Tough Mudder 2014

Hello all,

I'd like to see if any of my readers are interested in joining our Tough Mudder team "Bad Habits"

"Bad Habits" from L to R: Bill, Chris, Brooke, Me, Beth, Sal

Myself and five other brave people participated in this event this past August at Mt. Snow Vermont.  It was the most brutal thing that I have ever done.  

It was so wonderful that me and the team want to do it again.  This time we are opening up the invitation to others who might be crazy enough to join us.

The "Bad Habits" team from L to R: Sal, Chris, Bill, Me, Beth, Brooke

Bad Habits (our team) will be participating at the May 31st event at Mount Snow Vermont.  Email if you are interested in joining us.  Remember that the proceeds all go to support the Wounded Warrior Project.

Consider joining us for the May 2014 Tough Mudder.  It will be very difficult but also promises to be a lot of fun (if you like pain and mud).

If you are interested email me.

Faith and family

Hello all,

I think that the most common issue or question that people ask me about is how to share their faith with their family.

Let me offer some [made-up] examples:

• My niece doesn't go to church, how can I get her to go?
• My granddaughter is living with her boyfriend, how can I get her to stop?
• My (adult) son doesn't believe in God why can't I tell him that he should believe?
• My sister is telling her friends that God isn't real, how can I convince her that He is?

These are just a few examples.

The basic issue is, "How can I share my faith with my family?"

My answer, YOU DON'T!!!!

Please, PLEASE, PLEASE don't try to talk, explain, or preach to your family.  It doesn't work!

Disclaimer: this does not apply to those who are raising their children.  If you are raising children, by-all-means, explain your faith and teach them about moral living.

For anyone who wants to share their faith with their family (other than children that they are raising) it can only be done by example.

Please remember that Jesus preached the Gospel in His home town and His friends and relatives wanted to throw Him off of a cliff. (Luke 4:16-30)

I promise that you will receive the same type of reaction if and when you try to preach or minister to your family.  I can speak from experience.  I have deeply hurt a brother of mine because of the way that I presumed to "minister" to my family and it does not work!

What can you do?

I really like the words of St. Francis, "Preach always, sometimes use words."

Here's a list of my recommendations for preaching to your family.

1. Practice your faith with humility (don't do it to be noticed)
2. SMILE!  Nothing is more attractive than joy and peace.
3. Keep being humble.
4. Pray (In secret Mt 6:6)
5. Live your faith.  Be humble. (I hope you are seeing a pattern)
6. Never volunteer answers but you can offer to answer questions if they have any.
7. If, and only if, they ask a question then be well prepared to answer their question.
8. Do not preach.
9. Listen very well.
10. Be ready to share a story of your faith and why it is so important to you.  Nothing is as powerful and personal as a heartfelt story.

I think the bottom line is that if we preach to our family they will draw back.  It will hurt our relationship with them and our message will be rejected.  When we preach to our family we can accomplish the opposite of what we want to do.

We so often want others to believe as we do and love God as we do.  That is wonderful but if we preach to them without their permission then we will actually push them away from God and our faith.  We will be doing the opposite of what we are trying to do.

My experience is that this is not easy to do.  We want to preach to our family but if it didn't work for Jesus it won't work for you.

Trust God that He will send someone into their lives to draw them close to our faith and then make yourself available if God will call you to have a positive effect on the life of someone that is not in your family.

We can't evangelize or preach to our family, others can.

All we can do is live our faith with humility and joy and then 

"always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks for a reason for your hope but do it with gentleness and respect."(1 Peter 3:15-16)

My favorite thing!

Hello all,

I might have posted this here before but my favorite thing is, questions.

I love questions.  

I know that I'm really bad about posting new content on, but I do know that if someone asks me a question I will be sure to post an answer here on my blog.

So, if my lack of blog material is leaving you wanting more [please hear the sarcasm] then send me questions to answer and I will fill these pages with opinions, ideas, information, stories, and other typed tidbits.

God bless!

My homily: August 25th 2013

Hello all,

As you can tell I have not updated my blog in a while.

I am sorry for this.  It's an honor that so many people check my blog regularly and I'm grateful for that.  

I'm sorry that I have not taken the time to regularly share with you my homilies and my random thoughts.

An update:

Here at St. Paul's Church we have a new website feature.

The homilies of all the friars are audio recorded and then posted to our website.

St. Paul Friars' Homilies Online

I will try to post my homilies individually here, in audio form.

I'm sorry if you like the written out version.  Those took me a few hours to type and then illustrate.  My homilies are never written out so I needed to go back and remember what I said and how I said it in order to type it up correctly.  Then finding the pictures and getting everything looking neat took me a very long time.

Here is the audio of my homily this past Sunday

My homily August 25th 2013

Thank you very much.

Please remember that if you have any questions, concerns, comments, or complaints I'd be glad to address them here.  Just send me an email at FrPeterCFT@gmail.com or FrPeter@StPaulKensington.org

God bless,

Here's a thought

Hello all,

I was just going though my blog looking for a few things that I've posted in the past and I decided to share a thought with you.

Often I'm asked about going deeper in faith: "how to" and "tips" for doing this.

I think the most immediate and basic thing that you can do is read and spend some time (a few minutes) praying with the Sunday readings BEFORE going to mass on Sunday. 

It only takes a few minutes and when you hear the reading proclaimed and the homily you will be much more engaged and you will get a lot more out of the experience of hearing the Word of God proclaimed.

Here is the Bishop's web site and on the top right is a calendar.  Click on the upcoming Sunday and you will see the readings for the upcoming weekend mass here (this is for the Sunday mass on May 26th 2013)

This coming Sunday is Trinity Sunday and I'm struggling with what I'm going to say.  It is not easy explaining the Trinity.

God bless,

Homily: Pentecost Sunday

Hello all, here is my homily from Pentecost Sunday.

Let me know what you think.

Happy Pentecost everyone!

Bye the way... if you struggle with an understanding of the Holy Spirit or if you want the Paraclete to enter your life in a deeper and more significant way pray this prayer!

This prayer, along with reading the Bible*, is the best way that I know to allow the Holy Spirit to flourish in your life more completely.



* If you do not read the Bible I suggest and recommend it very strongly.  Don't read it like you might normally "read the Bible"... just read it as a story book.  Read two chapters a day.  Each chapter is about one page so it's not more than 5 minutes to read a chapter or two.  Read it like you would read a story.  Don't study it, read the story.  

Start with the Gospel of Matthew and then just read the New Testament straight through as a story.
When you are done do it again and each word will come alive more and more and the power of the Holy Spirit will come alive more and more in your life.

God bless you!

Homily: 5th Sunday of Lent, cycle C.

This is the novel that I read.

The other day I finished reading a long novel. My mother gave me it as a Christmas gift and I finally got around to reading it. When I started reading the book I was fighting the temptation, I was trying to resist the urge... but I finally gave in. I flipped to the last page of the book and I read the last few sentences. I was weak and I gave into the desire to see how the story ended.

I think we all want to know how things end. It may be a novel, or a movie, or in this case life. And that is exactly what we see today in our second reading. We see how the whole story ends.

This reading is from the 21st chapter of the Book of Revelation. That book is the last book of the Bible and there are only 22 chapters. This is the final vision. This is the end of the story. Here we see, not just the end of the Bible, but the completion of the whole story.

We see, in this passage, what God has always been doing. We see what God is going to do and what the end of the story of our faith is. Here we see the end of your story, or my story, and of our story.
This is it!

We see that from the very beginning God created from nothing a world that was good. In that world God raised up from the dust humans like Himself. Man and woman are in God's image and likeness. But that wasn't enough!

God so longed and desired to be united with His beloved children that He drew us into a relationship with Him through the covenants of old. Then He desired to draw even closer to us and He became one of us so that we could be completely united to Him.


Even that was not enough. In His flesh He saved us by dying but, most importantly, by rising from the dead. In this we finally see the ultimate victory over death and sin. In the resurrection we see what God has desired to do all along. 

And yet, God is not even done there. God is still working to draw all of creation closer to Himself. This is what we see in this vision from the Book of Revelation.

At the end of the world God will unite heaven and earth in a perfect union. No longer will those two places be separate. God will finally put this world right. This is what God has been doing from ancient times. He has been working to draw the world into a perfect union with himself. 

At the Second Coming of Jesus, at the end of the world, all the dead will be raised just as Jesus was raised from the dead, and this world will finally be put right. Then God will perfectly and completely unite heaven and earth in an eternal and complete union, a new heaven and a new earth, a new Heavenly Jerusalem!

We hear: "Behold, God's dwelling is with the human race. He will dwell with them and they will be his people and God himself will always be with them as their God.  He will Wipe every tear from their eyes, and there shall be no more death or mourning, wailing or pain."  

God's desire is to put this world right, unite this world to Himself, and destroy death and pain for all eternity.  This is what He has been doing from the beginning!

This is heaven, a very real physical place.  God does not want us to spend eternity in some fluffy place where we go about skipping from fluffy cloud to fluffy cloud all the while strumming a small harp.  NO! 

We will be raised from the dead (as Jesus was) and this earth will be put right and united with God perfectly.That is heaven!  That is what we've always hoped for.  Not some fluffy spiritual place.

So the question then becomes... what are we doing now?  Are we just killing time between now and then when Jesus returns in the Second Coming?  Is our job just to take up space in a church pew once a week, be good for the rest of the week, and then just waiting?

NO!  Not at all!  We've got something to do.

The best example that I can give is similar to the old commercial for "Shake 'N Bake" chicken.

You might remember the old commercial.  A young girl helps her grandmother make chicken for dinner. Everyone thinks the chicken is fried but the young girl tells everyone that it is "Shake 'N Bake" and then she proudly exclaims, "And I helped"

This is very much like what we are supposed to be doing.

Notice what we hear in the Gospel.  Jesus is speaking to His Apostles at the end of the Last Supper, just a few hours before He will suffer and die on the Cross.

It is in this act of love, in this gift of Himself on the cross, that we see the fullest expression of God's glory.  

Look! Look upon the crucifix and see the Glory of God!  There it is!  That is God's love and glory on full display.  God's glory is seen in His total, complete, and limitless gift of Himself in Love.

This is the reason that He tells us, "I give you a new commandment; love one another.  As I have loved you, so you also should love one another."  

Jesus isn't asking us to just "be nice" to others.  Rather, He is commanding us to love others as He loved us.  This is a call to give of ourselves is sacrificial love.  This type of love isn't easy.  That's why St. Paul said, in the first reading, that, "it is necessary for us to undergo many hardships to enter the Kingdom of God."

This self-sacrifical love is hard and difficult.  And yet this is what Jesus is commanding us to do.

Our job is not just to kill time between now and Jesus' Second coming rather we are called to work with the Holy Spirit as God continues to put this world right.  God is working to get this world ready for it's union with Heaven, at the end of time.  Our job is to cooperate and work with God by our self-sacrificial love.

You and I should be working with God, through our work of loving.  When the end of the world comes  and God has put this world right and united it to Himself, we should be able to say, like that little girl in the commercial, "I HELPED!"

That is what we are supposed to be doing between now and then, between now and Jesus' Second coming.  The world should know that we are working with God to put this world right because they will see that we are His disciples because we have love for one another.