The field is the world, the good seed the subjects of the kingdom.
The darnel the subjects of the evil one.
We are sowed at random.
We are, we fear with no one.

There are momentirely evil people.
There are no entirely good folk.
Our own goodness hardly stands out like a church steeple.
There is good and evil in all of us that we can unhooked.

Is there really an evil one lying in wait.
Ready to tempt us with all we really want.
Will we like darnel be cast into the fire to our own passions sate.
Will he at our death taunt us.

This is what I believe, the bad in us at death will go to be fired.
The good in us, we will find the One has of us not tired.

With my son, I was meditating.
Inhaling from the diaphragm, being still.
Breathing in and out through each nostril, avoiding thinking.
Trying all restlessness to kill.

Focusing on every part rising up the spine and now saying the Maranatha prayer.
Quietly saying come Lord, come.
Outside rain drops sliding down the window pane like a tear.
The cloud’s soothing shadows hiding the brightness of the sun.

And through the window by the bank high and grassy squared in section.
A great tree root grew in my inner and outer vision seeing.
Embedded deep, crazily reaching out in every direction.
Fixed yet growing.

Like a meditation it is still.
But it’s life force crates a peace that is with me still.

The kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed.
It is the smallest of all seeds but when it is grown it is the biggest shrub of all.
It is the smallest creatures into which so much can we read.
From even inconsequential things our faith can grow tall.

I am reading Fredrik Sjoberg’s the Fly Trap.
I never knew that hover flies were so numerous or so interesting.
They pollinate busily and feed on sap.
Yet we ignore their joyful humming.

The Marmalade horsefly, Sypchus, Ribesli, Eristalis and the Drone fly
There are 240 species in England alone.
Long ago I should of wearied of great issues and focused on the tiny things under the sky.
In these little beautiful living scraps of life that I might have found my true home.

Now I will ponder the wonder of small natural things.
And have faith in what guileless nature sings.

17th Sunday in Ordinary Time, 2020

The Kingdom of Heaven is like treasure hidden in a field.
Which someone has found.
What path will truth yield.
What truth indeed is sound.

Is it a good life to enjoy?
Or is it care for others, a life without sin?
No, it is finding joy.
This is the pearl, finding the soul within.

Then we could indeed sell everything.
And possess that part of our heart where the pearl is hidden.
We will indeed become the owner of the ring.
A perfect roundel of life with doubting care forbidden.

Like the householder who clears out all his junk.
And we will in our mind at least become an apprentice monk.

I was doing the last one hundred kilometres.
The Spanish hills rolled away before me.
Thirst quenched with countless watery litres.
The dusty road stretched before me as far as the eye could see.

I was on my way to the Compostela shrine.
To find the relics of St James.
I just had to follow my son along this pilgrim line.
Before and after me there were and had been be countless unknown names.

The legs are tired.
The mind numbed.
But hope inspired.
This labour some small token for a spiritual bank funded.

And now the city is before me.
The Cathedral, the Botafumeiro, a certificate, and beyond an indifferent sea.

I am the vine.
You are the branches.
In an abstract picture there is a truth seeking line.
Barely glimpsed from mud filled trenches.

In life’s turmoil we are not alone.
We are just a twig, a leaf on a mighty oak.
We sway in the wind afraid of its harsh tune.
Oh well, that great tree will still be there when we croak.

Fluttering we fall to the ground.
We lie there unregarded and rot.
But a little of us survives which is sound.
So we become part of something new, that is our lot.

But once we were part of some life giving force.
And one day soon we will be again of course.

They have taken the Lord out of the tombs she said.
I have not ascended to the master, do not cling to me.
We now follow where Mary led.
Like her we meet but we do not see.

It is July now, I can hear the rumble of the combine starting harvest.
Gone are those fresh days of Easter.
The air is heavy now warm are these days of summer rest.
But still those echoes of spring can be a reminder and teacher.

Gone now from our valley are daffodil, tulip, hyacinth, blossoms and bluebell.
Here now are delphiniums, lilies, dahlias, gardenias, hydrangeas, iris, and last crocus.
But still my eyes remain closed to what the spirit can tell.
This beauty all around me is all I can see in nature’s chorus.

But in this hot summer air.
An echo of fresh cool spring hope is still there.

His mother and His brothers were anxious to have a word with Him.
But stretching out His hand to His disciples He said, here are my mother and my brothers.
Do we not always put our family first, cosy in our own little rim?
In deed and mind whatever we say we put them before the others.

There is nothing to be ashamed of if reasoned.
If family comes first.
But faith surely can come second.
And third for truth a thirst.

If we try to do the will of Him in Heaven.
We will be His brother and sister.
It is a metaphysical leaven.
To his will if we are no resister.

But for us in our life we must admit, mere mortals, for what do we in reality thirst.
That our family come first.

The days of our years are three score years and ten.
It is soon cut off and they fly away.
The seventieth birthday is here and it is dreaded by all men.
Soon now our cares aside we will lay.

For You a million years is but an instant.
My life, all life is just one insignificant mirror shard of Your Image.
For You my time is your no time, all is constant.
You know that for us all truth and all past and future summers are just a desert mirage.

That maple tree before that I myself with bare hands I have planted.
Now it is in its first touch of delicate blooming growth.
Perhaps in one hundred years it will still stand glorious and scented.
I will long be in my grave but it too will wither and die, there is no other truth.

But we both will have come and gone, our lives no longer seen or read.
But perhaps we should be content, a little light and shade we too will have shed.

Do you want us to weed it out?
No, he said, because when you weed out the darnel you might pull out the wheat.
I look out now at the pristine wheat around me, all weeds put to rout.
But if you herbicide life as full of weeds, life you cheat.

There are no people who are either wheat or darnel.
We are all both.
As we grow we live together in this to final charnel.
It is to disease that we at birth plight our troth.

But through life, solitary weed by weed out we pluck with patience.
We will not be cast whole into the fire but our sins will.
At our death the lamp of life will not be extinguished but lit.
But to this end our vision sees but barely above a mysterious window sill.

We are now crouching in darkness.
But soon we we will rise and see by help of his harness through this bleakness.

Ut quid Domine
Why standest thou far off O Lord?
How often do I heartfelt say:
Pierce my heart with your loving sword.

The wicked hath said in his heart.
I shall not be moved for I shall never be in adversity.
There is always the secure braggart.
Who never doubts his own brilliant creativity.

He lieth in wait secretly as a lion in his den.
He lieth in wait to catch the poor.
In every guise does trouble dwell maybe even in the peaceful wren.
But most securely in our own heart’s grievous sore.

Our own desires we may never be able to suppress.
But can we not bear one thought for those we unwittingly oppress.

On the Clent hills, Kenelm is here in the low valley.
Born to be king, under a hawthorn tree, a headless corpse lies he.
This Mercian king did not count the cost of any tally.
He refused the maxim of me, me.

He would not murder his way to the crown.
But put his faith in Christ.
His reward everlasting renown.
His fate to his death be enticed.

To encourage devotion to an English saint.
Cardinal Newman would walk to the Clent Hills from the Oratorian house at Rednal.
We too can study our island’s history if our heart grows faint.
JRR Tolkien lived during his mother’s final illness at Rednal.

Thus a Mercian saint, an English cardinal and the Hobbit’s mystery.
Are linked here in his quiet English countryside in our history.

The beauty is proclaimed of Mount Carmel.
Here Elijah defended Israel’s faith in a living God.
There in our hearts to him we can play the minstrel.
In praise as on a natural stone quod.

Here settled the Carmelite.
A quiet contemplative life.
Prayer without respite.
Material riches cut away with a loving knife.

Our Lady of Mount Carmel.
The patroness of the order.
We can only marvel
At their love toward her.

But we just stand as on a mere foothill.
With our tender plodding spiritual skill.

Wednesday, 15th Week in Ordinary Time, 2020

I bless you father for hiding these things from the learned and clever.
And revealing them to mere children.
We worry about whether we are in error.
But the truth behind error is sometimes hidden.

Reason is faith’s dragging anchor.
Worrying rationality is the enemy of religion.
Children have this beguiling acceptance and no previous rancour.
We may have to imitate that lack of demand for precision.

St Bonaventure was a mendicant friar committed to poverty.
He wrote that the simple could have a clearer knowledge of God than the wise .
Belief in lack of wisdom may be a rarity.
But is it up to us to despise.

Can we ever have the child’s simple acceptance.
Can we lay aside for a moment all resistance.

Tuesday, Week 15 in Ordinary Time, 2020

By the age of twenty five he had lost everything.
Rejected as a priest.
He devoted himself to those who had nothing.
Despite every obstacle he refused to desist.

The hospitals were filthy . The staff violent and uncaring.
His reforms introduced against opposition stealthily.
But he had known these hospitals from inside, himself sickening .
And now his people emerged healthily.

He became bursar of Rome’s St Giacomo Hospital
He founded an order of the Camillian.
His work was as strong as forged metal
Against a bureaucracy truly labyrinthian .

We may not be able to follow those who in hospital care now too.
We can only say thank you.

Thinking about the feast day of Holy Roman Emperor St Henry.
Patron saint of Benedictine oblates.
At the door of the monastery he stands down the centuries like a welcoming sentry.
Letting us in whether or not we are spiritual mates.

We are really just a pseudo monk
So are we playing at the real thing.
But is it a disgrace to fear total commitment because we are in a bit of a funk.
For in our modest way your praises we can sing.

You mayb say St Henry was neither holy nor Roman.
Can we not then try to be apprentices , holy if not religious.
We aim to be neither a high nor low man.
But to the rule we at least try not to be mendacious.

We have our little daily dip into the rule and scripture reading.
And in this monastery of the mind for a few moments each day to you we are kneeling.

Some fell among thorns and the thorns grew up and choked them.
Others fell on rich soil and produced their crop some one hundred told
My little vegetable patch is cloaked with weeds. Where is that potato stem?
But did I not put them in rich soil as seed with labour untold?

Where now my runner beans, potatoes and mint.
Where now the sage and tomatoes.
The truth Is have I not laboured without stint.
Where now those straight little pride filled rows.

But now is this not the distinctive leaf of the potato emerging.
A hardy breed resistant to the brownest of fingers.
So yes we are put in rich soil for our own hopeful growing.
And yes ambition’s weeds choke us but slowly we emerge, a chorus of hesitant singers.

We cannot blame any poor soil.
It is only ourselves that can burst through by our own toil.

Now that my life expectancy is less than someone on US death row.
I often ponder on where I am going and for an answer longing.
Are we just a bundle of molecules casually brought together which death in abandon will sow.
Are we to another reborn restless body in endless recycles on death going.

More and more I think we are in this life primarily memories.
I remember my first aged 4 born aloft in those aeroplanes that flew from Lydd taking cars.
Then I remember the heavenly clouds, there are many more but no defining truth tarries.
Am I, then, only these memories which death in mortality indeed bars,

Do I have a unique immortal soul?
Known for all time?
An everlasting creator warmed bright ember coal.
Too beautiful, singular and eternal to express in any rhyme.

I do not know but I so want it to be true.
So that is what I shall believe is right and thus all or some doubt away is blew.

There was a man of venerable life.
Benedict blessed by grace and by name.
He fled a world of strife.
His wants and suffering to tame.

I wandered disconsolate around his birthplace Nursia.
The churches lay crushed by earthquake.
But from every destruction by war and nature, hope creates a new anima.
A rebirth that can crush under heal despair’s insidious snake.

His little rule for over a thousand years is on countless bookshelves.
Moderate, undemanding and soul enriching in every way.
It allows us to grow out of not into ourselves.
And in our own lay life not necessarily in a community to stay.

We too can create our own monastery of the mind.
And to our faltering spiritual steps be kind.

He will have the beauty of the olive.
And the fragrance of Lebanon.
From an ancient gnarled tree his soothing oil we ask him to give.
And receive in holy reunion.

From war torn years the past in memory whistles.
I recall a mad dash down the mountain to Beirut.
Brake lights not used for fear of missiles.
Hope of peace in that car was mute.

But let us recall the majesty of Cedrus Libani.
Begonia, poppies, jasmine, gladiolus, and orange flowers.
Stretching out to calm the sight in warm litany.
And the green Cyprus’s beauty light scatters.

Come back to the Lord your God is the call to Israel.
And to us through every trial.

Psalm 104

O sing to the Lord, sing his praise.
Tell all of his wonderful works.
All our days.
Our bulwarks.

Constantly seek.
The face of God.
A path however meek.
However we are by the world called odd.

Consider the Lord and his strength.
Constantly search for his face.
Never at arms length.
To the end of our race.

The miracles, the judgement he spoke.
We need only evoke.

We were at Mass, the busy world locked out soundly.
Dutifully attentive and in silence.
Then a lady started muttering loudly.
You could feel the disapproval now intense.

But then I laughed and remembered today’s Gospel heard but the point not seen.
A man was brought to Jesus and when the dumb man spoke
The people were amazed, nothing like this had ever been seen.
The very point was before us judgemental folk.

We judge.
But we do not sympathise.
We grudge.
But we do not empathise.

No wonder His labourers are so few.
We are indeed at the back of this particular queue.