Growing up I heard of the fairy tale of the ’emperor’s new clothes’.
In summary the emperor was looking for the finest clothes ever. A trickster pretended to be a tailor and “dressed” him up in invisible magic like clothes.
The emperor said “but I’m naked” so the tailor told him that these clothes were magical and that only other people could see them!
Delighted he appeared publically and although naked, the crowd, so blind by human respect cheered and applauded at the emporer and his new clothes!
It took an innocent little boy in the crowd to shout “he’s naked” for the crowd to wake up and open their eyes!
Everybody started to laugh and the emporer realised that he had been deceived!
You see the people were so afraid of the emporer that their fear blinded them from seeing the obvious.
In past generations the emporers were our priests. Ordinary people were so afraid of priests that if they appeared naked on the altar they would have been afraid!
It was considered a sin to say anything bad about a priest and people feared going to hell.
My dad once told me of the missionary priests who terrified him when he was young.
Only years later in Ireland did all the scandals come out! Bishop Casey with a child, the countless priests convicted of paedophelia not to mention all the other corruption!
And yet as the scandals broke, some and indeed many catholics remained like the crowd, in denial and unbelief and forever making up excuses and defending the undefendable!
Sometimes I feel like the little boy shouting “he’s naked”.
The crowd tries to silence me and say I’m wrong but slowly too they will see!
Priests are men! They are not God’s. They need our help, love, support, prayer and brotherly correction.
They do not need our worship or idolitory. None of them are perfect and the good ones will be the first to say it!
Jesus desires His Church to be full of love and for His priests to be full of the Holy Spirit of power and healing.
Jesus desires His priests to preach boldly, to pray with people for healing and deliverance from evil spirits.
Yes, Jesus desires His priests to be dressed in the Holy Spirit and to rise to the challenges of today’s world!
Helas, many of our priests are naked. They do not know the Holy Spirit. They do not want to know of healing or of people like me. They do not want to be instruments of God’s love.
And so the Holy Spirit is giving more and more lay people gifts of the Spirit to somehow compensate for what is now lacking in so many of our priests!
So today, let’s not be blind to the problems of our times and the weaknesses of our priests.
Let us pray for them and remind them of who they are and of their calling.
It is a beautiful morning here in Croatia. I am at the beach listening to the waves and contemplating life!
The last few days have been a little unusual, if there is such a thing for me!
On Thursday I fell of a bike and grazed my hand. A local nurse cleaned it. As she did so she asked me many questions about my life. She was catholic and was taken aback when I told her about my life!
Instead of being able to celebrate Jesus saving me from suicide and helping me to accept my sexuality and His love, she became rigid!
She asked me so many questions in a police type of manner. I had just fallen, I really wasn’t in the mood.
She seemed disturbed that Jesus speaks to me. I explained to her that we all have the Holy Spirit in us if we were baptised and that He is a person and not a dog or a cat and that He wants to talk to her too. I think she got my point.
I walked home a bit weak and went to bed early. Yesterday morning I woke up sore. My hand was inflamed and was a bit off.
I checked the bank account. Under 200 kuna left (about 14 euro).
I said hello to Seamus in the next room who told me that another one of his friends in Ireland was saying all sorts of things about me. He showed me the message.
I learnt that I supposedly hate my family and do not care if they live or die. This brought tears to my eyes. I had to leave Ireland 12 years ago and have prayed every day for my family. My mum was miraculously healed and despite them never really getting behind my life I have always done my best to keep in touch while putting Jesus first.
There would be no miracle more dear to me than for Jesus to open their eyes to the world of prayer and to be able to share this with them, but 12 years I am still waiting. I can’t force the hand of God.
The message went onto insinuate that I was somehow manipulating Seamus!
Michael the chief guru manipulating an innocent brainless Seamus!
I have travelled 11 years on my own. Never was I even looking for a travel buddy as I like my own freedom too much!
Seamus and I are so different that it’s like a dog and a cat! Only that we both got seperate and distinct inspirations in prayer to travel and work together we would never have even considered it!
We are just so different!
Seamus is 38 and has had far more life experience than I have had in the gay and drugs scene. He is intelligent and honest and met God long before I ever met him.
To suggest I manipulated him into following me gives me far too much credit and him too little.
I am a simple person. I do not wake each morning giving Seamus a white pill and starting a class of brainwashing and mind control!
And Seamus, he does not look to me like some guru. If he did I’d tell him to get lost. I have no time for leaches.
But I will say that Seamus has been an enormous support to me. He is the big brother I never had. He has seen my cry bitterly at the pain of my life and struggle with sexuality. He has helped me in so many ways to heal and to accept myself and I am very grateful to Our Lady for his help and brotherly love.
The message continued on to point out that a certain well known priest in Medjugorje did not believe that I am following the Holy Spirit.
Unfortunately this priest too has his weaknesses and was my number one supporter while I lived in Medjugorje.
He too struggles with homosexuality and I spent much time while I was there doing my best to help him. For whatever reason, he became jealous when Seamus arrived and we fell out.
He is a good man amd has a hard life and I am sad that he seems to be speaking badly of me because while I have my weaknesses I am a good person doing my best in difficult circumstances.
And so all of this before I was even out of the house, and worse still, all of this from catholics.
Fortunately Jesus put a very good friend around me yesterday who cheeered me up and made me dinner.
And so now I look out at the sea and think back to 12 years ago when I nearly drown myself!
What has changed? Why do people who don’t know me judge me so harshly? Why in the name of being catholic do they cause me so much pain?
Being catholic and dealing with homosexuality is not easy. Following Jesus is not easy. Living abroad is not easy.
Would it be too much to ask for your love and support in our journey?
Can you not see it in your hearts to pray for us and even help us financially if God has given you the means?
Am I not one of you? Imperfect, broken, catholic?
Do I not deserve to be given a chance and do gay people not deserve to be given hope?
And so today, once again I will choose to live. I will go for a swim rather than die and I pray that one day my perseverence may give hope to another soul living on the edge.
Thank you for reading and to the small few friends that I do have, thank you from the bottom of my heart.
It is another hot day here in Split! The sun is shining, the sea is warm, people are buzzing about and yet, many still do not believe in God…or do they?
‘Unbelief’ is a refusal to believe despite reasonable evidence!
Most people with whom I speak believe in God or some sort of higher power. They see the world and the universe and they acknowledge the presence of something or someone. This is good and normal.
However a lot of people do not know or believe in Jesus. This too is normal. The catholic catechism teaches that there are some dimensions of faith that we can figure out using our human reason (such as God existing) while other aspects need to be revealed to us personally, Jesus etc.
When Jesus walked the earth He did not expect everybody to believe in Him immediately. Through working miracles and explaining the scriptures to people bit by bit he unveiled Himself.
God has given us a brain for a reason, to use it, and if used properly it will bring us even closer to Him.
When Jesus performed miracles and people still refused to believe, He got angry. They had been given proof beyond ‘reasonable doubt’ and still stayed closed.
Unfortunately this is the case with so many people today and I have lived it first hand with my own family!
Despite my life and years and years of miracles they refused to get interested in prayer or to acknowledge or thank God for healing my mum. They refused to take any interest in the Holy Spirit or in my life and even insisted I was mentally ill despite experts confirming that I wasn’t. Sadly my own family caused me more pain than everything else combined.
Of course I pray for them and yet I know that they have grieved the Holy Spirit who desires to draw them out of the religious routine of traditionalism and into a personal loving relationship with Jesus through the Holy Spirit.
Unfortunately there are many like my family. They have hard hearts and not interested in the things of God. They are arrogant and justify their behaviour by pointing out other people’s faults and by fulfilling their ‘religious obligation’ of going to mass on a Sunday.
People like this are a counter-testimony to christianity. They are not growing, they are not alive. They are like a bad smell that drive others away.
Some would criticise me for writing this about my own parents. Some would call it a sin and me the devil (love u guys 😅😅).
But years of following Jesus has taught me diffetently. The first passage of the holy bible that I ever read was Matthew Chapter 10. I knew nothing but now as I read it tears come to my eyes, it is my “job description”.
However at the end of the chapter Jesus says “he who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me’ and this is a call to all of us to putting God first in our lives, before our earthly parents however good or bad they may be!
We are called to “honouring” our parents, not worshipping them!
We must honour what is honourable, forgive what is not and continue to walk in the truth!
And so going back to “unbelief”. The Church and world is full of people who do not want to get to know Jesus more deeply. They do not want to because they are afraid of what He may ask of them because they do not know or love Him from the heart!
Today Jesus desires to enter our hearts. He desires that we give Him time, that we educate ourselves more on how to better cooperate with the Holy Spirit.
He desires to free us and to bless our lives with a supernatural joy and peace!
He desires us to be the “reasonable doubt” that will draw others to Him rather than the bad smell that drives them away!
And so today are you interested in going deeper or are you like my ‘catholic family’ who have no time for such rubbish?!
Joy is a gift of the Holy Spirit and yet when one goes into a typical catholic church one feels the extreme lack of it!
Often when I go to Church I feel the stern looks of disapprouval that try to quench my joy!
My sins nailed Jesus to the cross and how dare I smile about it!
This old school traditional spirituality is false and breeds depression, doom and gloom!
Most of us grew up in joyless families. As I grew up I thought that it was a sin to laugh. My dad was the most serious funless person that I ever met and he seemed to think that he was a rolemodel!
God love him, he worked hard, very hard, but he had a face on him that would turn milk sour and as soon as he would enter a room in the house, I would leave as I felt an ice cold presence in the room and my mischevious temperament was like a ticking time-bomb for yet another beating!
Yes, I must admit that growing up Catholic gave me a distinct hatred for both God and Church.
From the stories of Padre Pio’s sufferings and rage in the confessional to the doom and gloom look of our elderly priests, God, at least this God wasn’t for me.
How often I cycled down the road at break neck speed sometimes even wishing a car would hit me and that I’d die. Many times I cried my heart out in the fields waiting for dad to leave. Sometimes mam found me. She was the only one that cared.
It was my dad who taught me the ‘Our Father’ prayer. Mam was in town and dad flew into a rage. Although I was very bright, when stressed I could not concentrate. I couldn’t remember it. He shouted and roared.
To this day I have trouble saying “Our Father”!
The catholicism I learnt of was all based on looking good in front of the neighbours and suffering. It was a message of misery. The more miserable you were, the more holy you were!
Church was like a big pity-party where one could moan and groan about how hard life was!
Never was there a mention of the Holy Spirit or of personal prayer or of joy.
Once you entered a church all joy was to be wiped off your face the same as going into an intensive care unit and disinfecting your body!
To smile was to mock, to talk was to gossip and if one was to even think of raising their hands or dance the doctor would be called.
In a short 30 minutes the mass would be babbled off. Everybody would receive Jesus, something now that I understand better makes Him vomit and after mass the party began!
With Jesus happy in His box most spent the afternoon in the pub where the real joy was to be had!
My parents never drank so they were always home. Often I wish they did just to get away!
Now that I understand God better I know that God is fun. He gave us all sorts of gifts like music and song and He wants us to use them and to give Him thanks.
Jesus is tired of us treating him like a boring old man. He is a young, fun and energetic God and not an 80 year old geriatric patient who is trying to get some sleep!
So let us make noise for Jesus, let us sing, let us danse and let us show the world that being christian is not a club for the miserable but rather a school of true joy and happiness
Let us forgive the older generation and move forward and be an example of joy and love!
Today I’m going to write about what some would argue that which I know nothing about!! Work!
‘Work’ in the eyes of the world means money. Only paid work in the eyes of the world counts where a person’s value is measured between equal measures of ego
and salary!
I grew up in a simple family where my mum and dad worked extremely hard, my dad on a farm and with the local council, my mum at home rearing a large family!
The work of a mum includes being a 24 hour nurse, psychologist, teacher, baby-sitter, taxi-driver all rolled into one!
She never gets a break and she gets paid in ingratitude!!
Ingratitude often from her kids, I can look back and see how I took my parents 100% for granted. And ingratitude from society!
In my case my mum had a sister. Mary is and was my god-mother and she was a bank manager. She had decided not to be a mother and instead went down the road of “success”!
My mum and her sister were total opposites in every way. Mam was kind, Mary was harsh, Mam was sensitive, Mary was cold, Mam was gentle, Mary was evil!
As I look back I laugh. I had a saint as a mother and a monster as a god-mother!!
When I went to live with my auntie I quickly saw through the emptiness of the working world and worldly success. Big houses, big cars and holidays and expensive food but deep down there was something missing….love!
Now in her own way Mary was good to me and even generous, but her goodness and generousity were only present when she was getting her way. I was terrified of her, once she pulled her shoe off and threw it at me in a demonic rage when I disagreed with her. Nowadays I don’t know if she can even put on her shoes as she has been humbled by a serious back problem!
And so going back to my theme of ” work”! Today my question for you is simple!
What is work?
Is it the bank manager or the mother?
Is it saint Theresa of the child Jesus or mother Theresa of calcutta?
Or is it both?
Personally I have had so many different jobs.
At 16 my career began filling petrol in a garage! I went from there to a building site and from there to an insurance company!
I worked every summer during college. At a hardware store and in a cinema in New York, in supermarkets in Ireland!
I worked as an actuary in Dublin and Paris before leaving it all to do god’s work!
God’s work took me to the church, endless hours praying for others! I was given a gift of healing and deliverance and prayed for thousands of people.
I drove all over France talking about Jesus while people said I was crazy. I worked part time jobs in sandwich shops and looking after old people! I gave english and maths lessons to help stay alive!
I taught english in India, I ran addiction recovery groups in Australia and gave talks in Ireland!
I built tents and worked with scouts in France, I plastered walls and cooked in a monastery in Spain!
I fed the homeless and worked among the rich in Paris!
I was head hunted and recruited by leading international insurance companies for my skills. I was kicked out of churches and religious houses for my honesty!
I wore branded new clothes, I wore rags and second hand clothes!
I have owned and driven expensive cars, I have owned and driven bangers!
I have wined and dined in expensive restaurants. I have lived from pizza and burgers!
I have rented luxury apartments, I have stayed in dumps!
I was labelled a genious, I was deemed insane!
I have had big salaries, I have been on state benefits!
Yes, through work I have been rich and I have been poor!
And yet I have never stopped working and I smile and thank Jesus for such a wonderfully rich life!
So today, let us not define work by salary but rather let us define it by integrity!
Let us not measure our success with the size of our houses but the size of our hearts and let us not measure our beauty by the brand of our clothes but rather the smell of our humility!
Lord Jesus, thank you for life and for the poor and the simple. You raise up the lowly and humble the proud!
Bless us all, even and especially my aunt Mary and others like her all over the world!
Intimacy or “in to me see” is about the deepest parts of our being!
Being intimate is about being close to another, but not just close, super close, and not just super close, united!
Maybe the first and best example of intimacy is God Himself! Three persons so intimately united that they are one! I’ll leave it to the theologians to explain that one!
And so God created us all for intimacy, for love, for community and so it is Him that puts in our hearts a deep deep yearning for Him!
In the world when we talk of intimacy we automstically think of sex but God is Spirit and so the type of intimacy that He calls us to is spiritual and it actually goes over and beyond the intimacy of sex!
Intimacy or “in to me see” is God calling us to be intimate with Him. God wants us to be totally free with Him!
I grew up in a typical traditional catholic family. Intimate things like sexuality were never spoken of. In fact it would have been considered dirty to talk of such a thing!
Women had babies but it was a forbidden thought to ask how they came!
But as one grows up one’s sexuality begins to develop. I recall feeling a deep sense of shame as this happened with me. There was nobody to talk to and as for God, you dare not talk to God about your sexuality and any thoughts you may be having!
The result was that God was not allowed to “in to me see” because I was led to believe that it was wrong and even unholy and sacrilege to talk to God about such things!
And of course it is no surprise that it was the area of my life that I hid from God that later went wrong, sexuality!
It took reading a summary of John Paul II’s “Theology of the body” to understand that sexuality was not something to hide from an angry God but rather to bring to a loving God!
JP 2 explained the gift and beauty of sexuality and God’s love and desire for us to use it wisely and beautifully!
JP 2 also explained God’s understanding, love and compassion of our sexual thoughts and His desire to help us live our sexuality to the ful in a healthy way.
JP 2 took away the shame of talking openly about things such as masturbation, pornography, homosexuality and gave us a new language of love, maturity and respect!
Today Jesus calls all of us to greater intimacy with Him. He desires that we feel free to talk to Him about everything, even and especially our sexuality which He made and which is so powerful.
He desires to bring us to a new level of freedom and joy by freeing us of shame and fear!
He desires to pour His Holy Spirit into these inner most intimate places of our souls!
He knocks at the door, He waits, won’t you open and say
The last few days Gospel readings have been interesting, on Wednesday we had Jesus blessing His Father for revealing the secrets of heaven to little children and on Thursday Jesus invites us to give Him our burdens and He can make them light.
So putting both together we are invited to being like kids and to giving Jesus our burdens!
Kids are great! They have no shame and if you ever see a little child they can run about naked and not even care. They will tell their parents everything as they have no sense of secrecy.
This is the type of openness that Jesus is calling us to as adults!
Now don’t get me wrong. I am not in the process of founding the first catholic nudist colony but I am talking of nudity of heart!
One of my best friends as a child was my grandmother’s sister. She loved me so much and my ears seemed atuned to her shoes hitting the road as she walked to our house. She always had a smile and she always had chocolate. Living in the countryside was very boring during the summer months and her visit was like a breath of fresh air.
When I was about 10 she got sick. She was getting worse and worse and so had to go to hospital. My mum who had worked as a nurse for a while prepared her for it. As she did she discovered that she had very developped breast cancer.
My grandaunt, Mary, had obviously had this cancer for years and years and despite having a montly visit from the doctor she had obviously never shown it to him.
The result was that it was too developed. She went to hospital and Christmas. She died on January 28th.
This was my first experience of death. I remember going to her funeral and even though I was a little boy that did not cry much, as soon as I saw her cold lifeless body uncontrollable weeping came over me. My mother had to take me out.
For the next 9 months every night I prayed for her and cried myself to sleep. I told nobody and nobody asked. After all “boys don’t cry”.
However the point I am making is had she not been afraid she could have shown the early signs of cancer to her doctor and received treatment. She would have lived longer and her death would not have been so sudden and cold.
While this relates to a physical ailment, too often the same thing holds true for spiritual issues.
There are people who like my grandauntie have a monthly “doctor’s visit” to the priest (the spiritual doctor) and despite going for the last 30 years they have never actually mentioned in confession some of their big cancerous sins!
People are often afraid to tell the priest about the abortion they had or of their struggle with pornography!
In ireland I was good friends with Fr Pat. One day laughing I said that I’d love to hear people’s confessions!? He looked at me and smiled and said “if only you knew” and told me a story of an old man of about 80 who went to confession and said
“I didn’t do what my mammy and daddy told me”!!
Were they even alive? Surely not!
And so you see, Jesus is calling us to vulnerability with Him, vulnerability in confession and vulnerability with eachother.
The bible says to “carry one another’s burdens” and so in order to do so we must be open.
In my own life I have received both enormous healing and enormous persecution for being vulnerable.
I could have joined the list of those who commit suicide due to being gay. I could have joined the list of those that got married despite being gay and yet instead I chose the road of honesty and vulnerability.
Over the years Jesus has given me wonderful friends, not perfect people in no need of healing, but broken vulerable people who need healing too.
It takes humility to be vulnerable, it takes strength to be weak and it takes courage to be open but it is also the most freeing thing on earth!
So let us open wide our hearts to Jesus, let us dare to be open and vulnerable and to be witnesses to the power of grace operating through human weakness.
It is 8 a.m in the morning and I’ve just been to morning mass at 7 a.m! I got to bed at 5 a.m so I’m doing well to be writing!
Yesterday I had an amazing day entirely led by the Holy Spirit. It made me reflect on the fire of God’s love.
Fire! If you ask a fireman about fire they will say things like
– dangerous
– powerful
– wild
– unpredictable
– spreading
And any of you from Australia or other countries where bush or forest fires are common will know this to be the case!
And so how can I compare the Holy Spirit to fire! Watch me!
Yesterday I got up and for 3 hours I was praying and even crying for something. I didn’t know what for but was compelled to pray and suffer!
After 3 hours the Holy Spirit told me to contact my friend who’s relative needed prayer for depression. Very clearly the Holy Spirit told me that I was to go and pray with her. After 3 hours suffering in preparation I was ready and I didn’t want to waste it!
She was expecting us tomorrow. I thought that doesn’t matter, God is expecting you today and we boldly drove 30 mins to her house.
Just like fire, the Holy Spirit is bold when He needs to be! Think of an ambulance driver and how boldly He must drive in an emergency. When God sees an emergency He pushes us to act quickly and boldly. There simply isn’t time for being nice, that can come afterwards!
And so I prayed over the lady who looked visibly much better after and I will pray with her again but then the madness began to happen! Just as the wind blows the fire the wind began to blow my friend and I!
We drove to the local town and felt drawn to evening mass at 7 p.m.
At communion time I was greeted by a big warm loving smile from a lady who heard my talk 2 weeks ago and the Holy Spirit used her to blow us over to a prayer meeting that they were having!
It was so beautiful for me to be welcomed so warmly and they all told me how touched they were with my talk a few weeks back. The love and sincerity of their hearts was obvious and we could all feel the Spirit in the room!
Just like the fire, it was spreading and growing and everybody that got in the way got burnt!
Burnt by love you may wonder, but yes, when God’s love hits us our soul burns with supernatural desire for God and we cry as if we are burning on the inside! Our tears are the smoke, our smiles are the flames and our love is the heat!
And so the special guests (my friend and I) were invited to pray with everybody and the tears of love flowed!
Afterwards some home wine came out with home grown fruits and vegtables and we all had a wonderful evening eating, drinking and thanking God!
And if that wasn’t enough the Holy Spirit sent me off on another mission when I got home and even though I only slept for one hour I woke up bright and fresh and ready for more madness!
And so a few lessons!
Like the fire the Holy Spirit is wild and unpredictable. You never know where He will go!
He consumes all before Him and so people either stand in the fire of love or like wild animals flee for safety!
Fire burns everything, it is not selevtive and the Holy Spirit is the same. He will burn every heart with love; man or woman, black or white, gay or straight, christian or not! He doesn’t care!
The fire of the Holy Spirit travels in the air and He looks for your mouth and mine to bring a spark of that fire to new woodlands! A simple spark is enough to start a raging fire! The lady we met at mass was like the spark of the Holy Spirit and through her warmth and love she made a big fire last night!
Fire thrives in the middle of rubbish and so does the Holy Spirit! The more sins and ugly your heart may be, the more He has to burn and the bigger the fire!
And so today, God is looking for people to be match sticks and to be the spark that sets fire to the world!
One of my favourite bible stories is the story of David and Golliath!
From start to finish it seems wrong! David was a silly little shepard boy day dreaming on the hills as he looked after sheep! The “real men” were trained warriors, big and strong, lots of muscles as we could imagine!
When it came to fighting Golliath, David wasn’t even considered to be asked. It would have been a joke to ask such a weak and silly little boy.
However little did the men know that out on the hills David was doing far more than minding sheep and picking flowers!
Often bears and wild animals attacked the sheep and David had learnt how to kill them!
David was humble! He did not run home and say “I killed a bear today”! He told nobody and so he let them all think that he was a fool! He wasn’t concerned about what others thought and I’m sure he laughed out on the hills as he sung and danced free as a bird!
Of course the Holy Spirit was on David from a young age and yet even with that people failed to recognise it!
When David heard about Golliath he volunteered to help! He was not asked to help, he had to step up. Some probably laughed and sneered “you, he will kill you alive”. Yet David remained simple!
David is an example of humility and boldness. He had the humility to volunteer to help despite knowing that He would be laughed at and the simplicity to face Golliath despite others not believing in him.
Some would say that he was arrogant and prideful but the outcome of the story proves differently.
So when the others finally agreed to accept David’s help, they still were unable to accept David’s way. They put so much armor on him that he could barely walk and all but sabotaged him without meaning!
Once again David had to rise up and say “no, this is not how I have been trained, let me do it my way”.
And so taking off all the heavy armour he faced Golliath with nothing except a simple slingshot!
Even Golliath laughed and underestimated David!
But David was no fool and with an angelic peace and calm aimed the slingshot at Golliaths head! And as that stone hit him with pin point accuracy and force, Golliath fell to his knees and David was praised and honoured!
Today my friends both you and I are perhaps God’s Davids. We do not have the heavy armour as so called “trained warriors have”, we have no degrees in theology and philosophy, we have no PhD’s in divinity and morality. We have no big fancy hats or certificates or cloaks! We have no rings or chains on our fingers or necks, we have nothing!
We have perhaps spent our lives like David minding our sheep, looking after our families, reaching out to the poor. We have fought battles that nobody else knows about. We have made sacrifices that only scholars read about, we have won wars that only heroes dream about!
And so dear fellow Davids! Let us step up in confidence to slay the Golliaths of our time. We do not need the kings armour, we only need God’s armour!
Sometimes when God is doing somethimg new the educated and the wise fail to see it. We see this in the lives of the saints who were terribly rejected and mocked just like David but as they kept on going the intelligence behind their madness began to shine through and now we see their statues in our churches all over the world!
It is no different today. The Holy Spirit is pouring out many new charisms of healing and deliverance on simple people like you and me! Many church scholars can’t see or recognise it, the book on the Holy Spirit was left out of their studies and old traditions and ways blind them to tasting and seeing the new living waters.
Consequently they call us crazy and mad, they tell us that we can’t do this and that we can’t do that. They even at times say that we are disobedient and that we are not following God!
They tell us that we need training and certificates, that we need insurances and permissions and yet God laughs! The Holy Spirit needs no certificates, love will never fit in a book nor do we need and special permission to love no more than we do to eat or go to the toilet!
And so let us throw off Saul’s armour and allow ourselves to be like David, confident and docile and trusting in the working of the Holy Spirit through us!
Yes! Let the power and charisms of the Holy Spirit shine through us and let us once again show to the Church and the world that authentic spirituality is for the meek and the humble of heart, for the lovers of Jesus rather than the lovers of books!
Come Holy Spirit! Strengthen us even more and set the world on fire with your love and power!
The world needs heroes, Jesus needs heroes, not spidermen, Jesus men!!
A few days ago I shared my life story to a group of catholics. Unfortunately it seemed to give them indigestion!
The subject of homosexuality is a subject that has never been properly addressed by the Church and so the spiritual care for gay people does not even exist!
The result is that good people read the bible and taking a fundamentalistic approach say things like gays will burn in hell or that they have to change…
The result is that in times gone by many gay men never told anybody. Many lived single lives and joked that they “had never found the right woman” while others ran away to big cities where they found other people like them.
Sadly many too entered the priesthood, the ideal “coverup”. Some of these had a genuine vocation, others didn’t!
But whatever the case it was never considered acceptable to even talk about homosexuality. To tell someone that you had homosexual tendencies was like telling them you were a gay activist. There was no love, no mercy, no compassion only fear and shame.
My own short life has been painful without measure, and not because I am gay, but because I am catholic!
Catholic Church teaching on homosexuality isn’t so bad if one reads it fully. It speaks of God’s love and mercy and the need to love and support these people!
But Catholic Church people so often live in the old school fire and brimstone mentality and instead of helping gay people carry their cross they kick them and push them and knock them to the ground in the name of God!
To tell a gay person that he has to change and become straight is like telling a boy that he must become a girl. This “has to” mentality is already full of fear and pressure and non acceptance.
What is even worse is to tell him or her that they have to change and not telling them how to change!
So ok guys, for those of you that believe gays must magically become straight, why not go out tonight to the gay bars and fix them all with your prayers and let me know tomorrow how it went!
I might spare you the trouble. I spent 3 years full time in Sydney working in a very well known christian healing ministry with a particular focus on gays!
I will tell you a few stories. One of my best friends, I will call him John was gay.
John was 60. At 20 he went to his pastor to tell him that he was gay and didn’t know why or what to do. He was told to pray and to get married and that the “sacrament of marriage” would heal it along with sexual intercourse with his wife.
This “holy boloney” sounded good. He got married and lived a hell for 15 years as did his wife. He couldn’t stay faithful and became an alcoholic, a sexaholic and depressed.
After 15 years he could take no more. He went to the Church for help, there was none. He even discovered that a group of old ladies were praying for him to leave their church. There was no room for John.
Eventually he left the Church and launched into the gay world. He became a drag queen and contracted HIV.
Some ten years ago John had an experience of the Holy Spirit and met God. He still struggles to find acceptance in the Church today.
John’s story was one of many. Men who got married or became priests and lived a life of hell.
Unfortunately it seems that some people in our Catholic Church today do not want to address these issues.
In a book written by a very well known christian healer and former priest, Francis McNutt one is led to believe that homosexuality can be healed through healing of childhood traumas.
On paper it sounds good. In practice it is not the case. Men after 30 years of prayer and healing still have homosexual tendancies.
Now that is not to say that prayer is waste because through prayer these men became so full of God’s love and compassion but they did not become straight and neither have I.
The other night I told the group of biblebashers that I was gay and that I had accepted it and that I did not want to change nor did I want to be attracted to women.
They quoted the “man will leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife” line at me. However Jesus never got married, St Paul didn’t marry. Where does the bible say that ” every man” will do this?
I have accepted my life and my sexuality and I do not need to be straight to be loved. Sure, I wish that I was free of all thoughts of lust but this does not mean that I desire to become straight. Do you straight folk not have lustful thoughts too? Have you not sinned sexuallly too? And even if you are married, do you not get thoughts for other men and women or turn at times to pornography? All those kids you have were not purchased at the supermarket so why the big taboo about talking openly and vulnerably about sexuality?!
In the bible there is no account of Jesus condemning gays nor is there any account of him affirming them either but what does exist is Jesus being very severe with arrogant, self-righteous, know it all, prideful religious hypocretes with hard hearts who condemn others without lifting a finger to help them!
And so today I have accepted that I am gay and I am perfectly happy this way. Jesus loves me, the Holy Spirit is with me and I am living a holy life to the best of my ability the same as a straight christian should be.
In fact as far as I can see I go places and speak to people about the love and mercy of God where other “real men” will not go. I am honest and open about who I am and my weaknesses. I am not afraid. Maybe in God’s eyes I am more of a man than you!
So maybe God has put me among you all to open your eyes to His mercy and to your judgement.
Maybe He is asking you to put down your books and bibles for a while and to start loving and listening to people with your hearts rather than your heads.
And just maybe He is asking you to be my friend as I live among you in this foreign country and so when I do leave Split I will be able to say “the catholics of Split are super” rather than shaking them like the dust off my feet like another group of hypocretes!