This, in many ways has been true for me personally for so many years since my parents passed away, although I was only still in my adolescent years when they passed from this life to the next, and that perhaps is partly what made it all that so much more difficult to bear alongside the fact I was back then, still in a very prodigal place in my life. And that was around the turn of the century and so, while years have come & gone since they left this world, the strains of life have remained pretty much the same, with the exception of course that I have come well and truly, Praise the Lord, out of the prodigal phase that I was back then, so deeply and entrenchedly quogmired within. By “pretty much the same”, I mean that in the now-time, I find that I am for the most part still stuck in a chronic cycle of grief that has not really healed and for me, and this has been incredibly difficult to bear. Daily life for me, is really a constant battle since when my parents passed away, there was no opportunity for proper and healthy closure between them and me. Being still severely entangled in the abyss of my addiction-lifestyle too back then, meant that the trauma of it all was made a million trillion or so times worse once I had been entered into the arduously lengthy process of being Rock-Bottomed to my senses by God. In some ways, my life during my prodigal phase was something like that of Fr Don Calloway’s, only in his case ¹, he was spared the trauma of being alienated by his family and he also experienced a phenomenal miracle of complete healing and deliverance, which btw, I have not had. So, by contrast, my life day-in, day-out is a constant battle with spiritual forces that have pitted themselves in direct opposition to both God and to His holy will being outworked and realized concretely in my life. Not one single day goes by where I do not have to engage in some kind of spiritual battle with the powers of Hell. So, I know first hand and only too well, the types of struggles that are often suffered outside “the much easier and freer zone”: the life-bouy zone where the support and comfort of humankind is relatively simple and easy to find if not common-place and often taken for granted. Because I have found the milk of human kindness to be sorely lacking in much of my personal experience relating to others over the years, particularly those years leading up to and ever since my parents passed away, the way of life I have circumstantially been driven into living is akin to an eremitical one hence my desire to discern this vocationally-speaking.

Out of all of this, I am at a point where I need to pray (and pray fervently and constantly) that the blessings in my life-experience begin to outweigh the struggles and turmoil. I was listening to a podcast tonight from BBC Live about the real-life story of the von Trapp family ² – that prodigious family of faith-filled Catholic entertainers who made famous the universally-acclaimed Hollywood blockbuster musical The Sound Of Music. And this podcast featured an interview with Johannes von Trapp, the youngest still-living member of the von Trapp children. When asked about how he would describe his relationship with his life in show business, he made the comment that although the way of life lived doing all the rehearsals and tours and carving out a new life for themselves as refugees in America was met with certain challenges along the way, the blessings in the way life worked out for them always outweighed any difficulties. And it struck me after hearing that, that this in fact is really how life should be. It should be that even if sometimes there are difficulties, the blessings ought to naturally outweigh them in both number and quality, and by so doing, they (the blessings) keep us bouyant or afloat when storms would otherwise threaten to sink us. It’s not that Johannes von Trapp was just “trying to put on a happy face” even though he was ‘miserable inside’ or that he was meaning only that he was really trying very hard to see blessings even when most things were the opposite. No! Far from it. Actually, he really meant that the experiential blessings in his life literally outweighed by far and wide, the bad stuff. However, I personally have tended to experience the inverse where the ratio of blessings or really positive stuff to bad stuff in terms of quantitative proportionality has been something like 35% (good) to 65% (bad). This is from a quantitative analytical perspective in terms of weighing up the positive events relative to the negative ones. And it just so happens, that my experience has been met with an inversely proportional ratio of good to bad when compared to that of Johannes von Trapp. Hence it is not surprising to hear him talk the way he does, and rather amicably and reminisciently at that, in that podcast about his experiences in life. For he was met with much fortune and I’m not just talking about material wellbeing although that certainly is a part of it but I’m talking about spiritual blessings in his family life far outweighing curses. It is a real mystery in life that some people have more blessings while others not so, and often, that has absolutely nothing to do with any meritorious or unmeritorious thing they have done. It’s a hugely complex issue and relates intimately to the area of inter-generational spiritual health and wellbeing. Anyhow, this is a way too complex theme to go into right now in any significant amount of detail only that it needs to be said, there must be a reason why certain things are the way they are and to get to the crux of the matter, we need to strive to constantly seek God’s holy will for our lives by unrelenting prayer and petition. I will another time soon, publish here in this blog another article I recently wrote on this theme of how our life circumstances are inextricably linked with the mystery of God’s sovereign will – this being the composite of both His holy will and permissive will coexisting together and having co-relational influence on each other. It is no mistaken impression either that the von Trapp family was very devout and faith-filled. Johannes goes to some length talking about this in the podcast and it is profoundly inspirational.

And yes, I’m rambling….because in some ways rambling is kind of typical to blogging, since when blogging started out at the very beginning of the 21st century as a so-called new or nouveau genre in writing, it was stylized as a kind of informal journalling for a public audience. And so it is that I deliberately take my time when writing this sort of entry as the content needs to flow onto the page with the verve of real-time spontenaity. But I now need to get to the point.

This whole past week and a half has been one roller-coaster ride of all kinds of emotional confrontations. Since the Sunday before the one just gone, I have traversed between ruminating on the pain of learning about others’ pain after the terrible tragedy that happened in Sydney on the eve of Sunday 14th December where two crazed gunmen fatally shot a dozen or more innocent people and injured many others who were all gathered at Bondi beach for a traditional Jewish festive event Hanukkah,³ and my own pain over my personal losses in life. And all of this interceding for the broken hearts of those others was co-mingled at times with the pain of my own loss, particularly as concerns both the passing of my parents, the damage my drug and related addictions did to my family-life,  the chronic and not-consciously-chosen inability to form meaningful and lasting human relationships because after my parents passed away, having no brothers or sisters or supportive network of either human extended family or friends made the whole thing nothing short of Hellish and I figure, since it took me five years to come out of my addiction after my mother passed on, that stuckness in those bondages during those five years just made things all the harder to deal with, even long after the main bondage of substance addiction and related moral evils were broken. I have also been amazed to learn during this most difficult time, many other things after this tragedy of terror at Bondi happened, some bad and some good. I supposed I am most heart-broken too, because it just goes to show how awful it was, them couple of months back, to have witnessed the way these f-ing neo-Nazis were just allowed to march up and down the streets freely in every capital city nation-wide and that this silly and very worrisome phenomenon also became rather poignantly visible in the UK and Ireland where in the latter region, you had these crazy Ulster Loyalists strutting their stuff and causing an immense amount of damage not only to public and private property but also to many innocent lives. So there you see the politics of terror, of race-hate, of resurgent religious bigotry all over again, and now we wonder why we are seeing similar examples visit locales we “know and love”. Bondi is not only well-known and savoured by avid surfies but it is abuzz with a perennial tourist season, pretty much all year round, which is why it would make a humungous amount of sense not only to tighten gun-laws but also to toughen laws against extremist gatherings – that includes clamping down on marches and speeches that hinge upon race-hate, anti-religious bigotry, extremist sentiments like ultra-nationalism, and also the use of innocent positives like faith-based allegiances for example, as fronts for extremism which turns religion into a division-stoking political pawn. The other thing that needs to complement this enhancement of legislation covering gun ownership and that aimed at silencing the voices of extremism, is to rigorize the security-measures around granting tourism and working-visas, ensuring that all possible organized crime and terror-linked loopholes are thoroughly investigated and closed.

I thought it was a marvelous idea btw, for the Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to call for a prayer vigil to be held at 6:47pm this Sunday just gone in order for us to commemorate and embrace in a gesture of universal good-will the lives of those who were sadly lost in this senseless and savage outburst and for those others so directly affected, who still remain here on Earth to bear the aftermath, whether temporally, spiritually or both. It was a genuinely kind gesture on the PM’s part to call for this, and one rather unforgettable at that as it also revealled too, something of the beautiful solidarity I sensed that Anthony Albanese must have had with Pope Francis during the latter’s pontificate. I was surprised and consoledly so, to learn too that our current Prime Minister is also Catholic. That moved my heart so profoundly that it re-invigorated within it, that freshness of admiration I had for him when I had helped vote him in along with many other zealous Labor voters during the last election – even though at that time, I actually thought he was Anglican!

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12-24/bondi-heroes-to-be-recognised-in-new-honours-list/106176488

Just a comment on some of the themes from the ABC News article cited above, I know that this situation is terribly sorrowful and sad for many, but to think that Chavi said that in this Jewish community, “everyone knows everyone” – well, to me that’s extra-heart-breaking to hear her say that as it really makes my own situation more starkly painful because I am all alone as a human being in this world and have no other human beings to know so intimately, so lovingly, so well – and all of this too, not by any choice I have consciously made so that it works out this way – with me full-knowing this to be the outcome of past wrong choices I made while in the death-throes of my addictions, when it just wasn’t the case at all that I could see the outcome at the time of being circumstantially thrusted into set-ups of fate that played on my naiivite and my acutely aggrivated lumpen state of adolescent ignorance about life! Moreover, the fact that I also share Jewish ancestry on my mother’s mother’s side of the family never helped ensure that I had the unremitting type of family and community support that most of these people in Bondi have! I had even tried to connect a number of years back with the Jewish community in Melbourne not long after I discovered the fact of my ancestry but this endeavour on my part was fraught with all kinds of trials and painful set-backs which was caused in the main by a gross rejection of my efforts from those I tried reaching out too. So, the pain of the loss of my own immediate family is compounded innumerable times over not only by the pain of rejection by extended family and other once-upon-a-time friends but all the more by the fact that trying to reach out to those of my mother’s mother’s ancestral background only brought another yet-again-unexpected load of rejection into my life. It’s as though there is an evil spirit that God has permitted to attach itself to me which seeks to slowly but surely choke the life out of my life by waging a war of attrition upon my days. This is why I have become HUGE on the topic of deliverance and exorcism relative to the subject of generational curses. And in part, that was the point of my illustrating the differences between Johannes von Trapp’s experience of blessings outweighing the grievances of life contrasting sharply with my own gamut of blessings and grievances being inversely proportional to the ratio of his overall experience. I realize that he is much older than me and that perhaps I am, in so doing this comparative, being too presumptuous as to how things might turn out on the whole by the time I reach his age. As it stands I am constantly praying in earnest and unrelentingly that by the time I reach his age, I can be just as grateful and appreciative to God that my life did not end up inversely proportional relative to the ratio of blessings to hardships.

I am also aware too, that there may very well be those people out there (and who maybe even reading this), who are nevertheless unfortunately of ill-will so much so, that as soon as they learn of my bringing this to light in this blog, they may seek all the more to heap a million and one more curses upon my life just to make sure from their evil standpoint, that I am (in their eyes anyhow) effectively made or rendered powerless to do anything proactive or constructive about these extra curses, which would only mean that in their view, I cannot get the spiritual freedom I so desperately want. Well, to these types I call the righteous indignation and mercy of God contained in the imprecatory Psalms down upon their lives in the hope that through their own (divinely orchestrated) Rock-Bottoming, they would be so contritely sorry for their sins that their hearts and lives be converted. Out of the entire book of Psalms the so-called ‘imprecatory’ Psalms are essentially those calling for a solid measure of divine retribution, with the word “imprecatory” stemming from the Latin imprecari, which means to “call down or invoke a punishment”, as in a divine punishment, remembering too, that all the while God is infinitely more powerful than Satan, as the victorious Angelic combat in no uncertain terms, proves beyond the shadow of a doubt. And believe me, there are many of these imprecatory Psalms contained in the entire Book of Psalms.

It must be remembered too that divine punishment is not necessarily evil but rather a good that while appearing negative, is used by God to chastize, thereby turning the hearts of the wicked away from their evil intentions and deeds, ultimately towards the good. A wonderful example from Church tradition are those profoundly personal experiences we know in our more recent times as Illuminations of Conscience. ⁴ Therefore, seen correctly, imprecatory prayers are pleas of desperate causes, supplications for God’s divine intervention on behalf of one suffering a grievous harm done to them unjustly or unfairly by another or others or where the culprit of these grievances is simply an unremitting stack or stream of unfortunate life-circumstances which do not abate or cease throughout the months leading into years, no matter what one does from the wellspring entire of their own human effort to try to effect positive change. These imprecatory prayers therefore are most useful for demolishing the strongholds of the wicked in the lives of those suffering a rare but merciless form of injustice and the demolition of such strongholds is achieved through God’s vindication in favour of the one who is oppressed. That said, there are many Psalms that cater for the spiritual strengthening and upliftment of those who are bowed down – down perhaps in the depths of their grief, down even, to the quogmire of despair. I would say that all these Psalms cater to varying degrees of sorrow and anguish, and various types thereof. And therefore too, it is important to discern which ones are most fitting for the particular context or situation being grappled with. Just a word of caution – when speaking about praying ‘imprecatory’ Psalms, we must not use these misleadingly. It has often been claimed that these types of Psalms are in some respects “curse-ridden” in that it is supposed that the Psalmist was calling down curses upon his enemies. This is a very controversial topic for many who call themselves Christians as in the New Testament the concept of “forgiving one’s enemies” features boldly. But we must put this concept of forgiveness in its proper context and refrain from being lured into the temptation to believe in a wishy-washy grossly diluted theology on the theme of forgiveness. It has unfortunately become all-too-popular in today’s relativistic moral climate to be deadened to having a healthy consciousness of sin and moral accountability, and to thereby promote being “soft on sin” as though this is the same thing as having an attitude of forgiveness, when in actual fact they are not the same. Ultimately Jesus preached a forgiveness that was wholesome and reconciliatory rather than fascile and purile. For true forgiveness to be lasting, certain mutually efficacious conditions must be met. In other words, in order to truly forgive, our hearts must be willingly disposed and docile to desiring a holistic reconciliation where this is possible. Of course there will be those rare cases where true reconciliation cannot flower, due to the stubborn reticence of one party or to the circumstantial, practical, logistical or locational impossibility of both parties to come to the table, e.g. one party is no longer here on Earth. On the other hand, being soft-on-sin or turning a blind eye to the evils crushing souls in our midst is equivalent to a sin of omission. And this is truly both hypocritical and heart-breaking because it spreads a climate of apathy or indifference towards the real and painful sufferings of others. The Pharisees in Jesus’ time were well known for being stubborn in their ‘holier than thou’ fallen spiritual pride, and this hardened their hearts to the sufferings of poor folk in their midst. They became soft on calling out the sin of moral injustice among their own religious elite and for this they earned the sternest of rebukes from the Lord. From age to age, He loves justice and mercy to walk arm in arm, and embrace. True justice will never be achieved without the complementarity of mercy, and true compassion cannot exist without righteousness. For in order for the true and lasting Peace of Christ to reign in our midst, in our world at large, this same Peace must first of all reign steadfastly in our hearts and unanimously, mutually between us and it must comprise unequivocally, of justice and mercy collaborating in unison. But such a Peace can only reign unanimously and mutually between us when each and every heart not only willingly and fully accepts and anchors it completely and utterly within themselves, but yearns ever so deeply for this same Peace to be welcomed by every other heart near and far, and in this yearning also desires so earnestly to concretely realize that spirit of universal brotherhood within the slipstream of their own lives as well for this to be equally so realized in the lives of others. For until all of this comes to pass, there will never be true peace on Earth as the Christmas rallying cry of Peace on Earth, and Good Will to Men is invariably a universal call to holiness and it draws into itself, not only the milk of human kindness but of that which should be shared between us and all of God’s beloved creation.

Thankyou for reading this article and may this Christmas Season be for you, one of steadfast and unfailing hope, good-will, and continuous transformation towards achieving union with the Supreme Good, which is none other than God’s holy will for your life.

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Other References

¹ Calloway, D., No Turning Back, 2019, Marian Press, Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

² BBC Audio | Outlook | The real story of the von Trapp family singers, first aired on the 22nd December, 2025. Available for over a year: https://share.google/Ozp1bYTpLlLSnDosh

³ Bondi beach mass shooting: what we know so far about the alleged terrorist attack | Bondi beach terror attack | The Guardian https://share.google/QqswGYhRRKn8sEwq8

Bondi Beach shooting: What we know so far about Hanukkah attack – BBC News https://share.google/kwx2vjHp8YkcXl0Co

⁴ Watkins, C., The Warning: Testimonies and Prophesies of the Illumination of Conscience, 2019, Queen of Peace Media, Sacramento, California.