The Hymn of Glory

God’s infinite Being, and His infinite Truth, Goodness, and Beauty are reflected by the profound signification that is to be found in the depths of every being He has created.  The human person is led by the mystery of created existence to an acknowledgement of God that is full of wonder and awe.

To praise, to adore and glorify the Infinite Mystery who possesses in an ineffable and super-eminent way all the loveliness of creation--who is the overflowing Source of every good and every beauty that draws and fascinates the human heart--this is at the foundation of religion, and especially of worship.

In a certain sense, all creation worships God. But when this praise is consciously and intentionally taken up and offered to God from out of the heart of the human person, then worship takes on its full stature, and the hymn of glory that all creation sings to God by virtue of all that it is reaches its summit in the personal offering of the human being.

The mysterious sign of the perfection of God imprinted upon each creature and upon the whole of creation finds its voice in human worship, which lifts up the world and consecrates it to God.

St. Francis Part One, Creation, and Benedict at Loreto Too!

The dateline on this post is October 4th, which was when the remarks below were given by the Pope during his pilgrimage to Loreto, to consecrate to the Blessed Mother the upcoming Year of Faith and the synod on the New Evangelization. These are the beginnings of what we trust will be specially blessed, even extraordinary days for the Church, as we commemorate the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council.

Of course, October 4 is the feast of St. Francis, and this post was supposed to be devoted to him. But to adapt for my purposes Boromir's popular meme:

I rather think he has a point. So far I have not been able to get out much about St. Francis beyond *GASP! What a man!*

There is so much to say. One could start right here: without St. Francis and his way of being-at-home-in-the-world while not belonging to the world, it is hard to imagine that anyone could have written The Lord of the Rings. St. Francis embodies that new Christian vision of the created world, in which things have their own truth and beauty precisely through their reference to One who made them.

LOTR is a "myth" without any gods, not because it is atheist, but because it is everywhere indicative of the transcendent source of reality. It is a "Christian myth" by the very fact that the divine is not to be found in nature or in fate, but rather in the pervasive presence of a transcendent Providence that calls forth personal responsibility and also shows mercy.

St. Francis provokes a lot of thought about a lot of things.

And that means that I intend to devote a post to him. Its just going to take a little more time. But its coming soon.

Meanwhile, to return to Pope Benedict's schedule, the Year of Faith begins October 11. It is intended to be a time for deepening our faith, and growing in awareness of the amazing event that is God's presence in the world through Jesus Christ. Like Mary, we must entrust our freedom to Him. He is not a restriction on our freedom. On the contrary, He alone is adequate for our freedom. He is the source and fulfillment of our freedom. Here are the words of Benedict XVI:

"As we contemplate Mary,

we must ask if we too wish to be open to the Lord,
if we wish to offer him our life as his dwelling place;
or if we are afraid 
the presence of God may somehow
place limits on our freedom,
if we wish to set aside a part of our life
in such a way that it belongs only to us.
Yet it is precisely God who liberates our liberty,
he frees it from being closed in on itself,
from the thirst for power, possessions, and domination;
he opens it up to the dimension which completely fulfils it:
the gift of self, of love,
which in turn becomes service and sharing."

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.