is clothed in "white for celebration":

And we had a lovely Christmas dinner with all the kids home and around the table. Here below, at least, is a picture of the table. You'll have to take my word for it that the food and the company were very special.

I didn't take many pictures this Christmas. I haven't been feeling well and don't have much stamina. I have had to take things as easy as this particular time of year will allow.

Still, it's a great blessing for the Janaro family all to be together, once again, for the holidays. It's something we never want to take for granted, but rather to cherish with gratitude and with a place in our hearts for those who are afflicted with sorrow for so many reasons at Christmas, particularly this Christmas of the year 2016.

Christ is born. Glory to Him!

O Holy Night

A child was born in a cave one night, long ago,

at the end of a weary journey,

to a family cast out from all comfort,

driven off to a damp cavern in the fields,

out into the dark cold ground of rock

and sparse stubble,

where there was no one to welcome the child

except for the lowest miserable exiles of the night,

the poor of the earth's crusty ground,
burdened with the weary weight of restless watching,
wandering in worn crack-heeled sandals

beneath the clouds, searching

for pale green shoots amidst the sand and stones,
to feed the hunger of their skeletal beasts.

He was born in this wild place,

defenseless,

barely sheltered from the windy sky,

first found by these grizzled ancient forgotten men

who had no reason to think

that anybody loved them or cared for them

or knew the lines of their faces.

But it was to them that he came.

And they found him, the child born that night

under the light of a star

that burned in its core with fire.

And the fire was kindled in their hearts, 

awakening something new,

burning with a joy and a hope

they had never known before.

Tonight that fire burns again in hearts all over the world,

burns with a life greater than all death,

burns with a peace that no violence can take away,

burns hot enough to melt our sorrows,

burns in the deep darkness of the night,

high beyond the reach of our own designs and efforts,

a bright beautiful star lighting up unknown roads ahead,

drawing us to walk through the limits of our fears,

leading us to the love that risks everything

to give itself as love and love alone.

Tonight I am led back to Christmas 2011, when this 17 year old girl belted out her own soulful arrangement of O Holy Night and set YouTube on fire.

It was a spark of that great fire of utterly defenseless, utterly unconquerable love, and it has become a light in many hearts at the end of 2016, a fire that burns with a life that is greater than death, a peace that prevails over all the horror of violence.

Listen below to O Holy Night, produced, arranged, and performed in 2011 by Christina Victoria Grimmie (March 12, 1994 - June 10, 2016), an ordinary girl full of an amazing music, a spectacular voice, and an extraordinary faith:

Support Indie Artists: They Give So Much To Us

The other day on my social media accounts I gave a special shout out to Audrey Assad, who uploaded to her Soundcloud page a quick song she recorded at home (in a few moments she had to spare after finally getting her two year old son to sleep). She set Wordsworth's famous Christmas poem to music, and the words have a deep resonance this Christmas for the daughter of a Syrian refugee of the last generation, who holds the suffering of her father's people close to her own heart.

She has the freedom to do things like this, not only because of digital recording technology and the internet, but also because she has been an "independent artist" since 2013. A revolution has been taking place in the "music industry" over the past ten years, and it can seem very confusing. But it's also an environment where a proven and dedicated artist can find more possibilities to make the kind of music she wants at her own pace and with a deeper connection to the people who recognize its real value.

The easy access to media is used by many different people in different ways, not all of them constructive. But we can only be happy when an artist of Audrey's stature and capability uses diverse media platforms to share her creative process with us.

Seriously, follow Audrey Assad on Soundcloud (see the link below). She posts songs here that she calls "living room demos" -- they are only available streaming on Soundcloud (which is free). She also streams videos and studio music tracks on her YouTube channel. This is why we have to support our INDIE artists - they're doing this for something more than money (though, obviously, they need money, which is why we have to be more than just "fans" -- we have to be collaborators in a community united by a common appreciation of beauty).

Agnese Officially Grows Up