Yes a book review is a little unusual for this blog, but the book reviewed is also a little unusual. I came across Kim Meeder’s writings some time ago during my regular internet meanderings, but it has only been recently that I’ve actually read some of her books. All of them thus far have been good, wholesome and inspiring. Her book ‘Bridge Called Hope: Stories of triumph from the Ranch of Rescued Dreams’ is a good place to begin to read her books.

258 pages, Kindle; 256 pages, Paperback
https://www.amazon.com/Bridge-Called-Hope-Stories-Triumph/dp/1590526554

Each chapter is usually a stand alone story, although there are some chapters that form a story arc, so it is suitable for read aloud time with children and grandchildren.

Kim Meeder runs a horse ranch dedicated to rescuing and rehabilitating abused horses, and dedicated to assist the healing process for disabled children, youngsters in juvenile detention centres and women who have suffered trauma. It is a safe place to try something new and become a little stronger after taking the risk of learning to ride on a pony or of touching and learning to groom a horse.

The book contains (at least for me) some eye-opening knowledge about horse management, a living example of what it means to live guided by the Holy Spirit, examples of God’s plans being much bigger than our own, and plenty of take-home quotes to chew over.

Horse management
Not ever having gone through a stage of horse-crazy, I learnt a lot about communication between horses and horses and horses and humans. It was a real eye-opener on what it takes to keep a horse healthy, food, water, shelter, sufficient space to move about in, hoof care, medications to deal with worms and other nasties. Likewise it was an eye-opener on the barbaric practices to obtain ingredients for beauty products from pregnant horses. Truly it takes an extraordinary amount of painstaking work to bring an abused horse back to physical and emotional health.

Guided by the Holy Spirit
Time and time again through the stories Kim’s first recourse is to prayer. Then she does expectantly wait for answers, and is also responsive to moments when she is invited to stop, listen and look deeper at situations. Willingness to drop everything at a moment’s notice to serve others in need is another part of that responsiveness to the leading of the Holy Spirit.

God’s bigger plans
Two stories in particular stand out for me as examples of this. One is the sudden death of a much-loved horse, and the bigger plan was to teach a youngster about how to open her heart to new love after a time of grief. The other is the tragic house fire suffered by a single parent family, and the bigger plan was to provide not only a better home, but also a whole new set of supportive relationships.

Quotes to chew over
Horses are incapable of lying.
‘I trust You Lord, I trust You, even though it doesn’t make sense. I trust in You.’
Being loved changes us all.
If God is in it, He will provide for it.
Faith like the wind, is invisible … but what it moves is not.
Words from a father, ‘Maybe sometimes I treated my daughter too much like a princess…but that’s only because when I thought of her as my daughter…I felt like a king.’
Just because we’re not where we want to be…doesn’t mean that God has abandoned us.
Instead of asking, ‘Lord, how can I get out of this season of pain?’ ask ‘Lord, what can I get out of this season of pain?’
Everything changes when we choose to release our grip on ‘my plan for me’ and rest in God’s plan for me.
It never was about serving me… it always was about serving You.’
Hope is not only something we should aspire to attain…it is also something we should aspire to give.
It might not be how you think… but the Lord does answer prayer!

All of you know from experience just how transitory life is, governments come and go, national borders change, transport systems change, medical treatments change.
The only thing that doesn’t change is God.

The good news we celebrate at Christmas of the birth of Jesus doesn’t change.
It becomes more meaningful in our lives as other stuff fades away.

Christmas proclaims that despite everything going on around us, God is still in control. And God always has a plan to deal with the evils that assail us.

During lockdown I heard a magnificent homily from Cardinal Collins of Toronto, Canada. He was talking about the time when for the Israelites the Red Sea was on one side of them, and Pharaoh and his army were closing in to attack them. It was only when the Israelites were reduced to prayer, to acknowledging that nothing else other than God could save them, that God opened up their escape route and drowned Pharaoh’s army.

That pattern was repeated many times in the Book of Judges, where the Israelites are living miserable lives under foreign rulers, that it is only when they collectively get desperate enough to pray, and they pray, that God raises up a leader anointed with His Holy Spirit to deal with the evil oppressing them.

In Jesus Jairus saw the very last hope for his daughter to live.
In Jesus the woman with the haemorrhage saw the very last hope of healing.
In Jesus the apostles sinking in the boat during the huge storm on Lake Galilee saw their only rescue.
All of them pursued Jesus and called out in their desperation to Him, and everything was instantaneously set right.

So we are never to get discouraged when things look bleak.
Pray instead.

Faith and fear are opposites, they cannot co-exist.
Faith calls into being the good things that aren’t visible yet.
Fear calls into being the evil things that aren’t visible yet.

When we are in fear the strategic thinking parts of our brains don’t function, and automatic responses of flight, fight, flee or freeze kick in. Immediate danger needs an immediate response - because there isn’t time to think through all the options.

In the bible God says ‘Do not be afraid’ over and over again.

This means that we need to feed our faith, and we need to reduce our exposure to things that engender fear.

One of the best ways to feed faith is to read passages from the bible, especially from the Gospels. Pondering Gospel scenes through the Rosary is another way.

If you notice your fear levels increasing after watching, listening to or reading the news, do less of that. If something is truly important, you will find out about it another way. Pay attention to when your fear levels increase, and where you were, and who you were talking to, when that happened. Spend more time with people who make you feel hopeful.

God is still in control.
God is always good.
God will never permit anything to happen unless greater good will come out of it.

All things, ALL things, work together for the good of those who love God.
‘We know that by turning EVERYTHING to their good God
co-operates with all those who love Him’, Romans 8:28a

That includes masks, lockdowns, illnesses, falls, aches and pains. ALL things.
If you haven’t seen the greater good yet, then it is still on the way.
After loss, death and grief …. resurrection always comes, always.

It is tempting to get discouraged when yet another layer of malicious evil comes to light. But such times should increase our hope and our courage because it means that God has been at work. Wounds only get better when they have been exposed to the light and cleaned of all gunk. God is the one who shines light into our lives. He is the one who exposes and cleans out all the gunk caused by the enemy of our souls.

As St Padre Pio recommends: Pray, hope and don’t worry.
Your prayers are needed more than ever, as is your hope and your faith.

God is in control.
God is always victorious over every kind of evil.
God is always working towards our greater good.

We can safely trust in Him, always.
……………………
Dear Heavenly Father, as the birthday of Jesus draws near the difference between the peace proclaimed by the angels to the shepherd and the conflicts and turmoil of our modern world seem starker than ever.
But You are still in control.
Draining the evil swamp areas, local and multi-national, while preserving the good, is a painstaking and messy business.
Yet You have undertaken to accomplish this for us, since it was so far beyond our capacity to do.
You are the only antidote to evil this big and this entrenched.
The blood of Jesus and the wounds of Jesus vanquish every evil.
Today we reaffirm our trust in You.
We thank You for the mind-blowingly wonderful outcomes that are on their way; victories against evil that are so thorough that only You can win.
As we wait for the promised manifestation of Your Kingdom on earth, we also wait for Your promised deliverance from all evil.
We know that we do not wait in vain.
But dear God, sometimes the pain of waiting weighs so heavily upon us.
Please help us each time our faith in You is assailed by the enemy of our souls.
May this Christmas find us more confident of Your love, Your goodness and Your providence than ever before. Amen.

In a few days’ time the first session of the Plenary Council of Australia will begin. From Sunday 3 Oct to Sunday 10 Oct there will be all kinds of online meetings going on.

The timetable is here (if you scroll down a bit)
https://plenarycouncil.catholic.org.au/assembly-1/

(But as that website page has been a bit glitchy, this is the timetable as it was online as at 30 Sep 2021.)

And the YouTube channel where you can find the livestreamed Masses and ‘open to all’ sessions is here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPKFmOZcjJfMQ9SfcotyZJg

The second session will happen mid-2022.

If this goes according to normal Vatican Synod precedents, the first session tends to be a bit of an ice-breaker, and sets the conversation going, and then second session is where the nitty gritty stuff happens – because the first session gives everyone a handle on where the battlelines are and what the stakes actually are.

Yes, the first session is necessary, just like a football game the first half is where you size up the strengths and weaknesses of the other team, and the second half – like the second session – is where the game is decided.

It is a process that involves real people, with their own talents, responsibilities and agendas; the prayers of the church local; national and universal, and the work of the Holy Spirit.

Do not underestimate the Holy Spirit;
we know from holy scripture that He is just as adept at bringing God’s plans to fruition through the evil, the skullduggerous, the fool, even through a donkey, as well as through the well intentioned and the truly good and holy.

Obviously the Holy Spirit can do far more with willing collaborators than with the unwilling ones. The degree of willing collaboration determines whether the Father’s base plan, His better plan, His outstanding plan or His jaw-droppingly-wonderful plan is enacted.

l want to see the jaw-droppingly-wonderful plan happen,
don’t you?

Yes, there are massive forces working against this,
including the enemy of our souls and his minions as well those who independently want to shape the church in their image rather than in God’s image, and the potent zeitgeists of our era.

Yet this is the great south land of the Holy Spirit.
We have yet to see anything here that would deserve a smidgeon of that epithet.
But that’s what gives us hope, that this is the time,
among the chaos and lockdowns,
among the inability to freely and publicly access the sacraments,
when it most certainly can’t be by our doing,
that God can do it,
that He can do it in such a way that we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that God alone did it.

That’s why beyond all our fears that this is going to be a secular-agenda-led talk-fest and a complete waste of time,
that it will be known as the Plenary Council of the Holy Spirit.

That doesn’t mean we stop praying.
It means we intensify our prayers.

One way to do that is to join in with the full rosary (20 decades) being livestreamed through St Mary’s Cathedral Sydney from 3pm to 4.30pm on Sunday 3 Oct 2021.
https://www.stmaryscathedral.org.au/event/holy-rosary-with-the-cathedral-clergy-3rd-october-2021/
(Remember Daylight Saving starts in NSW that morning! Fix your clocks.)

Another way to pray is to do what Archbishop Polding did when times were tough on the sea voyage from Sydney to London via the bottom of South America in 1846, when they risked being becalmed for weeks.
He got everyone to pray 5 Our Fathers, 5 Hail Marys and a Memorare for suitable wind.

We certainly need the wind of the Holy Spirit in our nation Australia,
and in the people of God who reside here,
in the Plenary Council of the Holy Spirit,
and in those who are on the path to seeking Him
but don’t quite realise it yet.

It seems like a good plan,
and achievable between now and 10 October,
especially as a family or household group,
to pray the 5 Our Fathers, 5 Hail Marys and a Memorare daily;
and if you feel so led,
to continue to pray them daily until the close of the second session in 2022.
…………………………………………
Our Father
Our Father, Who art in heaven,
hallowed be Your Name.
Your kingdom come,
Your 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. Amen.

Hail Mary
Hail Mary, Full of Grace,
The Lord is with you.
Blessed are you among women,
and blessed is the fruit
of your womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
pray for us sinners, now,
and at the hour of our death. Amen.

The Memorare
Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary,
that never was it known
that anyone who fled to your protection,
implored your help,
or sought your intercession was left unaided.
Inspired by this confidence,
I fly to you, O Virgin of virgins, my mother;
to you do I come,
before you I stand,
sinful and sorrowful.
O Mother of the Word Incarnate,
despise not my petitions,
but in your mercy hear and answer me. Amen

The Gospel for this Sunday, the 16th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B, comes from the latter part of Chapter 6 of St Mark’s Gospel and sees the return of the Apostles from their first missionary journey and what happens next. In between the sending of the Apostles and their return to Jesus, the martyrdom of St John the Baptist has occurred.

The Apostles return to absolute bedlam; it seems that everyone is clamouring for Jesus and for help as they begin the process of repentance. Reading between the lines, this means that those two by two apostolic journeys were wildly successful AND that people are looking for a new anchor because the news of the death of St John the Baptist has reached them (with all the accompanying grief, consternation, panic, and bewilderment that goes with it).

So it is surprising that Jesus says, ‘let’s get some peace and quiet’? No.

Would you, too, be running after the only person left who has all the answers and can make sense of this mess, whatever it took to do so? You betcha.

When they all converge on this lonely, deserted spot, Jesus has deep compassion on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd.

What does a sheep without a shepherd look like? Good question.
​
Something like this:

According to internet reports, this is how a sheep looked after about 5 years on its own.
​
A well cared for sheep should have looked something like this:

A wild sheep would survive in a natural habitat of good grazing combined with rocky surfaces to keep hooves from growing too long. Domesticated sheep have been under generations of breeding selection for wool yield, meat yield and even milk yield.

So should a domesticated sheep go missing it is going to be a lot heavier and with much greater wool growth than the wild version.

Unshorn wool is heavy, dirty and usually full of parasites. Without the premium grazing, a sheep is going to be eating what it can, and will be at more than usual risk of internal worms. Without regular care, hooves become infected, and knees become inflamed, making mobility difficult. Less mobility means less food, and weakened ewes will not produce enough milk to nourish lambs. Without the usual husbandry separations, inbreeding will occur with other uncared for sheep. More wool than usual will also be more wool over the eyes, reducing visibility.

A sheep that has been a few years without a shepherd is either dead, or a very sorry sight indeed.

Jesus saw these crowds as they were, overburdened, unhealthy, hurting and uncomfortable on the inside and on the outside (and unable to scratch the itches, and unable to rid themselves of the external and internal parasites), lame, blind, grieving over little ones who shouldn’t have died young, malnourished, and totally miserable.

But Jesus also saw them as they were supposed to be, quick, nimble, healthy, frolicking, joyful and contented, and producing lots of quality wool, milk and lambs.

And Jesus, the master good shepherd, knew exactly what was needed, and started the lengthy arduous task of bringing them back to full health, to the best that He knew it was possible for them to be – the best the Father had destined for them from the beginning.

He started that tasking with teaching, with teaching them the truth, and helping them to apply it to their regular lives.

It wasn’t all He did, Jesus also nourished them through the miracle of the multiplication of food, as the verses after Mark 6:34 tell us. But for the next few weeks we are going to be reading from St John’s version of this miracles and its implications in his Chapter 6.

The take away from this Gospel passage is that Jesus sees us, and He fully understands the bedraggled state we are in. But He also sees us in the fulness of what He created us to be. He alone knows how to get us from our current state, to that happy, healthy and productive state.

But to get from here to there, but we will have to fully trust Him and His process. Some of it won’t be very nice (shearing, sheep dip, worm removal medicine, hoof clipping, knee splinting, times of segregation from other parts of the flock, internal and external examinations etc) but we will feel and look so much better afterwards.

The challenge is, will we say Yes to Him and to His process?

Or will we begin for a while, and run away before it is completed?
Or will we just run away and attempt to take care of ourselves again?

Remember, very few survive going it alone without a shepherd, and they don’t thrive.

May He please help us to say a committed, and enduring, Yes to Him.
May He help us to remain, and not resist and kick up a fuss, when the processes are awkward and painful.
May He, in His great mercy and compassion, bring us to the fulness of health and well-being that He has always wanted for us.
Amen. Amen. Amen!

The Gospel for this Sunday, the 13th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B, comes from the last half end of Chapter 5 of St Mark’s Gospel and contains the story of the raising of Jairus’ daughter and the healing of the woman with the haemorrhage.

Both Jairus and the woman are in desperate situations, and both of them know that they are exposing Jesus to the risk of becoming ritually unclean, and of Jesus having to go through the various processes to become ritually clean again. To be ritually clean was a pre-requisite for public worship of God.

Anything or anything touching a woman with a haemorrhage would be unclean until evening; and anyone who touched a dead body would be unclean for 7 days and have to go through two ritual washings with lustral water.

But they are both desperate.

We are told Jairus begged Jesus earnestly, and the word used is ‘parakalei’, which is very close to ‘paraclete’; (giving us a visual image of the work of the Holy Spirit), and he begged Jesus many times. Like the widow in the parable of the unjust judge, Jairus does not stop pleading until Jesus agrees to visit his daughter. So in this desperate situation Jairus wasn’t concerned about making a pest of himself, nor about what his public expressions of desperation would do to his reputation.

This poor woman had suffered greatly with this haemorrhage, and despite treatment by many doctors, and the depletion of all her monetary resources, she was no better, and in fact her troubles had become worse, more severe and more aggravated by the various treatments. Apart from the physical pain, the woman would have suffered from ostracism by the community – who would want to become ritually unclean by associating with her? Any husband she may have had would have left her and formally divorced her; any children she may have had would have been kept far from her. The depths of her desperation were greater and had gone on far longer (twelve years) than Jairus’ acute desperation.

However Jairus can approach Jesus publicly and openly, this suffering woman cannot. To even be among the crowd would have necessitated some form of disguise. She can’t even ask in private for help, due to the constant experiences of rejection that are her lot in life. But what she can do, she does; and it takes a similar kind of bravery to Veronica on the way to Calvary for this woman to work her way through the pressing crowds around Jesus to get close enough to touch His outer garment.

Immediately she is healed completely, and immediately Jesus is aware that a healing of magnitude has taken place.

Can you imagine the terror she goes through when Jesus asks ‘Who touched My clothes?’ She isn’t supposed to be out in public, and if she tells the truth…..

But she is still a woman of great courage, so in fear and trembling she tells Jesus the whole horrible truth, (how easy would it have been to hide and say nothing?!) and Jesus doesn’t tell her off. He calls her, ‘My daughter’, when He could easily have called her ‘woman’; publicly acknowledging that her faith and her courage are worthy of membership in His family, and publicly confirming to all that she is healed completely, and that there won’t be any adverse consequences, so she may depart in peace under His protection.

Poor Jairus, these delays must have been agony for him. Then he gets the unwanted news that all hope is gone, his daughter is dead. Healing is no longer possible.

Yet Jesus reassures him, and continues on His way to Jairus’ residence, but with only a chosen few disciples. What is going to happen, is going to happen in private. Was she asleep (in a deep pre-death coma), or was she truly deceased? Jesus still restores her completely and immediately back to health.

What does this teach us?

That no matter how dire, nor how lacking hope our desperate situations are, Jesus can immediately and totally fix them. Even if they are even beyond all earthly hope.

Nothing is beyond the power of Jesus.

But if we are honest, we also ask, why did God permit things to get so very dire before He stepped in?
An easy answer is, ‘to display the divine power of God, when all human help was decisively proven useless’.

But why did they have to suffer so much before God stepped in?
Was it as simple as ‘Jesus hadn’t passed by near to them yet’?
Well then, why didn’t God send Jesus sooner?

And here we meet the same inscrutable wisdom and providence and timing of God that Job, and Tobit, and Naomi, and Jeremiah, and many other holy ones wrestled with.

He is God. We are not.

Therefore everything He does is done perfectly and with perfect timing; even if we can’t see or comprehend the reasons why. (Frustrating, isn’t it?!)

But let us place our trust in Him afresh.

Because He alone can fix everything; fix it totally, fix it perfectly, and fix it immediately.

Nothing, but nothing, is beyond our hope in His almighty power.

May He give us the grace to live this truth, and to never forget it. Amen.

O great God of mercy and compassion
we bring before You the many desperate situations
we feel we have been importuning You about forever.
You have not forgotten us,
even if everything else screams the opposite.
In particular we bring before You our most impossible desperate situations
and entrust the timing, and the complete and perfect fixing of them to You.
We expect from you spectacular and immediate miracles worthy of these Gospel accounts.
You are the same God today, as you were back then,
and as you will be forever.
You can do it again in our time.
You can do it again today, if You so will.
Please remember how human and limited our patience and endurance is.
Please send us Your reassurance,
lest fear cast out whatever little faith we have left.
We entrust all of it to Your capable hands and Your loving Heart.
Take care of everything, especially our most desperate situations, as only You can.
We decide today, to trust in You,
​with a deeper trust than we have ever had before.
Please help us by the power of Your Holy Spirit to live in that level of trust and to grow in it.
Jesus, I trust in You.
Amen.

The Gospel for this Sunday, the 12th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B, comes from the end of Chapter 4 of St Mark’s Gospel after Jesus has been teaching a series of parables to the crowds. It narrates the story of Jesus calming the storm.

Following on from Jesus teaching the parables of the wheat and the mustard seed which invited us to trust God’s process and God’s timing, we seem to have a parable in this event of the massive storm that invites us to trust in Him even in the worst of times.

What comes after this passage is the deliverance of the Gerasene demoniac, which seems to be where Jesus was headed to on the other side of the lake of Galilee. Is this massive storm an attempt by the forces of evil to prevent this deliverance? It does seem likely.

We do know that Jesus set out deliberately for this locality on the other side of the lake, and plenty of witnesses joined Him in other boats. We know that it was evening before the lake crossing even began, and that they only set out after the crowds had been dismissed.

Jesus was already in the boat before they set out, and we know that at times He preached from Peter’s boat close to the shoreline. There doesn’t seem to have been any prior preparation or planning for this journey; and in all likelihood the seamen among the disciples would have expected a rather swift crossing – no more than an hour or two, with landfall before it got pitch dark.

But we see this sudden, intense, physical opposition to their journey’s progress; and they feel they are facing it all on their own because Jesus is in the back of the boat asleep.

The usual translations we read, do not do the original Greek justice, and water down the intensity of the crisis the disciples in the boats faced. What we often read as storm or great gale can also be translated violent wind-storm, squall, whirlwind, hurricane. They are hard enough to deal with in daylight, but in fading light and darkness it must have engendered extra terror.

So violent was it, that the waves were breaking over and into the boat, so that it was filled entirely. Any efforts to bail out the water were proving to be futile. The boat was beginning to sink.

At this point, like them, we are asking, where is God in all this?

How acutely they must have felt the absence of His reassuring presence! They could have also asked; Why is God permitting this to happen to us? What did we do wrong? Where did we go wrong?

‘Teacher, teacher, we are perishing. We are at the point of being fully and totally destroyed.’

And Jesus gets up, commands ‘Silence!’, ‘Be still!’, and the immediate calm that happens is as great as the storm was.

'megale’ is used to describe both the storm AND the calm.

This supernatural calm overwhelms the disciples with fear, awe and reverence.

Only God.
Only God Himself is able to transform utter disaster, turmoil and chaos into perfect peace and order in a single moment. No one else and nothing else can.

And what does Jesus say to them (and to us)?
Why are you so frightened?
Have you no faith?
Have you forgotten Who is in control?

Ummm. Errrr.
We’re still terrified, before and after, and it is human to be afraid.
Gulp. Obviously not as much faith as we thought we had. At all.
Yep. Completely forgot. Utterly failed that one….. Sorry.

May God help us to remember that even in the worst of times, that He is still completely in control.

May God help us to remember that especially in the worst of times, we can be expectant for His sudden divine action to happen to fix everything perfectly– and thus not despair nor become despondent.

May God help us to remember that nothing is going to stop us carrying out the mission we have been given by Him, even if it has been delayed by enemy tactics – and to expect far more spectacular results if there have been delays and opposition.

In our darkest moments may God send His holy angels to remind us of this Gospel event, and through it to remind us that He is completely in control, and that the end He has in mind is far more amazing and more glorious and stupendous than anything that currently terrorizes us.

Amen. Amen. Amen.
​
He alone is worthy of our trust.
Let us place our trust in Jesus.
Let us renew our trust in Jesus.
Let us massively increase our trust in Jesus.
Amen.