15/10/2022

Jesus is the same today as he has always been. We know him as the Son of God and the perfect man. Some of us in this world have to face the dangers experienced by the first disciples but most of us are only challenged by a world, a society that either ignores Father, Son and Holy Spirit or by their way of life show contempt for God's final revelation, his Son.

St John is known as "The Theologian" but St Paul too is filled with ideas that are heavenly in origin. In today's reading Jesus is the head of the Church which thus becomes the Mystical Body of Christ, a unity of Love which holds us fast to heaven and so to God. St Paul prays that we too might have the enlightenment that he received on the road to Damascus which he shared firstly with pagans and with Jews throughout the Roman Empire and today with all mankind until the end of time.

Jesus teaches that the scope of Love, his Mercy is as infinite as his Being. Even those who deny him (Judas?) can be forgiven but the sin against the Holy Spirit cannot be forgiven. God save us from this sin!

Dear Lord you know that I am in wonder at the origins of your Church and sometimes struck dumb by the wonder of my being and by all that there is around me. I pray that you let me worship you today in the avoidance of sin and by active prayer. May the prayers of Mary and all the Saints join mine in pleading that the pain and suffering end in comfort for the dying and that your Holy Spirit bring them to your peace.

 14/10/2022

The Mass readings for today assure us that we are all known to God in his eternal freedom. Each one, each bit of each one from the greatest to the least we are known. We are to be joyful in praise of God and thankful for our being which is from God. We are free in our beings and so what cripples me in myself, the knowledge that I have sinned, is my choice to forget God. It is this choice not human weakness that is so foolishly disobedient and has to be atoned for by me the sinner even though forgiveness has been so painfully won for all humanity by the incarnate Son.

My words are my true belief. I have been sealed by the Holy Spirit. I have truly turned each day to the  Father, and tried to keep each day holy; I ponder each day the wonder of the Incarnation and the Love thereby witnessed. In God's universe there is nothing that challenges him except my will, my choice to leave the pain filled path revealed by Jesus' life on earth and follow the comfort of the highway mapped out for us by the fallen angels.

Dear Lord I am still a sinner. You know this. In my being I am fully in your sight and bathed in your love which my deeds do not witness. Jesus as a human faced the "Enemy" outside of Father, Son and Holy Spirit and thus you know how easy sin is for us, thy creatures. Nothing is impossible in your Eternal Being; let me atone for my sins and once again follow the loving path of righteousness trodden by Mary and all the Saints.

 12/10/2022

St Paul who has received direct guidance from God teaches against reliance on the Law. The Law that he studied diligently for many years is the manual for life built on the revelation received by Moses. We can find this "Law" recorded in the Old Testament and it was known most intimately by Jesus, who sometimes spoke in the synagogue and prayed the psalms every day. St Paul tells us that Jesus has made "Life in the Spirit" possible for all mankind. 

Father Son and Holy Spirit out of the Love that is God's being and by the power of God's will has always known that the Incarnate Son is to suffer for us, to wash away our sins. St Paul, knowing this, thus teaches that if we receive Christ in the Spirit we are secure from the sins that the Law was there to prevent.

St Paul does not attack our "fleshly lives" because he thinks "body" is sinful. He has seen the Resurrection and knows that God was man on earth in Jesus' bodily life. St Paul does know and teach, however, that we must use our human freedom to focus on our interior life and devote this to pondering on Jesus and his relationship to our place in the world.

Jesus is accused to his face of insulting the group he is addressing. Our Lord condemns no man but only confirms that there is a right way for us all to live. He is the way the truth and the life and he is our support in turning from indulging our fleshly selves to dedicating our complete being, body, mind and soul to the service of God's will for us.

Dear Lord, as I live this day let me be shielded against the snares which beset all of your children. Let my heart be fully open to your loving grace. May the prayers of Mary and all the saints be a model for my life and let me persevere in my own attempts at prayer. 

 11/10/2022

In the Gospel reading of today Jesus condemns the Pharisees to the face of his host, himself a Pharisee. I bet that there was an awkward silence then. At least there would have been if Jesus had not continued with his dire warnings. Contrary to life in this Age of the Media/Celebrity Jesus warns that appearance is nothing for Father, Son and Holy Spirit knows us completely. Pious faces and clasped hands; long cassocks or soutanes surmounted with ancient lace are a challenge to the poverty in which the Son of God lived his life on Earth.

Jesus lived his life in the chosen place and time. He lived the life of the Law.  All the precepts of the Law were followed in the Holy Family in the unrecorded events of his first thirty years during which Mary pondered   in her heart what she was witnessing in her family. Jesus was a complete Jew. Circumcised, presented to God, listening to/reading the Scriptures and annually praying in the Temple; there was nothing in his life that veered from the exemplary life of a devout Jew.

St Paul not only teaches that Christ is greater than the Law but that following the Law, as did Jesus and Paul himself had done, which is a must that has to follow circumcision will be a rejection of the Resurrection. The vices that are condemned by Jesus are still painfully obvious wherever we look, always remembering to remove the plank first. Our times are very different from the first century and it is very easy to turn this Meta-age into excuses for sin. Each day I pray that God may hear my prayer but am I a witness to the Lord who is still sacramentally present in the Church he founded on Peter?

Dear Lord you know what it is that I have to do to complete my life in your Love. Guide my thoughts and words so that I welcome the forgiveness you have won for me. May Mary and all the saints pray that I persevere in sincerity and come to an instinctive avoidance of hypocrisy. May all those near to death come to a realization that the Loving Mercy of God is crying out for their acceptance of him. He created us all to be with him in Eternity which is a never-ending moment of pure joy.

 10/10/2022

Jesus does not mince his words. We all of us can feel at the end of our tether and we may wish that the Lord would "get on with it". I know that this is disrespectful language but as a human being I can never lose sight of the Evergreaterness of God although sometimes I need to have my belief stirred up to face the Truth. 

Jesus knows his humanity and that of his brothers and sisters. In the Gospel he knows that we are gathering around him in great numbers because we have heard about the miracles this carpenter from Nazareth has performed. We all want to see a "sign" that we can make our own. Jesus reminds us of events in our history which is read to us each Sabbath in the synagogue. It is in his mystery body, soul, man and   Father, Son and Holy Spirit that we must place our belief for there is nothing greater in the whole of creation than he is.

St Paul is striving with all his might. He has seen the risen Lord and the Galatians have listened to his testimony but are still Jews at heart. They are acting as though they are still the people of the Covenant and do know better than Saul, the pharisee from neighboring Tarsus. St Paul knows that Jesus has completed the covenant and hence forth we are all living in a freedom that we prove not by the force majeure of "The Law" but by living as little children in the Love of him whom Jesus has taught us to call Dad. There is absolutely no disrespect in this God-given relationship.

Dear Lord you know all and I am part of that all. I cannot know you except by doing your will, responding with obedient love and wonder to the greatness of your being and the littleness of my own. May Mary's prayers and those of all the saints fill the hearts of your people on earth that we may wait with patience to see the Sign of Jonah returning on the clouds of heaven.

 09/10/2022

Race was very much a part of how the peoples of the first Century Palestine viewed themselves. Jesus too is aware of this for God had also viewed his Old Testament world as very much composed of "Nations" which had grown from families sharing common ancestors. Naaman the Leper was not prepared to accept the possibility of the intercession of a foreigner, in both race and religion in a foreign river, to be more successful than the treatments he had already received at home.

St Paul too never forgets that he is a Jew, and that Jesus is a descendant of David. Jesus makes a "racist" comment about the "Samaritan". I say "racist" because in my day and age we are condemned by our social norms for even being aware that all skin colours are not the same. It is a norm as ridiculous as the behaviours promoted by Gender Politics and the Homosexual lobby. The enemies of God always seeking to attack the Truth are that devil "going around like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour" of which St Peter warns us.

Jesus first comes to that favoured nation, the Jews, because it is they who have first known Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the Evergreater who has revealed in his Covenant and in Jesus the way we are to live our lives as his children.  Resurrection is the Glory into which we are called as individual souls each one of us known by name and in the fullness of our individual being not as Jew Samaritan or Greek. We are all loved by God. There is no greater truth than this.

Dear Lord, help us all to withstand the pressures that come from the anti-Christ who has captured our world and pours out venom against you both openly and insidiously. Let the holiness that is mostly hidden burst forth from your Church and may your Holy Spirit proclaim that God is King, Lord of all the Universe. May your saints in Heaven, led by your Mother pray that their Eternity touch our world again to reveal to all mankind that God is Love the answer to all our problems. 

 08/10/2022

St Paul makes it clear to us that we are all Christians now. We used to be Jews who had to live their lives in the straitjacket of the law. Of course, we are now all the races of the world and God in his Mercy has made us all to be free by virtue of Christ. Being part of the body of Christ that is the Church means that we are still all the offspring of Abraham and thus all still Jews.

In my lifetime great wickedness has been inflicted on the Jews by evil men who were able to complete their tasks by accepting the theories of race that grew out of the brains of men who tried to "cancel" God and supported their choice to do so by appealing to the evidence of Evolution. 

The same science has developed now to be able to control the very core of our physical humanity. It will not be long before the bodies of the very rich are preserved not in enormous tombs but in living clones produced by fellow humans.

I do not want to be part of this empty physical humanity that cannot see that what happened in Palestine two thousand years ago was Father, Son and Holy Spirit showing the perfection of Love in human time that was touched by Eternity. The unknown voice praising the Mother of such a Son is surely the cry of Faith that we all need to make in this very dangerous world.

Dear Lord you know that I still think of myself as part of your ever living body on Earth. Help me again and again to control my life by the Law of Love shown by your life death and resurrection and by the understanding of your ways shown by your Mother and first Apostles as recorded in the Gospels.