30/04/2025

Jesus in his lifetime did not ignore any of the people living in Palestine. 

Although his most intimate friends, however, were the twelve Apostles , who I am always pleased to remember were "ordinary" men and in no way "the learned and clever", "the great and good" of  modern society, he also had time for the non-Jews, Greeks, Romans and Samaritans, and also "the learned and clever".

Today's Gospel is Jesus' private interview with Nicodemus before the Passion and Resurrection. His words then were for all time and sum up the intentions of IAMFATHERSONHOLYSPIRIT revealed in the incarnation.

Jesus is the Love that is Divine Being sitting face to face with the Pharisee and telling him that mankind has to believe that He is the Son of God if it is fulfill the will of the Father.( I think that John must also have been present. Did he take notes.?)

In the first reading St Luke reports one of the many incidents that happened in Jerusalem after the Resurrection. The infant Church is already being persecuted and facing up to the unbelieving world. 

The Truth of the Love of God is so much easier when thought of as intangible belief rather than as a daily struggle to "Love the Lord your God, with all your heart and with all your soul, and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbour as your self."

Love is not just a word or warmth in the heart. It is not the self satisfaction of well-accomplished tasks. It is the way, the truth and the life lived only for us by Jesus.  It is any life that strives to  heed the word of the Lord and despises life in the Darkness that is our alternative to Love, the world without IAMFATHERSONHOLYSPIRIT but full of transient pleasures and delights that are our constant and certainly not irresistible temptations out of which only trust in Our Father can lead us.

 29/04/2025

In the first letter attributed to St. John can be found a summary of the spiritual growth of one who had literally lived the Gospels and who was one of the founding fathers of Christianity but probably knew himself to be as one of the Jews still following the Law of Moses.

Today we read and try to open our ears to the far from simple analogy that God is light. He does not worship the sun as the source of light but points us to the intangible substance that is essential for our lives on earth to continue. He develops the depth of the analogy by telling all believers that we are all in a fellowship, a communion of saints when we accept the truth that can only be seen in the Light.

The Light of IAMFATHERHOLYSPIRIT has been generated by the final sacrifice of the Old Testament which is the first and only sacrifice of the New. The blood of his friend which he had seen poured out on Calvary was for the whole world an everlasting promise that when we acknowledge our own personal sinfulness the price of our ransom has already been paid.

St John was found by Jesus when he was mending his nets by the shore in Galilee . There were thousands of well-educated, cultured and sincere holy men of God in the Palestine of the first century but Jesus chose simple, rough and tough working men to be the first recipients of his "Good News".

My hope is that the grace that happened for them can also be acquired by me and that I can truly find the rest that is the light yoke and easy burden of the sinless life promised to all of us by Jesus.

 28/04/2025

In this morning's first reading St John is entranced that some of his "Church", the flock that he has guided into holiness have remained faithful even to their deaths. He hears the "voice" of God confirming that IAMFATHERSONHOLYSPIRIT knows that for a human "holiness" is not an automatic state of being and celebrated when it is achieved in the  Kingdom of Heaven for it is in total accord with God's purpose and an individual's participation in the victory that is the unimaginable pain of Calvary.

The psalm which would have been known and often sung in the synagogue by Jesus and his Apostles is the total joy of the people of God when they returned from the Babylonian exile to the Holy Land.

I always have to laugh in amazement at the realistic power of St Paul. He could easily be seen as an egotistical narcissist as he writes about his missionary experiences and achievements. What he does do in his "my" sentences, however, is present himself as a true example of what Jesus tells us all that we should expect in this life  if we are sincere in our commitment to Him.

I know that I have had an easy life in comparison to the experience of millions of others. I cannot say that I have been hated by anyone because of my Christian principles. I have been disliked by many for my character defects, but never hated for my principles. 

Maybe that is not true for one of the reasons that I had to begin this record of personal prayer is that I was denounced in public from the pulpit and responded in kind as it was made clear that I was not to be welcomed in that House of God.

 27/04/2025

Low Sunday

I don't think that it is a good idea to turn away from anything in scripture that I don't quite understand. The reality that was Incarnate Son on Earth  bequeathed to us a rational faith that is still revealed to us by IAMFATHERSONHOLYSPIRIT in the words of Scripture that we accept as Truth that comes from God.

Each one of us has to have our "eyes of Faith" opened by an act of free choice. Many of us  are surrounded by much that is attractive in our lives. We can even take pleasure in ourselves and become self-enamoured, even besotted with our own being to the extent that it becomes easier for us to ignore God rather than strive to do his will.

Jesus lived his human life surrounded by people who knew themselves to be special. They were the only Nation that had a Temple dedicated to IAMIAM, the only God, who each morning called only them to listen to him. Jesus, however, during his human lifetime lived each moment in love of the Father and for the benefit of each one of us who can still call to him.

In this morning's readings I was at a loss to understand who is meant by "none of the rest" as in "none of the rest dared to join them but the people held them in high esteem" but much more so than this lack of understanding I am faced today with St. John's vision of Eternity.

Part of me tells me that I cannot  rise to the mystical heights displayed to e.g. Ezekiel and Daniel in the Old Testament and also e.g. Catherine of Sienna and Julian of Norwich in the time of the Church. I know this but also know that I cannot dismiss them as "beyond me" and thus refuse to accept what is part of the Revelation of Love made by the Father, through the blood of the final Sacrifice, Son on Calvary, and supported by the Ever Present Being, Holy Spirit.

With God it really is "All or Nothing".

 26/04/2025

The Pope whose funeral takes place today was castigated by many for his remarks that were randomly reported by hovering journalists. One of them which caught my attention and opened the mind of the seventy something man that I was then, amounted to "Nobody witnessed the resurrection but it was and still is proclaimed".

In fact this was a statement of the facts of the event which I thought I already knew. However, each of the Evangelists narrate this conclusion of the bodily active life of our Incarnate Son of IAMFATHERSONHOLYSPIRIT in a different way. They all remember with differences of detail but all really do proclaim, they shout out for all the Temple to hear that True Man lives in the perfect human image and likeness, the first fruits of the new harvest that is still being nurtured two thousand years later.

Some time ago when I first became aware of the really rotten state of some clergy and tried to accommodate my hope-filled belief in the sacraments into our Church's insistence that Christ in Heaven does the deed that changes the substance of bread and wine and that the holiness or otherwise of the celebrant does not matter, I read through a "Dictionary of Popes" and their edicts as recorded in Denziger. 

I know that this only skimmed the thinnest of Historical Surfaces but my life is centered in the texts of the New Testament and God did make his Final Revelation to "uneducated common" fishermen and their families. I was shocked by how soon the Church founded on Peter had become a wheeler-dealer within the temporal power of the collapsing Western and totally identified with the Eastern, Byzantine, Empire.

I also have tried to understand what it was about the Temple Religion of the Old Testament that it required "so great a saviour". Was it any worse than the so-called Pornocrasy at the end of the first millennium  or at the time of the Crusades, the slaughter of Cathars and Waldensians or the burning of individual heretics.

Today, I also have to ask how it is that a Pope could want to avoid giving an answer offensive to the world of our times by the refusal of responsibility that is "Who am I to judge?" when questioned about fornication which has always been condemned as sinful by Our Father.

I can only judge my own deeds by the light revealed in the Scriptures, Old and New and explained by some of the "Learned and Clever" who are more attached to God than to their own egos.

It is at the moment of my death that I will know how I have conformed myself to the will of God and welcomed  the Love that was poured out for the sanctification of the whole world and located in "I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven"; "On this rock I will build my church", " Whatsoever you bind on Earth will be bound also in heaven" "Whose sins thou wilt forgive are forgiven also in heaven", "My kingdom is not of this world", "Woman behold your son, son behold your mother." "I will be with you until the end of time."

It is possible to reflect on and discuss the meanings of Jesus' words but Cross, Resurrection and Holy Spirit are facts of history that tower above all other historical events much more even than do the World's Skyscrapers over the war rubble of Gaza, Yemen and Kiev or do the natural physical features of our globe over the total man-built environment.

 25/04/2025

Friday after Easter.

I know God as IAMFATHERSONHOLYSPIRIT as it is as three persons that he completed his revelation of himself. The first existent human being Adam/Eve knew themselves as individuals. They knew an other than themselves and a complement to each other. They were male and female persons. They knew that the "garden" was the place where they had become the being that they were and that there was another being that was not them. God spoke to them and they knew that he was The Creator.

As an individual person I too know that in this damaged world I am a being created by Our Father and that I am a being free to accept the record of God's dealings with his people or dismiss it and so become at the moment of death aghast that I too have lost the immortality of mankind that was God's intention for us from the beginning. 

Our Father must have intended that man in the sinless garden would become something much more wonderful than I am. True man Jesus lived a life of perfect Love in this world. His miracles are such a wonderful manipulation of matter that we attribute them to God. No-one can say for certain that they were not the work of the sinless perfection of humanity that would have been Adam/Eve if they had not sinned.

The New Church both of Institution and of Love are standing on trial today in the Temple, face to face with leaders of the Chosen People just as Jesus had been. John and Peter,  humble fishermen of Galilee confront the Temple Hierarchy, the Chief Priests, who guided their nation on the path to righteousness, and are not abashed. 

These Priests were the ones who had pleaded with Pilate to kill Jesus. They were the ones who had concocted the story that is still used to deny the Resurrection but they do not even try to deny the reality of the cure of the cripple at the Beautiful Gate; they too knew that it had really happened. They do, however, continue to try to silence the "Word of God".

I pray that I may become as full in faith as is Peter who after all his weaknesses can proclaim in full view of all the Chosen People and their leaders.

This Jesus is the stone rejected by you the builders

which has become the cornerstone.

And there is salvation in no one else,

For there is no other name under heaven given among men or women

By which we must be saved.

 24/04/2025

We have to look to the first preaching of the Apostles to conform our faith to what they had learned during the time that they had accompanied Jesus on his mission to redirect the steps of the first "Friends of God" back onto the way, the truth and life.

Jesus message is in its core  simple "The kingdom of God is near to us". His own people, however, did not accept that he was speaking about himself. Neither did his followers, however, until the Resurrection became the clear light of Truth and the purpose of the Temple and the Covenants could be at last understood.

In those days the Apostles were first interpreting their own experience. They were of Abraham's nation, they were the "Chosen People". Their religious feelings had not only been nurtured by Jesus but their Faith was entirely the same as that of "The men of Israel" whom Peter addressed in the Acts read at mass this morning.

Many, many generations have followed on from "those days" in the lives of the Apostles. In our lifetimes they are always "These days" as they were for  Peter, everything he had learned from the Lord was fresh in his mind and he continued to be shocked as he learnt the full extent of the Jesus' reformation of the "Law of Moses".

Each new generation of mankind has to face the new situation into which each of us is born. We must not, however, trust the norms we receive as birthright. "Everybody does it " does not excuse any form of sin. While we are alive we have to live within the moral framework that is recorded in the  Bible. We have to accept Jesus and the Apostles as our contemporaries and live as they did lives of thankful freedom directed always towards Our Father for whom there is no other time than "Now".