10/07/2024

It is very difficult for those living in today's overpowering world to raise our hearts and minds to God, "to know, love and serve" with integrity. 

My own life has been lived constantly aware that I am a long way from the "holiness" that is the will of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But I have always been able to avoid the unwavering commitment to the Father that is the way to perfection shown to the world by Mary and her son Jesus.

Mary is created as the perfect woman totally without sin. Jesus is the eternal Word who in perfect oneness with the Father and Holy Spirit is able to enter into created time as the perfect human bodily antithesis to the sin of Adam. 

I say that "I have been able to avoid" holiness because although I search my soul and confess that I am "sinful" my personal sincerity, my integrity is always called into question as I again turn my back on God and choose to disobey the Loving Kindness that is Our Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

There has always been with me ever since I can remember a longing for holiness and simultaneously an awareness that the total commitment has to be just that and not the "bring me chastity but not now" attitude that has been the story of my life. 

I can see the never ending salvation that is God's gift to us all, but I still cling to the things that are present to me in the here and now even though I know that they are as corruptible as my body and become unusable by me at the moment of my death.

In this morning's Gospel Jesus commissions his first missions that are all entrusted to Jews solely for Jews. My hope and faith is in the Almighty. His total integrity neither deserts any of his faithful followers nor  does he thrust any sinner beyond the scope of his mercy. He chooses both Peter and Judas as missionaries. Both are unable to hide their sins but as are we all, still able to choose to accept the mercy that  is created in the mystery of the events in the garden and on the hill of Calvary.

The message of the first missionaries is to continue the preaching of Jesus, word and deed.

         "The kingdom of heaven is close at hand". Fear not, for God is never far away!

Dear Lord , you know that I am afraid that by choosing you I have set a task that is beyond my ability. I know that saving myself from the power of sin is, indeed, beyond me but there is nothing that is beyond you so "I place all my trust in thee", eternal Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Save me from all my sins  and let my soul be united in prayer with Mary and all the saints that as we praise and worship your Glory our prayers will bring your perfect merciful judgement to us the living sinners and to the Holy Souls secure in their penitential amends in Purgatory.

 09/07/2024

Hosea continues to condemn the creation of idols. Mankind in all corners of the earth has at sometime  chosen to answer the inner voice that calls for an explanation of  the amazing thing that is our consciousness of "being". We all know that we are and that we are not alone; but we are all the unique one that is "I".

I cannot remember or imagine what it was for me to be an infant, a totally helpless but conscious being. It is out of remembrance of the care given to us by our mothers that the primitive female idols the "Great Mother" came to be. 

After more than 80 years of self-awareness, I know that I am more than what I think, see, hear, touch and taste. The psalmist warns us that if we make idols we will become like them senseless and inanimate. If we continue to give up our autonomy to our technical creations that is what will happen to us.

We are not dolls, the playthings of heaven but are formed in the image and likeness of the creator who spoke to the Jews through his prophets. We are not his puppets controlled by his strings. We are intelligent beings who have been given personal control of our consciousness. We are trusted by Father, Son and Holy Spirit to live in this world with hearts full of loving obedience to our unseen God and with goodwill towards all men.

We are not expected to do this by our own efforts but we can be sure of our salvation if we choose to disown Mammon and all worldly idols. God chose to be in human time and incarnate he suffered the unimaginable agony that is the sin brought into the world by our continuing disobedience.

Dear Lord, help me to pray. Help me to see my thoughts always in your light of revelation. Help the Institutional Churches to break with Mammon and subservience to sinful social policy which denies your created man and woman and praises the slogans of "Gay Pride" and the untruth "My body, my life". Help the "iams" who shout these to realise how tiny they are even though they are astonished by their own knowledge and cleverness. May Mary our heavenly mother lead all the saints in praise of the perfection of your being and implore your grace to purify all souls on earth and in Purgatory. I make this prayer in what I hope is sincerity of heart. Save me from the snares of Satan and his innumerable allies in this world.

 08/07/2024

The people  who surround Jesus  in this morning's Gospel are all Jews. They are all together in the same time and culture as each other. Their human consciousness has been formed by the only God who is the totality of being represented by "IAMIAM". Their souls and consciences have listened to the revelations made through the prophets. Of all the nations they are the only one who has a mission. Of all the nations they are the only one to be as close to God as a wife is close to her husband.

They are also all individuals who respond to their experience of living in a unique way known only to themselves and God. I always wonder whether we are right to assume that Jesus is God during his time on earth. We tend to assume that his miracles are a sign of his divinity. I wonder whether all the supernatural events witnessed in the Gospels  could have come from the perfection of  sinless humanity that had been destroyed by Adam, but fulfilled in Christ. Perfect faith really can move mountains

The perfect "image and likeness" always prays the perfect prayer and thus has a will perfectly aligned with that of the Father. He becomes one with the Father through the workings of the Holy Spirit and is always answered in what ever he prays. This could be why he experienced total horror at the end of his life on Earth. He had lived every moment of his human life in the sinless perfection that had never lost touch with the Father and Holy Spirit but in the Garden he becomes the first human to be really aware of the abyss of the Godless eternity created by human sin. 

We are created to know, love and serve. Our "true man" knows the Father as perfectly as no other man has ever done, he loves Our Father who art in heaven, with that same love that he loves all his disciples but first of all his human relations who, except for Mary who never ceased to treasure him in her heart, were embarrassed  by the "public show" he had made of himself in the synagogue. By his human bodily sacrifice of himself  he fulfills the perfect human co-operation for the eternal will of the Father to be complete. The Resurrection is the new  Adam, the first fruits of the new creation, who remains sinless and is with us till the end of time. He is also the Word who was with God in the Beginning.

Dear Lord, you know everything. You can strengthen my soul with your grace. you can inspire me to follow your example and to teach me that there is no need for sin. I can use my mind to understand how we have come to the same state of  corruption as were the Jews at the time of your Incarnation as True Man. Help me to resist temptation as you did during your time in the desert and let me grow in faith so that I may face death without fear. May Mary and all the saints keep us all in their prayer as they timelessly give praise to you and may your merciful love save us all living and dead. Come soon Lord Jesus, Come soon!

 07/07/2024

Today's Gospel reading has become part of the "extraordinary" revelations made to and through St Paul mentioned in today's letter to the Corinthians. In the first reading Ezekiel is in no doubt about the mission he has to complete during his life in this world. 

IAMIAM has not given up on his people and is sending Ezekiel to call them back to Jerusalem to build a new Temple and make sincere worship of God the centre of their being and their life  here on earth.

Who can know the mind of God? I am under no illusion that my attempts to bring my course through life into line with the revelations made first through men, the prophets, and then through Jesus, are the whole story of life on earth. There is much that I cannot understand especially the reasons for God making so many overtures and new beginnings for Israel.

It seems that our freedom to choose Father, Son and Holy Spirit is the most important part of the human being created by God. My personal being is in God's Image and likeness but infinitely smaller so it is not surprising that I cannot understand how the spiritual message revealed through the prophets was not accepted by the people who had received such care from God.

Jesus' three years of public life spells out for us our Creator God's purpose "in the beginning", the Creative Love of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. 

The Annunciation reveals to us the Trinity through Mary's personal freedom which accepts her role in God's plan. Today's Gospel emphasises our "freedom". Is it possible that we can act in a way that surprises God? Jesus is "amazed" by the reactions to his preaching. He announces himself as the herald of the "jubilee" and that appals his towns folk and most of all dumbfounds those among whom he has grown from infancy to manhood.

Dear Lord, each day my prayer is the cry from the heart of a sinner. I am happy to live this life but continually afraid that daily temptations will lead me to sin again. My reflections on the mass readings are the rock, the Church that keeps in my mind, the communion of souls, the New Holy Family that does not reject you in body mind or soul. Mary and John stood in for us all at the foot of your cross in real-time 2000 years ago and as the family that does not reject you today but freely prays for the Mercy with which you flood our world only for many of us to dam it out from our souls by choosing to favour our corruptible bodies and Mammon over the Word of God. Jesus lived, suffered died and was resurrected  to open our world to the the forgiveness to be welcome as it outpours from the centre of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

 06/07/2024

I am sure that God knows every individual who is living, has lived or will ever live in his creation. He first revealed himself to the Jews a tiny nation at the heart of the battleground between the great powers that ruled the cities of the area we know as the Middle-East. It is to this people that  God has made his first and his final revelations of himself and of what he expects our image and likeness of himself to become.

The greatest gift that we all have from God is freedom. We must use this freedom in the bodily lifetime that within which it is ours to know, love and serve. We are not machines that come into the world programmed by our DNA. Our bodies do follow the laws of created nature and in this they are "good". 

To retain our place in and maintain the "good" that is creation we have to choose to follow the revelations made by IAMIAM through his prophets in the Old and completed by the Incarnate Word, Jesus in the New Testament and supported throughout history by the Holy Spirit. Three persons, one God.

Today's Gospel is the meeting of the Old and New Testaments. The servants of IAMIAM  present us with the question about the identity of this then "unknown quantity" from Nazareth. We know the answer but we live in a material world powerful enough even to corrupt and destroy God's creation, nature. A material world which smothers the Kingdom of God and brings human failure into our Churchly Institutions.

Jesus did not attempt to prop-up the failing Temple and its "Law". He sacrificed himself to bring mercy into the world. He allowed the partnership between state and religion to kill him. The Resurrection  becomes the true being of the Sacramental Life of the Church and its Liturgy.

But, how many others since then have been slaughtered by that same unholy alliance? 

Dear Lord, you know that today I have much on my mind.  Let my prayers be heard as I try to get on with the domestic tasks that I should share but often neglect. May Mary and all the Saints help me by their prayers as I begin the clear-out that is so long overdue. As I pray I hear myself and realise that it is not only my room that needs clearing out but also the room that Jesus' tells us to enter as we say "Our Father" Help me Lord.

 05/07/2024

Even though I am sure that the Institutional Church founded on St Peter has never been completely true to the intention of Jesus, to the purpose of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, I am also sure that there is within it great flashes of human wisdom inspired by the revelations of the Old and New Testaments.

Today the reading from Amos presents the hopelessness of living outside of God's Law, of not following the Golden Rule. The Gospel presents the emptiness of  the words of the "Law" corrupted by Man and the Merciful Forgiveness that is the Word of God. Pharisees vs Jesus.

We can all be sure that the "Chosen People" failed in their God-Given task of showing to the world the delight of knowing that they were in God's favour and were the magnet to draw all of us into knowledge of the Love that gives "being" to all of creation. 

We are sure of this because the Incarnation to remedy the failure of his people lived among us for 33 years suffered, died and rose again. The Resurrection is the final seal of final revelation. The Word of God is authenticated and remains with us to the end of time to be delighted in by all who have listened to the Good News.

The economic crimes of materialism listed by Amos have never left us and the man-made wonders of this world still hold most of us in the grip of Mammon. Today's psalm emphasises that our true life is not to be found in this material world but in our souls protected by every word that comes from the mouth of God. 

Have the Christian Institutions and their hierarchs ever lived up to this essential message, the "core policy statement" that Jesus emphasised at his public trial before the Roman World of his day, and the still Mammon ruled world of today,  "My Kingdom is not of this world"?

Dear Lord,  you are our all knowing and all powerful God. Let me kneel before you in my weakness and failures knowing that although you are unseen by me, you see me and all my brothers and sisters living now with eyes of mercy ready to forgive us our sins as much as we can forgive any who sin against us. Help me to maintain the sincerity of these moments I spend thinking about your word and help me to live today without adding to my sins. May my soul be accepted into the Love that is the prayer of Mary and all the Saints of Heaven and may this communion prayer bring your Mercy to this World and to the Holy Souls in Purgatory.

 04/07/2024

We are all born into the worldly time that we know. The world as created by God and modified by man. In the Old Testament the Chosen People live out their time on earth within the ancient civilizations of the Middle East. The wonders of Egypt which still stand today were the "built environment" within which the sons of Jacob sought refuge from the drought which was threatening their lives.

The Pyramids still bear witness to the genius of mankind. Darwin's theory of evolution does not explain how the human brain became the intelligence that has not developed any further than that which was able to create the mathematics that are the rules of pure abstract thought.

The "prophets" of the Old Testament were inspired not to predict the unknown, the future, but to assure God's People that they were not alone in the world of matter, alone in the vastness of the night-sky pierced by innumerable pinpoints of light, the stars. This assurance is still with us and will be until the end of time.

Amos is not part of the institutional Brotherhood of Prophets, he is not a priest of Bethel, the then focus of God's presence on earth. He knows that he is a servant of God inspired to warn that sin is never acceptable to God and warns the King that sinful behaviour will bring calamity to himself and to the people.

Our God knows all individuals who are living or have ever lived. He knows with love each new soul that is the true life of every human; the image and likeness of God. He knows the wonders that human brains have created to master the secrets of his created material universe. He has always intended for us to be free. We are no artificial intelligence that has been coded into existence.

Amos warned the priest and the king what would happen if they and their people continued to forget God. The Old Testament has been completed and the good news is that Father, Son and Holy Spirit has completed and  sealed the revelation of the Glory of God. 

The Incarnation, Life, Death and Resurrection of Jesus the only begotten Son and final prophet has shown us all that it is not only possible for each one of us to reciprocate the Love that has become creation but that it is only by being willing to have our sins forgiven that the wonder that is our souls will be able to share in the never-ending freedom of the Sons of God.

Dear Lord, help me to live out this day in accordance with your will by refusing temptations and sin. Let thy will be done in my heart and please accept this my morning prayer as it is only you who can understand the confusion that has been my life. You know that I am still afraid in the bottom layer of my being that I am still not cleared of my sins even though I stand before you in the all-revealing light that is the Love of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Be not afraid for I am with you always says the Lord. This is my comfort together with my faith that Mary and all the saints pray for us unceasingly that we on earth and in Purgatory are always in the glorious light of Mercy earned for us in the horror of the Cross on Calvary.