14/05/2025

Before I read the mass readings today, I want to note what I experienced during the night. It was horrible and yet very real. I was in place that was nothing but completely lightless. I was totally afraid  aware that fear was my being and had the notion that this was hell and felt that I should thank God for this warning  but I could not find God. That dream was all fear-filled experience but then I began to observe and entered a stone building and rebuked three men for wearing caps in church this morphed into an AA meeting where many strangers and me too warned each other that it is easy to replace without realising it one bodily addiction with another.

My dream thus left me confused but we have no difficulty in understanding St John's Gospel for today. Jesus tells us that he loves us and that we too have to want only good for our neighbour. The same had been revealed to Moses but the Chosen People had never been able to fulfill their part of IAMIAM's covenant with them. 

The Incarnation reveals not only that IAMIAM is IAMFATHERSONHOLYSPIRIT but also that the Sacrifice on Calvary creates a Sacramental new form of being to ensure that we can all complete an individual covenant to worship, return love and obey by asking for the support that is freely given and therefore called Grace. 

It is always exciting to read how the early church responded to the mission given to them by Jesus and to read the foundational doctrine of love recorded by John but the subsequent history of the Institutional Church cannot be ignored and I can only think that there is still the Grace of God to be found on Earth because of the New Holy Family, the Church of Love, "Woman behold your son, Son behold your mother" for the Church of Peter very soon became entangled in the things of this world in direct opposition to the words of Jesus declared before Pilate. 

 13/05/2025

There is an intensity about the mass readings of Eastertide. The "Acts" are as they are named full of action and St John is after many years spent with Our Lady and reflection on his own experience truly the "Theologian".

In today's first reading Jerusalem is still the center of the world for most of "us" are still Jews who are still coming to terms with IAMFATHERSONHOLYSPIRIT.  Even though we have lived with Jesus, it was difficult for us to accept IAMIAM as IAMFATHERSON. We  only completed the Trinity of Persons at Pentecost when we first received the Holy Spirit and from then on have had to grow our own Faith by accepting his guidance.

Today the Church in Zion is experiencing the first attacks made on her by co-religionists. The unintended consequence is that Resurrection Faith is preached  for the first time outside of the Holy Land and the Apostles and their followers begin to accept that they are truly part of the "something greater" than Moses and all the prophets "here" when Jesus walked the Earth.

Today the Institutional Church also remembers the Apparition made by Our Lady at Fatima in Portugal. St John and she became mother and child listening to the dying words of Jesus and so we can be sure that John's Gospel is informed by the Church of Love that was thus established on Calvary; "Woman behold your son, Son behold your mother".

Mary was the first person to whom the Trinity was revealed not as an abstract idea but as a living reality which she nurtured with sinless, worshipful devotion. 

It is no wonder that "her son", John, is able to remember Jesus' words about us, "His sheep". 

"My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no-one is able to snatch them out of the "Father's hand. The Father and I are one."

 12/05/2025

Sometimes I start the day in a dried out condition that has to have a stimulus to get it going. The deer of the Psalm knows exactly what it needs and is immediately active in its search for the water needed to reactivate its heart. "Heart" reminds me of the old translation of today's Psalm in which the "deer" was "hart".

The website that I am using to find the Mass Readings for the day tells me that it is using a "new translation" of the liturgical texts. "Hart" was replaced by "deer" long ago but when I read in this morning's gospel 

"All who came before me are thieves and robbers but the sheep did not listen to them", 

I was alerted with my ears pricked and tensed as would be the hart/deer on hearing an unfamiliar noise while it was drinking.

The machine I am using enables me to instantly explore doubts/discrepancies as I become aware of them so I pull-up the Douay-Rheims translation of the same text. 

"All others, as many as have come, are thieves and robbers: and the sheep heard them not".

It seems to me that both English sentences carry the same meaning which could be interpreted as a condemnation of all the prophets who had fulfilled the word of God as revealed in the Old Testament.

To live by "every word that comes from the  mouth of God" we have to be consistent and pray for the guidance of the Holy Spirit who is both the source and meaning of the "hard sayings" of Jesus and the reality of my body and soul the creation of the Father, IAMFATHERSONHOLYSPIRIT.

St John reports that Jesus' listeners did not fully understand the analogy so he had to repeat himself. I have to say that I don't think verses 1-5 are difficult to grasp, but I need a lot more help than even St Thomas Aquinas can give to grasp v. 8. which really does sound like a condemnation of Old Testament religion even though it was revealed by IAMIAM.

 11/05//2025

During the last 3 centuries of the Old Testament some of the Jews, monotheists in a pagan world, had resisted the Hellenization of the Middle-East which had followed and sometimes preceded the conquests of Alexander. Even before the destruction of the Temple there were probably more Jews in Alexandria than in Jerusalem.

Jesus and all the Apostles were born into beginnings of the Pax Romana which was forced onto the world by the military might of the Roman Legions. It is another historical fact that there many more Jews living outside of Palestine than within it and the  Roman roads which had followed the Roman Legions made it quite easy for Paul and his companions to spread the "Good News" throughout the world.

Paul must have known Hebrew but the texts with which Jesus, he and all the Apostles were familiar were taken from the Greek translation known as the Septuagint. The Liturgy of early church used Greek and Aramaic and the gospel was directed at all Jews in Palestine and of the Synagogues which existed all over the world where there were not only Jews but also Gentiles searching for the Truth.

The historically latest works of the Old Testament e.g. Wisdom/Maccabees display a non-Jewish bias i.e. towards events and behaviour and are thus rejected by the Rabbis who at that same time were also rejecting Jesus and his Church .

The last work of our New Testament is a defiance of what our Faith can be if it becomes more of a philosophy than the fire of our living God burning within us. 

There is nothing "speculative" about the Good Friday when Jesus, true God and true Man, Lamb of God, Son of the Father, Begotten not made. of one being with the Father, through whom all things were made pressed the torn flesh of his back to the wood of the Cross and stretched out his arms for us to pierce his hands with our sins, the crudely made iron nails that would hold him up to be scorned by those for whom he had only love.

With Jesus there is always  "something greater here", St John's Apocalypse tries to capture and portray that Spiritual  "Greater" in words and images at which we can bow in wonder.

 10/05/2025

In today's psalm we sing "I will offer a thanksgiving sacrifice, I will call on the name of the Lord." 

The first of today's readings has St Peter nurturing the infant Church outside of Jerusalem. Just as did Jesus he "performs"  miracles of healing and today Dorcas returns to life as had done Lazarus and the son of the Widow of Nain.

The sophisticates of Athens guffawed when Paul told them of the miracles performed by Jesus and of our own Resurrection Faith.

"This is a hard saying who can listen to this" were the doubts raised in the Synagogue at Capernaum by Jesus' statement of his own Sacramental being, flesh and blood and Divine origin. "After this many turned back and no longer walked with him". 

There is never anything pseudo or hesitant about the faith of St Peter. Even in his failures he is forthright and today  "To whom shall we go, Lord? You have the words of eternal life and we have believed and come to know that you are the Holy One of God" is St Peter at his best.

His answer is a lovely statement of the belief that I hope I hold in my heart. St Peter's subsequent history of denial, forgiveness and heroic death gives me the confidence to proclaim my own faith in this humble way each morning and place all my hope in "The Lord".

The death of Dorcas and her return to life is an important event in the Church that was still an extension of Jesus' first priority to complete the revelation by Law and Covenant made throughout the Old Testament.

The return to this life of an apparently lifeless corpse is still even in these days of medical advancement a pretty major event but was, as in the case of Lazarus, "in those days" a real attention grabber.

I am not at all a "sophisticate of Athens" but read the readings of this morning's mass as a man who has some of the teaching of Two Thousand years of Church History as part of my consciousness. Lazarus was brought back into the world in which Jesus was still his incarnate self and would thus have been able to be present during the events that were to be the salvation of the whole world.

If Dorcas had been completely dead, would she have had anything for which to thank if brought back to this world? 

 09/05/2025

"In those days" are  three words that take us back to the time when Jesus was a living memory in the minds of many of "the holy ones" who had gathered together to prepare themselves for his imminent return.

They were so sure that they were the witnesses chosen by God to welcome Our Saviour back into the material world that they had divested themselves of their worldly goods and for some time lived together as one family.

They were becoming the "New Israel" living in this world but set aside by God to be the "remnant" wherein the "Son of Man" would find the Faith, Hope and Charity he had created by the Incarnation flourishing despite all the obstacles raised against it by the world, flesh and devil.

The Apostolic Church knew that it had to bear witness to the reality of Jesus' life, death and resurrection and strove hard to understand the new revelations made by this reality. The Early Church knew "My kingdom is not of this world" but soon began the institutional processes that have opened her to the corruption from within that proves itself to be more powerful than the total of external assaults made upon her.

"In these days" we have a new successor to St Peter. We all pray that he can live a holy life and be an example of the holiness that each individual has to attain by following the "Way" as did the Apostles in the Portico of Solomon. 

It would be a true witness to sincerity if  he could follow the example of one, who has enabled me to sit here and record my thoughts and prayers, and give away all the physical wealth accrued by the Church  as it is reported that Bill Gates is about to do.

 08/05/2025

The New Testament episode "Philip and the Ethiopian" takes very little of my time to read. 

The longest episodes of the New Testament are, as they should be, the Nativity Narratives and the accounts of Holy Week and the events that were witnessed after the Resurrection.

The "chariot" brings to my mind Assyrian and Egyptian reliefs of the war chariot that, even then, had been in use for thousands of years. Pharoah's army that had pursued Moses would have included chariots along with the "horse and rider that were flung into the sea." 

The eunuch, however, was seated and asked Philip to join him so he must have been riding in some type of carriage but not one of the war-chariots that I imagined.

In his public life Jesus had spent three years in preparing his newly chosen 12 sons of Israel for their mission to make IAMFATHERSONHOLYSPIRIT'S completed revelation of his Love for mankind known to the whole world. 

The whole of the Old Testament is a collection of real-time events that are episodic preparations for the  "something greater than Moses here " in the time of Our Lord. The Eunuch is studying scripture and as do all of us he needs help. 

His conversion takes only a matter of minutes. As I wrote that it occurred to me that it is only for minutes that I too ever devote my total being to Our Father.

Dear Lord, help me to be true to you, help me to know, love and serve sincerely and let me never forget that my prayers are linked with those of Our Lady and all the saints asking that my sins and those of all the world, together with the Holy Souls share in the grace of forgiveness that never ceases to pour out from the Resurrection of you the crucified "True Man" on Calvary.