Green Cathedral, Proložac, Croatia

Welcome!

Thank you for making my website a stop along your path. My faith, my love of literature and the visual arts, and my cross-cultural Croatian-American life are what frame my view. Sorrow and joy, pain and peace, grief and hope – they intertwine and coexist in my story. War, death, and broken body. Beauty, community, and faith. It is my desire to weave these strands together to tell what God has done and how He has had mercy on me. I offer this website and its content as a kind of rest stop along the path of life for all who might wish to pause here.

Visio Divina: The Wondrous Cross

by Irena Dragaš Jansen

This video offers visual prompts to focus our attention on the wondrous cross. Using the practice of Visio Divina – divine seeing – we will prayerfully invite God to speak to our hearts as we look at an image. Together we will ponder two special paintings to remind us how the cross emerges victorious over death, destruction, and rubble. Always.

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Wars and Peace

Reflections on Ukraine in the blur of past and present

by Irena Dragaš Jansen

My family and I survived a war. Our storytelling always falls on either side of the great divide: before or after the war.

Some years have passed since the war in Croatia and Bosnia, and yet that war has become as much a part of our life as anything else that has formed us: loves and losses, joys and sorrows, goodbyes and hellos. It can seem like only a memory.
Except that it is not.

When the war in Ukraine slowly crept up and then exploded one week ago, I was instantly overwhelmed by a flood of memories. The high-pitched noise of an incoming missile. The air-raid sirens. The feeling of helplessness at the sound of a low-flying fighter plane. Hiding in the basement during bombing. Our family fleeing and becoming refugees. The fear. The unknown. The chaos.

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