My first stop was the Catholic Church fittingly called St Patrick’s in memory of Patrick, the irish missionary who dedicated his life helping those who had made him a slave!
In Soho one finds slavery of a different kind, slavery to sex for one!
As I strolled about I could feel the heaviness of drugs, depression, addiction, suicide and I kept thinking of the picture of the merciful Jesus I’d seen in the church just moments before!
The contrast is striking between the 2 worlds of light and dark, purity and lust, prayer and addiction.
And yet as I stroll about I feel more than anything God’s mercy for a community so misunderstood for so many years even by the church and Jesus’ desire to bring people out of slavery and into freedom!
For this job Jesus too needs sex-workers, sex-workers of a different kind!! Jesus needs souls to love these hurt and wounded souls and to bring then one by one to a personal encounter with Him!
Jesus needs souls to rise above the sexual into the spiritual where one finds true peace and self-mastery.
So many souls are thirsting for love so badly that they are willing to be like animals, literally, these collars in the photo below are not for dogs!
And yet if these people had an encounter with Jesus, how much love could they put in the world?
We must never judge. If any one of us grew up in different circumstances we may well be living in Soho and worse than anybody here.
So today my prayer is very simple! May more hearts open to bring these people thirsting for love to the true source of love, Jesus Himself!
May our church be a place of welcome, of hope, of healing and more than anything may she offer an alternative way of life and community of love to those caught up in the snares of addiction!
“There are 2 certainties in life; death and taxes” my psychiatrist used to tell me!
Whatever about taxes but the certainty of death is one that has been with me every day of my life since meeting Jesus and at times I only just managed to escape it!
This morning I was at a funeral. It was in our local church. I counted 10 mourners and I felt a deep sorrow in my heart for this man.
In Ireland where I grew up funerals were always a big deal. The local graveyard was between the church and my house and so as a little boy I’d be looking out the window counting the cars!
Funerals were also social events, so much so that to this day if I asked my mum “any news at home” she may well reply with enthuasism “so and so is dead and we were at the funeral”!!
Country people were great for going to funerals to be fair and perhaps have a closer relationship with God from working the land, dealing with animals etc.
However as the priest gave a wonderful little testimony of the last few years of this man’s life and of his renewed faith I felt Jesus asking me:
“Does it matter how many people are here?”
Some of us may have 1000 people at our funerals one day, we may even have an air-conditioned coffin with leather cushioning and an inbuilt stereo system!!! We may have the largest marble headstone in the graveyard with 24 hour security and yet we may end up in hell!
The Egyptians built the pyramids with such notions! I guess God found it funny! A pyramid full of food and treasures for a mummy!!
And so this morning as a new week begins it’s good also for us to reflect on death and ask ourselves if we are prepared spiritually?
Have we made peace with God?
Have we righted any wrongs while we still can?
Have we people to forgive ?
So friends, let’s not waste life, let’s cherish every moment and let’s be ready for death and afterwards whether there are 10 people or 10000 people at our funeral it doesn’t really matter!!
Have a great day and remember it’s never too late to come back to God and the church and put your life in order!
Good afternoon from Bayswater (beside Notting Hill)!
At times I wonder how I have managed to blog now for so many years but life experience seems to provide the material!
This morning’s blog is no different!! A comedy!
I was walking to Bayswater when I saw what looked like a buddist monk (a bald asian guy dressed in orange!!). I’d seen a few of them the other day stopping people so I said ‘good morning’ with a cheaky enthusiasm!
Delighted he didn’t have to make any effort to attract this potential ‘follower’ he looked at me and said that he’d give me peace!!
Great I thought, and Our Lady will give you a good dose of my peace too when I pray for you!
So I proceeded to write my name down on his list of peace-lookers when and only then did I notice that his peace came with a price!! £20 seemed to be the price of peace!
You must me kidding!
“My peace is free” I said to him and he grabbed the notebook and went away furious! You could say that the poor devil lost his peace if he ever had any to start with!
Maybe now I better understand why Our Lady appears on mountains where everybody can go and where there is no charge.
Human beings have a terrible habit of charging for everything!
I guess if I threw a white rag over me and shaved my head I too could go about charging people for my prayers but the Jesus I know doesn’t charge and so instead I model ‘Primark’s’ finest fashions and am the world’s best camouflaged missionary!!
So let us keep praying, let us keep giving, let us keep trusting and let us not fall into the traps of the world that try to turn spirituality and church into a business!
Let us pray rather than pay and let us not be foolish with our money or be deceived by money grabbing tricksters eager to manipulate us and our vulnerabilities!
Our Lady Queen of peace, pray for us (cost free!!) and bring us to your son Jesus in the eucharist who again gives Himself fully and free of charge at every eucharist through the church!
And finally, thank God for the catholic church and all the priests and missionaries who serve us and pray for us free or charge all over the world. May we never take them for granted and may we truly believe in the power of our own christian faith and not be deceived by alternative spiritualities that really have nothing to offer in comparison!
Good afternoon from Notting Hill, a very upmarket area of London opposite in almost every way to my previous neighbourhood of Lewisham!!
Notting hill is the type of area where I might expect to bump into Hyacinth Bucket and be invited to a candlelit supper with the major!
(this will be my most used photo)!
David Beckham owns a pub just a minute away, we went there last night for a drink, nothing special to be honest!
So as I have a coffee I think of something I said at the table the other night!
After 12 years of almost constant travelling I thank God for 2 things that ground me!
1. The church. The world over churches and masses are pretty much the same and it is very comforting to find familiarity no matter where you go!
2. Starbucks and McDonald’s. Nobody was expecting me to say that but it’s true! How I love these 2 places because of the familiarity and the sense of normality no matter where I go!!
And whether in Notting Hill or in the slums these places remain the same! They are a great reminder that God’s love is for every area, rich or poor, and just like the McDonald’s menu is the same everywhere, so too is God’s love, blessings, graces and mercy!!
In Australia there are many ‘café churches’ where people come to coffee and pray and seeing all the young people in the coffee shops who contrast sharply with the white heads in church, I wonder if there isn’t something to it!
Anyway, enough of that! May today be a day of blessings and may our church be a bit like McDonald’s and Starbucks; a vibrant busy place welcoming and open to all people all over the world!
This morning after mass and a coffee the Holy Spirit spoke to me and simply said “off you go, I’ll guide you”!
After years of this I’m used to it just like a blind man gets used to his guide dog and learns to trust blindly!!!😂😂
So off I meander somewhat aimlessly and yet on a mission! There are moments when I wonder why Jesus gave me a brain at all as I follow like a 3 year old child!
Anyway I got guided to a particular club where prayer was not the focus! As I looked around I said “welcome to hell” to myself and yet I felt Jesus with me!
One particular gentleman stopped to talk to me asking me my age! He guessed 12 or 14 (a new record). Either the dim lights or his failing eyesight got the better of him!
After telling him that I’m a little older than 15 he asked if I was a doctor or a priest! I asked him why!!
“You look like such a caring good boy”
I wish I had recorded him and sent it to my mum in Ireland! At 14 I was anything but either of those things!!
So I went onto share my life with him and he was only half interested. At 63 his good-looks had faded, his hair was gone and he was sort of depressed! With no real faith his future seemed to be a gradual decline to the grave…what misery!
Shortly after I left and asked God what on earth am I doing. At times evangelization seems like an utter waste of time!
And as I reflected prayerfully I felt Jesus tell me why evangelization is good even if we see little fruits!
1. To grow your faith. Faith is believing in an unseen God and in this case believing in unseen fruits!!
2. Prayer, as we walk around and pray for different people, God will bless them even if we never even talk to them!
3. Education. As we go out and leave the relative safety of the church we meet people who we’d never meet otherwise and no matter how far away their lives may seem from God, Jesus died for them too and we must not judge!
4. Helping the church. As we go out and see the need of the people we can come back and ask ourselves what changes need to be made in order to attract these people to Jesus.
5. Obedience. In evangelization you go to places you would rather not go, you talk at times with people whom you’d normally avoid and so it is a most excellent way of dying to your own desires and ideas!
Clearly the list could go on but that’s a start. And so today maybe God is calling you to evangelize. You may not have a plan or consider that you could spend your time more wisely and yet maybe Jesus who left the 99 sheep to look for the one that was lost thinks differently!
Come Holy Spirit, call us, empower us and strengthen us that we may go out and bring your light into the dark corners of this world and protect us from all discouragement and fear!
≈ Comments Off on Evangelization to the sex world!
Good afternoon!
Yesterday we had the feast of Mary Magdelaine, the most famous prostitute in history!
Mary, touched by God turned her life around and became the first person to see the risen Jesus and was commissioned by Him to go and tell the apostles!!
What a turn-about, this filthy whore now transformed into a radiant evangelist!!
In today’s world I think no other saint can help us more! We live in a sex-crazed society.
So what did Jesus see when He saw Mary for the first time? He saw her heart and understood her. He did not judge her!
As we know today there are very many women (and men) forced into the sex trade and manipulated by those in power who are in desperate need of true love.
In today’s society almost every film, every tv program is about sex and all sorts of relationships. Pornography is available from the youngest of ages …
So is it any wonder that young people of today are sex-crazed when they have been raised with this as a norm!
I meet a lot of people in the gay scene and the stories are extreme. Just one to share is from last night. A young guy of 23 was talking to me and asked me how many people I’d had sex with! Not too keen on replying I turned the question around!
“I lost count at 850” he replied!
To be honest I was expecting more! His 19 year old friend was at 150 so he’d need to speed up a bit if he’s to get to 850 in 4 years!!
How does Jesus react to this?!
With mercy!
People who have so much sex are in fact extremely loving affectionate people who are in turn seeking love and affection! Often they find it hard to be alone and know of no other way of expressing love than by sex.
After a while the habit forms and having sex becomes just like smoking a cigarette!
Furthermore, in the world of sex people talk very freely about their sexual preferences and experiences, there is no shame. It is what it is and people just get on with it!
So if we meet these people, we too need to be comfortable in our sexualities and bodies so that we may talk openly about God’s plans for our bodies without any sense of shame!
And this brings me to my final point! If we in the church blush at words such as sex or masturbation then how on earth are we going to be able to bring the healing power of God’s love to a generation who speak about sex without shame?!
Perhaps the answer is obvious! Before taking the splinter out of our neighbours eye we must start by taking the plank out of our own!
All of us in church are sexual beings too with desires and fantasies, with struggles and pasts! If we could be as open about our sexualities in the church in a spirit of love and healing as others are in the spirit of lust we would be transformed beings!!
Jesus made us with sexuality, He loves us with sexuality and when we receive Him in the eucharist, He desires to unite Himself with our entire beings including our sexualities which He in turn purifies.
Jesus is the lover of lovers and if our sex-crazed generation knew that a love beyond sex is available every day at mass instead of asking how many people you’ve slept with, they may be asking how many masses we have attended!!
So in summary, we are all human and we are made for love and whether we are sex-maniacs or devout catholics, Jesus desires to pour His love into every fibre of our beings and transform us from the inside.
As catholics, Jesus desires us to be free! To be free and fully human, to allow His love to flow and glow through us so that others will ask us “what’s your secret”!
He does not desire us to live in fear and scruples frustrated like a hen before she hatches nor does He desite us to be sexually promiscuous!
The freedom that He desires is the freedom of spirit, a fruit of prayer, healing and full integration of body, mind and spirit!
My prayer today is for our church and world that the veil of shame and taboo may be lifted off sexuality and the body and that we may bring even these intimate areas of our beings to Jesus for healing, loving and spiritual renewal so that when others see our joy and freedom, like Mary Magdelaine, they will keel before Jesus who is the only one who can fulfil the aching desires of their hearts!
Saint Mary Magdelaine, bring sexual healing to our church so that she can bring sexual healing to our world!
Good afternoon from the Notting Hill area of London. Apparently Madonna has a house here and many other of the rich and famous live here too!
So a few nights ago Jesus asked me to stay up all night praying! The next day was jam packed with blessings after a wonderfully kind priest helped us more than we could ever imagined!
As I’ve come to learn, just before a big blessing is always a trial. For example, just before good Friday’s victory was the trial of the agony in the garden!
This trial was not a demonic attack nor was it a punishment, it was a suffering intercession for what was to come!
During His trial Jesus was disappointed with his apostles, not that they didn’t save Him, but that they didn’t support Him in prayer because they just didn’t seem to be able to grasp what was happening!
I noticed after writing my blog on Friday that I got 2 types of replies!!
Type 1:
God is with you, He will make a way, trust!!
Type 2:
O poor you, you were homeless, have you no money, maybe you should give up and get a a job!
It hit me that some people just don’t seem to be able to trust in Jesus at all when trials come and the mystery of prayer remains just that, a mystery!!
When the Lord is growing us, He puts us through trials, this is the time when we need prayer rather than solutions!!
Our western world is always trying to fix problems and the idea of trusting in Jesus and His solutions to our problems is considered to be an insult to our intelligence!
“God gave you a good mind, He expects you to use it” they’ll say!
In other words, forget about prayer and God’s strategy to solve your problem and solve it yourself with your own ideas and then to satisfy your conscience tell yourself that God approves of your plan!
The only problem is that God’s ways are not man’s ways and if salvation was left to man, we certainly wouldn’t have come up with the idea of God becoming man in a remote place over 2000 years ago and then getting crucified!
And so once again I’m shocked at how only a very few people can grasp the obvious!
God is still the same God. He calls us to prayer and to surrendering our lives and will to Him and He asks us to pray and suffer with Him!
And so a big thanks to all my prayer friends who understand God’s ways and a call to others to pick up the Bible and to actually read it, not like a sci-fi movie but a real life story of God’s ways!
Holy Spirit, give us a deeper understanding of prayer and spirituality and help us to be open to your will and to your ways in both our own lives and in those of others so that “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”
Last night Jesus told me to trust in Him and not book a hostel! I ended up staying up all night and praying for many people and intentions!
I found a small park and as I looked at the trees I wondered if it was anything like the garden of Gethsemene! I reflected on how I had my phone and friends to chat with, Jesus had none!
Part of me was angry at God for having no bed to sleep in. Stubbornness and Pride aren’t gone out of me yet!
If Jesus was God and if He had nowhere to stay and if I’m praying ane asking Him to shape me and grow me, then what am I complaining about?!!
So I decided to start thanking him as the temperatures dropped and I had a great peace.
As I prayed I felt Jesus answering many prayer intentions which had been given to me and once again reflected on the need of prayer and suffering for prayers to be answered!!
By 4 a.m. I was quite cold. In the eyes of the world I’m homeless in London but in God’s eyes I’m a soldier in training!!
After 4 a.m. I received a message on my phone and was invited to someone’s house. After a long chat about God I was kicked out for refusing to have sex!!
One has to laugh at the irony of it all. Jesus had sent me to talk to this guy and he threw it all back in God’s face.
But why should I be surprised. Jesus died for each one of us and yet so very few are prepared to follow Him and go that extra mile!
Anyway, I’ll grab a few hours sleep in the park later and God will guide the rest of the day!
So, thought of the day!
Are you willing to go that extra mile for God and if not, how can you say that you really love Him and what witness are you to being a Christian!
Jesus, give us a desire to give all to you no matter what the cost!
A few days ago I met a guy who is gay. He told me that his parents are ok with it but that at the same time they’d prefer that he was straight!
‘That probably sounds homophobic” he laughed!
Then he went onto explain why!
His parents love him as he is and would like to see him happy and they are aware that the world is a more difficult place for gay people. They would like that he wasn’t gay not because of any homophobia but merely out of love and concern!
Of course being gay is outside his choice or their choice and while they can’t change him or change society, they can (and do) love him and help him that bit more as he faces various trials!
Since coming to London I’ve learnt a lot! The workplace is still not a place of equality for gay people, about 50% of gay guys I meet still haven’t told their families and there is little help in church for gay people here despite it being such a big city!
I can see why no parent would wish their child to be LGBT as the discrimination is hugh and the mercy small.
I Iive it first hand in my own life every day and at times struggle under the curse of it all! Not the curse of being gay, I don’t care, but the curse of being judged, excluded, marginalised by so many!
So today I make a special appeal to parents, families, pastors and friends of LGBT people….please be kind, please show love, your son/daughter, brother/ sister, friend may need it far more than you think in this difficult world.
Yesterday I went for a walk to the financial district of London. It was nice day and I needed to destress!
I arrived there about 12pm. My t-shirt and tracksuit bottoms made a nice contrast to the many suits and ties! It was like a different world and yet I thought that it would be busier!
A Jamaican man outside Barclay’s bank started to talk to me, a nice guy who works there! I went for a little walk into the foyer, security came to talk to me! I guess I didn’t have the appearance of a client nor did my backpack seem a likely bag for £1m!!
Maybe they thought I had a bomb! Whatever they thought they certainly had no idea that once upon a time I was one of them and with bigger qualifications than most!!
So on I walked conscience of security probably watching me! As my dad used to say when I was young if I caught him looking at me “the cat can look at the queen”. In other words, there is no crime in looking!
I decided not to bother my older brother this time with a surprise visit. His salary might go down if they saw he was related to a hobo like me!! In these places image is everything!
So I continued my stroll and was praying away and reflecting on the financial world!
Some may think I’ve a chip on my shoulder with the business world but that’s not the case. The financial world is necessary too and some people have a genuine calling and skills to work in that world and that’s where God wants them! I don’t!!
So I strolled back towards Greenwich enjoying the sun and trying not to worry about where I’d sleep reflecting on the folly of it all!
Sometimes a day off is needed! Sometimes it’s good to visit the past to be reminded of why we left it! Sometimes it’s hard to rebuild all, to start from zero but yet if we take it day by day, even hour by hour, we’ll get there!
God knows our hearts, He knows the difficulties, the challenges, the handicaps.