The Gospel for this Sunday, the 4th Sunday of Ordinary Time Year B, comes from the first chapter of St Mark and shows us how the public ministry of Jesus began.

Like the scribes Jesus knew the scriptures well. Unlike the scribes, He wasn’t repeating from memory what been drilled into Him by rote. Jesus wasn’t saying Ancient Rabbi 1 interpreted the passage this way, and Ancient Rabbi 2 had a different interpretation, and that the Hillel school preferred Rabbi1 and that the Sadducees preferred Rabbi 2, and the Pharisees were still on the fence as to their preferred interpretation.

That kind of thing has its place in faithfully handing down to the present the collective wisdom and insights of the past.

When Jesus read from the scriptures it was something living, beautiful and fascinating. Mostly when the scribes read from the scriptures it was with the precision of dissecting a much-revered dead animal.

When Jesus sat down to teach from the scripture passage He had just read out loud, He spoke about how God’s love, mercy and wisdom were revealed in that scripture passage. And as Jesus spoke hearts were touched by the power of God’s love.

As a learned Dominican priest once preached, authority is growth power. When authority is activated properly, people have the stability and the security necessary to try the risks that lead to growth. When that doesn’t happen people live in siege and survival mode.

When Jesus taught, hearts started growing in love for God and growing in true knowledge of God. When that happens, hearts and lives change because the desire for more of God gets activated in them, and that desire motivates the changes in life that we recognise as repentance.

Who doesn’t want hearts and minds turning back to God?
The evil one.

Whenever truth gets spoken in love, there is a counter-attack, and it is immediate. Have you ever noticed that the first comment on a well-written opinion piece, especially on religious and pro-life topics, is both nasty and negative? I have. It is actually a kind of badge of honour or extra proof of the truths expounded in the opinion piece. No one bothers to denigrate a less well-written opinion piece.

The evil one has noticed the modus operandi of Jesus, and actively seeks to derail it. Jesus wants relationship not celebrity. The evil one shouts that Jesus is the Holy One of God, something that Jesus wants people to work out for themselves and at their own pace. Immediately Jesus shows He has the power to shut evil down, and to release people from its grip.

What lessons can we take home from this?
That God can stop evil in a moment, with a word, at any time He chooses.
That God does choose when and how to confront evil and dispatch it for maximum impact.
Be prepared for counter-attacks if you are taking ground for God’s kingdom, and take them as signs that you are on the right path and not as cause for discouragement.

So let us renew our trust in Him. Amen.
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#GospelRelection

The Gospel for this Sunday, the 3rd Sunday of Ordinary Time Year B, comes from the first chapter of St Mark and contains an account of how the public ministry of Jesus began.

If it had been up to us, we would have begun preaching and healing straight away after the baptismal experience in the Jordan river. But Jesus has taken extra preparation time, and there must have been a decent time lapse between John’s encounter with Jesus and John getting arrested, which could have been well over 40 days.

The ending of John’s public ministry becomes the signal for Jesus to begin His public ministry.

Where does He choose to begin? Not at the Temple, not in the ancestral lands of Judah and Benjamin, but out in the boondocks of Galilee where there’s a big ethnic mix of Jews, Greeks, Romans and peoples from nearby countries and plenty of descendants of Abraham who don’t know which of the 12 tribes they belong to.

How does He begin? By repeating the message of John to repent and believe, and in the early days without any kind of team at all.

The message of repentance is perennial. If we don’t make some kind of change in our lives, then we aren’t giving God any room to work in us. How can we expect God to do something new in us, if we keep on with the same routine week in and week out? Perhaps it doesn’t have to be a big change, just something small, sustainable and regular, and over time God can lead us step by step into more of Him.

Although sometimes He does ask for the big change.

We know that Peter and Andrew, James and John, had met Jesus before. Last week’s Gospel confirms that. But when the crunch came, and Jesus more or less said, ‘It’s go time, are you coming with me?’, they had to make a complete and total change of lifestyle then and there, or miss out on being disciples of the long awaited Messiah.

Which begs the question, if you had an encounter with Jesus tonight, and He invited you to do something completely different, would you give Him an unequivocal yes, a timid maybe, or a blunt no?

Note that Jesus doesn’t start the next phase of His public ministry with a big team, but with a small team that already has good working relationships with each other.

Jesus seems to be in the business of building solid relationships, not in the business of seeking celebrity. Only solid relationships endure the tests of time and other trials, celebrity is ephemeral.

For those of us seeking likes, comments and shares, this should make us pause and reconsider our priorities, and commit to putting more time and effort into building up the quality of our face to face relationships.

For many of us the ‘kairos’ time has arrived. Many of us have been waiting for a long time for this anointed moment. May God grant us the grace to give Him an unequivocal Yes. Amen.
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#GospelReflection
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The Gospel for this Sunday, the 2nd Sunday of Ordinary Time Year B, comes from the latter part of St John Chapter 1, and contains the account of how the public ministry of Jesus began.

What we don’t have in the Gospel of St John is an account of the temptation in the desert, nor do we have a narrative account of the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan river. What we do have is the witness of St John the Baptist. It is possible that by the time the priests and Levites came to question John that the baptism of Jesus had already happened, and the time in the desert was reaching its conclusion.

It is possible that after the time in the desert Jesus returned to the place where He had that extraordinary experience of God the Father and God the Holy Spirit. Most of us go back to places where we have been touched by God when we are in need or seeking guidance. As we read elsewhere in the Scriptures, river banks were popular places to pray.

We know that John the Baptist recognised Jesus, and publicly pointed Him out. But Jesus did not call attention to Himself, so it might not have been clear which man on the river bank John was pointing to.

It must have felt strange to everyone when no one responded, ‘Yes, I am He’. It must have felt strange to John the Baptist too, considering the massive revelation of God he had experienced when baptising Jesus.

If that wasn’t God’s way, (ie pointing out Jesus to a crowd), what then was God’s way? I think we can safely assume that John the Baptist spent the night in prayer about it.

So the ‘next day’ we see John the Baptist standing with two of his disciples. It was customary for teachers to sit when they were teaching, so he wasn’t teaching. He isn’t baptizing. He isn’t preaching to a crowd. It feels like he is deliberately waiting.

In John the Baptist’s shoes after the declaration of who Jesus was fell flat, I would have paid careful attention to the direction that Jesus went when He left the river bank.

Knowing in such an experiential way who Jesus was, every instinct of John’s must have been to leave everything and follow Jesus. To sit at the feet of the promised and long-awaited Messiah, who wouldn’t want that? But the hints of Jesus coming humbly to be baptized and then not declaring Himself indicated a desire for a much more incognito start than a bold, ‘here I am’. If John, by now a well known and public figure, follows Jesus as a disciple, goodbye incognito start. John also recognises that his vocation to call to repentance, to baptize, and to prepare hearts to receive God’s Messiah is still active and more necessary than ever.

Just imagine what a difficult obedience that must have been for John the Baptist! Every fibre of his being must have wanted to be with Jesus, yet he stayed true to his vocation as the voice in the wilderness.

But if he couldn’t go and be with Jesus and follow Him, he could send his heart instead, by showing Jesus to his two most promising disciples, Andrew and John. It must have been very, very hard to cut these two loose. Yet John the Baptist did it.

So John stood there waiting for Jesus to pass by, deliberately waiting with his two best disciples. We are told that John the Baptist stared hard at Jesus. He needed to make sure that it was really Jesus, but also more-than-maybe John needed and wanted to fix the features of Jesus in his mind and memory.

And so it began, this person to person domino effect of meeting Jesus, being changed by Him, and dragging your nearest and dearest to meet Him too.

God’s way is definitely not the way we would do it. We’d get mega-phones and horse-floats and big media releases. God does it person to person, and we know it works.

God’s timing isn’t like ours either. We’d be in a frenzy of getting as many crowds together as possible. Jesus lingers on a river bank in prayer, and has a leisurely late afternoon and evening getting to know two new friends. God isn’t in a hurry, and yet it all works out.

Here we have three major challenges:
The first one is that of being obedient even when it costs us dearly.
The second one, and maybe the more difficult one in our days, is trusting in God, and trusting in His timing.
The third one asks us whether we value following Jesus as much as St John the Baptist did. He desperately wanted to, but that wasn’t God’s will for him. We are able to follow Jesus if we want to; are we taking up that opportunity with gusto?
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#GospelReflection

As followers of Jesus, the Way, the Truth and the Life, it is important that we stand up for the Truth when deception is rife. We believe, that however painful it is, 'The Truth will set you free'.

That's one reason why I am posting this information today.

The other reason is that because I am doing my darndest not to use the big social media organisations, the blog becomes the best way to share (word of mouth and email being the other remaining ways left).

So here are the trilogy of reports into the 3 Nov 2020 Presidential Election in the USA prepared by Dr Peter Navarro. They are known colloquially as the Navarro reports.

The website contains all three reports:
navarroreport.com/

But you may like to read them in order...

The first one is 'The Immaculate Deception'
img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/be36dc6d-0df4-4c20-addf-fca72be46150/The%20Immaculate%20Deception%2012.15.20.pdf
Investigating the six key dimensions of electoral irregularities

The second one is 'The Art of the Steal'
img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/be36dc6d-0df4-4c20-addf-fca72be46150/The%20Art%20of%20the%20Steal%201.5.21%20FINAL.pdf
Investigating how it happened, or how it was enabled and permitted to happen

The third one is 'Yes, President Trump won'
img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/be36dc6d-0df4-4c20-addf-fca72be46150/The%20Navarro%20Report%20Volume%20III%20Final%201.13.21-0001.pdf
Tabulating the numbers and kinds of electoral irregularities in each of the contested States, and comparing the total with the margin of 'winning' votes for Joe Biden.

I have read all three reports.
I recommend that you read them too.
I recommend that you share them, and invite others to read them.

As the saying goes, all that is necessary for evil to win is that good people do nothing. Thus, this is my little 'something' towards the cause of good and the cause of truth.

The other little 'something' all of us can do is to pray.

Since it has become clear that this situation is far more than just human beings behaving badly, you might like to use this prayer:

St Michael the Archangel
Defend us in battle
Be our safeguard against all the wickedness and snares of the enemy
May God rebuke him we humbly pray
And do thou, O Prince of the heavenly host
by the power of God
cast into Hell satan and all the evil spirits
who prowl around the world seeking the ruin of souls.
Amen.  
  

Should you have been reading this blog for a while, you will soon see some changes. They result from a general queasiness and from the recent attacks against free speech.

When I began the foray into the wilds of Reddit, I experienced a general queasiness about the dichotomy on one hand of attempting to answer a person’s real questions and on the other hand those contributions becoming part of the product that is Reddit. Answering questions I am OK with, but becoming part of the product I was definitely not OK with. Why I felt this more with Reddit than with the other social media options, I don’t know, but I felt it strongly.

Last week President Trump was removed from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and other social media places. Many of the other people on those sites that I had been tuning into for up to date and reliable information also got shut down. If the duly elected President of the United States of America is denied free speech, then everyone else’s right to free speech just got shot down too, and not by a government, but by a multinational corporation.

So I asked myself if I could in conscience continue to be a partaker in these social media sites, and the answer was No.

As my little protest, I am withdrawing from engaging in them except for the purposes of responding to direct messages and refreshing my memory for the names of the people I want to find on non-censored sites. It is a tiny protest, but I can no longer contribute to the censoring media’s bottom lines.

Therefore I am going to bring what I’d normally do elsewhere onto the blog.

This means you should now see a weekly reflection on the Gospel for the upcoming Sunday, and a few obituaries from time to time.

It also means that I am open to answering r/Catholicism type questions (if you send them to me), and that I might do some blog-posts on perennial questions that Redditors asked.

I imagine that the big social media sites are betting that we are so addicted that we will eventually give in and go back. Yes I am going to miss the international updates, and I am going to miss most of the personalities and the memes that I found funny. But No I am not going back. The importance of free speech as a safeguard against totalitarianism is too great for my resolve to waver.

It will require a bit of creativity to discover how to connect with them in other ways, but it is do-able.
​
May God bless us as we start all over again from scratch on the non-censored social media sites, so that what we collectively build is much better than we ever had before. Amen.

As you may, or may not, be aware, the right to free speech is under serious attack.

The most glaring example of this is President Trump’s accounts on social media and email server being shut down. If the right to free speech is taken away from the duly elected leader of the USA, then no one’s free speech is safe.

It used to be said, ‘I may not like what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’.

Now it is, ‘If I don’t like what you say, I will take it (and you) down’.

There seem to be two ways things can go from here, but they both end up with the same result:

Scenario A, there is some kind of social media blackout between now and inauguration day, and possibly for longer.
Scenario B, proof emerges of social media complicity in false election results, an existing executive order comes into play, and the social media owners and their sites all get taken down (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, SnapChat, WhatsApp etc).
The same result is that the days of social media as we now know them are numbered.

So be prepared.

If there are voices on social media that you trust, then find out if they have a blog or website, and if so, sign up for email notification of new blogs and bookmark those websites.

If not, and you have alternative means to contact them, urgently encourage them to get a website and associated blog set up.

Are there alternatives? Yes there are.

Many have migrated to Parler, but because significant verification protocols are in place (in addition to an email address, a phone number must be provided, and to be a verified user images of driver's licence are required) it makes it easier for the enemies of free speech to find you via hacking, and easier for public calls to shut it down to be made.

Others have migrated to Gab, where being anonymous is still possible.

Both are receiving deluges of new members.

I have seen a list of alternatives to YouTube, I can’t recall what they were, but they do exist.

Be prepared

Think about what plans need to be in place to keep in contact with family and friends when social media becomes unavailable; and start putting them together.

Think about whether you still want to be an active part of social media organisations that have shut down free speech.

If your spidey-sense has been twitching, then you have been asking questions like...
How come the security at the Capitol was so poor?
Were they really outraged patriots who stormed the building or Antifa/BLM wearing MAGA gear?
How come Trump’s speech at the 6 Jan rally got glossed over so quickly?

If so, you may find these websites worth a browse
https://mariomurilloministries.wordpress.com/
https://themarshallreport.wordpress.com/
https://www.neonrevolt.com/

Why is this important?
Because the truth has to be important to anyone who follows Jesus who said, 'I am the Way, the Truth and the Life', and 'The Truth will set you free'.
And how can you come to the truth unless you have access to multiple viewpoints on the same topic/event? As soon as an alternate narrative is suppressed, freedom departs and persecution begins.

Who would ever have thought that we would see all levels of American government resolutely refuse to investigate allegations of election fraud? Seekers of truth don't do that, they investigate until an unequivocal 'yes there was' or 'no there wasn't' is determined to public satisfaction.

Peace isn't possible unless it is based in Truth. 
Any attempt to build peace based on untruths will crumble. 

​May God graciously help all of us to come to full knowledge of the truth, no matter how disturbing or painful that might be. Amen.

As most would be aware by now, Pope Francis declared a Year of St Joseph from 8 Dec 2020 till 8 Dec 2021.

This will overlap with the Year of the Family beginning 19 Mar 2021 and ending 26 Jun 2022.

Both are very interesting initiatives, especially when viewed in the light of devotion to the Chaste Heart of St Joseph and the series of apparitions in Brazil during the 1990s and approved in 2010:

3sacredhearts.com/most-chaste-heart-st-joseph.html

All three seem to be part of heaven's fight back plan for our troubled world.

One of the gifts of the Year of St Joseph is particular encouragement to pray for employment needs, viz:

"Everyone who entrusts their daily activity to the protection of St. Joseph, and every faithful who invokes the intercession of St. Joseph so that those seeking work can find dignifying work can also obtain the plenary indulgence."

The latter part is what this following prayer is all about, which you might like to use on a daily basis during this Year of St Joseph:

Daily Prayer to St Joseph for Employment

Dear St Joseph, chaste husband and foster father,
you were yourself once faced with the responsibility
of providing the necessities of life for Jesus and Mary.
Look down with fatherly compassion upon me,
and my loved ones,
and upon all who suffer anxieties over their present inability to support their families
and upon all who long to use their God-given gifts and talents 
to the utmost but cannot currently find a way to do so.
Please help us all find gainful employment very soon,
so that these heavy burdens of concern
and feeling useless will be lifted from our hearts,
and that we will soon be able to provide for those whom God has entrusted to our care.
Help us to guard against bitterness and discouragement,
and help us to grow in peace of heart and confident expectation
of God’s perfect answers to our needs,
so that we may emerge from this time of trial spiritually enriched
and with even greater blessings from God.
Thank you for your intercession for us
and for the amazing answers that are coming.
St Joseph, we entrust ourselves and our families to you. Amen.
Our Father…, Hail Mary…, Glory Be…
St Joseph, pray for us.

And if you would prefer an easy to print version:

Please feel free to copy and share this prayer widely.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if during this Year of St Joseph if unemployment, under-employment and the misfortunes of being stuck in the wrong job were completely eradicated?

Prayer can make that happen, but it will take you and me and many others united in daily prayer to obtain through St Joseph's intercession before the throne of Almighty God a worldwide blessing of such magnitude.