07/20/22

Today the Rosary is celebrated in Churches throughout the world. When I was young, boys in our street used to accuse me of "worshiping the Virgin Mary". It is a hard to believe now but all the children in our street used to go to Sunday School of some sort and as a result had knowledge of the Scriptures. "Abide with Me" was the climax of the "Community Hymn Singing " that used to precede the FA Cup Final. My past seems like a foreign country.

St Paul is dealing with the Jews who although, accepting his preaching the Resurrection, cannot be convinced that salvation is not an exclusive covenant with their race, the descendants of Abraham. St Paul is always faced with this problem for he is first welcomed by Jesus' own people in the diaspora but always has to convince them first that it is the Law of Moses that has been completed by Jesus and that surface trappings of his first belief circumcision, dietary laws, phylacteries etc are not part of the Love of Father, Son and Holy Spirit that Jesus has brought to the whole world.

As a boy I didn't really understand what I was being accused of. The part Mary plays in the God's plan for the whole world has been decided by God in the Beginning. The Word is God and the Word is the man Jesus and Jesus' humanity was Conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary. Litle bits of the immensity of God come to us sporadically as his Eternal Freedom touches ours and in the events of Jesus life as pondered in the heart of Mary in the Rosary we have the opportunity to immerse ourselves in Jesus' Life Death and Resurrection. The Protestant boys in our street were all wrong but it has taken long time for me to understand the reason why they were.

Dear Lord, you know that it is hard for me to face up to the fact that you seem to have abandoned your people on Earth. The onward march of social norms that deny any belief in you, the insidious corrupting of your priests, my own sinfulness and lack of visible faith can this be reversed?  May Mary pray that a return to the rosary on my part will be blessed by your Grace and may she continue to pray for comfort for the poor and suffering of this world.

 06/10/2022

Jesus tells us that we can use our minds to understand who and what we are in the Universe which is our physical reality. If we persevere in our knocking at the door the householder will answer us. St Paul is amazed how some of the Church in Galatia have received the words of his preaching but have fallen back on the familiar idea of "Law" as the way to salvation and abandoned the Spirit of his teaching. In actual fact it seems that in these earliest texts of our New Testament the Spirit actually had physical manifestations and it was these signs of the Spirit. that Simon Magus sought to buy.

We all know that our scriptures we read today were collated long after the events they record. We know from our own experience in the world that there can be many different versions of the same events witnessed by different eyewitnesses. St Paul had been stopped in his tracks by Jesus on his way to Damascus and it was from the direct experience of Father Son and Holy Spirit that he had received his mission. He had no other texts than the scrolls he had studied during his training as a Pharisee to refer to during his missionary journeys and proclaimed the Resurrection from his heart to the hearts of his listeners. His mission and teaching were not some human, scholarly thing but the Holy Spirit which filled first him and then his listeners.

He never lost the closeness of God he had experienced and was able to inspire others by his words, but could not understand that there could be any falling back from the Holy Spirit as he experienced it. Very few of us can have known this overpowering of ourselves by the Holy Spirit and the Saints who have done so have for their whole lives committed themselves to a life of total purity and prayer. They have kept knocking and the householder has welcomed with the gift of himself.

Dear Lord, today let me grow in your Loving Mercy. Let all of mankind created by you to live lives on earth directed to the perfection of the humanity destined by you for Eternity. May Mary who herself has known only complete sinlessness pray that we the sinful on earth can do penance for our sins in the knowledge that the cruel and savage punishment she experienced vicariously with her maternal love on Calvary, has glorified God in his Evergreater Mercy and thus brought about our forgiveness which we have only to ask for and it will be ours.

 05/10/2022

Paul's inspiration to continue to teach the final revelation by God of Himself, Father Son and Holy Spirit, was a direct command which had blocked the persecution that he had intended for the Church in Damascus. After three years he went back to Jerusalem, where he had guarded the clothes of those who stoned Stehen, had met Peter then and James but none of the other Apostles. His preaching in what is now Syria and Anatolia was continued for a further 14 years before he returned to Judea, the Holy Land especially blessed by God. It was then that the Apostles, they who had been companions of Jesus, recognised the validity of the message preached by their former persecutor; his dogma was accepted by the nucleus of the Church still growing in Judea, less than twenty years after the Resurrection, as the truth taught to them by Jesus.

Jesus had taught once and for all that it was not the letter of the Law, the religion founded by God in his revelation to Moses but built up as a human social system by over meticulous Pharisees, that should rule our beings but the Love of our "Father who art in Heaven". When Peter's Jewishness (was this encounter before or after Peter's rejection of dietary laws) took over his prayerfulness Paul was able to correct him. 

"Correct him" is what Paul did. The first leader of our Church was in error. The innumerable words and thoughts contained in the equally innumerable records of the Vatican and other Church centres neither add to nor change what is written in the Scriptures. If we cling fast to the feet of the Lord as did Mary the sister of Lazarus and Martha, we will be able to follow the Lord faithfully even though his footsteps may lead us to a personal Calvary.

Dear Lord, you know all of us, living and dead. You know human holiness and sinfulness. Let your grace fill our hearts with the joy of your Resurrection which is our life and salvation. We are weak but with you as our strength we can grow in love for you until the day of our death. May Mary at the foot of the cross have her sorrows comforted by the prayers many of us make through her to the Glory that is her Son in Eternity

 04/10/2022

The psalm today is what we all have to encounter when we first come to a consciousness of our living being. We are created by God whom we come to know as the self-revealed Father Son and Holy Spirit. 

God also reveals his will for the way we should live our lives. Not many of us come close to living the way of Jesus and his Apostles. Their lives are the perfect example of total obedience to the Will of the Father and together with Mary they are our first Church. We can all aim to live like them but most of us fall short. 

Today's Feast of St. Francis celebrates the Glory of God revealed in two human lives lived more than a millennium apart. St Paul's mission to the gentiles is a complete wonder. In the first place his conversion was accepted by those who had lived with Jesus and had suffered at the hands of Saul the persecuting Pharisee and secondly his teaching is the theology out of revelation that we read in our daily prayer cycles and masses. 

St. Francis was so captivated by the Love of God that he took Our Lord's words completely literally and for the whole of his life he tried to divest himself of everything that did not lead him closer to the Jesus who had had nowhere to rest until finally he bowed his head and died on the Cross. 

"Modern life" that scapegoat for much of my sinfulness is essentially no different than life known to Jesus. Martha was righteously busy and at work. Mary stayed at the foot of the Lord and listened to the Word of God. St Francis remained in Holy Poverty all his life. For him even the Spiritual riches of priestly ordination were too much wealth and he remained in the clerical state as a deacon.

Dear Lord let me live in your Love this day. Let me be conscious of your Glory and let the things and worries of this world have no more than their rightful place in my life. May your mother Mary, St. Francis and the sister saints Mary and Martha together with all the saints continue to pray that holiness will again be seen in your Church on earth.

 01/10/2022

The first reading at today's mass brings to an end the story of Job with his patience and submision to God rewarded by great riches. The riches of this world have all been created by man out of God's creation and built up by succeedung generations. They are not a sign of God's favouring some individual souls over others and we the poor and little ones are blessed by being unencumbered by the false sense of our own importance which comes from great wealth. St Therese the epitome of "littleness"in her way to true piety was far from little in her perseverence in her own decision to follow our Saviour in a life dedicated  to prayer with his Mother in Carmel. Although young at death she suffered agonies of longing before  acceptance by the Order and then  her disease made waking moments an absolute agony for her little body.

I have never had to face the pain of her "little" way to holiness and I spent the same years of her total life in neglectful sinfulness. 

The enthusiasm generated by the success of this first mission of the appointed 72 is palpably real in today's Gospel. How is it that the leaven distributed by the charismatic joy of so many persons  did not result in a popular movement that would have changed political History? We have to face as fact that in the eternity of Father Son and Holy Spirit, the outcome of Creation has always been known and that the glorious selfemptying of the Son to assume within the obedience of Mary the sinless humanity of Jesus along with his natural suffering and death was the only way to restore the being of humanity,destroyed by the misuse of freedom that is sin. That restoration is the Resurrection, our Faith, Hope and Charity.

Dear Lord let my being be always open to Love; let what I know in my mind be a true guide for my deeds and let the hope of the Resurrection be  true faith unclouded by the divisions to be found in your institutional body on Earth. May Mary who knows the faith of "litle ones " of this world join with St Therese in her prayers to raise up fervent priests who are able to resist the many temptations directed at them by our only enemy.

 03/10/2022

Two thousand years ago St Paul has to remind the Galatians that there is only one Gospel. He had preached to them the News of God that had come with Christ. Since that time there have been many who have filled out what is now doctine and many others have denied and then followed paths that lead nowhere for they finish where they start in the human egos that "know"more than God.

The man in the today's parable was born outside the "Law" for he was a Samaritan. The lawyer or theologian who challenged Jesus was not only a Jew but probably a totally committed follower of the Law of Moses and sincere believer in the Lord. The "Law" he followed is the same Law that Jesus knew to perfection and came to complete. It is the first pathway revealed by Father, Son and Holy Spirit and its heart is the Ten Comandments which  are still what they are just as God is still the Evergreater Father of us all.

"Knowing" God is not a matter of bithplace, the Samaitan was from Mt Gerizim not Zion, not  book learning and scholarship, Jesus' challenger was a self-confident lawyer, the by passers were of the "Clergy"; but to know God and be known by him we have to tame our egos and always put God and others before our self-love, before our self-interest , and particularly before our self-esteem.

Dear Lord you know all that is about me. You know the jealousy and greed that exist in the depths of my being; help me accept your love and let my deeds reflect that love throughout the rest of my life. May the Mother of the Church whose obedience to your will is the pattern for all followers of Jesus support those of us who feel alienated by the manifest failings of those who should be living exemplary lives.

 02/10/2022

Sometimes Jesus words seem to be very harsh. I think that today the disciples make a reasonable request. They must have been a bit downhearted and ask for their faith to be increased. I have done this thousand of times this year let alone in my lifetime. Jesus "snappy" reply here recorded does not do much to encourage any of us as none of us know anybody whose "Faith" has actually moved anything in God's creation, our physical Universe.

The first reading  is a similar plea by the prophet to the Lord God of Israel for support in his quest for faithfulness and as usual with the Old Testament Prophets the complaints are clearly stated "Why do you set injustice before me?" The answer is quite straightforward. If you  have a clear conscience by avoiding sin, your faithfulness will ease your way through life.

St Paul counsels Timothy to always remember that he must increase his own flame of faith; for Faith is not timid, fearful but full of power and strength. It is the Holy Spirit of God to whom he has opened his heart.

The analogy with which Jesus' chastisement of the disciples concludes has proven a bit tricky for me to follow. I think he is saying that if the disciples do their duty. If we live life as he has shown us the way then we don't need to do anymore We are servants of Father, Son and Holy Spirit and as such we must do the will of God and be thankful that we can. We are never "masters" for the Lord our God is always the Evergreater.

Dear Lord let me continue this day in your care and let me always be attentive to your commandments. We are all your servants and it is only by pondering and following your revelations that we can live in righteousness. Your will for us has been laid out and no man can change what is your Divine Will. May Mary whose total obedience gave birth to your Incarnation and again held your souless body at the foot of the Cross cotininue to be the Mother of your Church on Earth. May her prayers and those of the whole Church be heard by you our God.