Sky High

I am greatly blessed.

I just resumed my study of the life of Pope John Paul II for a little book I’m writing and illustrating. God has given me a really sweet reason to immerse myself in Him through someone who loved Him dearly. In only a few hours of spending my time reading his biography and discourses I feel infected by that love and close to Jesus. Few things are more moving to me that the love of God winning over tragedy.

I have a book called “A Year with John Paul II” and there are meditations for each day taken from the Pope’s writings and Prayers. Today, on a whim I opened it up to August 10 and this section cut me straight through!

“The consumer society in which we live and the fear of an uncertain future drive one to seek immediate gratification for oneself. One becomes, introverted, falling back on one’s small personal happiness, on one’s emotions, in a circle where aroused feeling is incessantly on the look out for new sensations, which quickly fade away, where there is no reference but to self and to one’s pleasures. This is no way to live. This is not the world you want: it would be a world without hope, one that empties man’s life of meaning.” - Discourse to the Youth of Fribourg, Switzerland, June 13, 1983

I tried to find the rest of the discourse online, but couldn’t so I’m no the hunt for the rest. There is a danger, at least for me at the moment, when I am focused on job hunting and working on my personal art to become oh so self-centered! To become more excited about “the next new thing” than God and the people he calls me to serve. Compliments, fame, fads, movies, etc come quick, strike high and then they are gone. But God’s love and the deep connection with neighbor is so much deeper and lasting I pray that even when I am working on my own I am drawn out of myself to something greater. That my heart might expand. And that is what I hope for you too! Whatever your creature comforts may be that they will not become crutches in your life but sweet nectar to add to your daily romance with our Lord and his people!

Disney Dreams and St. Joseph

So I survived my third portfolio review with Disney recruiters. I just came back from a mad dash to new york to show my portfolio... again.  I had a lot of people praying for me, including St. Joseph who is the saint in heaven I recruited to pray for me during unemployment. Anytime there is something big in my life that I don't know how to handle or even get my mind around what it is I really want to ask for my dad tells me to pick a saint in heaven who can pray more perfectly for my situation to help me out. When I didn't know if I should live in Providence or away from it I asked Mother Theresa to be praying for me, and low and behold Providence has been an insanely fruitful time and my apartment and surroundings have been a blessing I couldn't imagine then. When I told my Dad how I'd picked her he said it was a great idea since she'd looked for so long for a home for the poor herself. I didn't know that and I came to realize sometimes your prayer partners pick you because they are compassionate to your situation. I'm always in awe when I realize that Jesus loves me and that ALL of heaven is rooting me on. I still don't understand to the letter how this whole communion of saints things works, all I know is that I've been a humble witness to it's reality, being daily blessed by the saints in heaven and on earth. The family of God is a great, great comfort...

Read the Rest at Ignitum Today Here!

In the Land of Life and Death

In the throngs of unemployment I’ve been thinking a lot about endings and beginnings, pain and joy, purification and sanctity. Not because I’m having such a terribly time but small pains lead the mind to bigger pains and free time leads to meandering thoughts which compile into blog entries.

There have been times that I felt deep depression and sorrow with little to no relief. I could only see and feel the poison in my veins which deprived me of the strength and the ability to feel The Joy I knew held me. It was always in retrospect that I understood what was happening then. My God was sucking the poison from my veins and I cried and cried because it hurt and just when I thought it would be over it continued and I cried and cried, “My God why have you abandoned me?” It seemed I could only cry the first words of Psalm 22 and not continue. I didn’t know that this pain was necessary because it was healing things I never knew needed to be healed in order for me to have Life. The more I squirmed and tossed the more the process hurt, but as I let Him simply do what He had to I realized that I could breathe a little easier every day and that I began to experience the Joy mixed in with the Pain of letting God have His way with me.

One of the things He continues to try to take away is the idea that I know what is best for me and that I know what will truly fulfill my life. Those ideas I make up are very precious to me. I have them tightly woven into dreams in which every detail is played out and I present them to God saying, “Isn’t it beautiful the life I’ve thought up?” I say that I don’t mind what His Will is that it’s okay for Him to make of my life what He wishes, but I don’t really mean that. More often than not I make myself believe that I raised and pampered those dreams in the presence of God when really I hid myself in the closet, concocted them so that nothing could be poked or prodded until the masterful scheme of my life was completed. It is only then that I would present it, speak highly of it, say thy will be done and then go back to looking at my creation dreamily.

I am so attached to this dream or that dream that when it is brutally taken away the attachment I had to it is all too clear and the superficiality of my abandonment to God comes to light. It is afterwards that I enter into grief and the only way to have the grief bear fruit is to be willing to let God teach me who I am and what I truly desire more fully. He may not let me know right away because first and foremost he will teach me that what I truly want is to trust God with my whole heart and that every moment after the loss I have to choose to want him more than the company of my grief. He wants me to choose to give him the thoughts and actions of my present moment and not let my thoughts wander to the regret of the past and fear of the future, which can rob Him and me of so much glory.

The Devil surrounds all of us with our fears and regrets right before we take a leap to glorify God by living the present generously and boldly while carrying our burden. The carrying of a pain or loss does not exempt joy from daily life. Forget the flightiness of the happy and seek the depth of the joyful. Joy is rooted in Christ who is unmovable and declares suffering transformative and death conquered. This is why our burdens can be transformed and become both light and heavy. Heavy because a good lost should always be mourned, but light because it’s loss is not the end of Good. In the end if we are faithful we will experience All Good and be good ourselves. No longer burdened by our own weaknesses or the fallen world. The realist, the Christian knows this and so he mourns deeply but also laughs deeply because through this great battle of good and evil in a land both dotted with beauty and danger there is a Lord who is our ultimate end. Pain will end and Light and Wonder and Love will abound. I’d rather be awake and know I am a soldier with a Lord who I belong to and will have my rest in than be asleep and suddenly awake in surprise to find suffering with no knowledge of a cure. Christ is the cure to all our afflictions whether we can run, crawl or barely breathe.

To partake in the Divine Life is an honor, both extraordinary and ordinary. Every moment in life is tinged with a wisp of the wonderful and the mundane. The reality I clung to in the infancy of my life with God was a warped vision now made clearer by His Grace. The reality emerging before me is far more fantastic and terrifying than I imagined at the beginning of my spiritual journey. I realized that I have no control over my life except for my ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to Him and that truth is just shy of overwhelming. Sometimes my 'yes' is joyful, other times is it's painful. I am at the mercy of his Grace.  I suspect that the more I become like Him Who Sees Most Clearly the wonders and terrors of the world will explode into images I could not have taken in without being blinded with my younger eyes.

One of the aspects of the Christian life is becoming more and more familiar with reality. You become neither a pessimist that proclaims all things shot to hell or an optimist who shoves hell under the carpet and pretends the room is perfectly safe. As a Christian becomes more and more like Jesus and knows him more intimately he becomes acquainted with the most sumptuous joy but also the darkness of death, the pain of suffering. You cannot know Christ and put on his life and likeness without knowing death. He said himself to find your life you must lose it (Mt 10:34-39). This abstract idea was brought to light when Jesus lost his life and found it. He was dejected and killed to show us that by embracing God’s will, even our death we will find ourselves resurrected. Jesus is the proof that sin can be conquered, that death is not the end. Life comes by laying down one’s life, and if He gave himself up to the short mercy of men why shouldn’t we give ourselves up to the limitless mercy of God?

Shaken

So do you want to bear the savior of our world? I know it's last minute, but it would be great if you said, yes. 

The other day I woke up and my life was on it's head, not to the point of insanity but God definitely shook up the snow globe fondly called "Fabi's Life". When my friend, Leah Darrow was little her grandfather was shot and his house was burnt to the ground. Her mother and father upon hearing this horrible news took all their children, including Leah to Mass. And I've always remembered that part of her witness.

So even though my life wasn't struck with a tragedy of that nature, it was still a terrible week. I  knew I would find hope at Mass right in front of my eyes. I had no words so to look and receive and have Him hold me was all I could do. The homilies and readings this week cut me to core. It felt like God was talking only to me.

Gospel May 18, 2012
 Jesus said to his disciples:

"Amen, amen, I say to you, you will weep and mourn, while the world rejoices; you will grieve, but your grief will become joy. When a woman is in labor, she is in anguish because her hour has arrived; but when she has given birth to a child, she no longer remembers the pain because of her joy that a child has been born into the world. So you also are now in anguish. But I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy away from you. On that day you will not question me about anything. Amen, amen, I say to you, whatever you ask the Father in my name he will give you."

John 16:20-23

So even in the midst of uncertainty God is doing things with my heart and mind and for that I am grateful. I am grateful for the blessing of turning twenty-five, my loving family and friends and for this adorable kitten which will be coming home soon! 

It is good to have life shake beneath your feet because it reminds you that nothing is certain or secure except the love and salvation that God offers and the life found in him. He wants us to remember that because that is reality, a reality that saves us if we realize and embrace it. It frees us from thinking that our value and security lies in the world and relationships that come and go. He giveth and he taketh away not to hurt us but to free us in the end: to love without fear, to work without vainglory and to live for His will alone. 

I love you all who've felt the ground shake this week!

The Baby Jesus

I know Catholics are known for loving on baby Jesus a lot and not just during Christmas… I mean He’s all grown up now and our King of Kings, mighty in heaven, etc right? But I believe it so important we remember that in His humanity he was God and that each stage of his life expressed his full divinity just as we all as babies were fully ourselves and our mothers remember us tenderly, vividly and love on that image of us in a way that almost plays back those very moments before their eyes. And Jesus was the most beautiful of children, a living image of what it was to be child-like and not childish. He was perfect when he cried, when he slept, when he peered out those wee eyes in confusion! So how much more should we meditate on that divine little babe! Jesus in his perfection never lost childlike goodness because He is all things good. That is why I do not find it strange to see depictions of Jesus as a child with deep, knowing eyes because it so wonderfully symbolizes his essence in two ways- That he is all the good of a little boy and all the good of a man, that innocence and wisdom can coexist in one being. As He grew He never stopped being a child. We were the ones that forgot because we see a man with our eyes and so we expect his manliness, but not his divine childishness. We see the courage of a King when he dies upon the cross for the love of His Queen, but forget the unfailing trust of a small child who still believes every word his father tells him even at the threshold of death. And so I find it natural to call upon His Divine Childishness to help me preserve all the good of my youth, because it is inextricably bound to helping me invite all the good of adulthood.

How beautiful is my Lord in every single light, in the morning or in the night, in my memory or here in sight, it is you and so I rejoice in everything you touch, all the things that you are are are. For he is who he is whether he is big or small in a manger or on the cross.

Have a Blessed Christmas my friends.


Keep me in your prayers and I’ll keep you in mine. Send your prayer requests over the next couple weeks to fgarza@g.risd.edu.

With Hope,

Fabi