Jesus is the Gift that Brings Healing and Hope

Humans are fragile beings, who are often ignorant, confused, exhausted, and overwhelmed by events and circumstances. Humans get sick, injured, traumatized, and restrained in so many ways. Eventually, humans grow old and their bodies and at least certain aspects of their mental capacities grow progressively weaker. We experience this in various ways at various times in ourselves and/or in those we love. We all carry great burdens.

We are all suffering.

The road of life is difficult. Human freedom, nevertheless, is real. It is woven into all of this mess. The love of Jesus is also real, and it is offered to us within all of this mess.

Our lives therefore, are inescapably dramatic. Love is always possible in this life. So too is sin. We know this if we are honest with ourselves. We know when we have freely chosen to do something that is evil. The weight of our human condition may diminish the blame we deserve, but we still know that we must take responsibility for the things we do wrong.

We must examine ourselves honestly, and repent of our sins.

It is true that our myriad human afflictions can reduce (in various ways) our measure of responsibility for the evil that we do.

But nothing in our particular human condition can turn evil into good. If something is morally destructive in itself, there are many aspects of our burdened humanity that can make it less destructive for us. But there is nothing that can make it good for us.

If our misery drives us to plunge deeper into more kinds of misery, this is a sorrowful event that should evoke compassion, solidarity, and the effort to help. We deserve this solidarity, each one of us, because we are human beings!

But we cannot use our misery to justify ourselves. We cannot redefine the constraints of our misery as an “alternative form” of human fulfillment that we have a “right” to create for ourselves. It doesn't work. We remain miserable. Even if the whole world told us we were happy, would it make any difference, really?

Self-justification is a project that ends in despair.

It doesn't help, however, simply to point this out. Because we all remain broken and in need of healing. We need healing.

Jesus is the gift that brings healing and hope.

Jesus heals us from our sins and begins to heal the brokenness all the way through us, to lift up our humanity, to empower our freedom, and to enable us to embrace the mysterious path of suffering for ourselves and others.

Our destiny is the glory of God, and His glory is our healed and transformed humanity in which we are brothers and sisters of Jesus forever right down to our bones and nerves and tissues, right down to the delicate and exquisite balance of all our parts, to the depths of spirit and mind and heart and flesh and blood.

The human person: alive and whole forever. Filled up and flowing out with joy.

The hope for every human person is Him. God wants each and every human person to be transcendently beautiful and free forever. He wants to make us His adopted children and lead us into His Kingdom where we will see Him face-to-face and live forever in communion with Him and with one another. He has made us for eternal life, and has promised to bring us to this integral fulfillment when we trust in His Son Jesus and follow Jesus present in the life of the Church.

This is the hope that enables us to taste even now the promise of fulfillment. This is the hope that generates the compassion which we are called to have for one another, the interest in life, the building up of the good in this world, the struggle to move forward without being crushed by our own burdens.

In all things, He is our hope.

Saint Barnabas, Companion of Saint Paul

June 11th is the feast of Saint Barnabas, ranked as an “apostle” alongside Saint Paul (see Acts 14:14), although he was not one of the Twelve. He was an early member of the Church of Jerusalem, with Acts 4:36 identifying him as a Cypriot by birth, and as one of disciples who sold his land and laid the money at the feet of the apostles. When the newly converted Saul of Tarsus returned to Jerusalem and sought to convince the church that he had seen Christ and had become a believer, it was Barnabas who presented him to the apostles and vouched for the genuineness of Saul’s conversion. He later assisted Paul in several of the latter’s missionary journeys, including the earliest visits to Antioch. Though brief of detail, the scriptures give enough about him that we recognize him as a companion of Paul:

"The Church in Jerusalem...sent Barnabas to Antioch. When he arrived and saw the grace of God, he rejoiced and encouraged them all to remain faithful to the Lord in firmness of heart for he was a good man, filled with the Holy Spirit and faith. And a large number of people was added to the Lord. Then he went to Tarsus to look for Saul, and when he had found him he brought him to Antioch. For a whole year they met with the Church and taught a large number of people, and it was in Antioch that the disciples were first called Christians" (Acts 11:22-26).

Nine YEARS of Remembering Christina Grimmie

It’s astonishing to think that today marks the ninth anniversary of Christina Grimmie’s passing from this world. Her music and pioneering contributions to audiovisual media remain very much with us. I still reflect often upon her almost singular vocation in mainstream popular music — a vocation invested with such a rich humanity. In an environment that can so easily become inhuman, superficial, and conflict-driven, Christina was persistently human. She was full of passion for her own singing, songwriting, and musical composition, while simultaneously giving herself in friendship and encouragement to her fellow artists.

I have done lots of reflecting about Christina on this Blog. For many years I have followed the paths of music and the expansion of media as well as the needs of humanity, the witness of faith, and the gift of love. Not only as matters of study, but above all as factors of my own life and the growth of my own family.

Open this LINK to see and read all the posts I have devoted to Christina Grimmie — text and images — over the course of the past nine years. There is enough for a book! Although it seems that I keep repeating the same themes about her beautiful life, and her offering-of-herself to Jesus and her “frands” right up until the final moment, when she opened her arms on that night and her gratuitous, defenseless love was met with incomprehensible hatred and bullets.

Nine years later, it seems like the violence of this world has grown and grown, like a monstrous whirlwind that threatens to sweep us all up. But can we not say that love has also grown? Christina's legacy continues to grow. Her frands (like my own used-to-be-teenagers) have become adults now. It won't be long before they take positions of responsibility in their own communities. They will make their contribution to the shape of their societies and the dispositions of their nations (the “Team Grimmie” page on Facebook has members from 99 different countries). I think they will contribute to making this world a better place because Christina has taught them and witnessed to them about the greatness of God's love.

I still see her in this way, with her arms open, ever welcoming, creating spaces of beauty and humanity — spaces of encounter where she could meet people and people could meet one another, spaces of inspiration and encouragement, spaces of peace.

May these spaces of peace and friendship continue to grow.

Pentecost 2025: “The Spirit Breaks Down Barriers…”

“The Spirit breaks down barriers and tears down the walls of indifference and hatred because He ‘teaches us all things’ and ‘reminds us of Jesus’s words’ (cf. John 14:26). He teaches us, reminds us, and writes in our hearts before all else the commandment of love that the Lord has made the center and summit of everything” (Pope Leo XIV, Pentecost 2025).

“The Harmony of the Spirit…”

The harmony of the Spirit works for fraternal communion among us, a coexistence of diversity among “living stones” that build up the house of God. The Holy Spirit fills our hearts with His love.

Come Holy Spirit, Come Through Mary

Veni Sancte Spiritus, Veni Per Mariam.

So I pray, many times during the course of the day. It is an invocation worth pondering as we prepare for the great feast of Pentecost. At the very center of the mystery of salvation, there is a woman.

It was the Holy Spirit who preserved her from original sin and from all sin. It was the Holy Spirit who dwelt within her heart from the first moment of her conception, who taught her from her first thoughts to seek God's will and ponder His word, and who inspired her to consecrate herself wholly to the Divine plan. It was the Holy Spirit who gave her a sense of wonder in the presence of God, and that dedication and self-abandonment which she expressed when she called herself the "lowly servant" the "handmaid" of the Lord. It was the Holy Spirit who came upon her in that first, secret Pentecost that occurred in her heart and in her womb when she said "Yes" to the word of the angel Gabriel, when her loving obedience overcame the selfish disobedience of Eve. 

The Word, the Only-Begotten Son of the Father, took flesh in the womb of the Virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit. And it was the Holy Spirit that sustained and deepened the "Yes" of Mary's heart all the way to the Cross, a "yes" that accompanied the redeeming love of Jesus offered for the whole human race, and therefore a "yes" that embraces each of us personally.

So it is no surprise that we find the Mother of God in the upper room with the disciples praying for the gift of the Holy Spirit and receiving Him anew in the birth of the Church. And now the Virgin Mary, reigning in glory with her Son, prays for us to receive the gift of the Spirit. We receive the grace of the Spirit because we receive Jesus Christ. Jesus became man in the history of the world through the maternal mediation of Mary, and so today He takes flesh in our lives through the maternal mediation of Mary. Jesus comes to us in the invitation to love that shapes the moments of our lives, a shaping that passes in a mysterious but deeply human, attentive, and motherly way through the heart of Mary.

Mary is the "Mediatrix" of all graces (within and subordinate to the One Mediator, her Son Jesus). Thus her involvement in our lives is not just a distant fact of the past. It is a reality of the present, a reality of this moment, a living reality for my life. Mary, my Mother, my Mother. Through her Christ makes Himself present in our lives now, and so through her, the lowly servant of the Lord, we receive the gift of the Spirit in Christ, now, each of us, in all of our many circumstances.

How can I imagine such tenderness, so extensive and yet so personal? And yet it is Love that makes it possible. And so I turn to Mary, always, with confidence. She is my Mother.

Veni Sancte Spiritus, Veni Per Mariam.
Come Holy Spirit. Come through Mary.

June 4th 1989: When Will the Chinese People be Free?

In these days we recall once again the paradigmatic act of violence that symbolizes in many ways the sorrows, sufferings, and frustrations of the great ancient people(s) who live in the world's most populous nation. 

From the night of June 3rd to the morning of June 4th 1989, the Chinese Communist PartyState deployed the overwhelming force of the “People’s Liberation Army” for an aggressive offensive invasion of a city. But it wasn't some foreign city that stood as a threat to China in these days.

It was Beijing.

How strange that the Chinese Communist PartyState thought it necessary to wage war against their own capital city. Moreover, the forces they sought to overcome were… their own people who lived in the city! 

The people had succeeded in preventing armed units from entering Beijing after the May 20th declaration of martial law; they made their stand in solidarity with the hundreds of thousands of students who had occupied Tiananmen Square in peaceful protests over the previous seven weeks. Under the broad category of “Democracy,” the students were calling for the freedom to ask the fundamental questions of human existence, to express the ineradicable desires of the human heart.

These young people were not satisfied with the bread and circuses of the previous decade’s “Reform and Opening” engineered by the PartyState. Many didn’t have a clear idea of what they actually wanted. But they wanted the freedom to search for it. And their desire spread like fire in the Spring of 1989.

This was enough to mark them as enemies of the State power that had arrogated to itself the right to define, and ultimately remake, human beings according to its own suffocating ideology and/or the ruthless exigencies of a power politics dominated by an increasingly invasive and pervasive Party "control" of all aspects of people's lives.

The Army came to impose and restore "order" in the city. But countless citizens of Beijing - ordinary people, workers, vendors, bus drivers, restaurants, even the local media - stood with the students. Finally, the 27th Division of the PLA was ordered to force its way into the city and “clear the Square” of the protestors.

The full story of that horrible night remains in part obscure, but only because the repression was so inhuman, so brutal, and so thorough in “clearing” Tiananmen Square of the protestors and the evidence that they had ever been there. First the army took the city itself by indiscriminate force in its streets, with tanks and Armored Personnel Carriers (APCs) shooting down civilians frequently and at random.

Then the 27th Division, known for their efficiency and unquestioning obedience, headed for the Square, where the student protestors maintained their non-violent resistance surrounded by guards (not carrying lethal arms) of the Shenyang Military Region. What happened next? Many voices with diverse agendas give different accounts. The Chinese Communist PartyState, not surprisingly, praised the 27th Division for quelling “counterrevolutionary riots” on that night, and put the death toll at about 200. The general consensus of those who have studied these events is that “thousands” died in the city and in Tiananmen Square on June 3-4, the vast majority of whom were unarmed civilians and students.

There is one report, only recently made known, that deserves particular attention. Documents declassified by the British government in 2017 include a secret diplomatic cable from Britain’s ambassador to China in 1989, Sir Alan Donald. Information was relayed to him by a consistently reliable intelligence asset who received it directly from a member of the highest organ of central government, the State Council.

This excerpt from the asset’s report - as presented in the BBC news - speaks for itself. I should note that this text describes some very disturbing - frankly, just plain sick - behavior. According to the BBC's presentation, when the army arrived, a deceitful announcement was made: “Students understood they were given one hour to leave square but after five minutes APCs attacked. Students linked arms but were mown down including soldiers. APCs then ran over bodies time and time again to make 'pie' and remains collected by bulldozer. Remains incinerated and then hosed down drains. Four wounded girl students begged for their lives but were bayoneted.”

Today, thirty six years later, the Chinese Communist PartyState has nothing to say about this crime against humanity, which not only crushed untold human lives, but also tried to crush the human heart’s aspiration for something beyond material prosperity, that deep and mysterious awakening of the core of the human personality that people seek to express when they use the word “freedom.”

Freedom can be distracted by false and superficial promises. It can be deluded, misdirected, discouraged, and even turn toward destructive behavior. Those of us who live in the “Free World” have demonstrated all this beyond any reasonable doubt.

But the fundamental impetus of freedom cannot be crushed. Its “crying-out” cannot be silenced. And it cannot be satisfied by narrow ideologies, material success, nationalist tribalism, or any other LIES. Freedom seeks the real fulfillment of the human person, the ultimate reason for which every human heart is made.

"Divine Mercy" and the Gift of the Holy Spirit

"For the sake of His sorrowful Passion, have Mercy on us and on the whole world."

I pray this prayer every day, when I say the chaplet of Divine Mercy. According to Saint Faustina, Jesus urged the practice of praying this repeatedly, using the beads of the Rosary, promising that this "chaplet" would be a source of great and special graces for us and for the world (if you don't know this prayer already, see this LINK).

When I pray the chaplet, I seek to unite myself spiritually to the offering of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, because it is through the Eucharist that I can pray the prayer at the beginning of each decade: "Eternal Father, I offer you the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Your dearly beloved Son Our Lord Jesus Christ, in atonement for our sins and those of the whole world."

These prayers express so much about the love of the Father, the truth about our sins, and our total dependence on the mystery of Christ's sacrifice. But sometimes I have wondered: where is the Holy Spirit in this prayer? Then I thought (and this is just my own opinion), that Mercy itself refers to the Holy Spirit. Through the redeeming sacrifice of the Son of God made man, the Father and the Son breathe forth the Spirit upon the world, and into the hearts of those who receive God's saving love.

The Divine Mercy devotion and the special icon given to Saint Faustina focus on the "blood and water" that flowed forth from the Heart of Jesus. But as Saint John tells us, "there are three that bear witness...the Spirit, and the water, and the blood; and these three are one" (1 John 5:7-8). In some sense, can we not think of the Mercy of God as the gift of His Spirit?

Then, the prayer of the chaplet becomes a Trinitarian prayer: "For the sake of His [the Son's] sorrowful Passion, [Father] have Mercy [send Your Holy Spirit] on us and on the whole world." I don't see any reason why it cannot be understood in this way, but the more important thing is that I know that when I pray the chaplet and implore God's Mercy for me and for the world, I am begging for the grace of the Holy Spirit, by which God works the miracle of His Mercy in me, and embraces in His Mercy all those who have been entrusted to me - those who need my prayers. I want to lift up my heart and immerse myself in the mystery of the Holy Trinity, of the God who is Love, and who is my only hope.

And I beg for that Love to be poured out as healing mercy on a poor world that is so broken and so full of longing and suffering and deception and violence — a world that I feel inside my own heart, crying out for a love it does not know, crying out for the Presence of Christ to radiate love within it through me. 

Come Holy Spirit, make me an instrument of God's love and mercy.

Saint Andrew Kaggwa of the Uganda Martyrs

This is the story of Saint Andrew Kaggwa, one of the group of martyrs whose feast we celebrate today.

The nineteenth century witnessed the first sustained interaction between European nations and the many different cultures of sub-Saharan East Africa. Europeans met not only various tribal societies, but also a remarkable political entity on the shores of what is now Lake Victoria: a nation of three million people united under a centralized bureaucracy and ruled by an absolute monarch.

This realm was called Buganda, and its ruler was the Kabaka. The “Kingdom of Buganda” dominated the surrounding region, received tribute and took slaves from enemy tribes, and traded with Arab merchants. Some of the Bagandans accepted the religion of the Arabs, abandoning their traditional animism for an adherence to one God.

Among the many slaves was a young boy born about 1855, taken from a neighboring tribe, adopted by a Baganda clan family and raised as one of their own. He was given the name Kaggwa. His strength and outgoing personality won the favor of many, and he was recruited by the prestigious royal service as a teenager. He was assigned to the royal musical retinue which was at the time trained by Arabs. Young Kaggwa had a keen intelligence and (along with many other Bagandans) a remarkable hunger for the truth. Desiring to serve the One God who created all things, he followed his Arab teachers at that time and became a Muslim.

Meanwhile, French Catholic missionaries first arrived at the court of Kabaka Mutesa in 1878. Mutesa was a complex character, fascinated by religion, refined, but also corrupt, ruthless, and bent on the maximum consolidation of his own power. He allowed freedom for religious teaching, but constantly vacillated his favor between Arabs, English Protestants, and French Catholics.

Kaggwa was not content as a Muslim. But soon he encountered the French Father Siméon Lourdel, a Catholic priest from a strange land with a strange skin color, but also specially prepared to share something beautiful with the Baganda people. Lourdel proposed the true God who created all things, and who also became man in Jesus and redeemed the human race from sin. Jesus seeks every person of every race and nation, to draw them into communion with his ongoing presence and gift of himself in the Catholic Church.

By the time Kaggwa took his place at the Kabaka’s court, he had decided to enroll as a Catholic catechumen. The grace of the Holy Spirit worked powerfully in transforming his own searching intelligence and openheartedness. The missionaries were astonished by how Kaggwa and several other young catechumens rapidly learned the catechism with thoroughness and comprehension, became passionately committed to their faith, and began spreading it to others even before their own baptism. Kaggwa soon brought his friends to receive instruction from the missionaries, who found that they had already learned much from Kaggwa himself.

Finally, he was baptized “Andrew” Kaggwa on April 30, 1882. In the next four years, he rose to prominence in the court of Mutesa’s son, the Kabaka Mwanga. He married and began a Catholic Christian family, and also taught the faith to many others as a catechist in his home. In this way, however, he aroused the envy of anti-Christian officials which led to his martyrdom a week before that of young Charles Lwanga and the other children attendants at the royal palace on June 3, 1886.

On John Paul’s Birthday, I Remember Being 28

Today is John Paul’s 28th birthday. When this blog began he was 13. Now he’s nearly five years married with a family of his own. When I was 28, I was still single and several years into my graduate studies.

It was the year 1991.

Here is a poem-of-sorts that I wrote a few months short of turning 28. It has a visual component, as I am comparing myself to ten years earlier (1981). It’s not a very deep reflection, but it’s based on a sense of how we change as we grow older. At this age, after a decade of “adult experiences,” we have a stretch of life we can “look back” upon.