‘Follow the clues’

It’s odd how science & faith are often portrayed as rivals these days, the former being hijacked by atheists and held up as the cleverness of enlightened man to explain all. It is increasingly impressive too.

I find it comical in a way as all we do as scientists is really follow breadcrumbs neatly laid out by our creator so we can make the discoveries He has hidden away in nature. We can use our inquisitive nature to unravel the mind blowing complexities of our world and this ought to lead us directly to Him in an attitude of awe. In this way all discoveries are meant to benefit the human race.

Sometimes however, our reliance on knowledge can also undermine our dependency on God so we don’t look to Him as we should.

Too little attention is paid to following the clues that lead us to discover why we are here in the first place. This field of study too has a trail of breadcrumbs to follow that lead to His throne. The saints point the way and the many movements across the centuries have their own pathways like the desert fathers, Celtic communities, charismatics or the schools of prayer that develop during Marian apparitions. It is up to each individual to pick up the trail head and follow one of the schools of prayer which will deepen knowledge and closeness to God. Then, as with a scientific discovery, we can enter the mysteries and treasury of grace, to come into the fullness of life (John 10:10). The Lord has so much to give to those who want it. 

In a way the rigidity of the church, with its obligations and regulations, tends to make many stop at the minimum as if it is the maximum or all there is. Perhaps the growing numbers of prayer groups is a remedy to this blockage in our search for a deeper and fuller walk with God. 

Practicing our faith is more than just showing up on Sunday. Often people go to church weighed down with problems and difficulties and after Mass just bring them home again. Can a community develop in the few minutes before or after Mass? 

Small groups have advantages in that people can get to know each other and a sense of community forms and praying openly together seems to make people more understanding or compassionate of one another’s difficulties as they intercede for each another. We realise we are not alone and can learn from each other’s experiences. 

And the more we pray, the more aligned our prayers become to God’s wishes, the more are answered and this builds faith in communities and confidence in a God who is no longer a remote Sunday morning visitor but an intimate ally. 

The prayer group I attend gives an opportunity to lay down one’s burdens and concerns and bring them to God in prayer and miracles happen as the community prays in faith for His intervention. Nothing is off limits, no prayer too big or too small. 

Delivered from Addictions .. a story from America

Testimony of Adam Lambert

I want to tell you a story about my life in hopes it will draw you to know the peace I have found in Jesus. I was raised in a household where alcohol was always present. I spent most of my childhood hiding from my feelings through drugs, alcohol, sex, and violence. And yes you can hide in fights and such as it is a way to vent some of your pain. I started smoking cigarette's when I was 7 years old. I took my first drink of beer when I was 8. I got into pornography at the age of 8-9. I started smoking pot at the age of 11 and was a pill freak at the age of 12. For those of you who do not know what a pill freak is, it is a person that will take any pill you lay in front of him and then ask you what they just took.

The first thing I remember of my Parents as a child is of my Dad throwing my Mom across the room into a bookshelf he had built. This went on quite often until I was 12. My mom would scream for my older brother to help her, but as he was only 2 years older than me, he could do nothing. When I was 8 years old I had enough of the abuse and tried to stop my Dad from beating my Mom. I ran up to him and started to hit him. He picked me up by the hair of my head and threw me on the couch. I remember sitting on the couch in the living room in tears, because I knew my Mom was hurting and there was nothing I could do about it. My Dad spent allot of time telling me and my brothers that we were worthless and would amount to nothing. I took it as the truth and had a very low self esteem of myself because of it. My mom and dad divorced when I was 12 also. I was glad of this as I thought the HELL was ending. 

I started dating a girl when I was 16. When I turned 17 she was pregnant. We got married half way through my senior year of high school. We divorced 4 years later. I joined the Army to see the world and to be like my older brother. I requested to be sent to West Germany. In the Army I had to quit the drugs and due to the drug tests we had to go through. I could still drink though and I did ALLOT of it. By the time I left West Germany 3 and 1/2 years later, I could drink a half gallon of liquor and still get up and walk. I drove home in that shape many times. 

I have been married a total of 5 times and I have 6 children from these marriages. I have, to date, done every drug known to man except anything that goes in a needle. I was strung out on crack for 2 years while married to my third wife. One Saturday I found us with no money and no food for our 10 month old child. There was a church that met in the clubhouse of the apartment complex where I lived. I went down there at 12 noon to see about getting some money from them. They had not gotten out of Church yet. I went back at 1 o'clock and they were still in there having church. I went back at 2 o'clock and they were still in there. I was starting to get a little frustrated. There was a group of people coming out of the church and I asked them where the pastor was. I was told the pastor was in the church. The lady then asked me what I wanted and I told her the situation. She handed me $5.00 and invited me inside. I was dressed in a pair of shorts that was entirely to short and a muscle shirt that had sexually explicit pictures all over it. I told her I would not enter a church the way I was dressed. She told me they did not care how I looked and to come in anyway. 

This got my attention as I was under the belief that you did not go to church without your Sunday best on. I went in and sat there through 4 hours of preaching with my now ex wife and son. At the end of it another lady got up and asked us to come to the front of the church as she wanted to pray for us. She prayed over us in tongues and then they took up a collection for us. They gave us $30 to get some food with. When we got back to the apartment my ex-wife started cussing and it offended me. Now I stopped and had to take a look at this as I had one of the foulest mouths there were. I asked her to not say that because it offended me. It was at this time I realized there had been a change in me. While the lady prayed over us I was delivered from all the drug addiction and alcoholism. I was delivered from the extreme temper that I had. And most of all I was delivered from the pain in my heart. I realized that for the first time in my life I knew what it felt like to be loved and to love someone. I had fallen in love with Jesus. 

I got on my knees and started praying for the lord to teach me about him, as my ex wife left the next day and moved away, I had no-one there to teach me or anything . The Lord held up his promise in his word that he would send the Holy Spirit to be my teacher.

Death to Life ... a Padre Pio story

One Sunday morning, 26 years ago, my wife and I were planning to go on a picnic to a local beauty spot. After we finished our dinner, Ann went into the sitting- room with a cup of coffee. The two older children, Michael and Nichola, and I started to prepare a picnic hamper.

At this point Ann was pregnant with twins. While we were making the picnic hamper we heard a scream from the sitting-room. I ran in to find Ann lying on the floor.

A few years before that, Ann had miscarried a child. I thought it was something to do with this happening again. We called a doctor. By the time the doctor came Ann was completely stiff, her eyes were rolling in her head and her mouth was twisted up to her ear. The doctor got a pair of scissors to cut the clothes off Ann and gave her several injections. The ambulance came and took her to the local hospital.

A team of doctors and nurses examined her while I sat in the waiting-room. They came to me and said: "Mr Mulrine, your wife has no more than half an hour to live. She either had a massive brain haemorrhage or has a tumour of the brain. We just don't know but we feel that's most probably what it is. " They said: "If you wish, we can keep your wife alive by ventilator until the unborn children reach the age of 38 weeks, which is about two-and-a- half months away. If you don't sign the forms, then your wife and two unborn children will die within the next half-hour."

I signed the forms and they told me to go in and say goodbye, she might or might not hear me. I went in but she was just like an animal, there was blood coming from everywhere; she was completely distorted. Then they took her away and put her on the life-support machine. She looked as if she was lying peacefully after that.

That night I went down to visit my mother and my mother- in- law and I was handed a little relic leaflet of Padre Pio by my mother. That was the first time I ever heard of him. I shoved it in my top pocket. I then went back up to our house to make arrangements for the children to be looked after. I went, after that, to arrange for time off work. The man we had bought our house off had roses everywhere in the front garden and when I was passing them I thought, 'I will take those roses to Our Lady's altar.' But I sort of laughed at it and walked away.

Eventually I was walking through a place called William Street where there's a beautiful flower shop. The window was full of roses. Once again I got this feeling that I should take flowers to Our Lady's altar. So I went in and bought some and took them up to the chapel. As I was putting the roses on the altar, the stems of the flowers caught the little leaflet I had been given. It was sticking out of my pocket and it fell to the ground. I lifted it up and knelt down and said the prayer on it, which was a prayer Padre Pio would have said for people looking for his intercession. It said everything you would have liked to have said but didn't know how to say. From that time on I had a great prayerfulness about me, which I never had before.

Ten or 12 days passed and Ann was still the same. One night I was sitting down beside her with the little leaflet and I said: "Look, if you're going to do something for me, give me a sign." I asked Ann to squeeze my hand and I swore she did. I sent for the nurse and the doctor but they told me I was clutching at straws, there was no chance at all. They said she was clinically brain dead. But they said there was a specialist coming down in a few days and he would talk to me and put me more clearly in the picture.

Eventually this doctor came down and told me what I had been told before. He said: "Your wife either had a massive brain haemorrhage or has a tumour and we have no intention of doing anything at all because your wife is clinically dead, only the machine is keeping the children going." Another five or six weeks passed. All this time I was going to Our Lady's altar with roses and praying to Padre Pio. They then asked me could they move my wife to hospital in Belfast and I said: "Yes."

One night in Belfast I was sitting beside my wife's bed when one of the nurses said: "Mr Mulrine, would you mind leaving for a while?" It was about half past one or two o'clock in the morning. I went down to the end of the corridor and I started saying the Rosary. I got up after the first decade and walked towards Ann's bed but something pulled me back. On the last decade of the Rosary I looked up the corridor and I saw this figure coming around the corner and I ran towards it and said: "Excuse me, you're looking for me."

I had never met the man in my life, I didn't know who the man was; don't ask me why I said that. He said: "I'm looking for a man called Mulrine." I said: "That's me." The man's name was Michael Murray and he and his wife ran the Padre Pio Centre for Northern Ireland. He said: "I got a phone call about half-an- hour ago from a lady who said for me to take the glove of Padre Pio to Sean and Ann Mulrine in the Royal Hospital." This was a brown mitt that Padre Pio would have had over the bandages, over the stigmata on his hands. We went up to Ann and he said to me: "She might hear you talking, tell her what it is." So I told her. We put the glove of Padre Pio on Ann's head. Despite all the tubes, she moved her hand, she grabbed the glove, she brought the glove to her face, blessed herself three times, brought it to her stomach and blessed her stomach with it. She then just fell back into the bed again. This was the first movement we had seen. After that, Michael and I sat and he told me some things about Padre Pio. Then we left. I went to my room. Next morning I went to Ann's bed again but she was moved and the bed was gone. I thought they had taken her to take the children out. The nurse came to me and said: "The doctors have read the reports from last night and they've taken her down to surgery for exploratory examination."

They removed part of the crown of her head and put a camera in to see what was there. They came to me after the operation and said they had seen several of the major vessels in the brain and they had burst. There was a large amount of congealed blood in the centre of the brain and it could not be sucked out. They said: "We don't know how the event last night happened, we can't understand it, she's clinically dead." That night I went into my room and I couldn't go through the door for the overpowering smell of roses. It was years later that I was told that this was the invisible presence of Padre Pio.

To cut a long story short, Ann came out of the recovery room, they put her in bed and she opened her eyes and started to talk and move. They took her off the ventilator to see how she would do. They called it a fluke. They said: "We don't know how this has happened." Ann got so well that she was eventually brought back to Derry, where the babies were born just a week after she arrived. She just went from strength to strength. She never looked back and she and the two boys were released from hospital on 23 September, which was the anniversary of the death of Padre Pio.

Eventually we went out to San Giovanni in thanksgiving and we met Father Alessio who was Padre Pio's secretary and nurse. He is dead since. He asked could he investigate Ann's story as part of the cause of Padre Pio. They investigated for four or five years or more. When they asked for the doctors' personal opinions, they all said it was beyond medical science how she is today.

As a result, for the beatification we were asked to meet the Pope and present flowers from the people of Ireland. And for the canonisation I was also invited to go up to the Pope with the presentations. We take the trips out now in thanksgiving. We never make any fuss about it. We don't say it was a miracle. We say it was a grace given by God through the intercession of Padre Pio.

Sean runs the Padre Pio Centre for Northern Ireland, which is affiliated to the monastery at San Giovanni Rotondo

And Jesus looked at Peter.....a story from East Germany

After the fall of the Berlin wall a group of nuns went to east Germany to help the local church which had been persecuted for 40 years or so.

One day a sister was visiting the hospital to give communion to the sick. She entered the ward to visit one Catholic patient who had requested her to come and as she was giving him communion the man in the next bed began to weep.

She went over to talk with him and through his sobs his story unfolded. He was born a Catholic and practised his faith into adulthood. After Mass one Sunday he was met by the secret police (the Stasi) who told him that if he was seen in the church again, he would lose his job.

With a wife and 2 children to support he left his faith behind and had lived most of his life away from the church. Only now as an old man on his sickbed did he have the opportunity to come back to God..

30

Luke 24, 30-31 And it happened that, while he was with them at table, he took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them. With that their eyes were opened and they recognized him, but he vanished from their sight.

The Purpose of Pain .... a story from America

In the apple-growing state of Maine in America, I was visiting a farmer friend and saw an apple tree so loaded down with fruit that the branches had to be propped up to keep them from breaking under the weight of apples. When I remarked about the fruitfulness of the tree, my friend said to me, Go over and look at that trees trunk down near the bottom.

There I saw that the tree had been badly wounded by a big gash across its side. The farmer explained, That is something we have learned about apple trees. When the growing tree tends to run to wood and leaves and not to fruit, we stop it by wounding it, by cutting into its bark. And we don't know why, but almost always the result is that the tree turns its energies to producing fruit.

Part of a sermon by St Anthony of Padua....

The man who is filled with the Holy Spirit speaks in different languages. These different languages are different ways of witnessing to Christ, such as humility, poverty, patience and obedience; we speak in those languages when we reveal in ourselves these virtues to others. Actions speak louder than words; let your words teach and your actions speak.

We are full of words but empty of actions, and therefore are cursed by the Lord, since he himself cursed the fig tree when he found no fruit but only leaves. Gregory says: A law is laid upon the preacher to practice what he preaches. It is useless for a man to flaunt his knowledge of the law if he undermines its teaching by his actions.

‘The Measure of his Sacrifice’

In this centenary year of the RAF the ringtone on my cell phone is the roar of a Spitfire’s Rolls Royce Merlin engine as it flies by. Its era is before my time but there is much to gain from a look at that period of history. In particular it reminds me of an extract from a letter written by a young pilot to his mother; left in the care of his CO in case he failed to return from a mission. His bomber went down over Belgium as they supported the evacuation of Dunkirk and bought time for the men on the beach. In it he writes “the universe is so vast and so ageless that the life of one man can only be justified by the measure of his sacrifice”. He was 23. 

I wonder how far you would have to walk to meet a young man (or an old one) of such quality; with that kind of wisdom and clarity of thought. Other lines in his letter revealed how he saw the Germans as ‘the greatest organized challenge to Christianity and civilization’ and felt honoured to be part of the RAF and to ‘throw my full weight into the scale’. 

He found his part in the ‘larger story’. He knew he was made for something more than this life; that our life in the flesh is where we prepare for the eternal spiritual life, here we must forge our legacy and our future by sacrificial love. 

What he, and the many other defenders of those traditional values, died for has now been largely swept away. That Christian civilisation that the Nazi’s failed to destroy, successive governments have undermined as public opinion was swayed and the Christian witness was muted. 

Recent anti-Christian developments include the insistence on Catholic adoption agencies to allow gay couples to adopt children or close down altogether and now I understand that praying and counselling outside abortion clinics may be prohibited by law soon. Now the enemy is no longer a hostile nation but a godless generation. 

Many thought it wise to compromise or collaborate with Hitler, as was seen in France with the Vichy government, and perhaps there are those who try to do likewise here with the new regime too, compromising beliefs for a quiet life without confrontation. 

But our only course can be to stand firm and fight on against these and the future attacks on the heart of Christian civilisation which is the family. Christians who don’t compromise or collaborate will find themselves in conflict with these new ‘values’ that we have allowed to gain traction. 

What legacy will we leave, what will be the measure of this Catholic generation’s sacrifice? Perhaps another old soldier can lend his counsel from beyond the grave “Never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in... Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.” (Churchill) 

(reference :- Flight Officer Rosewarne's letter)

Streams of living water .. a story from Italy

Sr Briege McKenna, relates a wonderful prophecy in her book Miracles Do Happen (Veritas, Dublin). In a chapter titled the Queen of Peace, she writes: In May of 1981 I was ministering in Rome and had the privilege of praying with Fr Tomislav Vlasic, a priest from Yugoslavia.

He had asked me to pray for his parish back home. I received one of the images I often get. I saw a white church with twin steeples. 

Fr Tomislav was sitting in the main celebrant's chair in the sanctuary of this church and streams of living water were flowing from the altar. Many people were coming and cupping their hands to drink of this water. 

Fr Tomislav was very consoled by this image because his parish was going through hard times. The church was experiencing great difficulties and the government was less than sympathetic towards the Church. And it was about a month later on June 24 that Our Lady made her first appearance to five youths of Medjugorje. 

She has been appearing daily since then and there have been many conversions and miracles in that rural village. Thousands of people come from all over the world. Mary is asking people to return to her Son and telling them that if they would pray, fast and go to confession, there would be many conversions and conversion would lead to peace. And she calls herself the Queen of Peace. 

Fr Tomislav found himself in the very church I had described to him in the image in Rome