2/12/2025

Tuesday Week 2 Advent

Yesterday the Gospel Reading taken from St Matthew emphasised that the authority of Jesus was first recognised by a Gentile, a Roman pagan who made an analogy with his own military rank.

It is true, however, that the WORD, is first revealed to the Jews of the Old Testament . 

In today's reading from the New Testament, Luke, Jesus rejoices, he is the Holy Spirit, thanking the Father for revealing IAMFATHERSONHOLYSPIRIT as God to be accepted without quibble by the  innocence of the "Abba" with which he raises his human mind and soul to God,

The Fathers of  Resurrection Faith proclaimed by the Apostles had soon found in the Old Testament the premonitions that the Prophets had had about how IAMIAM would bring "Adam" back to the perfection he had lost in the Garden.

Today we are treated to the exuberant lyrical anticipatory joy of Isaiah that is  supported by the psalm. 

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb.

and the leopard lie down with the young goat

and the calf and the lion and fattened calf together;

and a little child shall lead them.

These are beautiful images of peace but we know that they are not images of reality for the "little child", whose birth we are now awaiting, will lead us by first accepting the unimaginable pain of our sins and making it crystal clear that he is the way, truth and life that we are to embrace if we are going to truly know, love and serve.

We must join with him in willingly carrying our cross on our way, never seeking to avoid the stark reality, the truth of death, and thus create a unique life that is a reflection of the Love that has created us to become able to share with all beings  the limitless expanse of Love that also burst out of human hearts that are true.

 01/12/2025

Monday Week 1 of Advent

Yesterday my total conviction, at long last, that all prayer, awareness and thinking about God should, if it is to accept the guidance of SON, Jesus of Nazareth, become the child-like loving trust that he displayed in his "Daddy".

I have often struggled with how to "love" God with my human heart. For decades of my life I have listened to Paul "Faith, Hope but above all Charity" but there has never been that jump, the skip of joy in my heart, that is characteristic of my human love when I try to raise my mind and heart to "Our Father".

The stark command "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with thy whole heart and mind" has never been absent from my awareness of being but has never inspired the certainty that is the  warmth of the affection that is my response when meeting family, friends and especially dogs.

IAMFATHERSONHOLYSPIRIT creates out of LOVE. Each creature, molecule, atom, particle of matter is a product of his LOVE. It is the boundless Joy which is his whole being.

I think that the whole point of his Incarnation is for us to be able to accept that we can do no more with our lives than respond to his Joy in Being, i.e. our lives, His Creation with the same Joy that is his Love living in our hearts. 

We must not go after things that are too great. St Francis knew that our "sentimental" love of the babe in the crib was a reflection of the vastness beyond all understanding of  IAMFTHERSONHOLYSPIRIT and that our love of inferior creatures, animals,  was indirect love of their creator.

As I join the Church in preparation for the Nativity of Our Lord I hope that I can become  satisfied that there is nothing "mere" about the sentimentality of my love and joy at Christmastide, and  that it is the same LOVE with which we love our earthly fathers, families and friends that God, the source of all Good, requires us to return to him for that is the limit of our human nature we can do no more than be true to our humanity.

My own dad often used to say "The more I think of human nature the more I love my dog" I don't know whom he was quoting but I do know what he meant.

 30/11/2025

Sunday Week 1 Advent

There must have been millions of people like me who have come to the end of their lives knowing that they are still searching for the peace of mind that no matter how they try still remains out of their grasp.

My consciousness is never at rest but is always bombarding itself with memories, imaginings and simultaneously aware of the physical reality of the present moment. 

In my case, at this moment, reality is awareness of the sincerity with which I am trying to draw close to "Our Father" and also aware that it is in my little "i" that I can come closest to IAMFATHERSONHOLYSPIRIT and that it is thus that myself can displace my God and become Sin.

Jesus told us that he did not come to bring peace to the world. There was no need for him to bring the "sword of war" mankind had already done that. What was the "sword" that he did bring? It was also light, a sheer all penetrating, invisible, laser direct from Love, IAMFATHERSONHOLYSPIRIT, into the insignificance, but thus "deified", of each human soul, "iam". 

Each one of us has to grasp the Sword that is our consciousness of being and guided by the scriptures live the life that is and comes from Jesus, which is also the way and the truth. The natural reality for our souls is the Love that knows each one of us. God is total reality way beyond anything that has or has ever had material existence

Jesus taught us that "Our Father" is not a Supreme Supernatural Being, an abstract idea completely beyond human intelligence, but that he is "Abba", "Daddy" and it is thus that he has to be loved and trusted by his little children.

Today we, this eightieth Jesus Generation are again beginning the preparation that was the ninth month of Mary's pregnancy. It is only mothers who can truly know the physical presence and growth of another being within their own bodies. 

Mary had fully accepted God's choice of her to begin the concluding narrative of his assurance that he and his love for us are complete reality and thirty three later she was also to accept the role of  Mother of all mankind.

"Woman behold your son, son behold your mother"

Dear Lord, help me today to avoid all that does not conform to your will and thus remain ready for your personal call to me or your promised return to this world. May my prayers join those of Mary and all the saints that the sins of mankind living and dead be wiped out and that your Mercy soon become All in All.

 29/11/2025

Saturday Week 34 Ordinary Time

Today Jesus gives a direct warning to his disciples about letting ourselves become held in the embrace of bodily dissipation, deluded by the confusion of drunkenness or enslaved by the material cares of this world.

At that time his disciples were mostly from among the "poor" of Israel although some of the "high and mighty", "rich and powerful" and "learned and clever" were also attracted by his "signs" and stayed to be captivated by his "wisdom". All of this social mixture of followers, however, were expecting him to deliver some sort of New Order  from the political status quo that was the "Pax Roma" in which they reluctantly lived in those days.

Jesus, however, was calling all of the individual souls alive then and now to become holy because he is holy. This is the only way that our Holy Mother the Church could have become what Our Lord had intended when he stated his intention to found her on Peter, at the Gentile shrine of Pan in Northern Galilee.

Today I know that "dissipation" is not confined to the public lives of the "rich and famous". 

It was the scandal of child abuse that first opened my eyes to the lack of integrity in the heart of the Church and that this dishonesty is not, in fact, a new phenomenon but has existed for centuries. I have also always known how "lust" can so easily rule my every waking moment. Personal poverty is not a guarantor of freedom from sin.

Today I also know that 40 years ago I was dragged into the clarity of sobriety by the Love of God working through the shared experience, strength and hopes of the caring strangers of AA and become thus able to strive to respond to Jesus' call to become holy.

But at this very moment, I am still entangled in the things of this world. I am enraged by the failures of the football team that I support. Captivated by the posturings of political commentators and unbelievably devasted by bureaucratic failures that have little importance except in my mind.

When we first became the "Jesus Generation" many of us were sure that the resurrected physical body of Christ, Jesus of Nazareth would soon return from the unseen spiritual heaven of the Father to rule "an everlasting kingdom where all dominions would serve and obey him". Until that time we would be supported by the Paraclete.

Two thousand generations later, we are still the "Jesus Generation",  and nothing has changed. St Paul and the other Apostles and Evangelists formulated Resurrection Faith and John and Mary knew then that it was in mutual care for each other that the will to love of the Father was manifest. 

Peter's Church soon began to ignore "My kingdom is not of this world" and the holiness that can be found within it is the result of individual spiritual effort and adherence to John and Mary's Spiritual Church of Love, "Woman behold your Son, Son behold your mother" rather than to the Institution that was long ago captured  and still remains within the "this" worldliness that is the emptiness of Mammon.

 26/11/2025

Thursday Week 34 Ordinary Time

The writer/writers of the Book of Daniel were singing to the Lord. Their Canticle has been part of the Christian Liturgy for centuries but the writers of Daniel knew that they were not compiling a historical record of events that had truly happened during the reign of Darius. 

Sometimes I too feel an upwelling of feeling that I can only call Joy but it is really something that is way beyond my ability to give words to and can only find its voice in the ancient, psalms and hymns recorded in Scripture.

"Blessed be God for ever".

The Evangelists from whose memories and close associations with Our Lord and/or his Apostles was composed the Gospels were trying to present a factual account of the human life lived in his own creation by IAMFATHERSONHOLYSPIRIT in the person of Son, by the Eternal Resurrection Christ the Lord.

We, therefore, have to believe all that is recorded in the Bible. By that I mean that I cannot pick and choose. I have to accept with equal force "I am gentle and humble of  heart and my yoke is easy" and "I come not to bring peace but the sword". The Parable of the Minas and the Good Samaritan are both teachings of the Lord.

Today in the Gospel we read a statement made by Jesus about the future of Jerusalem, the Liturgical Heart of his Chosen People. It is a prophecy which St Luke was one of the many disciples to see fulfilled in their lifetimes.

I have lived during equally devasting times. Christian civilisation was unable to resist the evil that had arisen in its heart and the industrialised slaughter of Non-Europeans happened within the nations of the somewhat Christian but now Enlightened, in human eyes, to Godlessness, Gentiles.

Two thousand years after the words spoken in today's Gospel and after the Resurrection of Jesus completes God's revelation, mankind is still not listening to "Our Father" and Jerusalem is again "trampled underfoot" but not by Gentiles.

The Jews who again control Jerusalem have still not got beyond the strictures of personal delight in their own beings that Jesus condemned in them. 

The Church founded on St Peter has never fully grasped that the words of the Lord which she studies every day do, in fact, mean what they say. 

How could the Byzantine Emperors claim to rule Church and State as would have Christ? How could Pope after Pope wear  a triple crown in the full knowledge of Jesus' declaration before Pilate? How could Reformers claim that material worldly success was proof of God's favour.

I do not know what Jesus means by the "Age of the Gentiles" but it must include these days when mankind, Jew and Gentile, refuses to listen for the Word of God and tells us by their deeds that it is Mammon that is "All in All". 

They are but a repetition of all that has ever been created  by Godless humanity  and desperately require the return of Our Saviour for even though we have often abandoned Our Father he has never abandoned us. 

Since the return of Jesus to His and Our Father, every generation has been able and we too still can  choose to live in the Church of Love that has never been excluded from the Church founded on St Peter but has always existed for those with Resurrection Faith  in the words spoken to Mary and John, by her dying son.

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

.

 25/11/2025

Yesterday on TV I watched some very intelligent people mocking other people, who were not present to defend themselves, for the same weakness of the humanity which they themselves were displaying by their very mockery.

No living human should be sure that the material reality in which we all live is absolutely the  limits of being. Even though the secrets of the material world are today made manifest by science it is plain stupidity to deny that at the moment of death even though it seems that the "bodily time" of each one of us ends no-one can be certain until that moment arrives for him or her.

"Feet of Clay" tells us all that we need to know about our human kingdoms, knowledge, wealth and power. The writers of Daniel were not the only humans to know this. But there is something greater than Daniel, Plato, Buddha, Confucius or even Moses here with us even now.

During his life on earth the Son of God confronted the "learned and the clever" but he never mocked them. He himself was mocked on the Cross. They spat at him but he bled for them, They derided him but he loved them. The events of two thousand years ago are still being repeated as I write this.

I have always known that I am a sinful being but I have to thank God that I have not become my own idol. My "Feet of Clay" is not sinfulness but the actual "image and likeness" which has to always know that "There is something greater here", but too often fails.

" The greater" is not an unknown "Other" but the eternal presence of IAMFATHERSONHOLYSPIRIT who saves us from the unimaginable pain of knowing lovelessness  by his revelation of TOTALLOVE. I hope and pray that there is no-one who has ever lived who has not known at least a few seconds of either being loved or of loving another.

"Faith in the love that lives in the heart" is the only proof that I can have of my belief that this life in time is not the totality of my being. In today's Gospel Jesus is preparing his disciples for the event that will change the Created Universe for ever. He promises that for them and for us, their future, there is nothing to fear. "You will be hated by all for my name's sake. But not a hair of your head will perish"

Today he promises but soon after he was to confirm by the words of eternal love uttered in real-time using his dying breath. "Woman behold your Son. Son behold your Mother" shortly followed by "It is finished" thus finalizing the Revelation that we have still never lived up to.

It is only by each one choosing to live in the gift of Calvary, New Holy Family , the Body of Christ, the Church of Love that we can make a world that is as it was created to be by Our Father, and thus a World that is able to welcome the Second Coming of Christ our Saviour.

Maranatha Lord. Come Lord Jesus. Please come soon. Amen

 25/11/2025

Tuesday Week 34 Ordinary Time

Today I am still troubled. 

I am, however, not giving up on the the daily effort that is required to bring all the elements that constitute the "Idol" Daniel revealed as the dream of Nebuchadnezzar that I make of and for myself out of the self-centred delusion that is the life of this world, into the never-ending reality of the life of Christ, living in me.

My body, on feet of Babylonian reinforced concrete, iron and clay, is rapidly crumbling but my personal soul, "image and likeness" of Our Father is still striving for the "Heaven" that once truly accepted is the never changing perfection of "seeing IAMFTHERSONHOLYSPIRIT" as he truly is.

"Today I am still troubled" but how troubled must those have been those who stood with Jesus and heard his very words spoken in today's Gospel. Many of them were to be part of the Crucifixion mob and then  overcome by the Resurrection. They were to witness the complete destruction of their Temple and at the same time continued to live personal ordinary lives amidst "wars and tumults", "famines and pestilences".

That first generation of Christians who had known the friends of the Lord became his foundation on the Rock, the solid rock that was the very real human Peter, the early Church but they remained in the purity of heart that can see God for only a short time.

It is no wonder that my "my soul is still troubled" for I am one of yet another generation who have not truly fulfilled the will of God during our time on earth even though we have not only been called and shown how to become the Kingdom that is not of this world, but have also heard the dying Jesus' assurance of our place in his personal New Holy Family, His Mystical Body, the Church of Love.

Will we on earth, who still have Faith, see the Son of Man again in the land of the living? Maranatha Lord. Come Lord, Jesus come for we still are in as desperate need of YOU as we ever were. Amen