"My eyes have seen your salvation, which you prepared in the sight of all the peoples" (Luke 2:30-31).
It's Forty Days after Christmas. Happy Feast of the Presentation of the Lord!
An ordinary man engages the circumstances of daily life, seeking to draw closer to the Mystery who gives meaning to everything.
"My eyes have seen your salvation, which you prepared in the sight of all the peoples" (Luke 2:30-31).
It's Forty Days after Christmas. Happy Feast of the Presentation of the Lord!
This Blog appears to be aptly titled: Never Give Up is now 12 years old, and it shows no signs of… y’know, “giving up.” Why? Am I really that crazy?
My Blog is still going strong, even though the “hits” on individual articles have plummeted to discouragingly low levels. (Although I don’t really know what those numbers signify.) Sometimes I feel like I’m “The Last Blogger.” I do see Blogs out there, but often their most recent posts are, like, from 2018. I’m not putting anybody down; in fact it’s perfectly reasonable. I wonder, however, how many current Blogs there are out there that have posted 200+ days every year for the past 12 years. And every post is still in the archives! It’s also backed up on PDF files, and a couple of other formats. I hope it will thus survive any Internet disasters that might come along, and remain accessible in some form in the future.
Right now, I probably have enough readers to put in a small classroom… for a seminar. I probably never had much more than that for most of my articles and posts. Sometimes all they get is an “experimental” (i.e. strange) piece of “digital art.” Other times they get pictures of a cute baby. But there is a fair bit of substantial (if rough) writing, and if I repeat the same themes over and over, it’s because I myself need to revisit and remember them again and again.
There is some material here that should be polished up and put into a more high profile publication. At this stage, I would need technical and editorial assistance to make that happen, and I have no way to hire anybody. It would have to be a labor of love for them (as it is for me)—and I mean the kind of love that looks like this: $0.00 per hour/day/week/month/etc.
I had a couple of Blogs prior to this one. I think I started my first Blog in 2006, when bloggery was already well-established. I was still teaching, and I tried to use it as a potential “new media” forum for interacting with my students. Didn’t have much success with that.🤪 In fact—dear former students, if you happen to be reading—it was one instance in which I deserved all the eye-rolls you gave me or at least wanted to give me (and it wasn’t the only instance, but it was one that I remember). Although I did offer chances for extra credit. People always want extra credit, right?😉
Around the same time, I joined that “Facebook” thingy. But it took me a few years to warm up to using social media. After my book Never Give Up: My Life and God’s Mercy was published in 2010, I began to do more stuff on the Internet. I asked my peeps on Facebook if they would be interested in me doing a Blog and of course there were plenty of people who said, “YES!” (There may have been plenty of others who thought, “No,” but they weren’t gonna post that in the comments.)
Thus I became a “blogger” during what may have been peak season of Blog-dom. Everyone had a Blog. Some Blogs had huge followings and their authors were like rock stars in the world of new media. But then along came Twitter and Instagram and TikTok, turning everyone into producers (and consumers) of short, random, flashy multimedia “shows.” The last decade saw the evolution and extension of audiovisual interactive media on a scale beyond anything we could have imagined in 2011 (well, the folks with webcams making their own funky little videos on YouTube were ahead of the curve). Then, of course, screens shrunk to the size of cell phones even as they exploded with dazzling and distracting (or “engaging”) new kinds of content, and everyone has gadgets with tools to produce and/or share audiovisual “splashes” to the whole world. #️⃣HashtagGlobalVillage #️⃣HashtagNOISYGlobalVillage. Ah, McLuhan saw it all coming 60 years ago. He proclaimed it. He warned us about it.Meanwhile, blogging is dying. A hangover from the old “Gutenberg Galaxy.” Electronic publishing and distribution have certainly revitalized the printed word (or, rather, the virtually printed word). Books, flyers, newsletters are ubiquitous. The “printed word”—precisely because it is NOT printed—has discovered an unimaginable plasticity. The written word has never been bigger. It’s like a supernova, the last glory of a dying star. The more graphically malleable printed words become, the more they draw on the visual powers of the image. Might we even say, the more they merge with the image?
I’m not saying this is good or bad. I’m just trying to understand what’s happening.
Words are far from “dead,” of course. The written word will endure in all that is essential to it. Attentive writing (and attentive reading) will be rare, but then again that has always been the case. Most of the printed words of the Gutenberg epoch were not really necessary. The essential words will remain legible, and perhaps they may be crafted as they once were, with distinctive visual beauty (even new forms of beauty that will enrich the reading experience). Moreover, audio technology (think of audiobooks, podcasts, recorded lectures, etc.) has revitalized and rendered accessible in new ways the beauty of the sound of words and the possibilities for listening to the spoken word.
Maybe I should do a podcast?
Anyway, here is page one, January 29, 2011. Whatever form communication takes, it will never cease to be the gesture that Luigi Giussani speaks of here. And I will continue to pray for “more light and more strength.”
No, this is not a philosophy paper. I just want to say “Happy Feast of Saint Thomas Aquinas!” I often celebrate the feasts of the great theologians and philosophers by “spending time” with their writings. I have spent lots of time in my life with Saint Thomas. I was educated as a lay student at the Dominican Pontifical Faculty in Washington D.C. (one of their first lay students, back in the mid-1980s). I have published work that deals extensively with Aquinas, and he has laid the “foundations and scaffolding” of the edifice (such as it is) of my extensive study of various modern thinkers. Many of them identify themselves as “Thomists,” among whom Jacques Maritain holds a special place, not only in my intellectual development and published work, but also in my “heart.”
I remember being four or five years old and my mother was folding the laundry and talking about the reading she was doing that was opening up her mind (and my mother had a huge, ardent, precise, and magnanimous mind). I have images in my memory from that conversation (and perhaps others): there were the two Popes (John XXIII and Paul VI) and the Council and somebody who had influenced her deeply but whose writings were confusing (that would have been the remarkable Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin) but then a French Peasant who was a philosopher “corrected” her from going in the direction of the wild ideas that were brewing in 1960s “Teilhardism”… and, she was just learning so much. She radiated her still-youthful enthusiasm for truth and understanding.
And the four-year-old JJ was just imaging a French farmer-philosopher and whatever else and feeling that the being Catholic and following the Church was not a narrow thing but an immense adventure of human reason and faith that embraced everything. Later I started noticing that wise old face of Jacques Maritain staring at me from the bookshelf on the spine of “The Peasant of the Garonne.” It was the radical beginning of my own intellectual vocation, and for many years (from childhood to age 58) it was an ongoing work that I shared with my brilliant mother. How grateful I am to her. How much I miss her.
Years later I would study Maritain, dedicate several chapters of a book to his realist epistemology, and write his and Raissa Maritain’s conversion story. He is one of the great figures of 20th century Catholic philosophy whose influence has been pervasive in the articulation of post-conciliar Church teaching (especially through Paul VI but also John Paul II) even if his person and work have been largely forgotten… at least in this era. The great Jacques Maritain will certainly be read in the future. He has much wisdom to share with emerging new civilizations that embrace the authentic dignity of the human person and an integral humanism—a “theocentric humanism” that Maritain called the Humanism of the Incarnation.
I also studied and wrote about two very different 20th century Catholic figures who both incorporated Aquinas into their original proposals for the renewal of Catholic faith. My STL dissertation on Karl Rahner’s “supernatural existential” was the fruit of years of wrestling with the whole scope of the thought of this singularly brilliant Jesuit theologian. Rahner’s complex efforts to bring Aquinas into dialogue with elements of Kantian, Hegelian, and Heideggerian thought are often dazzling and ingenious, although in my opinion (and others too) ultimately unconvincing. But Rahner’s expositions and inquiries move in many directions and engage many questions in provoking and fruitful ways. My thesis argued that Rahner ultimately went “too far” in the development of his theory of the “supernatural existential,” and in fact changed his original proposal. It’s an extensive study that I really should scan and make accessible online… if I can find my original copy! There is a copy safely bound and shelved in the Dominican College Library, so if necessary I can just make a trip there and scan it from the shelf. It still occasionally pops up in footnotes in other people’s articles and books, so maybe I should put it on the Academia website.
The other great figure of the contemporary Church that I continue to study, who recognized the realism of Aquinas as vital to his own immensely fruitful evangelical witness, is—of course—Luigi Giussani. That work pops up in many places, including this blog, and the paper from my 1998 lecture series “Man in the Presence of Mystery” is accessible online (just go HERE).
But enough for now. The day is nearly over! I actually spent some time revisiting Chesterton’s famous little book on Saint Thomas. These days, when I read Chesterton, I can’t help literally laughing out loud, particularly when he makes gratuitous exaggerated statements off-the-cuff, with a twinkle in his eye, or goes off rambling on a tangent. There is less of that in his book on Thomas (though it’s not absent, and I had plenty of belly laughs today). Chesterton can get down to the point with a flair and brilliance and conciseness that evokes conviction. And let me assure you, the passages in Chesterton that annoy you at the age of 20 or 30 will be hilarious when you read them at age 60. G. K. Chesterton didn’t have a mean bone in his body. He was a magnanimous man, and ultimately he is funny because reality itself is funny, life is funny. Thomas Aquinas’s life has more than a few “funny moments” especially when you look at them within the perspective of God’s plan for this unique holy patient brilliant saint whose intellectual charism was destined to be a permanent gift to the Church and to humanity. Yes, there is humor to be found in any good story. Humor, one might say, is the little sister of Beauty.
I will leave you with a quotation from GKC about Aquinas’s realism that is not so much humorous as it is “getting to the point” with gallantry:
“The mind is not merely receptive, in the sense that it absorbs sensations like so much blotting-paper; on that sort of softness has been based all that cowardly materialism, which conceives man as wholly servile to his environment. On the other hand, the mind is not purely creative, in the sense that it paints pictures on the windows and then mistakes them for a landscape outside. But the mind is active, and its activity consists in following, so far as the will chooses to follow, the light outside that does really shine upon real landscapes. That is what gives the indefinably virile and even adventurous quality to this view of life; as compared with that which holds that material inferences pour in upon an utterly helpless mind, or that which holds that psychological influences pour out and create an entirely baseless phantasmagoria. In other words, the essence of the Thomist common sense is that two agencies are at work; reality and the recognition of reality; and their meeting is a sort of marriage. Indeed it is very truly a marriage, because it is fruitful; the only philosophy now in the world that really is fruitful. It produces practical results, precisely because it is the combination of an adventurous mind and a strange fact.” (G. K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas, chapter VIII).
So I set about “restoring” it with some AI filters. We all know that ID photos are famously unflattering, but the strained, weary, hollowed-out look of the man in this picture from two decades ago is not far off the mark. In those strange days, I was somewhere in the midst of debilitating illness and treatments that might have helped but were not much fun.
Does the current 2023 picture look “better”? I have been a bit run down lately, but generally speaking I have felt better overall the past decade (2013-2023) than I did in the period prior to it (2003-2013). Twenty years, in any case, brings a lot of changes.
I will say that if I had not “retired” from classroom teaching and administrative duties in 2008, there may never have been a picture from 2023. I am grateful that I got to live those days, and for whatever days remain ahead. May God grant me the grace to live them well.
I don’t think there is any way to “measure” love and kindness in a way that could answer the question of the title of this essay. In any case, it’s not a question that I know how to answer.
There are, however, some ways of taking up this question that might appear to lead us to an answer, but which ultimately prove to be reductive and inadequate. For example, sometimes our silly, overindulgent, comfort-saturated uber-affluent society fancies that “we” (and here we presume to speak for the whole human race) are all growing closer to one another—that we are learning to understand and celebrate everyone’s self-expression, and moving toward a more harmonious and unified life in our global village, and even a more authentic and inclusive “spirituality.” Overall, we’d like to feel good about ourselves in this respect.
Never mind for the moment that there’s a gruesome war going on which appears to be growing beyond anyone’s control, and that in many other conflicted parts of the world, nations are arming themselves to the teeth. The world, in fact, is becoming an ever more scary place, even if there are many sincere efforts to humanize the explosion of technology that is “bringing us closer together” whether we like it or not. We live in dramatic and dangerous times, in which many of us suffer from interior afflictions—often without realizing it—as we face unprecedentedly intense pressure and potential conflict in our daily affairs.
There’s not much tranquility in our real lives. We live in conditions of overextended activity, distraction, and rootless hyper-mobility; and we regard one another with incomprehension and mutual suspicion, and with a strained vigilance for potential conflicts. These circumstances tend to complicate the mood of feathery optimism that we sometimes cultivate in our social milieu. Our subconscious defensiveness, cloaked under the pretense of “progress,” includes the promulgation of a few “new commandments” (which, when rightly understood, are valid in themselves): “Don’t judge people! Don’t condemn others! Be kind! Be tolerant!”
Here we even invoke the teaching of Jesus: “Do not judge” (Matthew 7:1).
The problem comes when these legitimate maxims—originally rooted in confidence in God’s providence and a respect for human dignity, and inspired by evangelical love—degenerate into pretexts for defining our human interactions evasively, in ways that precisely fall short of love. This happens when we say “don't judge" but what we really mean is “remain neutral, uncommitted, unconcerned about the real truth and happiness of another person." We wish in our minds to subtly dehumanize the other person, and pretend that their freedom is inconsequential and their choices therefore cannot weigh upon themselves or hurt us. We are, in fact, afraid to love.
We are afraid to take the risk of grappling with the provocation of a real human relationship with a person who is different from us, or who challenges us by their vulnerability—a person who needs help from us, but who also is a need for the Infinite Mystery, a fullness we cannot give them or ourselves.
And when we talk about "tolerance" and “inclusiveness” what we often really mean is that we want to define in distinctive (and distancing) categories people who are different from us in ways that make us feel uncomfortable, or whose actions and flaws we don’t understand, or whose suffering is beyond our capacity to resolve or empathize with. “Tolerance” can be a wall between people that they agree to build so that they can be protected from one another. Here again there is no room for love to grow, and there is the danger that ultimately we won’t care about anybody beyond ourselves and/or our own group.
This is the disease that festers beneath our pretenses of comfortable optimism. Under the disguise of superficial sentimental expressions of mutual affirmation, we are growing more alone, more isolated from one another.
But Jesus says that instead of judging and condemning one another we must love one another, give of ourselves to one another, forgive one another. This has never been easy, and in today's world it is in some ways harder than ever. Our drift toward isolation and anxiety is not entirely our fault. But we must not kid ourselves that our human relationships are healthy and secure, much less that our society had found the “key” to living together in peace, harmony, and enduring happiness for everyone.
We are still at the threshold of an emerging "new epoch" dominated by power, and we must endure all the tumultuous intensity of its unprecedented experiments in "stretching" the capacities of human persons and environments. Finding ourselves in this bewildering and conflicted ambient, many of us are confused about our own identity, afflicted by trauma, and desperate to protect ourselves.
God alone judges us, and perhaps we can better appreciate this as a blessing. Even as the Lord sees us entirely and scrutinizes our hidden faults, he also knows all the complex circumstances that constrain us and that can diminish somewhat (and even to a significant degree) our culpability.
This brave new world, with its unprecedented and ongoing multiplication of so many kinds of power, smashes and breaks people in the places where they are vulnerable. It's a world of constant mental strain, and those who cannot keep up with the pace of its relentless, absorbing expansion of forces—or at least manage the stress—must shift through the wreckage it leaves behind in themselves.
These are traumatic times. Not surprisingly, many of us are traumatized. Naturally, we are trying to protect ourselves, and we seek out various forms of isolation, motivated by a combination of fear and the instinct for survival.
A few of us can try to hold on strictly by ourselves; we are the intellectuals who analyze everything and commit to nothing. More often, we are isolated "together" behind the fortress walls of our tribes—our illusory substitutes for commitment and community—bound together by violence and fear and the desire to make war on others.
But the light of the Gospel shines even in times like these. The Gospel addresses our whole humanity, and its power not only brings eternal life but also offers the best hope of subordinating the vast scope of our power to the wisdom of an integral humanism and a deeper awareness of the dignity of human persons called (and enabled by the Holy Spirit) to live together as brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ.
Jesus says "stop judging" and "stop condemning," but at the same time he says, "Give..." which is akin to the exhortation to love, to suffer for the sake of justice, to lose ourselves for his sake so that we might truly find ourselves.
But he does not only exhort us. He draws us on the path that he himself has made through the cross to the resurrection.
This was a bigger deal than it sounds like. It was quite an achievement for me in the (it sometimes seems) increasingly limited realm of external physical things I’m able to do without help.
I drove the car on a Saturday afternoon. By myself.
For many decades I drove all sorts of cars on long trips and short trips, logging thousands and thousands of miles all over North America. Even after I began to get sick 20 years ago, I still did plenty of driving. As my stamina flagged, however, Eileen took over more of the longer trips (e.g. driving to my parents’ place an hour or so away). But I ran errands around town, and was able to pick up kids and drop off kids.
I drove regularly until around 2015. It took a toll on me, and I didn’t like it much, but then again I never liked driving much (with the exception of a couple of old manual transmission cars I owned back in the late 1980s, which were actually fun to drive). I did like being able to go places when I wanted to.
A decade ago, it was simple. We had two cars and two drivers in the house. We had the Toyota minivan and then we had “Dad’s car.” The other five members of the household were kids. They needed rides, not cars. But when the kids got bigger, it ironically got more complicated.
Eileen always needed a car to get back and forth from the John XXIII Montessori Center, and at first the kids were going to school there, and then to nearby Chelsea Academy or John XXIII’s adolescent program (White Oaks School). But then the kids started getting driver’s licenses and jobs and became university students. So far they’ve all attended “the local university” (i.e. Christendom College, which is only ten minutes away from our house).
We actually acquired more vehicles. We sometimes had as many as four cars. Second-hand, junky cars. But they worked. They were acquired in various, sometimes peculiar, ways. Teresa bought her own four-wheel-drive ATV, but she was working with horses: buying them, training them, selling them, working at stables, holding summer horse-riding camps, sometimes hauling horse-trailers around. So she had her own vehicle. With John Paul, Agnese, and Lucia, things were sometimes “chaotic” during the period when they were all at Christendom. There was a point when there were more siblings at the university than there were cars, and they had to endure the immense challenge of “sharing” —uh, huh, that was not fun for anyone.
But those “sharing” situations didn’t last very long, as I recall. Eventually Lucia got something even better than a car—namely, a boyfriend… who eventually became a husband. So everybody had “wheels,” except for me! Well, technically “we, the parents” had “our car”—a four door Toyota Camry (actually, several Camrys since 2006, in different colors; the engines in those things never die, but eventually some other part of the car wears out, and it’s more economical to just replace the whole car). But over time (and for obvious reasons) “the parents’ car” was rebranded as “Mom’s car.”
After all, I’m not going anywhere, unless it’s with her. When I go out by myself, I walk. That can be hard some days too, but at least the exercise is good, and I can go at my own pace. Otherwise, I “travel” virtually for nearly all my research needs, and to purchase any odd things I might need. It’s just as well, because most days there are no cars in our driveway.
The actual number of vehicles around here has decreased. John Paul graduated, got a job, got his own car (a much nicer car than anything I ever had), got married, and moved across town. Agnese graduated, got a job, and took her car down the road to the house she shares with some friends. Lucia graduated, got married, sold her car, and moved to New Jersey where Mike’s family lives.
Suddenly, our driveway no longer looks like a used car lot (or a salvage yard). We’re back to two vehicles: Teresa’s (and she’s not here very often) and “Mom’s car,” which is coming and going all the time.
This is my predicament: even if I wanted to go somewhere, I don’t have a car. I am a 60-year-old man in a rural town in the United States of America, and I don’t have a car.It hasn’t bothered me, however, because driving—like everything else—has become an increasingly exhausting activity. My health is still more or less “stable” (on low power) but it also seems to be slowly declining. It requires more energy to do less, especially from the neck down. I haven’t given up yet, though. Recent years, however, have been weird.
I had decreased my driving to the occasional bookstore, library trip, or visit to a nature spot. Any more just took too much energy and then I would be in danger of getting over-stressed, which is not a safe condition in which to drive. (Actually, I have always been a terrible driver — either philosophically abstracted and not paying attention to the road, or else obsessive, irritated, anxious, mistake-prone: I have written about my utter folly behind the wheel elsewhere on the Blog — see HERE and HERE, which tell an interesting tale of God bringing a wonderfully greater good out of my … uggh… facepalm 🤦♂️… almost getting myself killed: it’s a very good story, ultimately, thank God. Check out those links.)
So—to return to the more recent story—I hadn’t driven more than a handful of times in 2017, 2018, 2019… [you know what’s coming up].
2020: the Pandemic arrives. I don’t know if I have quite recovered from the surreal-ness of that whole time. I actually did lots of walking in 2020 and felt quite well, ironically (better that I do now). But nobody was driving anywhere, it seemed, in 2020-2021ish-2022ish(?). There are many ways to consider the Pandemic, not only as an obvious medical crisis (a very real one, that tragically took the lives of some members of our parish community), but also as a socially disorienting event in various ways. In the U.S.A., of course, it was also turned into a political brawl and a media frenzy. And then, suddenly—it seemed—the crisis passed, and everybody went back to acting as if it never happened. Places and events opened up and people started partying twice as hard as ever. Daily Covid statistics seemed to vanish from the News.
It should be said that part of this was due to a “success story.” Immunity and (relative) domestication of the disease through the collaborative efforts of the medical community in vaccine development, plus(?) the virus playing out some natural cycle in the human population seemed to reduce the worst dangers of the disease.(?) [It’s not over yet: China bungled things since Day One and we still don’t know what’s going on over there.]
But something else suddenly intervened to turn everyone’s thoughts in another direction. In media, politics, and—sadly—in reality too, a new danger rose up and stole the spotlight away from the Pandemic. The plague of COVID-19 seemed to give way to another plague—“contained” for now to a particular place, where it wreaks murderous havoc, but in danger of metastasizing into a global toxic nightmare—a plague of the mind, (at least, it begins in the mind); a virus born in the minds of Kremlin imperialists that is “infecting” the bodies of their targets, but also endangering the diverse minds of those who surround it, who might become inflamed with their own opportunism, manipulation, and greed, and move in directions beyond anything we can imagine. The world seemed united in the fight against COVID-19. How will the world be shaken and burned by the poison of PUTIN-22?
Our hearts break for the suffering of the Ukrainian people, and—of course—they have the right to defend themselves, and other nations should help them as much as possible. But we cannot trust the (il)logic of technological warfare, its potential for rapid escalation, and the possibility of catastrophic retaliation. This war is at an impasse that can only be broken by escalation. Who will control the scope of this escalation? Perhaps there is no choice except to “play with fire,” but let us not forget that it is fire, and let us make sure that the merchants of this fire are held to a high standard of integrity. It is perilous when profiteers are allowed to make the rules of such a dangerous “game.”
Have we learned anything, as human beings, from these traumatic years? I fear we may need to be reminded again and again, in perhaps different ways — but there’s hope in that, because we are not the masters of reality; we live this profound need for something we cannot give ourselves (even if most of the time we distract ourselves from our own radical dependence and indigence). Events that “remind us” of who we really are can be scary, but ultimately what’s more scary is the possibility that we might forget who we are.
This blog post started out as whimsical reflection about me driving “my” car for the first time in three years. Let me return to that story. Last Saturday, John Paul and Eileen had gone shopping in Winchester (and, good son that he is, he drove). Meanwhile, I had it on my mind to take care of something in town… and there was the car. “Mom’s car.” In the driveway. Not being used. So I found my car keys, and—with some small trepidation—got in and started the car. It felt fine. It felt normal. I drove in the town and returned without incident.
I might just do it again soon. It seems my driving days may not be completely over.
So how did this story get so “heavy”? Well, life is “all one piece,” and I have never been able to ignore that. I am not the master of my own reality. This used to cause me a lot more anxiety, but I’m learning that I grow by responding to the reality that is given to me, whether it’s driving a car or living through the transforming dynamics of home and family life or my own illness or a global pandemic or the suffering, the rage, the injustice, and the ominous unpredictability of war.
“Baby [I] can drive my car!”🎶 Ha, I need a car that I can use more often. Jojo will probably get a car before I do. She’ll need it more than me, before long. I just ask to be able to be wherever I need to be today, every day.
Not exactly a “news flash,” but all of this being-a-Papa is still wondrously new to me.
Left: Maria falls asleep on Papa’s shoulder (n.b. Clownie is sleeping too). Right: AWAKE and shaking up that wooden doll.☺️🙂
Six years and seven months later, this face still surprises and inspires me.
The face, of course, is that of Christina Grimmie—which I hope is still recognizable through the artistic “interpretation” that my imagination has used to attempt to express one of the ways I perceive it. Here I’m aided by digital filters, “paint” apps, and the specific manual “virtual sculpting” that together constitute a method of virtual artistic expression I am continuing to develop (and, I hope, improve). I work on Christina “portraits” with a persistence, intensity, and patience that surprise me. Rarely am I satisfied with the results, but I continue to seek to do this work—to craft a perspective, a vista, a momentary flash of the inexhaustible personality that animated her face.
Christina’s is still “everywhere” represented online. The late singer/songwriter/teenager-young-adult YouTube pioneer was slain on June 10, 2016 at an open meet-and-greet after a concert in Orlando, Florida. One of the great plagues of our society—gun violence—took her life from this world at the age of 22. Violence took her away from her family, her loved ones, her “frands,” the music she made with her astonishing voice, and the radiant image of positivity and hope that she sustained even amidst difficult circumstances that was a vital inspiration to so many of her young followers. Nevertheless, her legacy has grown over the past 6+ years, and her giving of herself continues to bear fruit.
Today, images of Christina’s remarkably expressive face have multiplied exponentially all over the internet (helped, no doubt, by growing AI technology). Her YouTube channel remains current with just under four million subscribers, and her incredible voice is still being heard by many people, some of whom are just discovering her immense musical talents for the first time. The international Team Grimmie continues to grow. And Christina’s family and friends continue her generous and grateful affirmation of life—her determination to respond to evil with good, to hatred with love—through The Christina Grimmie Foundation which provides financial assistance and human solidarity directly to families of victims of gun violence.There is something extraordinary about this girl.
I’m still “searching” for her face—from pictures shared by others (always “credit to owners” for the original photographic images presented here; this blog is strictly for gratuitous and educational purposes and is never-for-profit), or from many screenshots of videos that serve as “foundational sketches” for my artistic efforts, or from whatever-other-places she pops up—I have a huge file of materials for my “Grimmie Portraits” which serve as templates for my private and personal art works (many of them “in progress”), a few of which are gratuitously shared here or on social media.
There is reflected in Christina’s face a deep joy, a gigantic passion for life, a powerful yearning to give and to receive love, a sense of responsibility for the gifts (and the people) given to her, and an overflowing gratitude: always this gratitude from the depths of her heart. I look at her face and I’m convinced that her life was full of what she saw deep down in things, the encounter with the Mystery that sustains and resonates through all of reality, and that awakened and energized her in the days of her brief beautiful life.
I want to see what she saw. I want to see more, and to live with greater ardor an adherence to that Mystery.
Six years ago I posted the above image and texts. I used to search out those occasional moments when Christina made explicit reference to her faith. Her words about her love for Jesus Christ were unambiguous and all-encompassing when she spoke about the foundation of her own life. Perhaps by isolating these quotations, however, I was too preoccupied with presenting her in the form of a “pious image.” Certainly, when she said “my faith is my whole life,” she meant it. But the remarkable and truly “mysterious” quality of Christina was that she lived her faith, ardently, right inside of a real and relatable teenage/young-adult life with its panoply of interests and “distractions,” the give-and-take of adolescent fun on her YouTube channel and in her social media, and her pursuit of a successful career in popular music where she could share all of her prodigious musical talents and her stupendous, jaw-dropping singing voice.
In all of this, she remained down to earth. Recently, I found the source of this beautiful quotation in a YouTube live stream. Christina was chatting with her frands about television shows and songs and video games—the kind of talk that my own kids (ranged 16-25 years old) pass around among themselves and with their friends, and that I cannot enter into because I am by nature an uncool Dad. 🥸😜 Then in the midst of this stream of jocular verbiage, Christina found a moment to make reference to her faith and to clarify it with a seriousness that was earnest yet effortless—that didn’t withdraw from the adolescent mood of the conversation, that was natural and memorable, and that was followed by more talk of food, music, and video games.
My instinctive “uncool old man” reaction would ordinarily be to find nothing particularly remarkable in this kind of conversation, even with a religious reference in the middle of it. But as I watched Christina I began to glimpse something deeper in the way in which she was engaging and accompanying her frands, who were mostly teens and pre-teens. She was sharing her own interests, her own goofy self, but within that normal 21-year-old young woman was the immeasurably greater reality—the Mystery, the Mystery-made-flesh—transforming her, shining through her humanity, Jesus Christ her whole life.
Faith is a great adventure, a growth in conviction, an enlargement of the fascination of life, of hope and love and vulnerability, of the search for the fullness of the meaning of things. Christina Grimmie remains for me a bright light on my own journey of faith seeking understanding, longing to “see,” loving and hoping for the fulfillment of love.
The persistence of my poor artistic efforts over the past six years are grounded here.
From Bethlehem to the Jordan to Cana — the Word made flesh embraces our lives and changes us. He reveals to everyone the face of a loving and merciful God who wants to stay with us, who wants us to know that we are never alone, that we are loved with an everlasting love.
Even though the liturgical calendar returns to “Ordinary Time” after this feast, we will keep our Christmas tree, lights, and Nativity Scene up and glowing throughout the month of January and up to the feast of the “Presentation of Jesus in the Temple” on February 2, which is 40 days after Christmas.
This longer “Epiphanytide” is linked to old traditions for celebrating the season, and many places in Europe and Latin America the decorations and Nativity Scenes remain up all through January until the last of the celebrations from the Infancy Narratives recorded in Luke 2:22-40.
As we need little encouragement to prolong the party (not to mention the fact that we have an indestructibly green fake tree that didn’t go up until Christmas Eve, and that nobody minds putting off the tedious tasks of taking it all down, packing it up, and returning it to the attic😜) — we have always observed this time-honored “extension” in our home.
January, after all, remains cold and dark. It is good to continue to remember in this special way that Christ our Savior has come into the world, and that He is our Light.