As always in the monastery the atmosphere takes hold slowly, only with some chance repetition of words does it begin to take hold, but I found something in Thomas Merton’s book Elected Silence that made a great impression on me. As a young man by chance he reads about medieval philosophy and in particular the notion of Aseitas. Aseitas (aseity) simply means the power of a being to exist absolutely in virtue of itself, require no cause, no other justification for its existence except that its very nature is to exist. There can be only one such being: that is God. And to say that God exists a se, of and by reason of Himself, is merely to say that God is Being itself. “Ego sum qui sum.”

Like the young Thomas Merton this explanation immediately made a big impression on me. I have always been troubled by the existence of God because I have seen Him as, like us, doing things, as a kind of prime mover. As I went to sleep I now had a view of him in my mind’s eye as being at the centre of all things but unmoving complete, not making or unmaking, caused by nothing, fulfilled in itself by its own existence. With no more a beginning or an end than the concept that 2 and 2 equals 4. I began to see, however vaguely, that when everything else in the universe moves and is moved, there must be something at its heart that never moves, just is.

On Monday morning, sitting in the quiet of the monastery, I read:

“When God says that He is being, if what He says is to have any intelligible meaning to our minds, it can only mean this: that He is the pure act of existing. Pure act: therefore excluding all imperfection in the order of existing.”

“Beyond all sensual images and all conceptual determinations God affirms Himself as the absolute act of being in its pure actuality. … Being is being,”

It seemed almost suddenly that years of my mental buffeting around the notion of God were mere illusions. Merton quotes St Paul: “The letter killeth, but the spirit gives life.” My mind was still fumbling, still confused but a step seemed to have been made.

On Monday I was dreaming gently on this theme that God is just actuality, complete in Himself or Itself. In my dream, I saw God as a kind of crusty rock, vast, immovable, but then in my dream something seemed missing. I realised it was love. God was not just a Rock of Ages nor a mathematical formula from physics nor a philosophical concept. God was love. But a certainty remained at the source of the message there must be something unchanging.

In Tuesday’s reading, the lame man asks Jesus to cure him, because every time he tries to go into the pool by Bethsaida.

“Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool. For when the water is disturbed and I am going down, another goes down before me.”

My faith is like that: the water is disturbed for an instant, I believe, and then before I can immerse myself I am too late.