07/12/2025

Second Sunday of Avent

St Paul is the first "Christian" who faces up to the divide that separates himself and the rest of the "brood of vipers" from the Gentiles whom Jesus unites in the historical events of the Incarnation.

Matthew quotes the words of John the Baptizer who, in no uncertain terms, challenges the hypocrisy of the Temple/ Synagogue religion of his day even before Jesus becomes its Saving Victim.

During our lifetimes we too have to challenge  the assumptions that constitute our providential economic and moral environments. St Paul was first blasted into Faith and then confirmed it by his acceptance of grace to avoid sin but he remains a Jew which means that he is one of those first chosen by God's direct guidance to know, love and serve in this world. 

The Resurrection, however, has taught him that "IAMIAM" is not to be possessed and limited by birthright but now self-revealed as IAMFATHERSONHOLYSPIRIT Jesus brings the possibility of salvation to each individual soul regardless of the circumstances of birth.

It is impossible for any of us to know why it was that God appeared in time when and where he did.

Five hundred years ago Blaise Pascal was able to find in the continuing Jewishness of the Jews of his generation a proof that confirmed his belief in IAMFATHERSONHOLYSPIRIT and we too have to continue to listen to St Paul and the other Jews including Jesus who proclaimed the final revelation that is the Resurrection.

The Scriptures were written for our instruction. Jesus submitted to the Law of Moses and accepted the tortures  perpetrated by his own people so that the Gentiles can know that the Scriptures are the TRUTH that comes from our ever-truthful God.

The Jewishness of the Jews of our generation is exhibited in the State of Israel and has largely lost the "Godliness" of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and has never accepted that of Jesus. The wonder of their being without God is a truly frightening and inhuman thing but no more so than kingdom of this world from which the Church founded on St Peter has still made no serious effort to disentangled itself.

In the Garden, God taught his beloved Adam and Eve that they were free to return to him the Love with which they were created. It is that first refusal that God allows each individual to make for himself that brings sin into the world.

It is my own choice to sit here getting, colder and colder trying to respond to the WORD this Second Sunday of Advent 2025 for I too am a free being and only ever become sinful because I choose to ignore the teaching of Scripture and the Love of the New Holy Family which brings the Grace of the Crucifixion into my heart.

May the Lord help me to know love and serve ! Amen

 06/12/2025

I know that I am but one of billions of human beings who have been and are aware of the reality of their own being but incapable of holding onto the insight that is the awareness of the BEING of "Our "Father".

My mind has developed from my experience of living in time and the teaching of the scriptures a coherent narrative to which I try to bear witness in these my responses to WORD contained in the liturgy of the worshipping community founded on St. Peter.

We all are free beings who to various degrees have been trapped in the circumstances of the reality of time and place into which we have been born. The first and last limit common to all of is  that of our bodies. None of us can escape this reality. The dying and the new-born are equally helpless in that neither can refuse to accept what is happening to them.

My soul experiences the bodily life that is " of this world" together with the self-awareness that is "image and likeness" of  "Our Father" who is unseen, self-revealing eternal life, IAMFATHERSONHOLYSPIRIT.

In the first reading Isaiah is sure that it is God who "inflicts the blow" which  breaks his people. 

The Incarnation, however, reveals that we cannot imagine how great is the Creating Love that chose to create mankind in his own image and likeness for the petty disobedience of Adam and Eve breaks human perfection and requires Calvary, the limitless pain of God for it to become capable of rectification.

As we grow and decline towards our final ends we all can choose how to live in whatever circumstances in which we find ourselves but there is always guidance to show us the light of ETERNAL TRUTH. 

It was individual human beings  who cooperated to construct and make use of the ovens of all the Death Camps that disfigured "Christian" Europe during the first four years of my life, just as the "Manifest Destiny" of the "Land of the Free" was achieved by the human "ethnic cleansing" of a whole "New World".

The Incarnation, Jesus, teaches us that it is not Our Father who inflicts suffering on mankind but as he stretches out his arms he accepts the incredible pain of the nails which each one of us hammers into him with  Infinite Mercy that prays for the forgiveness of the Father to be given to us for we can never truly know what harm is done by sin for even when we are aware of God for "there is always something greater here".

 05/12/2025

Friday Week 1 Advent

"Our Father who art in heaven" knows that I have spent much of my lifetime in sinfulness.

In the passage from Isaiah read at this morning's mass, the prophet responds to the WORD, as he receives it in the real-time of his day. The WORD is Eternal Truth that has always intimately known with love each individual soul whose interactions with HIM and with each other become the ever changing "this world" in which Jesus assures us that we cannot find the reality of the eternal kingdom.

Isaiah proclaims that the sufferings of mankind  are inflicted by evil doers who are themselves blind and deaf to the WORD will come to an end when we their children "sanctify my name; sanctify the Holy One of Jacob and stand in awe of the Holy One of God."

In this morning's Gospel the Incarnate Word performs signs to satisfy the Jews who in those days are still the sole recipients of divine revelation, the children of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and who are then  part of the concluding worldly events with which IAMFATHERSONHOLYSPIRIT completes his revelation to all subsequent generations of humanity.

Each one of us is responsible for living our individual lives in obedience to the "Ten Commandments". Adam and Eve introduced Evil into the Garden and ever since then IAMFATHERSONHOLYSPIRIT, Our Father, has told us that we have to choose for the entirety of our lives to return his LOVE by free obedience to his will.

Every evil, individual or cumulative act that is happening at this moment is the result of human choice. We are defying God in our sinfulness even though we know that the wages of sin are the second death by which we condemn ourselves to unimaginable torments.

The Crucifixion of Jesus is the Mercy of God Incarnate. The Nativity for which we are now preparing happened in real-time 2000 years ago, was necessary for the vastness of the human sin of Adam could only become capable of atonement by the "impossible pain" of God suffered in the real-time of human history.

Jesus, himself, prayed the Psalms not only with his disciples but also with Scribes and Pharisees whom he met on many occasions in the Temple and Synagogue. Today I am praying with the psalmist knowing that my sins can be forgiven and that I can "dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life" for Jesus himself promised that the Church he founded on Peter was also the Eternal Love of the New Holy Family, Himself, Mary and John, the replica of the Holy Family he completed by his birth in the stable at Bethlehem.

 04/12/2025

Thursday Week 1 Advent

As I begin my day with thoughts of prayer, I am a totally blank screen both before my eyes and behind the bone of the skull that encloses the brain within which these thoughts have their beginning.

Thinking about prayer, however, is not prayer. 

I believe that making the conscious effort to respond to WORD as revealed in the Scriptures is the utmost  human beings can do to prepare themselves for the final revelation that our deaths bring to each one of us.

Isaiah knows that all prayer has its origin in WORD who is Christ the Lord in whom "we have to trust for ever". Christ is himself the rock that is the foundation we all have to "put on", in the words of St Paul,  to become the Church where the New Holy Family can flourish in every generation after "Woman behold your son, son behold your mother" announces the birth of  the Church of Love.

Today Jesus warns his disciples, and each one of us who is now living, that recognising him for what he is, "Lord of All," is only the beginning of the way to the kingdom. 

He also warns me directly that even though I am pleased with these words that are still coming out of my finger tips and think that I am praying, if I do not do as he does, proving it by my love of neighbour, and love of IAMFATHERSONHOLYSPIRIT then I am surely the foolish man for whom the sand of his own being can never become a replacement for the Rock of God.

Dear Lord help me to truly respond to the Love with which you reach out to the whole world. Help me to know that the spittle of the bystanders and their jeers, the nails driven through your hands, the spear thrust into your side are still a reality in your eternity and that you still undergo them as a result of my sins the weight of which you know that I have never truly understood. As we prepare with Mary for your Nativity help us to know, love and serve as did she in the Holy Family and still does in the Church of Love, the New Holy Family that you became man in order to create. Amen

 03/12/2025

Wednesday First week of Advent

One of the reasons that I took my personal decision not to have a funeral ceremony at the end of my life was my experience of attending many at which even the words of "The Lord's Prayer" were unknown to most of the congregation.

It was not always so for there was a time at the beginning of my life when the words of today's psalm " The Lord is my Shepherd" were as familiar as the national anthem to the people of the UK.

The Christianity of the first half of the twentieth century in England was, however, a faith that had been fractured for centuries and was dominated by our personal/familial allegiance to the "Faith of our Fathers" which we all knew to be the "One true Faith" and we had been for centuries ready to fight to prove it.

T.S. Elliot was certainly not applying his " Not with a bang but whimper" to the Christianity he was to personally embrace two years after responding to the emptiness of life without the support of God in his "The Hollow Men", but one hundred years later it is as true for the demise of God in our lives as the words with which Jesus predicted his creation of the Church "Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church".

Today I know that I am not present within a physical community dedicated to living according to the will of IAMFATHERSONHOLYSPIRIT. I am the only  human being present at this keyboard and thus "alone" but by striving to be true to her created image and likeness, my soul in reaching out to Our Father joins the New Holy Family, the Church of Love the truly "natural" home for my being that is Godlike Spirit.

In the Gospel today Jesus provides his chosen people with yet another sign. Nothing is impossible to God. When we are with God there is always "something greater here" for instructing his disciples and feeding their followers on the mountain is total, eternity, power, beauty, truth, and love incarnate in the son of Mary.

God's self-abasement in the stable may whimper, in the garden his humanity pleads and remains steadfast but on the cross he suffers, bleeds and dies to bring  to conclusion the loving revelation of His will to give us the capacity to become part of His Love.

 

 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.