“Pray, Hope, and Don’t Worry”

“Pray, hope, and don’t worry.”
~Padre Pio (September 23)

Autumn is Here, and It’s Wet!

Happy Fall 2023. (…or Spring, if you’re Down Under.) We have arrived at another equinox.

Unlike the rest of the planet, here in “The Valley” we had what seemed like an unusually mild summer. 

But it has been very dry. Thunderstorms came like splashes of water on thirsty ground, but they didn’t help the water levels. The lawns have hardly needed mowing all summer. Then, after surprisingly bearable temperatures throughout July and August, we finally had a big heat wave at the beginning of this month.

Now we have arrived at the nearly three-quarter-mark of the year. The temperatures have plunged and the skies have opened. The seasons are “shifting gears” again.

My joints ache. Arrgh! They hurt!—which is not exactly “news,” although getting older is not helping.

They will trouble me especially until the brisk air of October comes in to stay. Wet weather is the worst for the old “rheumatism,” but I shall manage as best as I can while we finally get relief from the drought.

I love Autumn. I’m not too thrilled about the shorter days, especially the earlier evenings. Still, the best weather of the year (at least in my opinion) comes to our area in the next three months. Fall colors are not usually dramatic, but they vary throughout the season and combine with the changing angles of sunlight to create many colorful vistas.

I shall post some “natural” photographs (is there even such a thing?—that’s another question for another day). But photos are a form of media that seem best suited for “catching” nature as she puts on her own show.

But I shall also permit those Autumn colors to inspire my art. It will be fascinating to watch where they lead me.

Jesus Calls Matthew… and Each One of Us

Happy Saint Matthew’s Day! It’s time once again for our annual contemplation of “The Call…” painted in 1600 by that Master of Shadows and Light, Michelangelo Merisi da CARAVAGGIO! I am still “shook” by this painting as much as when I first saw the original in Rome, 30 years ago.

The painting expresses something of that great mercy that Jesus brought into the world, that healing mercy, that inexhaustible mercy, God’s mercy. He calls Matthew to follow Him, to stay with Him, to trust in Him. Christ’s mercy penetrates the darkness of Matthew’s life of sin and engenders something new within Matthew’s heart, an attraction that awakens his true desire and draws him to Jesus. In following the call of Jesus, Matthew is converted. 

The Pharisees’ condemnation of their behavior didn’t change sinners or give them hope. What changes them is the presence of Jesus—Mercy incarnate—the Divine Physician, the Savior who calls sinners to follow Him and be freed and made new by His love. 

He calls Matthew the tax collector to be one of the Twelve Apostles, His chosen witnesses for the foundation of the Catholic Christian people. 

He calls each one of us—no matter how messed up we are, no matter what our sins are, no matter how impossible it may seem to us that we might ever change our lives—He calls us all through our time in this world, every day, every moment. With infinite love and mercy, He implores us, He begs us, “Follow me, stay with me, trust in me.” He wants us so much, because He loves us with an immeasurable love. We who wallow in our sins, fixated on ourselves and tying ourselves in knots—what if we allowed ourselves to hear His voice? What if we looked up to see His face? Why not follow Him? He is the One for whom we have been created. He is our happiness and fulfillment. And He is here.

If we stay with Him, we will change, we will be healed and transformed. Mercy opens up within the depths of our souls a new “space” of desire, a hope that He will save us, that we can be with Him forever because He has come to be with us. The more we follow Him, the more He draws us to love Him, and the more we see all of reality in a new way, the true way. The “conversion of Saint Matthew” is the fruit of his encounter with Jesus Christ who calls him. It is enough to say, “he got up and followed Him” (Matthew 9:9).

Thus we read in today’s Gospel:

“As Jesus passed by, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the customs post. He said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And he got up and followed him. While he was at table in his house, many tax collectors and sinners came and sat with Jesus and his disciples. The Pharisees saw this and said to his disciples, ‘Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?’ He heard this and said, ‘Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do. Go and learn the meaning of the words, I desire mercy, not sacrifice. I did not come to call the righteous but sinners’” (Matthew 9:9-13).

The Birth of the Church in Korea

Today is the feast of the 103 Korean martyrs canonized by John Paul II in 1984. The remarkable story of the beginnings of Christianity in Korea—along with an account of the conversion of one of them, Saint Mareuko Jeong (in older transliterations “Mark Chong”)—appears in my column in this month’s Magnificat. Here is the text:

Saint Mareuko Jeong Eui-Bae is one of the 103 Korean martyrs whose feast we celebrate on September 20. He is among some 10,000 Koreans who gave their lives for Christ during multiple fierce persecutions in the mid-19th century. Most were ordinary lay men and women, but some were also from the educated classes and the nobility. We know enough about the high-ranking nobleman/scholar Mareuko Jeong to appreciate the particular drama of his conversion.

Korean cultural life flourished for many centuries, creatively appropriating ancient Chinese literary and religious traditions into its own independent society. But by the end of the 18th century, the 500-year-old Joseon dynasty was in deep decline, and dependent on Qing-dynasty China. Meanwhile, the Joseon Neo-Confucian State had become a religious/political structure of rigid social hierarchy, with the monarch at the center, followed by the noble and scholarly classes, and with many of the common people reduced to a status of virtual slavery.

It was the scholar-officials who began searching for ways to reform this ossified society. In frequent diplomatic trips to Beijing, they met “Westeners” (including Catholic priests) and obtained books on developments in Western science, technology, philosophy, and religion translated into Chinese. Thus arose the “Sohak” movement—groups of scholars who studied “Western learning” and discussed its possible value for reforming Korean society. For most, it was mainly an intellectual examination of various Western ideas, but a few were drawn specifically to the Catholic faith. Yi Sung-hun was baptized in Beijing in 1784, returned to Korea, and baptized a few of his compatriots. By the time the first priest arrived in 1795 there were 4000 baptized lay Catholics waiting for him.

There was also aggressive opposition to the new teaching. The Joseon royal house and their Neo-Confucian supporters viewed Christianity as a threat to the Korean social order. Worship of One God in Jesus Christ undermined the religious/superstitious system of rites offered for the monarch and the hierarchical continuity of clan and family. Christianity preached that God was the Father of all people, who were brothers and sisters with a common destiny in Christ regardless of their origins and social status. Among the scholars who abhorred the new Christian teaching was (Mareuko) Jeong Eui-Bae.

Born in 1794, Jeong was an established professor of Chinese literature and defender of the status quo when persecution broke out in 1839. By that time the French Foreign Mission Society had sent a bishop and two priests to Korea. In 1839, Jeong Eui-Bae witnessed the brutal mutilation and execution of Bishop Laurentius Imbert, Father Peter Maubant, and Father Jakob Chastan. (They are also among the 103 martyred saints.)

The 47-year-old scholar had seen death many times. But in these three men Jeong saw something completely new: an astonishing joy in the face of torture and death. Jeong was growing old in a society where death was covered with shadows. His studies gave no hint as to how to face death, much less to embrace it with the joy he saw on the faces of those missionaries that day.

Disregarding his honorable station, Jeong obtained and read forbidden Christian books and met the people who believed in the One written about in those books. Glimpsing there the Source of hitherto unknown joy and hope, the long-cynical old professor was totally converted. He was baptized Mareuko (Mark) and devoted his newfound zeal and intellectual skills to working as a catechist and caring for the sick. The poor humble people whom the former aristocrat had once scorned he now served with love until his own martyrdom in 1866, at age 72.

San Gennaro

Happy "Janaro Family Feast Day"! Buona Festa di San Gennaro! 

Today is the Feast Day of the Great Ancestor of the Janaro Clan, the original Saint Januarius, fourth-century bishop and martyr. I'm sure he must, somehow, be related to us, what with the "Benevento" and "Naples" regional traditions and all... or there must be some connection, because "Janaro" (with the "J") is a variant in old Neapolitan dialect of "Januarius." Both of which are derived from the mythical Roman god "Janus," the "guardian of the gateways" and all places where people come in and go out (note that "January" is the first month, the end of one year and the beginning of another).

Thus I hypothesize. 

In any case, according to Legend (and I should know, because I made up the legend) he is the patron saint of the Janaros. 

SAN GENNARO, PRAY FOR US!!

The Exaltation of the Holy Cross

Mid-September brings the ancient liturgical celebration of the “Exaltation of the Holy Cross” (September 14), which is linked to the fourth-century reclamation and first public development of Jerusalem as the center of Christian pilgrimage.

The locations of the death and resurrection of Jesus became accessible for the first time to pilgrims from all places thanks to Emperor Constantine’s official tolerance and increasing public favor of Christianity, along with the work of his mother Saint Helena, who found the original sites and the relic of the True Cross that had been preserved over several centuries of pagan Roman administration of the city.

These places matter to us because God entered human history, died on the cross, was buried, and rose from the dead there, not thus becoming restrained by these places and moments, but rather establishing Himself as the Center of the fulfillment of history and the radical origin of a new creation, as the Redeemer and Lord of all times and places, of each and every one of us.

The Cross of Jesus is exalted, not with a merely worldly glory, but with the glory beyond anything we can imagine, the endless glory of the God who wants to give Himself to us, the God who is Infinite Love.

September 11: “Hatred of the Human”

"It was not Jews, it was not Christians,
it was not Westerners, it was not Easterners.
There were all of these people at the World Trade Center.
What did they have in common?
Their humanity.
That was their offense. That was the object of their hatred.
This was hatred of the human."
.
~Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete, commenting on 9/11 in an interview with Frontline, 2002.

Christina Grimmie: Held Up “With Love”

In addition to my nature scenery, faces like this one make me want to persevere in working hard with digital graphic art, in the possibilities it offers for portraiture. As I mark seven years and three months honoring Christina Grimmie, I’m inspired and grateful for all the music she shared with us.

We recently celebrated the tenth anniversary of Christina’s second album, With Love, and its beautiful title song. May the One about whom she sang this song “always hold her up” in the presence of that Love which overcomes every evil and all forms of violence.

The “Russo-Ukrainian War” Must Not Be Forgotten

The “Russo-Ukrainian War” (as it’s being called) is more like the First World War than anyone expected a major clash in Europe in the 21st century would look like. There are many obvious differences, of course: for example the prevalence of unmanned drones in bombing raids. Death and destruction fall anonymously from the air often enough to keep ordinary Ukrainian people constantly anxious and alert. But the front lines of battle are on the ground, and they move slowly and at great cost. Something like trench warfare has made a strange comeback.

What else are we witnessing here in addition to Ukraine’s struggle for the just cause of reestablishing its own legitimate territorial borders? Are we still in “the early days” of an as-yet-unimaginable global war? It has gotten no easier to predict how military conflict may yet escalate, or what future geopolitical problems might emerge from the current situation. These are some of the many obscurities of “the fog of war.”

With an estimated 500,000 casualties and millions of ordinary people brutally driven from their homes and into exile, the present war of Putinist Russian aggression in Ukraine has more than enough carnage to distinguish itself as a significant historical phenomenon (how awful it sounds to classify so much suffering in academic terms!). 

Not surprisingly, it is becoming more difficult to package the news about the war for the typical Western “information consumer.” But no one should forget or make light of this awful war and the suffering it is causing. I am convinced that there can only be a fully “just peace” when Russian leaders repent of their crimes against humanity, not only in this present war, but over a century of crimes perpetrated against Ukraine, against the peoples of Eastern Europe, and against their own people. 

Our Lady of Fatima has promised that “Russia will be converted,” and that humanity will be granted a “period of peace.” We do not know how this period of peace will unfold. It may well be that Russia’s historic riches of culture, religious humanism, and spirituality will be renewed after Russia’s conversion (which must include the effort to make amends for its crimes and the irrevocable and unambiguous renunciation of the criminal regimes that have afflicted so many over the past century). Today’s war criminals must humbly submit to punishment by legally constituted international courts; let them not be met with vengeance, but with appropriate justice that might also become a road of penance and conversion for them. 

Some day, a renewed Russia will hopefully play an important role in shaping a more peaceful world. But the true greatness of Russia is rooted in the centuries of people who followed Christ in simplicity and humility, who were willing to bear their burdens, poverty, and afflictions with a passionate love for Christ and His Gospel. The greatness of Russia is not expressed in nostalgia for the monstrous reign of Stalin. Nor is it served by the sham traditionalism of Putin that is so flimsy that it cannot hide the will-to-power and the nihilism that operate beneath its surface.

Russia’s conversion must pass through a period of penance and self-limitation (as Solzhenitsyn insisted in his open letter to the Kremlin leadership in 1973). But the West must not see Russia’s (increasingly inevitable) decrease in worldly power as a cosmic endorsement of its own vapid, negligent, decadent, and often cruel lifestyle. The West must also be converted before we lose the last fragments of the “civil society” that allows for our most basic freedoms. We must cease our arrogance and corruption, our wasteful self-indulgent “splendid feasts” while the Lazaruses of our world long for the crumbs that fall from our tables.

We must all pray for the grace of conversion, and the grace to recognize and love Christ “in all things and above all things.” Jesus Christ is the Lord of history and He is present now in our lives, in the world, begging for our love. Each of us must seek to reform our own lives through the working of the Holy Spirit, to follow Jesus, to make reparation for sins through union with His most compassionate Heart, and to beg for peace for all the peoples and places that cry out from the pain of violence and destitution.

May God have mercy on Ukraine and its people, on Russia, on Western nations that have grown fat and lazy and ignorant of God instead of using their abundance to perform works of mercy, and on all the poor, helpless, crushed peoples all over the world. May God have mercy on us all.

The “Flood” of Digital Graphics: HELP!!

Among many developments in “AI” technology, the graphics revolution is one that I see happening day-by-day, week-by-week. New ways to digitally create and manipulate images are continually becoming more accessible to the public. 

I have been trying to use digital technology to be artistically creative, but the flood of new things is overwhelming right now. Electronic media do not set “natural limits,” and at present they are pushing in the opposite direction. If digital artists do not set their own limits, they will not succeed in being creative—in actually making a work that is finished. They will be caught in the vortex of an endless video game. 

That is one reason why I like to post my work online (even if I’m not satisfied with it). It’s one way of giving finality to a project. Perhaps I should start aiming for a “print,” ultimately. Even open a shop to share my work concretely. There’s no substitute for three dimensionality—something you can hold in your hand. 

It should be noted that all this is a current weird extension of the perennial struggle of the artist in any medium. Piles of unfinished canvases, sheets and recordings of unfinished or half-finished music, fragments of poems—there’s nothing new about any of that. What’s new (and an added stress for the nervous system) is the additional “layer of mediation” that electronic technology opens up, which apparently increases power and versatility but also increases “distance” from the created object(s). Even the clutter of your not-entirely-discarded efforts can be “stored” in the digital cloud.

This is marketed as making creativity “easier.” It certainly facilitates banality, frustration, self-deception, vanity, and wasting time. But it cannot substitute for attention, focus, patience, intense effort, or discipline. To create a work of beauty—an analogous expression of Beauty (however humble)—is never easy.

Mother Teresa: “To Love and To Be Loved”

Saint “Mother Teresa” (September 5), pray for us.

September is Here Again

The month of September 2023 has begun.

The new academic year is already well launched, but in the USA and other countries the “Labor Day Weekend” brings the vacation season to a close. Eileen and Jojo are back to school. And once again I feel a bit “lost” to the transitions and changes of routine that for many years set the rhythm of my life.

I continue the pattern of life that chronic illness has set for me — a kind of surreal form of “house arrest” that is not terribly burdensome. I have my books and access to information and communications technology on a massive scale. Aside from battling a bit of depression, my mind remains very much alive and engaged on many things. Almost every day, I have a segment of outdoor activity, where I walk the grounds around our house and in the neighborhood. I have not tired of our little patch of earth. I work with digital art for a portion of each day, and read and write during another portion. We watch some television in the evening. I pray, and try to “participate remotely” in one of the many live-streamed Masses available on YouTube throughout the day. Then, each Sunday, I go to Mass — my big outing of the week — and family usually gets together on Sunday afternoons.

I get tired easily, and then things are not so clear. Usually I have to nap every day.

I’m beginning my 60th September (I can’t possibly be 60, can I?). Half a lifetime ago, I was in the process of moving to Italy. Yes, that was 1993 … that’s what 30 years ago feels like. Ah, Roma! You will forever be “my home.”

Exhausted. But there is so much to do, so much that I want to do. I have spent a lifetime refining my ability to understand and share my gifts. What will become of those efforts? Something still burns within me — something that, it seems, still needs to grow and be cultivated to bear fruit.

I pray and pray, knowing that everything is in God’s hands.

Pope Francis in Mongolia, Knocks on China’s “Wall”

I don’t know an 86-year-old man does it. 

The pope has undoubtedly natural reserves of energy, notwithstanding the knee problems, the sciatica, and other internal problems. But grace builds on nature, and the animating force that has driven Francis into one of the world’s great deserts is an evangelical love for the people of Mongolia.

There are only a few thousand Christians among three-and-a-half million Mongolians, many of whom still lead nomadic lives but also carry the memory of their forebears who built an immense empire throughout China and Central Asia in the 13th century. It was a starkly ambivalent empire, bringing total destruction upon those who resisted its conquering armies, but also a measure of peace and civil and religious tolerance to places that that submitted and became tributaries.

While it flourished, the Mongolian empire made relatively safe the vast East-West overland trade route, a long and perilous way held together by an archipelago of oases. For a time in the Western Middle Ages, a “line” of communication and exchange was opened that stretched from Venice to Beijing.

This memory, however, was not the purpose of Francis’s visit. Today Mongolia is a scantily populated “periphery” of the global landscape. Its people are easily ignored. But they are people, human persons, each one of them loved by God and redeemed by Jesus Christ. This is enough for the Holy Spirit, to whose inspiration Francis is committed to discerning and following.

It also happens to be the case that Mongolia today shares a border of some 2000 miles with the north of the Peoples Republic of China. The possible significance of this border in the playing-out of events in the 21st century and beyond is impossible to determine today. But when Pope Francis walked through the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar he came closer than any of his predecessors to the soil of the historically great, currently enigmatic “world” that is China.

China is also much loved by God, and destined to play a pivotal role in the emerging epoch. Like his confrere Saint Francis Xavier, Pope Francis reached the threshold of China. He “knocked” on the doors of its metaphorical “Great Wall” (not far from the remains of the actual Wall on classical China’s northern frontier). May the Lord grant that others will follow, building bridges of communication and understanding, opening up the paths of the Holy Spirit, the way of evangelization. We hope that the next encounter between East and West will be marked by an enrichment of the fullness of Catholicity, rather than by an explosion of another cataclysmic war.

“…A Different Perception of Things…”

It is so easy to become divisive, belligerent, and self-imposing (individually or “tribally”) in a fragmented society. It is also easy to become fatalistic, cynical, apathetic, withdrawn, or confused and afraid. How can we live in a true way, true to our own humanity, our freedom, our “selves” here-and-now, today?

We waste so much time trying to define ourselves by limited proposals and perspectives, by human ideologies that insulate us from facing our own radical vulnerability; our need to ask the question that pervades everything in life and that is infinitely deeper than ourselves.

The foundation for engaging reality is not an ideology we have to construct, or membership in the “right party” among all our ever-more-divided and exclusionary partisan factions. The foundation is a Person to whom we belong in a relationship of abandonment and trust — and we are empowered to belong to Him (within the depths of our freedom) because He has given Himself to us in His infinite Love, and He is with us now. It is okay if we don’t “understand” things, or feel “overwhelmed” by things. We can ask Him, stay with Him, follow Him — an He will change us and cause us to grow in new ways, into the inexhaustible spaces of His wisdom and love.

Adherence to the Person of Christ makes you a new creature, who has "the dignity, the certainty of your destiny and the capacity to operate in a new and more human way." This new humanity means "A different experience of the sentiment of yourself, a different perception of things, a different emotion of the presence of others, a different impetus and density in relationships, a different gusto in the troubled dynamic of work, an outcome that was inconceivable, unimaginable before" (Luigi Giussani).