19/05/2024

Our God is beyond all human knowledge. The Incarnate Son is the final revelation. He is the "True Man", the New Adam. Not a new creation but the sinless only Begotten Son who in his completely human flesh developed naturally, as do all created mammals, in the womb of the Virgin Mary.

The IAMIAM, creator of all things, who spoke to Abraham has through his life, death and resurrection revealed the Son and the Holy Spirit is the Love that was first presented to Mary by the message of an Angel.

I have come to learn over the years that, although I can always find excuses for my sinful behaviour in the weakness of my flesh, that my body is not itself programmed to inevitably fall into sin. We all have the opportunity to live lives that give glory to God and we live in the same "human flesh" as did "Our Lord",  that can become sinless. Mammon takes over our beings once we concern ourselves only with the material world and we thus exclude the Holy Spirit.

In the words of John, Jesus appeared to his fearful disciples and breathed onto them the authority to forgive sins. The Holy Spirit did not manifest himself except in the words recorded in the Gospel. 

In the Acts, Luke records that there was a physical manifestation which shook the room and  touched each one of those present with a "tongue" of fire. It is a historical fact that all the nationalities mentioned had, by the time the Acts were written, the beginnings of the faith that leads to the "Way, the Truth and the Life".

Dear Lord, Father Son and Holy Spirit you have revealed all that we need to know about you to be able to love and serve. We have  to "know" by "loving", to "love " by serving" , to serve by obedience to your commandments and always putting the needs of others before our own.You have given us infinite spiritual power but we have ignored it even though we have seen the Resurrection. May Mary and all the saints together with whom I can be part of your mystical body ask for ever more of your Mercy to send the Holy Spirit who is Father, Son and Himself into the hearts of all mankind. Let us all speak not with tongues but with one voice, your voice, Eternal Love. Amen.

 18/05/2024

The whole of my life, of anybody's life, if written to capture every second that we have lived would, similarly to the last line of "John's" Gospel,  not be contained in the books of the whole world. 

There have been millions of human lives lived on this planet but we actually know very little about some of them in billions of books. I am sure that some scholar has worked out, with or without the help of "AI", the exact time that the events of Jesus' life recorded in the Gospels took to unfold in real time.

At this moment, we know everything about ourselves. God, however not only knows everything about me and every other human but he also knows the results of the infinite other choices that the freedom he has given to all mankind makes possible. The changes to the reality that I am, if all of my "what if" speculations and "if only" regrets, had materialised are known to God. 

We measure our lives in years but we live in each moment as it comes. I try to understand what it is I think that I am doing each time I begin my day in the presence of "Our Father". I want to be loving like the "little child" beloved of Jesus and confident that if I keep my ego, the source of my sin, at bay I will become able to look on the "Face of God" and live.

Most people of this generation would tell me that this is a forlorn hope, pie in the sky a stupid self-delusion. Mammon rules the lives of most of us. We are prisoners not in self-funded lodgings as was St Paul in Rome, but in the very flesh that embodies the "image and likeness" that is our created soul. 

Our souls belong to God and have been created to join the eternal New Life that will be the end of time. We can all align ourselves with the will of God because the power of sin has been eliminated on Calvary, but we are still completely free beings and can choose at every moment of our lives to accept God's Grace or create evil by refusing it. Father, Son and Holy Spirit really are the EverGreater. Our All Powerful God, however,  trusts us to join in the Love that is our only right choice and our personal gate to heaven. How can we ever refuse such unspeakably beautiful, perfect Love that humbled himself to accept in a human body the reality of such cruel torture and death on a cross , for our sakes?

Dear Lord, help me to know, love and serve and let each moment become for me prayer that is  praise, petition and penance for my sins. May this morning's offering to you be my plea for your grace to convert all of mine who resist your grace. Jesus lost only one; help me to approach that target. May Mary and all the saints of heaven pray that all we sinners on earth and in purgatory be forgiven by the Evergreater mercy of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen!

 

 17/01/2024

Today's reading from the Acts is a straightforward recording of what the Roman authorities did in response to St Paul's formal, as a citizen, appeal to the Emperor.

St John expands on the mission given by Jesus to the Church he founds on St Peter.Three times he asks the same question. Is this a purely rhetorical device or can we hear Father, Son and Holy Spirit, each triune person, asking and emphasizing that our first duty is to love God and to prove it in this world by taking care of all our neighbours,

The triple repetition upset Peter. Was he being doubted in his sincerity? Jesus who was with them was unmistakeably the Incarnate Son of God. His very presence confirmed the reality of the Resurrection. His wounds proclaimed New Life for our bodies after death. Peter was upset as he knew how easily, such a short time before, he had, also three times, denied that he even knew Jesus.

"Love" is a simple word but it is infinite in its significance and ever greater than my ability to understand it. We have to stand wordlessly before the cross on Calvary and look with wonder on the disfigured body of the Son of God and choose to share in the Love that unites the women, Mary, John, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It is for this we have come into the world.

Dear Lord, you know how my ego is so hard for me to contain. I try to pray in humility but as you know,  I always begin to admire my own words. Help me to be silent and open to the Holy Spirit so that I can receive the gifts that you pour out onto the souls that sincerely try to do your will. May the prayers of Mary and the Saints for sinners bear fruit on earth and release from Purgatory for the Holy Souls.Amen

 16/05/2024

Jesus is praying for us to be "one". The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are "One". The oneness of God is in each person of the Trinity. Jesus does not pray for us to become an amorphous mass of collective humanity but reveals that each of us is an individual person created and known by Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We are born so that we can each become equally aware with love of Father, Son and Holy Spirit and of each other.

The "Jews" of John's gospel are not treated as individual "beings" but as  a "mob" a mass of humanity subservient in will to a simple idea become slogan; "Crucify him!" St Paul divides the collective call for his own death by identifying his beliefs with those of one of the parties at the moment united by their hatred of the "Way". He is saved from "The Jews " but sent on to "The Romans".

We are not pre-programmed to unite automatically with Jesus, the Father and the Holy Spirit or with all men. God has revealed himself as our Loving Creator, Our Forgiving Redeemer, Our Spiritual Support. Jesus tells us that it is we who must listen to his words and become one with them. It is only I who can choose for myself to obey the commandments and thus live in this world at one with all who do the same. 

It is thus how Jesus taught his Apostles on the night he was betrayed and before showing us the power and integrity of all his teaching in his death and resurrection. No matter how our Institutions claim perfection for their version of "the way" and the infallibility of only their teaching, if we choose God in our hearts and obey his Commandments we can find Christian Unity in the Church of Love also founded by Jesus not at table but as he hung dying on the cross in his words to Mary and to John."Behold thy mother, behold thy son". This is Love that never fails.

Dear Lord, help me to understand your teaching without becoming "clever" and more concerned with my "ego" than with your will for me. I hope that I am ready to come to the end of life and that I am open to you the Holy Spirit. Show me how to influence the family which I have fathered. Let my death become a turning point for them in their lives. Your will is evermore my guide. Let these words from my mind become proven by the deeds of my body. Let my prayers be joined with those of Mary and all the Saints that the Holy Souls be loosed from their sins and that the Unity of God and his Church of Love become a visible reality and thus shake up humanity to act as one created to love.

 15/05/2024

St Luke's account of St Paul's farewell to the Ephesians is a snapshot of the mutual love that Jesus lived and preached and is the purpose of the Good News with which he had commissioned his Apostles to fill the whole world. St Paul sums up his mission on its completion. 

During his three years in Ephesus St Paul and his companions had preached, argued and been persecuted but he had never lost his own way and thus the humility of his own love had become the mutual heart of this Church in one of the great temple cities of the Western World.

St John's account is part of Jesus' own farewell discourse to his Apostles. Jesus is also summing up his mission and is reporting, as it were, to his Father what he has done in life before the coming "hour". Jesus has revealed to us that eternal truth is not to be found in this world, the material universe in which he too lived out his incarnation. 

There are no words that can contain the blessing that Jesus is conferring on the whole of humanity living in human time. We can open our hearts and allow the grace of the Eternal Father to rule our lives on Earth and so live in Truth, or we can refuse the promise that is to be sealed soon after this discourse with the blood of this new and everlasting covenant.

Dear Lord, you know that I am truthfully a little one overwhelmed by thoughts of the human beings who have not received your message of love. I cannot understand your ways but humbly pray that I may become one of the ones not lost after listening to Jesus. Help all the innumerable souls who have died not hearing your word and let us all be welcomed into your new and eternal kingdom whenever you choose that to be. May Mary and those saints already saved pray for all the millions of us who have become trapped by the Mammon which rules our world and disfigures your Church founded on St Peter.

 14/05/2024

Jesus teaches us how to become what we were in the eternal mind of the Father at the moment we were created. Everything that we are and experience throughout our lives has grown out of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit's joy in Being which they share with us. This joy is also called Love. Love is the source of the limited created time in which we live and also the timeless Eternal Joy that awaits after our progression through life.

The incarnate Son, Jesus, emptied himself of his Devine Being and entered time as the son of Mary. He lived in Palestine as a complete man in the daily round that we all know . The important difference between Jesus and his mother and us is that they were without the sin created by Adam and handed down to us throughout the ages.

In our lives we can be aware of God but never contain him within our understanding. Mankind has come to an empirical knowledge of so much of created matter that anything beyond our knowledge is ignored or dismissed as non-existent. We have to live our lives in this man-made world of great cities, wonderful machines and beautiful people and it is possible for us to be so enthralled that we forget "this too will pass".

Peter in the first reading is the man who had denied Jesus three times and also been reprimanded at many others. The 120 people mentioned had all seen the Resurrected Lord and knew that they had a duty to teach to the whole world and subsequent generations that nothing about the material world was ever to be as important as the teaching of the master. They were thus creating an "Office of Apostleship" to make sure that they were following his commands exactly.

Ever since that day "The Institution" has tried to be true to the words of the founder but in fighting against the material world has itself become part of that world  which Jesus teaches us to avoid. In the Institutional Church of today Christ is not in the hierarchies of office but in the love which we all should have for each other inside or outside the Institutional Church. On Calvary Jesus was abandoned by all except the Marys and John. This is the example of love that we need to follow in our lives to become the beloved human, body, mind and soul, being we were at the moment of our creation and for eternity.

Dear Lord, help me to live this day as would have Jesus in his Holy Family. Let me too be free from sin and let me grow in understanding of how it is that your will for us all to live  sinless and at peace in your Love. Let me always be aware of that I can never truly know the ever growing infinity that is your being that is ever aware of even the  minutest cell of your creation. Let your Love smother the hatred that is the source of wars and all violence today and may all sinners such as I become aware that even as you forgave St Peter we too can hope for Mercy in this world and accept with thanks the opportunity to do penance now or after our death with the Holy Souls in purgatory. May the prayers of Mary and all the saints be always with us and may the grace of Father, Son and Holy Spirit overcome the evil that we create in our thoughtlessness, forgetful of your Love.

 13/05/2024

There is no teaching of the Church which does not include the Mother of Jesus, Our Lady, Immaculate Mary, but most of all Theotokos, the bearer of the Incarnate, Word, Son of the Father and her son Jesus of Nazareth.

Over the centuries while pondering, as did she, the mystical event of the reproductive awakening of her body being announced by an Angel many have been inspired to use "nuptial" imagery to celebrate the "integrity and praise" that we can all honour but never explain in the terms of biological science.

We have to live our lives in this material world, but we must never forget that this  will pass and each one of us will be judged on how well we have believed and been true to God's revelation of the Way, Truth and Life.

Since the founding of the Church on St Peter, God has not sent us prophets as he did to the Jews. The Institutional Church of this World based in Rome has for centuries claimed a monopoly on Truth and Revelation so the "Prophetical Office" has been vested in Popes, bearers of the "Keys".

Jesus spent 30 years with his mother. We know very little of their life together with St Joseph but we do know that it was at his mother's behest he performed his first miracle. At first he appears to "answer back" a sort of "Oh,mum! Do I have to?" but he does help out his mother's friends to save them from the embarrassment of not having enough wine to serve to their guests at the wedding feast.

In this humble mother/son domestic conversation the Evergreater reveals his incarnate presence on Earth! His mother is also one of the few who remained until his death on Calvary where she is appointed  mother of St John and our Mother in the New Holy Family that is the Spiritual Church of Love.

Dear Lord, you know that there have been many false claims of spiritual experiences. Our world is full of deceivers who try to exploit believers. Pilgrimage to Lourdes seems to be the modern version of the Canterbury Tales and so of doubtful spiritual worth. My own mental pilgrimage to your presence could also be full of self-deceit. Help me to the self-trust that comes from a genuinely clear conscience. You know that I can never be over-scrupulous for I have always been too close to sin. May Mary who encouraged the children at Fatima continue to spread the love that comes from God over us all as we try to live true to the example of her Son, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.