#missionary

By the hand of Witch Penelope, the only person God gave specific instructions to prophesy about the coming things.

To the fakers who claim Gods name, those who claimed Jesus Christ, but have ignored Gods voice, about who you should be associating yourselves with and about who you are serving.

The places you go, the places you bring your innocent children to are fortresses of the enemy. You have purposely placed your and Gods people in danger out of pure pride, you hold on to your fake beliefs. God turns His face away from your prayers. You are to Him a clashing of symbols with no rhythm.

You are about ready to be hit hard too.

In Jesus Christ holy name, Amen.

When my boyfriend took my virginity he wanted to take me on my back so he could see the look on my face as he slid into me for the first time…

My eyes rolled back into my head and I couldn’t breathe it felt so good

HOMILY for Feast of St Patrick

Jer 1:4-9; Ps 116; Acts 13:46-49; Luke 10:1-12. 17-20

There’s much celebration in the borough of Camden and beyond today. We’ve been in need of some good news, and today news broke of the release of someone after six years in captivity. I’m speaking, of course, about the news that Nazanin Ratcliffe, a charity worker, has been released from jail in Iran at last. We thank God for her release and for this good news. However, this is very fitting today on St Patrick’s day, a day of great jubilation for millions around the world. For St Patrick, too, had been in captivity, enslaved after having a pirate raid on his part of Roman Britain, and he was taken to Ireland where he worked as a shepherd for six years of enslaved labour.

And yet, in God’s providence, these six years of hardship, which Patrick hated, were instrumental in the coming of the Gospel of salvation to the Irish people, the people who had enslaved him. Patrick’s father was a deacon, and his grandfather might have been a Christian priest too, but at the time when he was captured, aged 16, Patrick was not an active believer himself. In this respect, he’s a fitting patron for many adolescents born into Catholic families! But during those six years of captivity in Ireland, Patrick had a conversion experience: as a shepherd he had time to pray, to repent of his sins and ask God for forgiveness, and eventually, he was converted to a living faith in Christ. So, we pray today, through St Patrick’s example and intercession, for that same grace to be given to all of us; to those who have a lukewarm faith, a dead faith, a merely cultural faith or familial faith but not a living personal faith in Jesus Christ. May we too be brought to a deeper conversion, a deeper friendship with Christ, a living relationship with God.

May we rejoice at the Good News of our liberation, not so much from a prison in Iran, or from slavery in the fields of Ireland, but something far worse: slavery to sin, addictions, passions, which lead to eternal death. We rejoice that Christ our Saviour has set us free from this! As St Luke says: “The Lord has sent me to bring the good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives.” St Patrick, having been a captive and a slave himself would have known the truth of this statement, literally, but he chose to return to Ireland after having studied and been ordained a priest, because he saw that the people in Ireland experienced an even deeper poverty and deprivation: they had not heard the Gospel, or they had rejected it. So St Patrick writes in his spiritual autobiography, “Never before did they know of God except to serve idols and unclean things. But now, they have become the people of the Lord, and are called children of God.”

So we rejoice today in that historic conversion of the Irish people thanks to the efforts of St Patrick. His years as a shepherd prepared him well to become a missionary shepherd in Ireland, a true pastor for the people of Ireland, and we pray today for many more to follow in his footsteps as true priests and bishops, willing to suffer for the sake of the Gospel and for the salvation of souls.

For hundreds of years, Irish missionaries have gone throughout the world, inspired by St Patrick’s example, to preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth. As a convert to Catholicism in Singapore, I knew the good example and steadfast faith of Irish nuns and Irish brothers who taught in our Catholic schools. They never lost their accents, their humour, and love for good craic, even though they lived all their adult lives in the Far East, many of them dying and being buried in Asia. May these wonderful Irish missionaries – many of whom are rejoicing in eternal life, I’m sure – pray for Ireland today, and for all the sons and daughters of St Patrick!

For now, it would appear, the time has come for the world to send missionaries back to Ireland; and to the Irish communities throughout the world; and to those who, like the youthful Patrick, do not have an active faith right now! In our time, Americans and Nigerians (who also have St Patrick as their national patron saint), for example, have been going to Ireland as lay missionaries and priests and religious, to remind the Irish people of their ancient faith. So too I find myself having come from Singapore to this place, in a sense, repaying the debt that I owe to Br Kevin Byrne, Br Oliver Rogers, Br Joseph Kiely, and all the other Irish-born De La Salle brothers who inspired me with their gentle faith and their firm teaching about the love of Christ. They converted me, during those six years I lived in Singapore, so you could say that, by God’s providence, because of St Patrick and his legacy, I now find myself standing here today as your parish priest.

Hence the best way we can celebrate and honour St Patrick today is by actively living and handing on the One True Faith, a strong faith in the Holy Trinity and in God’s providence and power, a faith that St Patrick expresses beautifully in his Lorica, or Breastplate invocation. Let us now pray with him:

“Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, 
Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, 
Christ on my right, Christ on my left, 
Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down, 
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me, 
Christ in the mouth of every man who speaks of me, 
Christ in the eye that sees me, 
Christ in the ear that hears me.

I arise today
Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity, 
Through a belief in the Threeness, 
Through a confession of the Oneness
Of the Creator of creation”

Amen.