Nothing is Ever Enough

This human life: full of joy and adventure and promise; full of so many reasons to be grateful.

But nothing is ever enough.

All the promises and all of the beauty eventually fall short; they pass with time even as we endure, unfulfilled. They open our hearts, but if we try to hold on, we are left with only the wounds of dissatisfaction.

Sometimes life itself just seems to betray us, and our hopes are frustrated by external afflictions. Or we might have years of vigor to pursue a satisfying life, but eventually our spirits grow weary of the continual disappointment.

We might become tired, cynical, or bitter as we get older. Or we might shrink our hearts and cover our secret despair with the mask of resignation. Eventually, we realize that all we have to look forward to is death.

If it all seems unbearable, that's because it is unbearable.

The only hope we have is to call upon the Lord. We must really call upon Him, with faith. Too often when we approach prayer, what we're really looking for is an escape from our suffering. But harsh realities cannot be dismissed by "religious talk." Theology is not enough. Superficial pious sentiments are not enough.

The brokenness and frustration remain. The wounds remain and grow worse. It is here -- where we really hurt, where we really experience our infirmity, our need -- that we must turn to the Lord and call upon Him.

There is nowhere else to go, nowhere else to bring these burdens, this life, this cry of the heart. But the miracle of grace always awaits us.

Jesus on the Cross.

Jesus is the God who has already come to be with us, and who waits for us in our sufferings.

Only Jesus can carry this kind of pain, this pain that challenges my identity, that reaches all the way to me as a person. This is human suffering, and only He knows it all the way through. He is the True Man, who has united Himself to every human being. He is also the True God, the only begotten Son of the Father, who alone knows the depths of every person because He is the Source who whispers each person into being, and the Way, the Truth, the Life who calls each one to their destiny.

Our only hope is to abandon everything to Him. "Jesus, I give myself to You. Take care of everything." Again and again, whatever, and wherever, without hesitation, without fear... "Jesus I abandon everything to You."

He has made our sufferings His own on the Cross, joining them to His victory, which is the revelation, the giving, the pouring out of God's love.

This Love is the secret of all the beauty and goodness and all the promises and aspirations that awaken our hearts, only to increase our thirst. But Love has come into the world to be with us, so that we will never give up, so that we will persevere, holding on to Him, recognizing that everything belongs to Him.

This is the hope that changes and transforms life, that saves us. Where else can any of us go? We have to go to Him, and give ourselves to Him.

We have to trust in Him.

There Are No "Coincidences"

God is present in this moment. Whatever the circumstances may be, He is using them as elements of a Person to person dialogue with each one of us.

God became man out of love in order to seek us out; He has personalized the whole vast, apparently random and chance-filled universe. He takes all the multitudes of forces that come together and make up the situation of reality at any given moment, and fashions them -- from all eternity -- into a love song that He wants to sing to each of us personally.

There are no "coincidences" in real life. In the ultimate truth of things, which has to do with their place in God's plan, no event is insignificant; no situation we find ourselves in can be called meaningless, because God in Christ has chosen to dwell in this world, and to shape everything into the possibility to discover Him through love, through joy, through suffering freely embraced, through sharing His mercy.

God has come to us, to dwell in this moment, to consecrate the human concreteness of this moment so that it becomes a gesture of His love. He comes to dwell with us; He takes on a human heart so as to accompany each of us and to gather us to Himself.

He comes to us and draws close to us in the humanity He has assumed in Christ, and asks us to recognize His presence and His transforming mercy even in the most difficult moments of life. This recognition takes shape within us as a genuine response of confidence and love.

Even in its apparent weakness, adherence to the mercy of Christ is the radical form of every truly constructive engagement of life. Through Christ we enter the real world, and we accomplish work that bears enduring fruit.

Blogging: A Small Gift of Love I Offer to You

The Internet "thingy" that connects us.

What am I trying to do when I blog? I am trying to give of myself, because as a human being I am impelled by the urgent desire to offer what I am and have--as a human being I want to love. I am also trying to open myself up and show myself and ask to be loved, because I am a human being and I need to be loved. I want to love and to be loved.

So I write because I want to love, to affirm and to give goodness. And I don't want it to be fake. This means I want truth. And I don't want it to be boring. This means I want beauty.

This is what I want to do in my writing. I want it to be a gift of love.

I say this not as a theory, but as a judgment. I know that this is true. I know that the motor of my life is love. It is a judgment drawn from experience. My humanity is alive inside me because I have been loved. The experience of being loved awakens the human heart. The difference between living a human life and living a life of desperation is the awareness of being loved. And this awareness is grounded on, and continually nourished by, the experience of being loved.

It began in childhood. I have had problems, and sicknesses, and mental distress since childhood. But these are the consequence of illness. Beneath them all was the radical security that came from being loved by my parents. As I came to maturity, I met people who loved me--sometimes in very simple ways--and I grew. I finally met a woman who loved me with a love that embraced me in a way I didn't deserve, to which I wasn't entitled, and which I could not earn. It was a gift. Beyond attraction and common interest and sympathy of personality there was that radically undeserved love, a love that could not be grasped, but only received according to the form of a gift, within the space created by a gift in return. And so we were married.

It was the great sign that radical, undeserved, gratuitous love was the foundation and sustenance of my life. And it remains a sign that grows. It is a gratuitous love that overflows and is fruitful.

I need this sign to continually manifest itself, if I am to remain convinced in the reality of my heart that I have been created to love and to be loved. Every day I need to place myself in the position of receptivity to the love of my wife, and my children. I must acknowledge my need, my poverty, and that my capacity to give is founded on the fact that I am a gift. I am loveable. I see it in the simplest things in the day, such as when I am hungry and my wife makes pasta, because she loves me. The kids want me to read them a story, or help them with their work, or have a conversation with me not just because of their own needs because they want me. They love me. Why am I wanted? Why are there these people in my life who say to me, "it is good that you are you, that you exist"?

They are witnesses that I am created by love, that I am given to myself in love, that I am worthy. And this engenders in me the desire to give myself, because goodness wants to be shared, to be given away. It is not afraid of being lost. And so I am writing, in the confidence that these words are a gift, even if only a fragile one. I want to tell you that it is good that you exist. I know that. And I want you to experience it, and be sustained by it.

Let us love one another....

Walking in the Afternoon

The sun is shining. The air is warm.

There is goodness.

Goodness will endure.

The storm and show of evil is not the final word.

All the clatter that shakes our thoughts

will not be silenced by a better idea.

Our hope is that hope has an answer

that whispers like the still small voice.

Right Now, Right Where You Are....

Think, think, think, write, write, write, read, read, read, think, think, think, doubt, doubt, fear, fear, think, think, read, read, read, think, read, write, doubt, FEAR....

Really, its as simple as Teresa popping into the office and asking for an apple slice.

He is here.

I can't hold myself together with a comprehensive understanding of myself, or with stuff, or with anything that I try to capture with my conniving and my worrying.

Instead something happens. Someone comes. Someone Else is here.

This is what Christmas teaches me. Of all the billions of people born in human history, there is one who -- right now -- says to me, "I am the meaning of your life."

"I am what you are searching for, what you keep trying to make for yourself, in an effort that leads to desperation again and again, because you know that what you're looking for is beyond all your thinking and understanding and expression; you know its out of reach...."

"Don't be anxious. I have come to dwell with you. I am here, right now, right where you are. And I love you."

Whatever darkness you suffer, remember that He is here.

Whatever sorrow, confusion, guilt: He is here.

He wants to bring you through. He loves you.

"I have come into the world to be its light" (John 12:46).

Rejoice! Its the Christmas season. Happy Christmas Season!

"Cheap Happiness"?

Why do we love distraction so much? What are we hoping to find by chasing after so many things?

I was in Target the other day. I needed raw almonds, and they have the big two pound containers. My plan was to go in, get the almonds, pay for them, and leave the store. Well...maybe I'd peek in the electronics section, quickly. Heh heh.

FLASHBACK: ME, AT TARGET, A COUPLE OF DAYS AGO...

Okay, where are the almonds? Oooh, books! Not much new here. Bleech. Its a bunch of garbage...oh wait, here's Political Scuttlebutt by Fred BigMouth. I wanna take a quick look at this.

Twenty minutes of reading. Then I finally said, "nah, this isn't very good."

Now, why am I here? Almonds!

Let me just check to see if there are any bargains in electronics.

On the way I pass the books and the DVDs and the clothes (let me look at those shirts over there...) and the bling and the food. Everywhere stuff is flashing, aiming for the appetites (and usually aiming low). Eat THIS!!! Giant "Creme*" Puff Poos (*artificially flavored). Sodas! Drink me, drink me, drink me!!! I have VITAMIN C. I have NO CHOLESTEROL. No sugar, no calories, drink me and be beautiful!

Movies? They're all trash, or else stuff blowing up. Two for five bucks.

Oh yeah, everywhere the magic words beckon: ON SALE! Save Money!

S.A.V.E.  M.O.N.E.Y.

Its remarkable: you spend money, but you feel like you've saved money. What a deal! So you spend your money on stuff that you don't need and wouldn't have even thought of buying, but you walk out of the store feeling like a champion. "Look how much money I saved! See, its in bold print, on the receipt."

In reality, you exchanged your money for a bag of junk. Which you are bringing home to a house full of junk. And what is all that junk really worth?

I suspect that the "health" of our economy depends on a lot of us being suckers.

Meanwhile, I'm in Target at office supplies, checking out some pens. Pens are fun. So are calculators, and writing paper, and all these things that no one uses anymore. But I've been here over an hour! I'm going to get the almonds...right after I swing by computer accessories.

Wait, what am I doing? I'm surfing the Target. This is like wasting time on the Internet, but with legs.

I finally got my almonds in the end, and I didn't spend any money on junk, but something still bothered me. A ten minute errand stretched into two hours of what? Distraction. Mostly I'm just laughing at myself here. There's nothing wrong with "window shopping," right? And its not like I was pressed for time.

But this wasn't like strolling down Main Street. I sort of felt like I was being pulled all around the store. Distracted. Not by the trashy stuff (I don't look at those things), but by all the other stuff. Everything seemed cloying. Everything seemed to be jumping off the shelves and saying, "look at ME! I can make you HAPPY."

Its the whole "cheap grace" thing, but in a more diffused mode, because we don't even talk about "grace" anymore. The reason why its being served up, more and more, bigger and faker than ever, is that we're still looking for it. We want transcendence in a package. We want "cheap happiness"! We like to play around with artificially flavored happiness, plastic happiness, processed happiness.

We don't care if its fake as long as it looks and feels real, and as long as its a bargain. Of course, fake is fake. So we're not satisfied, and we keep buying more. That's why we have houses full of junk. That's why we have hearts full of junk (in more ways than one).

Why are we so restless? Why do we keep trying to settle for the cheap stuff? Is it because we know that real happiness can't be bought at any price?

Real Happiness is not cheap.

Real Happiness is not for sale at all.

Real Happiness is free, if we are willing to receive it as a gift. It means becoming like children. It means being humble, and that can't be faked.

It also means making room, at least in the spaces of the heart. Are we willing to let go of our junk?

There Are No Shortcuts

I have nothing to say. I have been staring at a blank screen for over an hour. Staring. Really.

Lots of ideas have gone through my mind. The Amerisphere is full of ideas, because we have all been provoked in recent days. Why do these mass killings keep happening? People argue about gun laws. People argue about whether or not these shooters are "mentally ill." People talk about our violent society, our narcissistic culture, the effects of violent video games, the degradation of masculinity, social isolation, family breakdowns, and so on.

Some of these reflections have value. Some of them are rather silly. Many of them are, in part, ways of distracting ourselves. We want to reduce the fundamental questions of life to social and political problems that can be fixed somehow.

Let's figure out what causes this, and fix it!

But many of us are just shaken up and confused. I work in the office of a children's center. Eileen teaches there. We have a six year old daughter. My gosh! There are no words for this.

We have prayers and sorrow and deep sympathy for the families, certainly.

We are also reminded of our own vulnerability, how we have invested ourselves so profoundly in relationships and circumstances that seem to hang by a thread. We are reminded of the presence of the faces we love so much, how dear they are to us, but also how fragile everything is...how easily we might lose our loved ones, even our children.

"Why do people have to die? Why this darkness, this absence, this wrenching separation from someone I love?"

The big questions. We all experience them sooner or later. Even if we are convinced that we "know the answers," our guts will still be torn by their pain.

Christians need to remember this.

Of course, our faith reassures us that there is eternal life, that death has been conquered. There is comfort here; indeed, when life seems incomprehensible we are reminded that our trust in Jesus must be radical and total. We must trust, because it is through love that faith holds on in the most obscure places, the inexpressibly personal places where ideas can seem so cold.

[If I continue writing words here, it is only with the understanding that I'm just stammering, and that I hardly know what I'm talking about. If I write, its only to point to a reality that is infinitely more important than anything I can say.]

Christianity is not "cheap answers to the fundamental questions of life." Christianity is a Person who loves us and endures our vulnerability to the very end, transforming it from within. The "answer" is the way He embraces each of our lives. We are changed by living with Him. We are not changed by a satisfying explanation. We are changed by Him.

There are no shortcuts. We must live through everything, trusting in Him. Especially when we feel powerless and He seems absent. We may not even feel any trust, but still we must trust, we must beg to be able to trust, we must continue to hope even if it all seems wild and impossible. Because He Himself really endures with us all the tears, the separations, the crushed hearts. Really.

He has made it all His own.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is a time to be grateful to God. People often talk about being "grateful" or "thankful" for things, and yet they don't mention God, because they think that they don't believe in God. But their language betrays a deeper awareness underneath whatever explanations they give.

Gratitude is always a response to the gift of a person. And if we are "grateful" for the circumstances and elements of goodness that come to us in life, we are already acknowledging the mysterious One who bestows these blessings upon us with attention and love.

If the material universe is all that exists, then nothing is worthy of our gratitude. There is no one to recognize, no benefactor. When we say we are "thankful," our natural sensibility leads to the spontaneous expectation: "thankful to whom?"

Logically, it would make more sense to just call it "Turkey Day." But it takes more than ideology to separate the human being from his or her essential thirst for God.

We had a beautiful Thanksgiving day. I am grateful to God for the food and all the good things He provides. The turkey was about 19 lbs., and stuffed full of good things:

I 

I am far more grateful to God for this woman who expresses herself with such generosity in making a meal like this, caring for a home, directing a class, and loving a foolish man like me with such gentleness and consistency:

Our table is full and our family comes together, including "Uncle" Walter and "Papa and Grandma." We thank God that He has given us to each other.

And then, of course, those young people who are with us every day. We are grateful to God, and always a bit astonished. He used our love for each other as the instrument to create new persons, and these beautiful new centers of intelligence and love have been entrusted to us in time.

Also, we need them if we're going to finish all this food!

The littlest person even managed to weigh more than the turkey this year (although I think the turkey still had more fat). And she thinks the jokes about her providing extra drumsticks for the meal have really gotten old:

May you all enjoy this Thanksgiving weekend, and may God keep you safe in your travels.

Let us be thankful...not to the blind and unfeeling particles of nature, but to the One who loves us and provides for us.

My Life is not Solitude

God never leaves me "alone." My very existence in this moment is brought about by His creative and sustaining love.

This goes to the core of my identity; this is what I am: "relationship-to-Him"! There is no autonomous "me" that can somehow stand "outside" of this relationship. Sin adds nothing to me, because sin is radically "no-thing." It is a lack of existing. It can only diminish me.

God gives me to myself, right in this moment. And He calls me to Himself.

My joys and sufferings are His infinitely wise, uniquely crafted, and tender love through which He shapes my life and leads me to my destiny.  How little I really understand about my “destiny.”  How little I understand about the “eternal life” which means belonging to Him forever.

We must remember every day that God is with us and that He draws us toward our true identity, which is to reflect His eternal glory in that unique way that corresponds to each of us as a person created in His image and likeness—a reflection that we do not yet understand but that He sees and knows.

No matter the storms and the fury; the depths of our lives are not solitude.  At the heart of life, of every moment of life, there is companionship with the Merciful God.

Why Are We Always So Frustrated?

Everything is grace,

Everything is the direct effect of our Father's love. 

Everything is grace, because everything is God's gift....

--St. Therese of Lisieux

Everything? Really??

Okay, I can do the theology here, but when it comes to actual stuff that happens ... its very hard to see everything as a gift. Sometimes "everything" is a train wreck. Where is the "gift"?

At such times, it seems easier to understand that proverb of contemporary worldly wisdom, which might be paraphrased as: "Life stinks and then you die!"

But no. Those are always words of profound dissatisfaction. The human person knows they are wrong. If there is any "resignation" in them, its only in the attempt to make a cynical peace with the idea that the universe is one big scam.

But I can't say "I've been cheated by life" except from the expectation that life is supposed to give me something, that at the heart of life there is a promise.

Thus, people go on hoping for something, and if they say things like this its because they are trying to cope with a sense of frustration that seems to renew itself over and over again.

I usually don't go so far as to say that "life stinks..." (well, not lately anyway). But I do feel that "life is often frustrating."

How can my frustration be a gift? Why do I have to live with frustration, day after day; dull, throbbing frustration aching through the day; frustration like a prison that seems to build walls in every direction? What's the "gift" in that?

Well, frustration provokes me; it challenges my freedom, and my sense of who I am.

In the face of frustration, I can choose to give up. I can say "life stinks" and wallow in pity for my isolated self.

Or I can remember that my very self is a gift, and that this moment of frustration (with all of its bitterness, pain, and incomprehensibility) is a gift because it deepens my awareness of who I really am. It reminds me in a concrete way that I am made for something greater, something beyond my control, something I don't make or measure or manage, something that I can't find anywhere in this world.

Nevertheless, this "something" is real. It is at the root of me, it sustains me, and it carves itself into my heart in the form of a promise.

What does my five year old daughter do when she's frustrated by something?

"Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy! Help! Please help!" She asks for help. She asks Daddy to come.

What do I do if I see Josefina crying, helpless, frustrated by something because she's just too small to understand it?

I go to her and pick her up and hold her. She still cries. Sometimes she cries even more. It seems like she doesn't even notice I'm there.

But I am there, and I keep holding on to her.

Time: An Education in the Love of God

ALMOST THREE O'CLOCK (picture courtesy of
 http://www.picture-newsletter.com/clocks/index.htm)

"Time is a gift."

That's what they tell us, anyway.

It usually seems like something else. We presume upon it. We take it "for granted." Or else, we feel like we don't have enough of it. We're afraid of losing it. On the other hand, it can seem to stretch out before us like an endless dry desert, or burden us like a terrible weight.

Its hard to say anything good about time that doesn't sound cliche. Of course, many things sound cliche to us because we go around repeating them without trying to understand what they really mean.

Human things take time.

Even that apex of human existing--the free decision--that instantaneous flash of spiritual vitality, usually occurs within a context of time, as the fruit of deliberation, the process of formation that shapes our way of perceiving goodness, and the cultivation of good (or bad) inclinations.

Time signifies the "becoming" of things, and especially the becoming of human persons. We are not born in a state of complete realization. We are born with the vocation to become the persons that God, in His wisdom and love, wills us to be. Time is given to us for the discovery and the fulfillment of that vocation, for the learning and the carrying out of God's plan for me.

Time is necessary for that unique human endeavor and experience that we call education.

But we never learn the whole of God's plan, even as we struggle to cooperate with it and, often, endure it in its many incomprehensible aspects. The "map" of human nature only sketches some parts of the journey, and shows us the boundaries of the road.

This is because the person that is "you" and the person that is "me" are called to a supernatural vocation--we are called to transcend "human nature" as we can conceive it, and become sons and daughters of God. And we are born into a human family that bears the mark of this vocation and at the same time the strange alienation and incapacity to attain it. Yet it is this vocation that corresponds to the very depths of what it means for "me" to be "myself."

And so the Word became flesh. In his humanity the Son used time, to dwell among us, to educate us, and above all to love us with that transforming love that expresses and communicates God's plan for each and all of us. Jesus on the Cross conquers our alienation and separation from God, and makes it possible for each of us to become children of God, which is the real destiny that corresponds to our vocation--the path upon which God continually draws our hearts.

Thus the ultimate answer to the question, "Who am I?" is inseparable from an event that took place in time (but that is not limited by time). My person and my life are defined at every moment by the redeeming and transforming love of Jesus Christ. This is the truth for every person, and it is the great mystery that is woven into God's plan for each of us--the plan that unfolds in the time we are given.

Time is the realm of faith. Time is where we are educated to trust in God, to lose ourselves in order to find Him, and to find ourselves in Him.

Who am I? What gives my life value? What shapes my personal vocation, and places before me the steps I take? What is the meaning of my life, of this present moment? What is the real, concrete foundation of my unshakable dignity as a human person? It is this: Jesus Christ loves me.

"I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me; and the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me" (Galatians 2:20).

Homecoming and Friendship

This weekend's annual Homecoming at our college drew me to the post I wrote for last year's Homecoming. I was then prompted to reflect and develop further these (still very incomplete) thoughts about friendship. On a certain level, the things I said last year are a precise "fit" for this past weekend. But my reflections have continued to grow, and so here is a revised post of considerations that are still in progress:

I had some nice visits this weekend with some long-time friends (notice I didn’t say “old” friends). Some were people I had not seen or heard from for many years. Others were people I had not seen for a long time, but whom I have been in touch with in varying degrees through one or more kinds of media. Still others were people I have seen (and keep in touch with) frequently over the past thirty (or more) years

And then, finally, there were the people I see all the time, and who help me in my own life. Especially with them, the pace of daily events often crowds out the simple possibility of "visiting" one another. This is something we hardly realize until some celebration comes along that brings us together gratuitously. This is one of the great values of a celebration.

It is a blessing to be with friends. I marvel with gratitude that my life has been endowed with such real, substantial, and long-lasting friendships. I realize after nearly half a century of life that this is not a common experience in our culture.

But what makes these friendships real? What makes any friendship real? I have found that there are two kinds of enduring friendships, and although both presuppose time spent together, both are based ultimately on something that transcends (even as it enters into) time and space. That “something” is truth.

The first kind of enduring friendship is one that is based on a common search for the truth. These friends may not share the same faith, and may have other disagreements over matters of importance. But they have traveled the road of life together in some way, and have ardently engaged together in seeking the purpose and significance of things.

In these friendships there is a real recognition of “truth,” even if the term is not used, because what unites these friends is their awareness of a common desire for something real, for something that lasts and gives meaning to the events of time and the story of life. It can be a something that is hinted at and reflected through very ordinary experiences that people share, or even in the intuition that corresponds to the harmony they discover with each other through shared interests or sympathy of temperament and perspective.

But for friendship to endure, it is not enough to have “things in common,” or to simply “get along;” there is the enduring theme of a great destination, toward which friends journey–perhaps in the dark, perhaps without knowing the way, perhaps in continual argument over what exactly the destination is, or perhaps simply with the quiet, implicit recognition that it is there and that it draws them onward.

The second kind of enduring friendship is in many ways like the first, but it has another aspect. It is a common journey toward the fulfillment of the truth that has already been encountered. Such friends are often brought together by some particular event or experience they have shared. They have had an encounter with persons and circumstances that seem quite ordinary in themselves, and that might be spread out over a significant period of time. But this apparently ordinary history of place and time and circumstances carries within it the experience of something extraordinary and utterly convincing.

These friends have experienced together something that defines the rest of their lives and that they will never be able to deny without denying themselves. And one often finds that they will be the most odd and unusual sort of companions. One is struck by a great variety of temperaments and preferences, backgrounds, inclinations, and tastes. What binds them together as friends, however, and keeps them together through the years and even through divergent circumstances is this common experience.

And it is not just any experience. It is an encounter with nothing less than the Mystery that gives meaning to all of life, the Mystery that has entered their world and placed them together on a common road. At a certain point in time the truth brought them together, they recognized the truth, they tasted it, they said to one another, “Here is the reason why we live,” they met the truth and were regenerated by it.

Sometimes we forget where we come from. But when we meet our brothers and sisters again, we remember whose children we are, and the home that we are all seeking together. We help each other simply by seeing the different ways in which this awareness has shaped each of us thus far, We recognize--in the various ways that our personalities are maturing, and also in our struggles and failures--the Reality that we still have and still seek in common, even if we haven't seen each other in a long time.

And, of course, we can become great friends with others who have found this same truth under different concrete circumstances, whom we meet further down the road.

All this, however, raises another question: When I encounter the truth of my life, does that mean I can no longer have the "first kind" of friendship? Does it mean that I ought to look down upon those who are still searching, with pity and a sense of superiority? Not at all. Quite the contrary!

The truth of my life is not an abstract theory, which I can master by learning its terms and its logic. The truth of life is a Person. He has not come into my life to end my journey, but to show me where I'm going, to draw me to Him, and to shed light on everything along the way.

This means that my friendship with those who are still seeking the truth can only become more profound. The relationship with Him who is the truth of life can only deepen my appreciation and reverence for every person, and my desire to be their companion. I recognize that I myself am part of the experience of that person's life, through which the Mystery-who-dwells-among-us invites and draws their freedom.

Those of us who know Jesus Christ cannot simply live like a club, or a partisan group that controls truth and that preaches down at others. We are called to stay together as brothers and sisters, but also to dwell with others and share their lives and their sufferings and their searching. He who is "the truth" has us. He is changing us, and He wants us to be living witnesses within the journey of others...with the right words in their proper time, but above all with the love that He generates and shapes according to His particular plan for each person.

The Hundredfold of St. Augustine

St. Augustine. There's no end to what we could say about him. There is one particular thing that has always fascinated me. St. Augustine is a radiant example of what Jesus calls "the hundredfold" (Mark 10:31).

Jesus says that if we follow Him, we will receive eternal life...but also, we will receive a hundredfold in this life (along with "persecutions"). He also says "seek first the Kingdom of God, and all these things will be added as well" (see Matthew 6:33).

What does Jesus mean? He does not mean the we should follow Him in order to get stuff in this life. That would be to reduce Jesus to our own measure. Jesus wants to transform us according to God's wisdom. He wants to give us a new mind and a new heart. He promises eternal life, which is the mystery toward which everything in this life points, and which is therefore the real meaning of everything in this life.

The Servant of God Msgr. Luigi Giussani often said something that resonates deeply in me, and corresponds to my own experience. He said that if you really follow Christ, you will also discover that you love your wife a hundred times more than you ever could have imagined; that you love your children a hundred times more, your work a hundred times more, your friends a hundred times more. You will discover the real greatness of this life, and you will even be able to embrace suffering.

There is a particular way in which St. Augustine's life indicates this pattern. Here was a man who aspired to be a great rhetorician, an artist with words. He pursued this ambition with relentless passion, but without understanding its true value. And then he found Christ, and he gave up all thought of being a rhetorician. He gave up the desire to be known for his speeches and writings and works in this world. He longed for Christ, followed Christ, and kept his heart fixed on Christ.

And from out of his singular passion for Christ--without even thinking about it, or caring, or noticing it--he wrote an amazing book. Desiring only to praise Christ, he wrote a book that was not only the greatest book of its epoch, but one of the greatest ever written in human history. He gave the world inimitable and unforgettable Latin prose, soaring and poetic diction, and timeless, soul-penetrating insight into the heart of the human being.

Aurelius Augustinus the rhetorician and scholar, had he followed his ambition, might have become a teacher with some following, or even perhaps a minor provincial statesman of his period. Students of late antiquity might have known his name. But Saint Augustine, by following Christ, became also a hundred times more in the history of this world. He wrote books that speak to every time and in every language, and he gave us words that ring out through the ages--words that rival any that have ever been uttered in human speech.

There is something of the hundredfold here, although it has been more for our benefit than for his.

"Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would have not been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace" (Confessions X:27).

Ten Years Ago: From An Old Book Of Mine

Ten years ago I began writing The Created Person and the Mystery of God, and it went through editing and finally publication a year later. I was glad to have a book that I could show people and say, "Here, this is the stuff I do." It was my schtick, my "song and dance" routine. "It is a youthful work of Janaro's early period," haha!

In many ways, the "routine" has changed. The words were larger then, and the perspective was, perhaps, smaller. I'm not sure I agree with everything that fellow wrote. Above all I think what I write now comes from a deeper place, and I even think I understand texts like this one better today than when I wrote them.

Perhaps getting knocked around a bit has done me some good after all. Still, many will probably think the writing sounds the same. As my kids say, "blah blah blah, blah blah blah!" But to be fair, there is much value in the truth expressed here. In any case, I hope that I have time to mature as a "thinker," because it appears that I'm going to need a lot of time.

The Mystery who gives man his being has drawn close to him, spoken to him, and become his companion within history. What we want to begin to understand is that this gift, this message, this continued presence of God in man’s history is an affirmation of the value of man himself; it corresponds to all that is most noble and beautiful in man, and it heals what is broken in him.

God addresses man His creature according to the fullness of the dignity of his humanity—God addresses man as man, as a person. Man therefore is not called to adhere to God in a way that contradicts his humanity; he adheres to God with the full richness of his nature and his capacities—that is to say, by a fully personal act—an act that fully engages his reason and his freedom; an act that does justice to his reason and emerges from the depths of his freedom; an act of knowledge and love.

--from The Created Person and the Mystery of God by John Janaro (Click Here)

Happy, Happy: So What Does It Mean?

Happy is not sappy.

Like so many other words that relate to the human being, "happiness" has been twisted, degraded, and used to fool people. It is not the solipsistic state of being pleased with one's self. Nor is it the temporary (and merely apparent) satisfaction of human impulses. Nor is it even the exaltation of any kind of earthly success. None of these things last. And we all know that happiness is meant to last. Forever.

In this passing world, we may call a person truly happy if they have found the beginning of happiness, if somewhere in the midst of all their human incoherence, the flower of joy has taken root and sprung a shoot inside the soul. In this world, true happiness always remains a goal. But it begins within us and sustains us--sometimes in mysterious ways--as we travel the arduous road to its final destination. The name for happiness in this life is hope.

Following up on yesterday's post, here are the words of a happy man, who makes reference in this little piece of text to another happy man (a man who taught thousands of people--including me--how to follow the One who makes us happy):

Thus do we discover the truest dimension of human existence, that to which the Servant of God Luigi Giussani continually referred: life as vocation. Everything, every relationship, every joy, as well as every difficulty, finds its ultimate meaning in being an opportunity for a relationship with the Infinite, a voice of God that continually calls to us and invites us to lift our gaze, to find the complete fulfillment of our humanity in belonging to Him....

The Lord...calls everyone to recognize the essence of our own nature as human beings: we are made for the Infinite. And God has our happiness at heart, and our complete human fulfillment.

Benedict XVI (August 20, 2012) 

What Does Religion Have To Do With Being Happy?

Often when we witness to our faith today, the problem people have is not so much what we believe, but rather why any of it at all should be considered vital and important by a human being.

Our society has room for religious views of all kinds, as long as they remain on the level of abstract theories about things, or irrelevant musings about "what's behind it all." Even many Catholics hold their faith in this way, as a kind of "background" explanation that only needs occasional contact with the real interests of life.

There is a dislocation in our secular culture. Having pushed God to the margins of reality, we have lost the awareness of the fundamentally religious character of human existence.

Religion is not just one part of life; it is the deepest dimension of everything in life. It is much more than an organization, rituals, and a set of ideas to which one nominally adheres. It goes right to the core of the question of the meaning of life in the concrete sense, i.e. the meaning of everything that we actually do in our daily life. 

Why do I get up in the morning? Okay, I have to work, or feed the kids, or whatever. Why? Why work? Why have a family?

At first these may appear to be stupid questions with obvious answers. "I work to get money, you dope!" Why do I need money? "Because I need food and stuff...." Why? "Because I want to have a decent life, a good life, I want to be satisfied, I want to be...." At a certain point, this questioning will lead me to dig up something deep inside me, something that is so close to my soul that at first it might seem like the easiest thing in the world to understand. It is as close to me as the roots of my desires and interests, and so when I assign a word to it, I might think that I know exactly what I'm talking about.

"I want to be HAPPY!!!"

But what is "happiness"? We know that this is what we really want. But what is it? This is not an abstract philosophical question. It's a question about why I got out of bed this morning.

We live in a culture that claims that the "real world" is confined to its material elements, and that the ultimate arbiter of rational human interest is empirical science. Everything that appears to be outside of these confines belongs to the realm of dreams or delusions, or at best to the unknowable and inaccessible (and therefore irrelevant to the serious business of life).

In this context, the question "what is happiness?" becomes almost subversive. The need for happiness, if we confront it truly, will take us beyond this world, beyond everything, toward an Infinite Mystery which is the only reality that truly corresponds to our hearts. It is a religious question, and human cultures throughout history--regardless of how they have attempted to answer it--have always recognized its religious nature.

But if we really believe that there is nothing significant beyond this world, then the need for happiness is desperate, unsettling, even pathological.

It is therefore something to be suppressed. We must not ask this question. We must distract ourselves from it, even though it permeates our being. We must live our lives on the shallow surface of every experience.

The truly religious person, however, is someone who is at least seeking the answer. And the Christian claims that the Answer has come into the world, and is seeking us.

This is a basic reason why our Christian faith doesn't make any sense to people. This is why people can't understand why it matters to us. Indeed, this is why many of us don't understand the place of faith in our own lives.

We have been conditioned to evade ourselves, to suffocate our hearts, to flee from the deep cry within us that cannot be satisfied by anything in this finite world. And this evasion has become a forgetfulness. We have cheapened and falsified all the terms associated with the question of happiness: love, justice, goodness, truth, beauty, freedom. We no longer remember how to ask the question.

No wonder the Christian proposal makes no sense. Fr. Giussani often quotes Reinhold Niebuhr's insight: nothing is more incomprehensible than the answer to a question that has never been asked.

There is, of course, still another possibility. There is the possibility of meeting some real people who have actually begun to be happy. The human person might wake up, remember their heart, and discover that they have been controlled by lies.

Nothing is more subversive to the dominant powers of this world than happy people.

Mary: At the Center of the Whole Human Race

Mary, the Mother of God, shapes the Christian identity of the believer and the vocation of every human person. For every human person without exception has been created to know and love Jesus Christ, and in Christ to share forever in God’s very own life of Ineffable Love. Mary, indeed, is at the center of what it means to be a Christian, which means that she is also the center of the whole human race. In accordance with the mystery of God’s magnificent, gratuitous plan of love, she brought forth into the world and continues to bring into our lives the One who concretely constitutes the true meaning of our humanity.

By cooperating with her whole being, her whole affections, her whole heart and her whole will, Mary brought into the world the only One who can give meaning to the universe. For from the beginning, the universe has been destined to be transformed by God's gift of Himself. God created the universe and everywhere permeated it with a mysterious impetus corresponding to the design of His Love. And in the beginning, the human being was created to be a tupos, a sign, of the-One-who-was-to-come, the One who will bring all things into unity and fulfillment in Himself.

Here and now, Mary brings to me the only One who knows the profound mystery of who I am; the One who knows, from within its very source, the gesture of Divine Love that created me, and that calls me to eternal life, to a participation in His Glory.

Totally Involved By Him

The center of existence,

which is what gives meaning

and certain hope

in the all too often difficult journey of life,

is faith in Jesus,

it is the encounter with Christ....

It is not a matter here

of following an idea or a project,

but of encountering Jesus

as a living Person,

of letting ourselves be totally involved

by Him and by His Gospel.

Benedict XVI

It's Not Enough! I Want More!

Yosemite National Park, June 2012 (photo John Paul)

Longing, yearning, aching for that "something"--this is the way my heart is made.

Most of the day I smother it, but it is what makes for every authentic engagement of life that I manage in a day, and it makes it possible to perceive things as they really are and to recognize that my relationship with reality consists in a recognition of its beauty and a joy tinged with sadness--things are and yet they are not enough.

Being Christian does not take away this yearning. It intensifies it. It does not remove the sweet pain of my need for the Infinite. It is the revelation that the Infinite One has embraced my life.

Being Christian makes it possible to live life according to its true meaning, without escape or desperation. I don't live this possibility. I flee every day, into my own schemes and vain imaginings and grasping and blindness. But I have moments when I remember that this is what life is really all about.

They are moments of prayer. They generate hope. In hope, I truly begin to live.


[previously posted July 20, 2011]