02/11/2024

"What's it all about John?" were the last words to me of a friend as he lay dying. Shortly afterwards he learns the answer. 

He "learns" and still "knows" because to be with God is to be beyond time. St Paul today confirms in writing to the Corinthians that we pass from life in a "twinkling of an eye" into the deathless eternity beyond the material universe, where we will know God as he has always known us.

Throughout his life on Earth Jesus has always taught us that our mortal lives are a gift from the Father, they are like lamps that need oil to burn, they are to be unspotted wedding "outfits", they are to be lived in the spirit of always putting the needs of others before our own.

In our only life on earth, we have to listen to the teaching of Jesus and always be aware of IamFatherSonHolySpirit by striving with all our being to be guided by everything that has been revealed in Scripture.

Job laments his lack of writing tools to record his experience of living in the hands of God without any control of anything beyond his own being. Millions of us in the three millennia since then have recorded billions of thoughts and prayers but we are still faced until our final moments, by the same question as was Mike.

My friend  died quietly into eternity. He had lived for 90 years and for most of them he, as do I, knew the teaching of the Church but in his last seconds of bodily life he knew that he was dying into the answer that we can only find in that final milli-second when we learn whether or not our death is the end or the new beginning.

May his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed rest in Peace and  may the Holy Souls in Purgatory  welcome the second chance that only the infinite mercy of God can provide for them. Amen

Dear Lord let me sincerely pray that the dead be loosed from their sins for that is a "good and holy thing to do". You know my parents and all other family members whom I have forgotten. There are some good friends, priests but many others who pass through my mind as I write this. Mary is always sinless and thus fit to be your mother whom you gave to us as you came to the end of the bodily torture you endured for us. May she lead the Saints and Angels in the collection of the "rose petals" that you never cease to shower down on us and the Holy Souls to bring the overpowering defeat of the evil that delights us into sin on earth but reveals its complete uselessness at the instant we see that Your Truth banishes all who ignore both Our Father and Your teaching. Amen