30/12/2022

St Paul after his physical blinding and spiritual cleansing on the road to Damascus must have become the proverbial "tabula rasa" for he had to absorb everything that he subsequently used to evangelize the numerous churches that he founded. Not only did he found them but continued to support them and keep them from error when he moved on.

The love that St Paul preaches is not the shining ethereal love of the philosophers, an idea or an ideal, but the warm, even smelly love of humans living in this world with their families. It is the love experienced by Jesus, Mary and Joseph living with an extended family in Nazareth. It is the first emotion felt by the newborn in the arms of their mother; it is the humanity denied to the aborted ; it is the best of all human characteristics and it can grow to become the love that lays down its life for its friends.

It can also be lost at an instant and the loving partner, wife husband, child, stranger then becomes the hated other who does not respond to my will and being. It is so easy to stop loving each other and turn that love into permanent hatred which seething and tormenting ultimately denies God to his face and is the primary source of all human conflicts small and large. God's Love is always with his creation, he sees that it is good. We have an obligation as creatures to accept that love and reflect only it as we move through our lives on earth.

Dear Lord let my will be aligned with yours as I live out today. Let me be as good a reflection as is possible for me of your Love and let my deeds match my intentions. May Mary be my example of love and understanding as now she knows Father, Son and Holy Spirit as you really are and pondering has been replaced with the worship that is the eternal reward won for us all by her son on calvary.

 29/12/2022

Jesus' followers were only human in the same way that  we are. They were highly blessed to have been alive in the presence of Jesus and to have walked around Palestine listening to his peaching and to have been commissioned to do the same themselves. St Paul had not known the blessing of being in the physical presence of Jesus but had been blasted into blindness by the sight of God on the road to Damascus. A blindness that accompanied the Glory which he saw and although cured needed another two years to come to the full knowledge and love of Father Son and Holy Spirit. And then he acted.

The original apostles were called by their fellow Jew and witnessed the miracles and absorbed the lessons of Jesus' Life. "What's in it for me?" then as now was their first human reaction to everything they encountered and did. Even I, writing these few thoughts am aware that I am hoping that they are acceptable to God as a weak penance for my sins.But they bolstered by "Kingdom of God" hoped to receive political rewards from their Rabi whom they continually disappointed by missing the point.

Thomas a Becket was a servant of a Church that considered itself to be the Superior to the State and expressed his devotion to that Church by defiance of the King. Jesus showed that he is not a political rival to Caesar. He, the Evergreater, accepted in complete humility the political solution to the problem he posed to both the Temple and the Empire. The Church of St Thomas' day was still fighting to become Caesar and it is out of this basic denial of Jesus' teaching that we have arrived at the deplorable state our  Church is in today. She founded by the suffering and Resurrection of our Incarnate God cannot speak out with any authority against the sinfulness that is promulgated in every corner of the World by the technology that has become its own truth while the author of all being, life and truth has become "the little man" on a piece of personal adornment.

Dear Lord only you can help us for the power of Mammon and Satan have infiltrated the holiness of your Church and we your people are without food for our souls, we are sheep without  a shepherd.. May Mary your Mother teach us all to pray with her by pondering your works and imitating your resistance to temptation and acceptance of suffering.

 28/12/2022

In the years immediately following the Resurrection, the Good News of redemption was spread purely by word of mouth initially in the  East but incredibly quickly into the Western Provinces ,Gaul and Spain. The message was spread by the Apostles who were able to travel safely by land and sea in the Peace of Rome which provided the incubation period for our Faith to grow. The only texts that were in use were the scrolls and Greek manuscripts of the Old Testament. The Antioch known by Peter and the Alexandria of Mark were centers of learning and innovation as too were the islands Cyprus and Malta. St John's Ephesus and the smaller cities of the Ionian hinterland were highly prosperous and cultivated centres were the Word was accepted and pondered.

John's Gospel and letters were written not only for the synagogues but also for intellectual pagans who too could appreciate not only the deeds but also the depths of the teaching of our Saviour. Thus he can begin this letter with the nature of God as revealed by Jesus. The all-forgiving nature of our God is revealed in Jesus and expressed by his death which has opened up the gates of God's mercy to the whole world. All the Apostles and Evangelists proclaim the Resurrection and it is this faith in the "impossible"that converted both Jews and Pagans and is the core of our faith today.

I suppose that pagans living in the cultic centres like Antioch Paphos and Ephesus were aware of other gods and must have known the synagogues of Jews whose great temple in Jerusalem rivalled their own in splendour and in the contents of its vaults. What did they make of these "fanatics" who came to denounce the "gods" and proclaim the Resurrection. They came not as conquering hordes but weak and powerless, unarmed except by the faith with which they had been graced  and with the knowledge of Father, Son and Holy Spirit which brings with it peace that is beyond our understanding; the Kingdom of God which is not of this world.

Dear Lord help me to overcome the petty core of my selfishness and let me reach out to you without thought for appearances but with sincere recognition that it is you and you alone who create and save all mankind. We have to forget material trappings and pray to know you as did your Apostles, Joseph  and your mother. May Mary's prayers bring righteousness to the Church which is in a weakened state that only your grace can inspire back to true holiness.

 27/12/2022

John as a saint is still filled with the love of God. He knew Jesus on earth and had spent three years wandering through Palestine as a disciple known to have been especially favoured by the Lord. That devotion to the Love that comes from God is what sets his Gospel out from the others. The genealogies of Luke and Matthew emphasise the humanity of the risen Lord but John proclaims the Glory of God who in the "Beginning" knew his own Being, the Word and Love that is the Holy Spirit.

For God there is no beginning or end or time of any sort. John knows that the history recorded in the Scriptures is eternally present for the Father and so "the Beginning" is of the revelation in human time. The human "Beginning" is in his race to the empty tomb. Peter enters first although John gave precedence to him. There is nothing there. Why were they racing through the garden? The Lord had first shown himself to Mary Magdalene and it was to confirm her words that they raced for without their Lord they were nothing We too are nothing without Grace that the babe in the manager has won on the planks of the tree on Calvary.

We can only be in the Love that is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Dear Lord, Covid 19 is part of your creation but it has knocked me out for the last few says. Today I begin to feel better and can again attend to the mass readings knowing that excuses are useless and that I have to rely on your Mercy. May Mary who taught what she knew of you to John continue to pray for the purification of  your gift to Peter and let all in Purgatory and on Earth come finally to be what you have created us to be.

 20/12/2022

From the time of Adam until Mary's straightforward acceptance of the role God had chosen for her to play in the Salvation of his sinful creature, man, there were some people who had performed our side of God's Covenant with clean hands and a pure heart. Some of these were the well known prophets and leaders, priests and Levites who served God in his temple and the women too who served there. Mary has always been  known to Father, Son and Holy Spirit for God's Will did not suddenly break into action in the days of Augustus and Pilate. For God the whole of  this creation is eternally present when he saw at the beginning of human time,  "that it is good". 

All Mankind is in some way created in God's image and likeness so the way chosen by God to erase our fault is to empty himself of Godness and with the  Holy Spirit fertilize, in the womb of Mary,  the body of Jesus for his  Eternal Word to be made man and to dwell among as a human in our limited freedom and time.

This is the reality of our existence. God is with us as was forecast from long ago by the prophets. God has revealed himself to  be unknowable in his totality but to chosen ones then and now he has taught us how to use our being and freedom to obey and serve with clean hands and pure heart. The Babe we welcome into the stable at Bethlehem is the immeasurable Glory of God, the Word of the Father whom he has taught us to also call "Dad"as he does, for all the human race is in the perfect family loved into being and cared for by Father, Son and Holy Spirit to know, love and serve.

Dear Lord I hope and pray that today I will be able to match my words with deeds Please accept my worship for the honest intention with which  I turn to you at the start of each day. Mv faults have been erased by the selflessness of Jesus who knows himself as You know yourself yet empties himself to accept. the being broken on the  Cross. Has such pain as this ever been known before or since.? May Mary who also knows the pains of your birth and death continue to lead all the souls in Heaven in the  Praise that is without beginning or end and at the same time plead for comfort to be given the Holy Souls and also to us the sinners on earth.

19/12/2022

We are not able to understand the nature of God for as soon as we recognise something of his nature,  we know that he is more than that. He is the Evergreater. The readings today ask us to think more about Jesus and recognise that God has in the past through messenger angels previously announced the conception of prophets. 

Firstly we have to contemplate Samson whom God touched with his greatness and then punished for his sins. The contrition of Samson when a prisoner, blinded in Gaza, working with slaves resulted in the temple dedicated to "Dagon" being destroyed for there is only one God.   

John the Baptist's conception was also announced by a messenger from God and he too was born to prophesy, to make known the Mercy of God to forgive the sins that we repent. The psalm praises the all encompassing Glory of our God in whom there is unlimited knowledge even to knowing each one of us from the moment of conception and his creation of our souls.

Jesus is completely different for Gabriel announced that the Word is begotten in the womb of the Virgin Mary by Father through Holy Spirt, thus revealing for the first time the mystery of the Trinity which we can adore in wonder and praise but never comprehend for Father Son and Holy Spirit is God the Evergreater.

Dear Lord, truly, my thanks has to be much more than a word when contemplating my being and the being of the whole world. You know that my gratitude/praise is sometimes watered down  always the result of my sins. Help me this day to live in the joy of righteousness and thus feel the strength of Samson that returned to destroy false Gods. May Mary, whose sinlessness means that she has never succumbed to the temptations of the devil, continue to implore the Holy Spirit to drive-out the evil that invades your Church on Earth and bring us all to the simplicity of Samson and John who filled by their love for you were able to bear witness by losing their lives to become part of your Glorious Eternity and an example on earth to the end of time.

 18/12/2022

The readings for this the final Sunday of Advent make a summary from our God of how Son by the power of Holy Spirit came to be born into the home of one of the poor ones of the chosen people in first century Palestine, a province of the Roman Empire which then ruled the "world". There were then many rich and powerful that could have been the setting for the incarnate Son to share in our humanity. But God chose to be poor and first met the lowly people of Galilee which was then scorned as the pits of provinciality by the upper classes who were disdainful of the workers, those who had to do the manual work that they shared with slaves.

God had announced his intention to ultimately complete the revelations he made through his prophets and his care for Abraham's descendants over hundreds of years. We are reminded in this mass that Jesus was descended from Israel's great King David whose tomb was still recognised in Jerusalem. St Paul himself a Jew speaks with human pride of Jesus' lineage but first of all he proclaims Jesus to be the Son of God. This is for all of us a fact that we know by the Resurrection. The same Jesus who was killed on the Cross was risen from the dead by Father, Son and Holy Spirit and still lives on in the same "flesh" but marred by the five wounds and scabbed by the Crown of Thorns with which he was begotten by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the wife of a carpenter in Galilee. Galilee! Galilee of the nations! Can anything good come from there?

Mary's perfect obedience was helped by God in that her being did not share in the  Original Sin bequeathed to all humans by our first parents but Joseph shows us that anyone of us can know God with perfect obedience.  He must have been given a huge amount of grace to be able to accept the message of the angel as coming from God. I wonder how long he lived as Jesus' "father"?

Dear Lord let me grow in Faith and let the sentimentality of viewing you as babe and toddler become the true Love that knows you in ultimate Glory, the perfection that reveals the certainty of our Salvation. The body racked with pain and totally broken and disfigured by the sins of mankind for whom you only have love. May Mary and all the Saints lead the earthly Church into Faith, Hope and Charity that is able to overcome the egos of her leaders making them be true servants of the Lord as are you and Joseph.