I always find the Good Friday service in the Abbey tiring. All that standing during the Passion and the Intercessions. How pathetic we are compared to the suffering we are remembering. But my legs were weak after our walk, carrying the cross seven miles from Wells. So my senses were dulled a bit as I came face to face with at the end at the end of the queue with the cross during the veneration.

‘Behold, the cross on which hung the savior of the world.’

I was over come with emotion. As I bent down to kiss the nails at the feet, I wanted to linger with my love and adoration, but the queue was moving. It seemed an allegory for the process of life.

Later I decided, as usual, reluctantly to try to go to confession. I never know what to say apart from the obvious anger or laziness. But why, I wondered, am I not more content? Perhaps, in my case, because I am in love with ideas, both in religion and in life, and not people. I wondered if this, then, was the problem. After confession, I sat for a long time. I remembered my continuing doubts about whether God exists at all, compiled with the feeling of joy I had encountered in the cross that day. I wondered if there were two selves – the ego; the ‘I,’ formed by the skin and bones and the soul within. That any other feeling of envy or anger or laziness was cooped up in the body and that the bliss of spiritual encounter was deeper within.

As I sat there in the darkness of the emptying Abbey, I felt quite alone. I felt as if the skin and body were gradually disintegrating and, for a time, I could feel my soul like a burning round ball of fire under me and others. That God is alive in all of us. And that in that home anywhere in the world is different. After about two hours, I got up. But after my meditation, where was the bliss? I could only feel the death of the body. But then I remembered that this was Good Friday, and this is what happens on Good Friday.