22/10/2025

Wednesday Week 29 Ordinary Time

St Paul wrote this letter to guide the very first Christian community that was then in its infancy in Rome. It has become since then a foundational text for all Christians. 

Most of the first Christians fall into the category of "blessed even though they have not seen" which we also share with all subsequent  generations. St Paul himself is the only Apostle who was personally called after and by the Resurrection and who learned all that he knows of Jesus' life and teaching as do we from the then still living "friends" of Jesus and from the Old Testament.

I have come to realise that the Middle-East chosen by IAMFATHERSONHOLYSPIRIT to be the location in this world of the timeless Incarnation was in those days at the beginning of the Pax Romana a place of intellectual and cultural ferment where the creation of vast wealth had enabled millions to devote their time to physical and mental activity which without the Revelations made to Jews in Palestine, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God" is a "literal waste of time" and of human life. It was not just the pure simplicity and poverty known by Jesus in Galilee.

St Paul wrote this letter only twenty-five years or so years after the Resurrection and we  2000 years later have also to encounter and respond to this the final event of God's Revelation as did St Paul on the road to Damascus.

The wealth of the world is now far greater than even then and we are more entangled in our technologically enhanced consciousnesses. We have still been given the gift of rational life, however,  by "Our Father" to enable us to make the free choice to which St Paul encourages the Romans and all other would-be "Christians"  to devote our lives. 

"Become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed and having become free from sin become slaves of righteousness".

 21/10/2025

Tuesday Week 29 Ordinary Time

I try to start each day by the recollection of my place in the vastness of the Universe. I welcome the guidance that I find in the Scriptures that have been preserved for millennia and I try to be aware that when they were first recorded they were the work of living men who had been part of their living generation and products of their cultures, just as I am of mine.

We are all unique individuals but are also a product of our times and place. St Paul could never have lived the life of righteousness that he did if he had not been directly chosen by the Resurrection to proclaim for all time that God does not have favourites but he was also aware that he, Saul, was himself one of the Chosen People, a Jew, educated in the exclusivity promoted by Hebrew Scripture.

The Incarnation is a historical event. 

We cannot explain why God chose to complete his revelation  of Salvation and that individual human beings known in His eternity by IAMFATHERSONHOLYSPIRIT were chosen to be offered the choice to co-operate by their own free choice with the Will of God at that moment two thousand years ago, but have to accept it as the greatest of all historical events.

All the characters of the New Testament and Church founded on St Peter, the enemies or friends of Jesus were products of either Hebrew or Greek culture who had to respond to the uniquely eternal events that had happened during their lifetimes.

Jesus is "Son of Man" because he is in his being the pure humanity of Adam and Eve, uncorrupted by either sin or touched by the culture of his time and place. My response today to the same events has to resist the influence of both "Now" and two thousand years of history. 

God's grace abounds and I can become righteous for "although sin reigned in death, grace reigns through righteousness, leading to eternal life through Christ Jesus".

Dear Lord, help me to respond to all that you reveal as did sinless Mary without fear and complete trust for you are Our Father, my Lord and my God.

 20/10/2025

Monday Week 29 Ordinary Time

At this moment, I am trying to become in my response to the words of scripture used in this morning's mass, a receiver uncontaminated by neither the "noise" of self nor the "white noise" of my environment, the universe of which I am a tiny speck but a speck, as are we all, empowered by our creator to free our invisible selves, our souls from the material, temporal distractions which keep us from the faith which "God counted as righteousness in Abraham".

At the moment 2000 years ago when IAMFATHERSONHOLYSPIRT was a living man showing us how to recover the holiness lost by the disobedience we call "Original Sin" he was speaking to each of the crowd that was then melling around him and also to each of us who have ever lived since then.

The people who formed the crowd of which he was the centre was formed of individuals who all were beset by human worldly problems. Jesus' response to the man who appeals to him for help in a family dispute tells us that his mission is not to create a just society, a kingdom of this world.

The only way that there can be political, social justice in this world is as a result of the personal righteousness of each of us. Our Father has created us in love for us to love one another and 2000 years ago he sealed his completed revelation on the Cross and confirmed the Way, the Truth and Life with the Resurrection.

We are all called to strive for holiness by avoiding the supreme danger to righteousness that is to be found in material being. The world and all that is in it is captivatingly wonderful but "I am" and  thus part of it to acknowledge and do only the will of its creator.

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

Thy kingdom come Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven,

Give us this day our daily bread

And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

And lead us not into temptation

But deliver us from evil

 19/10/2025

Twenty Nineth Sunday in Ordinary Time

I am constantly aware that my consciousness, my being, is not completely under the control of my rationality. 

It has never been easy for me to control my "moods" and I have often resorted to chemicals starting with Alcohol "to gladden the heart".  Each day, I thank IAMFATHERSONHOLYSPIRIT that forty years ago I was forced into abandoning "drinking"  that had become my misuse of God's bounty.

Physician prescribed medicines can also affect my moods and damage my ability to pray but most of all my being can be dominated by the unseen power brought about by the events of this world.

I have to believe that "All Scripture is breathed out by God" and that when I weaken in the fight against this world and all its delights the angel of the Lord will lift me up as did Aaron and Hur hold up the arms of Moses. 

Scripture is the primary source of the power we call "Grace" and there is only "Good" in it. I must never be separated from the history of the Salvation event inaugurated in Genesis and rounded off by St John's revelation.

The power of this world's Anti-Christ has many sources. I can at this moment instantly "click" my way into hours, days and lifetimes of attention-grasping fact and fiction that spits into the face of our Crucified Saviour.

I am also aware that seemingly innocent pass-times can be stronger than my best intentions. Can it be doing God's will that I am totally miserable for days when my football team suffers a defeat?

Today I pray that I may digest Paul's words to Timothy and that nothing disturbs me from the complete peace  safety and righteousness found in the Church of Love, the New Holy Family;

"Woman behold your son, Son behold your mother."

 17/10/2025

St Ignatius of Antioch

When I have completed thoughts inspired by this morning's Ferial Mass readings, I will have to look up what I remember about today's saint. That he complained about his guards on his journey to death in Rome as "panthers" and actively was welcoming this journey to martyrdom sticks in my mind but I cannot remember the details.

In the first reading, St Paul continues to emphasise that it is faith, pure belief in God, that will bring us to the righteousness that is the target we have to aim for in our lives lived out in this world. Our faith can be witnessed by our deeds that conform to the Will of God but the institutional worldly deed that is following the "Law" as it had become by the time of the Incarnation had lost the sincerity that empowered it to achieve personal righteousness for its followers.

There was a reason that the Incarnation happened when it did.

Our God respects our freedom and completed his revelations by becoming man and experiencing for himself the limitations of the human mind, body and soul in dutifully accepting a life completed by death with the self-willed refusal of sin that is both our worldly example and source of supernatural grace.

Even three hundred years after the Resurrection Christian Martyrs were still willing to make the same absolute commitment to Faith in IAMFATHERSONHOLYSPIRIT that was Jesus' faith in his Father and ours. St Paul makes his first appearance in Scriptures as a participant in the "Joint Venture" that was the murder of the first martyr. 

I am pretty sure that St Ignatius welcomed his own death and I guess that I too will die sooner than later. I am sure, however, that Jesus tells all of us who read this morning's Gospel that there is nothing to be feared about death if we appeal for the free gift that he created 2000 years ago in worldly time on the hill outside the city walls in yet still painfilled Palestine.

The ultimate horror of that death becomes the Glory of Grace that is the Resurrection and available to all who allow themselves to experience Faith that is the Church of Love, the New Holy Family established at that moment in the real-time of this world when Jesus, dying God and man, declared

"Woman behold your Son. Son behold your mother"

 16/10/2025

In today's first reading we are listening to the totality of IAMIAM as experienced by the Old Testament confronted by the Resurrection. St Paul is a living Jew who is part of the human generation that not only knew the Law as revealed through Prophets but lived and had shared the same material Universe at the same time as the Incarnation.

The Law had been for Paul and the actual friends and enemies of Jesus as necessary for their lives as the air that they breathed and the food that they ate. The Lawyers whom Jesus challenges  in this morning's Gospel have so intellectualised the events of the past in "Scriptures" that even today Jews continue to "boast" about God as they live lives that continue the face to face defiance of IAMFATHERSONHOLYSPIRIT many of them showed to Jesus and which resulted in the Crucifixion.

The life, death and resurrection of Jesus is not about creating texts for us to study and discuss. The Way, Truth and Life does not lead to anything that is temporal. How could any one add to the "Greater Glory of God"? The Resurrection completes the revelation that the essence of my being is timeless spirit which has been created to live in material time by freely conforming to the revelations made to past generations and by being ready to receive those made to each of us.

Our recognition of the material universe depends entirely on the evidence provided by our senses but our eternal lives can only be recognised by Faith in the revelation of Love completed by Jesus and the works that this Faith inspires from us during our limited lifetimes.

 14/10/2025

Tuesday Week 28 Ordinary Time

How could it ever be possible that Paul would ever be "ashamed" of the "Gospel" revealed to the world by the Incarnation, Jesus, Son of God and Son of Mary?

I have throughout my lifetime sometimes felt embarrassed by the outward signs of my religion and  recently been truly ashamed by the manifest failings of the "Institutional Church", but the only shame that I can associate with the Word of God comes about from my personal failure to live unwaveringly the Way, the Truth and the Life revealed for all peoples and all times in the Holy Land engraced in time and place by the presence of IAMFATHERSONHOLYSPIRIT two thousand years ago.

Paul, however, was a Pharisee who could have known or been known to those condemned by Jesus in this morning's Gospel reading. He had been personally called directly by the Resurrection and knew that "everything within him had been cleansed" for he had let go of all that  had not come from God which defined him as "Paul"  and he thus became an example of how to live a life of faith by clinging onto the Resurrection throughout his life and preaching this up to the very moment of his death.

I know that there is nothing about me that is not known to IAMFATHERSONHOLYSPIRIT and pray that I too may be an acceptable offering, a libation, as was Paul, for I am a sinner who can be cleansed only by Mercy to finally become at home within the New Holy Family, preached by Paul as the "Body of Christ", the Church of Love that will stand until the end of time.