21/06/2023

St Paul continues to encourage the Corinthians then and Christians of all times to ensure that the gifts falling to us from God's providence are shared equally throughout the world. The material wealth of the world has grown unbelievably since the Incarnate Person of God, Jesus, shared in the human life of his creation. Inherited wealth and human work means that there is no need for any one to be homeless or hungry. There is absolutely no need for this, but the poor are always with us.

Yesterday a computer pioneer came to my mind because his software was giving me grief. Jesus tells us not to publicize our good deeds by any sort of self-glorification. The billionaires who are fond of their foundations in this world should take note and try to understand exactly what Jesus means by "they have had their reward". 

Our Church which has a pile of money, art and very valuable real estate has always faced difficulties in trying to manage this wealth. Judas was the first finance officer and since then all attempts at maintaining or growing the "Patrimony of St Peter" have resulted in following the precepts of this world and an institutional Church the public face of which is less than holy.

I worry that this prayer, which is my daily response to the Scriptures read at Mass, is a pathetic attempt to justify in secret what all the Pharisees then and now do in Synagogues and at other public places. I want to pray in my secret room which is my heart and truly turn over my life to the Providence of the Father, the Mercy won by Jesus and Inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

Dear Lord you know how soon I can lose equilibrium of soul that you show to me when I am trying to worship. I cannot deceive you. Now is always the favourable time and it is now that I can ask for pardon for all sins which I have forgotten but which are one with the lance that pierced your side. I cannot imagine that pain. May Mary who witnessed and compassioned  all your pain plead for your Mercy to protect me from further sinning and to reserve for me a place with the Holy Souls in Purgatory. 

 20/06/2023

The greatest of God's gifts to us is Life, being a part of his creation and with the consciousness of it too. The greatness of life is that it is our opportunity to know, love and serve God by resisting the world, the flesh and the devil. Today the World in the person of Bill Gates is interfering with my mind. I cannot get into my Windows account and I am peeved. Yes, in a very childish way.!

Google and all the Social Media have turned themselves into the "non-mystical body" that is as it were a worldly anti-church offering real-time communication to all the living  as does Christ's Mystical Body, his Church on earth, offer Spiritual Communion with both the living and the dead. The worldly networks that can connect every individual in the world can do in the twinkling of an eye what St Paul did with such difficulty. Google has even turned itself into a Universal Calendar complete with its own "canonised" secular saints and "Feast Days".

Today's Mass Reading from St Paul is an appeal for funds to those suffering from a famine in Jerusalem. The Church has always taken "love thy neighbour as thyself" to heart. It was to care for "widows and orphans" that the first deacons were appointed in Jerusalem. St Stephen is recorded has having forgiven his killers in the words of Jesus "Father forgive them they know not what they do".

Jesus tells us that in addition to loving "our neighbour as ourselves"  we also have to love our enemies. Our lives are lived in the Providence of God, the sun shines and the rain falls on the honest and the dishonest alike but our response to providence is entirely up to us. God as created us as free beings to respond to his self-revelation, his commandments and his providence as we so wish and thus choose for ourselves death or eternal life. 

Dear Lord, let me implore your mercy for me and all my loved ones . Let me learn what it means to love my enemies not only as an idea made of words but as a genuine prayer for the welfare of all from the depths of my being. You except none of us from your salvation let my ability to love become as yours. May Mary who has always known how to love without reserve continue to pray for all who love and hate me. Let me avoid sin this day.

 19/06/2023

St Paul preaches that "Today is the favourable time". 

I take it that he means that "Now" is the time we have to be without sin in our thoughts, words and deeds. It is "now" that I have to be true to my calling. It is "now" that I have " to Love the Lord my God". It is "now" that I have to love my neighbour equally as I love myself. The past has gone. I know it as a time of lost opportunities and of many sins for which I have to beg forgiveness. The future is a big "may be" but a "may be" in coming with the sureness of its end.

God's Providence is always "now". We can build on the past. We can learn the lessons of the Scriptures. We can follow the historical stages of God's revelations of himself. We can gain a perfect knowledge of Theology and of Liturgy and we can demonstrate this knowledge of how the Church has taught us to grow in sanctity in the past by sermons and books. We do not live alone with our thoughts of God. God does love each individual person but he also knows us as a tiny part of his final creation, Mankind. It is with and for all of us that the incarnate Son walked and talked in Palestine. 

Our lives can only be lived Now and with the humanity for whose sins did the Saviour Son in total agreement with the will of the Father accept the cross to become the Mercy of the Resurrection which in the Person of the Holy Spirit, himself Father, Son and Holy Spirit, fills the world with the free gift of God.

We do have to align ourselves with God's will, however, even to the extent of "turning the other cheek"  if we are to avail ourselves of this "free" gift that was won for us at such great a price.

Dear Lord, may each moment of today be the favourable time without sin for me. Let me know, love and serve in the sure hope of the cleansing of Purgatory to ready me for your Eternity. May the prayers of Mary, all the Angels and Saints who can be with the totality that you are be the support of all sinners who in confessing their guilt plead for your Mercy.

 18/06/2023

Today I am reminded of why it is that I am ready, happy, to start my day in this way. I am a body and soul on earth. I am a being created by God, one of the billions who fulfill God's providence during our lifetimes in his creation. God is the Trinity beyond our comprehension but, who in the joyful love of his own being, created a universe to exist in the time that is the reality in which we all live.

God loved his creation into being and especially loved the Jews whom he chose to be the receivers of his revelation . God imprinted within the beings of all his creation the code which determines the objective reality of all the parts of the world that we can know and wonder at as we learn more and more about  the physical characteristics of our objective reality.

In mankind, however, he created the greatest analogy to his own Ever-greater, image and likeness,  individual freedom. Although the knowledge of what each individual's  outcome will be is known to God it is not embedded in our being, image and likeness, as is our body's DNA. Even the Incarnation has not been enough to overcome Man's self-deceit. We have became overpowered by the wonder that is man and all his work and chosen to worship ourselves rather than the Evergreater, Father Son and Holy Spirit.

God's compassion for  sinful man is Jesus, begotten not made, self-emptied of his ever-greater power, God from God, light from light accepting all the sins of creation into his divine being and purging them when we are still sinners as St  Paul preaches so that we are able to fulfill Love with which and for which we are created.

During his time on earth, Jesus did create the Church. He gave us the structure based on his own group of friends but he also gave us a "Mother". An Immaculate Mother untouched by sin, a perfect but totally human Mother who even to this day guarantees the presence of her Son, Jesus,  even in the often marred by sinful clergy Apostolic Foundation his Church has become.

This why I am happy try to begin each day in this way.

Dear Lord, you know my many sinful failings help me to avoid them this day and help me in the work that I have to do to welcome my family. May the prayers of Mary together with all the saints be answered and let your mercy shower down as the roses seen by St Theresa whose short life was filled with an abundance of pain and of Love.

 17/06/2023

Today the Church follows up the Feast of the Sacred Heart with that of his mother's sinless heart, her soul.St Paul tells that we should judge no-one by the standards of the flesh. Jesus has overwhelmed us by his love. He has purified us by his death. 

The sinless one becomes sin and takes away the sins of our humanity. Now we can be as sinless as Adam was when first created. This is more than just another gift of God. We have to accept it as a new creation and regulate our lives so that we are always open for the ways and truth of Christ to become our very being. Meditating on this mystery brings us to an awed silence of adoration.

Jesus lived away from public awareness for thirty of his thirty-three years. God was secretly present in Nazareth and was known to the relatives of  Mary and Joseph, to his play-fellows and to the Synagogue as Joseph's son, the young carpenter.

Today's Gospel contains the only recorded event from those thirty years. It is, fittingly enough, an account of participation in the great feast of Passover. Jesus was a faithful Jew, one of the People of God and accordingly followed the Temple Ritual in addition to the Synagogue meetings he attended with his relatives

St Paul does not preach condemnation of our material beings. He tells that now that  we know the immeasurable spiritual grace of Christ all of our standards and choices in our worldly lives have to ignore worldly judgements and look only to the Spiritual Truth of Christ for their justification.

Dear Lord, you know my failings, my sins, you know how soon I regret them. Help me this day to be true to your teaching and look to remove the forests out of my own eye before presuming to judge my neighbour. May Mary whose sinless being is with you, body and soul to lead all the Angels Saints in heavenly adoration continue to plead for grace to fill the hearts of all on earth as it did her own immaculate heart .

 16/06/2023

Today the Church reminds us that Jesus is a complete human being. God's love for mankind has shown us that only he can wipe away our sins. My own punishment is not enough to create, by washing away personal guilt, the child-like purity that God willed for all of us to have. This can only be achieved  by God eternally emptying himself to become true man while being true God.

God's total being is each of the persons of the Trinity. Jesus is not only the sacrificial victim that wipes away the sins of the world he is also the Word/Son who is eternally known by Father and Holy Spirit in the Being which God shares without any dimidiation of himself,  with the reality of creation.

"I am gentle and humble of heart and you will find rest for your souls", the loving kindness of Father we hear in these words of  Son and the security of Holy Spirit they bring to our souls are all that we could wish for in life. Previously Jesus has told us that we have to respond to him with total sincerity even though that response will bring strife and the sword to our lives. Are the theological and philosophical attempts to resolve the contrasts between these opposing positions  the work of the "learned and the wise" whom we are not to take for our role models? 

We cannot avoid seeing the strife that surrounded Jesus during his public ministry. His own family were embarrassed by him. The synagogue  wanted to throw him over a cliff in Nazareth. Satan launched a direct spiritual attack on him. The wise and learned conspired to trick him, to disprove him by his own words. The secular authorities did the bidding of the High Priests and his disciples abandoned him on the hill beyond the city walls.

Where in all of this pain and strife where do we find the heart of a child? Mary believes totally in the will of the Father, knows implicitly that Jesus can change the water into wine and accepts the bequest made from the cross. Our Lady is born without sin and just accepts  all that God wills for her. 

The grace poured out from the pierced heart of the Lord saves us from sin and thus we can all become "the mere children" beloved of Father, Son and Holy Spirit" just as Mary is.

Dear Lord I thank you for the gift of faith and hope to live this day in peaceful love. My sins are grievous and I cry out for your pardon so that this confusion that is my being avoids doing harm in thought word or deed to any other person. May I grow closer to Mary who without stain of sin is created to be Queen of Heaven and first disciple of your Son.

 15/06/2023

St Paul is speaking of and to the Jews of the Old Testament. They are devoted to the scriptures but their minds do not accept the Light of Christ, the foretelling of which is the sole purpose of the revelation made to them and their ancestors.

Jesus tells us straightforwardly that it is by our relationships with each other that we will be judged. All of us who have ever been given the gift of Life will be judged on our conduct towards each person we meet in this world.

Paul's message is that Christ is everything for us; Christ in his mother's arms, Christ walking with his disciples, Christ near to despair in the Garden, Christ dead on the Cross is the finality of Gods' witness which becomes Christ, the Son, in the Glory of the Resurrection who captured Saul, the persecutor, on the road to Damascus  and was then witnessed and preached by St Paul for the rest of his life.

St Matthew, who had walked with and been taught by the carpenter from Nazareth, had experienced the joy of being with the "Messiah", had been enthralled by his wisdom and sorely disappointed by the outcome on Calvary records in his Gospel,  how Jesus, by his words and deeds epitomised the Law of Moses, and by his death becomes the triumphant Glory and Light of God's Love in the Resurrection.

All who are living now are walking together separated by disputes, irritated and annoyed, disgusted by the behaviour of others great and small, already knowing that "Hell is other people"and not within us, will have at our time of death  have to face ourselves in the Light within which there is place only for Truth.

How can any of us face that eternal reality without the Mercy that is Father, Son and Holy Spirit?

Dear Lord help me to live according to your teaching revealed conclusively by Jesus. Let me know you as Father and sustained by your Holy Spirit let me turn away from sin and direct myself only towards you. May Mary and the Saints of heaven continue to beseech your Grace for all of us on earth who cannot accept that living in your Providence is the only way that leads to your eternal Glory which is an instant that knows no before or after. Have Mercy on all our souls let the forgiveness poured out on Calvary bring pardon to the Holy Souls who are learning to forget self and love only you.