I started the week by reflecting again on how a single entity – God – could create the universe. I was watching a programme about Jupiter’s moon – Titan – an extraordinary place where lakes of methane gas have been discovered. And this week scientists have discovered a galaxy whose light takes over a billion years to reach us! Who or what could ever create this?

But then I thought that God may not be part of this physical universe at all and no less existent for all that. We know that just as love exists as well as justice and peace, so hatred and pride and jealousy and envy exist, although they have no corporate form. So if God is love, he exists no less than the methane lakes of Titan.

But how could a non-corporate God create a corporate universe. Perhaps the words of Jesus regarding how if one had faith the size of a mustard seed one could move mountains is the key. Could God, whose faith is obviously huge, because he alone knows for certain that he exists, have by sheer will created or started the process of a physical universe, even though he is nowhere a part of that physical universe?

This was a busy week for me and it was difficult to get to mass. On Tuesday I couldn’t really be bothered. However I made the effort, but then couldn’t get a feel for the service in the allotted tiny chapel where we had been squeezed in like sardines because of a concert being prepared. It didn’t matter that I could hear little and see nothing. There is no need to intellectualise the process, it just is. One is in the presence of the communion and therefore it is almost not necessary to see or hear anything.

On Thursday the process was reversed. I went to a huge mass taking an hour and with the full works of sung glories. Until I had communion it made no more impression than the Tuesday’s.

And on Saturday I had time only for a three minute visit to a county chapel in Lincolnshire, but even that was useful.

What I can draw from all of this is that intellectual conundrums are fascinating, but they ultimately prove little by the way of experience of God.