Fr Andrew: "My own answer to the question of why so few Christians experience the Holy Spirit is this: the Holy Spirit is experienced mainly in divinely inspired action, but very few Christians are willing to surrender to such action, a surrender that is associated with genuine love of God, with sacrifice and the renunciation of the deceptive love of evil. Many of us, to a greater of lesser extent, are like the people that Jesus first encounters in the Gospels. We want God to help us and to heal us - but mainly so that we can then get on with our lives in peace and prposperity. God will, of course, help us often in material ways, but God wants us to go further than this. He wants us to surrender our whole lives over to Him, to really be able to say "thy will be done", not in the manner of a slave but in the manner of a beloved child. This surrender is an entirely different matter from merely asking for gifts, and it is something that we tend to find very hard. This difficulty of this surrender is, I think, why the coming of the Holy Spirit is the final revelation of the Godhead and happens only on the far side of Calvary, the ultimate surrender to the will of God in love." Music by Edwin Fawcett. Visit Totus2us.com for much more. Totus Tuus (All Yours) was the motto of Blessed John Paul II to Mary. Our Lady is also everything to us - Totus 2us.

Fr Andrew: "An extreme version of this fear of illness and suffering seems to be much of the inspiration for the increase in suicides today and the drive to promote the practice of euthanasia, the killing of those deemed unfit to live. Many saints, by contrast, have made a special point of overcoming their natural repulsion or fear for some of the worst diseases, especially leprosy. They've looked beyond the disease to see the person suffering as a beloved child of God. For St Francis of Assisi, a major turning point in his path to extreme holiness was when he embraced a leper. St Damien, who died in 1889 after caring for lepers for many years, is the first officially recognised saint of Hawaii. What then inspires people like St Francis, St Damien and many others, who are largely unknown, to care for the sick and outcast in this way? The most straightforward answer is that, by surrendering to the love of God, they were given the gifts that they needed to accomplish great deeds. Their lives show the fruit of the Holy Spirit called benignity, which is like a holy fire by which a person melts to relieve the needs of others. They also had a special form of courage. The source and keystone of this courage was not a confidence in their own physical survival, indeed St Damien himself died of leprosy, this courage is a gift of the Holy Spirit, a confidence in attaining heaven, the only goal that really matters, so long as one remains in personal union with God." Music by Edwin Fawcett. Visit Totus2us.com for much more. Totus Tuus (All Yours) was the motto of Blessed John Paul II to Mary. Our Lady is also everything to us - Totus 2us.

Fr Marcus: "Our task therefore is to awaken our age out of its apathy and indifference to consider that life may be worth living, that there may be some meaning to our being born into this colourful world, that there might be something a little more profound about those whom we love than a random mutation of chemicals, that death may be questioned and need not be seen as the end. This is the way of Job. There is perhaps more to people than the next pleasure, the next honour, the next victory. Our job is to convince people to see further, to question more, to offer the goodness that St Paul speaks of. ... I invite you, finally, to listen to the words of Pope Benedict: 'Only where God is seen, does life truly begin. Only when we meet the living God in Christ do we begin to know what life is. We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God: each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary. There is nothing more beautiful than to be surprised by the Gospel, by the encounter with Christ; there is nothing more beautiful than to know Him and to speak to others of our friendship with Him." Music by Edwin Fawcett. Visit Totus2us.com for much more. Totus Tuus (All Yours) was the motto of Blessed John Paul II to Mary. Our Lady is also everything to us - Totus 2us.

Fr Andrew: "Regardless of the success or otherwise of all impersonal substitutes for God, a deeper problem remains. We are ourselves personal beings, and so it is unsatisfactory to propose that whatever created the cosmos is sub-personal. More specifically there is a natural desire not only to know that there is a God, but to know God, to be able to relate to God in a first to second person way, as an 'I' to a 'you'. On this point therefore the denial of a personal God therefore creates unusual dangers for humanity. If God, the Father Almighty, the true God, is denied or rejected, then there is an incompleteness in us, like a house that is left empty. And the problem with leaving a house empty is that it can be occupied by squatters or parasites. To give an example, the lesson of recent centuries is that in those places where Christianity was suppressed, those countries were not left in a state of spiritual neutrality, but tended to end up worshiping something else, often accompanied with a reign of terror." Music by Edwin Fawcett. Visit Totus2us.com for much more. Totus Tuus (All Yours) was the motto of Blessed John Paul II to Mary. Our Lady is also everything to us - Totus 2us.

Fr Andrew: "Many Christians however still live with divided hearts, adding some practices of the City of God to lives that are still shaped to some degree by the City of Man. As a result many Christians are less effective and fruitful in this world than they should be. The step which most Christians find difficult is to surrender all things to God as revealed in His Son Jesus Christ, and to surrender things to the guidance of the Holy Spirit. This surrender may or may not involve a physical abandonment of our possessions, as the Apostles did in today's Gospel, by abandoning their fishing nets and following Christ. But this surrender does involve putting God first, whatever our walk in life, to devoting significant time to daily prayer and the Sacraments, to following our God-given vocation and seeing the passing things of this world from the perspective of our true home which is in heaven." Music by Edwin Fawcett. Visit Totus2us.com for much more. Totus Tuus (All Yours) was the motto of Blessed John Paul II to Mary. Our Lady is also everything to us - Totus 2us.

Fr Andrew: "In preparation for the Year of Faith beginning on 11th October 2012, I would like to devote some homilies this year to a systematic exploration of the faith, beginning with the Creed. As we have just celebrated Christmas, it is also appropriate to focus on the central section of the Creed, devoted to Jesus Christ. The words of the Creed are of course familiar to all of us who attend Sunday Mass but that very familiarity means it is tempting perhaps to recite the words without thinking about them. But these words are like gold, and just as gold is purified by fire to burn away dross, these words were chosen, tested and purified through centuries of debate and considerable suffering, in order to assist in our salvation." Music by Edwin Fawcett. Visit Totus2us.com for much more. Totus Tuus (All Yours) was the motto of Blessed John Paul II to Mary. Our Lady is also everything to us - Totus 2us.

Fr Andrew: "Today we celebrate the first disclosure of the Son of God to the gentiles, to the non-Jewish people, to Magi or Wise Men from beyond the borders of ancient Israel. These men probably came from Persia, the area today known as Iran. .. But we know little about these men except that they must have had remarkable humility. In their search for truth, they were prepared to go wherever they were guided by the star. They left their country and travelled first to Jerusalem and finally to a humble dwelling in Bethlehem, and when they saw the child Jesus with his mother Mary, the Bible records an extraordinary action: these wise men, presumabely notables of some wealth in their own country, fell to their knees and worshipped. They worshipped because they had an epiphany or theophany. In the face of Christ, they recognised the face of God-made-man." Carol - In the Bleak Midwinter. Visit Totus2us.com for more. Totus Tuus (All Yours) was the motto of Blessed John Paul II to Mary. Our Lady is also everything to us - Totus 2us.

Fr Andrew: "I invite you to picture in your minds eye the image of the stable, with representatives of every aspect of God's creation gathering around the manger: the child's mother Mary, her husband Joseph, the shepherds who have come in from the fields, the Wise Men shortly to arrive from the East, the ox and the ass who know their Master's crib and the star in the sky. They have come to Bethlehem not simply to revere the birth of a great man, some future prophet or world leader, they have come to worship God Himself; they have come to gaze on the face of God, God-made-Man for our salvation." Carol - Away in a Manger. Visit Totus2us.com for more. Totus Tuus (All Yours) was the motto of Blessed John Paul II to Mary. Our Lady is also everything to us - Totus 2us.

Fr Marcus: "We're made for the lights of eternity, we're made for God. God became man, born that man no more may die, born to raise the sons of earth, born to give them second birth. He became one with our humanity, not with an animal, a plant or even a planet. He became one with us and it tells us about ourselves that we're made for him and our hearts will be restless until they rest in him. Lets allow him on this night to subvert us! To enter clandestinely as a warrior into our soul, to break down and topple all those idols, all those false things that hold us back, because he will bring light. O Christian realise tonight in the wonder of the manger your nobility. Amen." Carol - Away in a Manger. Visit Totus2us.com for more. Totus Tuus (All Yours) was the motto of Blessed John Paul II to Mary. Our Lady is also everything to us - Totus 2us.

Fr Andrew: "Yet throughout all these centuries of tribulation, the promise of God in the first reading remained, namely that God Himself would make a house in which to dwell, and that the sovereignty of David's line and throne would be established forever. And this is the background against which the events of Christmas are highlighted, like a light set in the darkness, like a mystery at last revealed, in the light of which the whole history of the Old Testament is seen as a foreshadowing and a prefigurement. For what St Paul describes as the Good News is something genuinely and uniquely new in the world, namely that God has become man and dwelt among us. The temple that God has prepared is not the gold and stone of the Temple of Solomon, but the body and blood of Jesus Christ himself. The ark of the covenant is no longer a casket overlaid in gold, but the Virgin Mary, the Immaculate Conception, who held the living Word of God. And when God lies in a manger so that we can at last see him face to face, he is not come to us through the plans and works of a man, but through the loving obedience of a woman who gives us, in a few simple words, the entire key to holiness and to glory: "I am the handmaid of the Lord. Let what you have said be done to me."" Music by Edwin Fawcett. Visit Totus2us.com for more. Totus Tuus (All Yours) was the motto of Blessed John Paul II to Mary. Our Lady is also everything to us - Totus 2us.