NOW AT LAST we arrive at its proper place at the end of these great speeches the feeding of the 5,000.

Trains, meetings, polling stations, and late-night counts but a quiet moment in the tiny local church in the gathering gloom before it was locked.

Today is the day of the great speech to Nicodemus:

“God gives him the spirit without reserve.”

I went to Mass expecting readings for Wednesday of the second week in Easter and I got instead the feast of SS Philip and James, Apostles and Martyrs and the first words of the Gospel:

Jesus said to Thomas, “I am the way the truth and the life. If you know me you know my father too.”

The day was full of meetings but ultimately the question most worth asking is contained in these simple lines.

I asked a question today of the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary. They were essentially the same. In Libya, we should pursue peace and a ceasefire rather than regime change, even if the country ends up divided which of course it was for many centuries anyway until the Italians united it in the 1930s.

That, I suspect, is what most Libyans want anyway: peace rather than any particular regime. And in my view it is only a just and moral war to the extent that it promotes peace. I believe that most of the world’s miseries in history are down to people thinking that they have a superior moral right to determine what governments foreigners should live under.

In the reading today (John 14:27-31), Jesus starts with these words

Peace I bequeath to you
My own peace I give you.

On Sunday evening I stood next to Walesby Old Church and watched one of the most perfect sunsets that I have ever seen.

The light all day had been brilliantly clear, almost translucent. The Laburnam in the garden was the brightest yellow I have ever seen it, the Lilac the mauvest of mauves. Now at exactly 8.30 in the evening the sun, a huge orange globe sunk directly into the horizon, something one sees very rarely around here. The whole sky gradually changed into a bluish grey colour.

It was intensely quiet and I walked slowly home over the Wolds waiting for the first stars to appear, the nearest street lamps five miles away there is no light pollution.

Today, Monday, we heard that Osama bin Laden had met his violent end.

In the readings this week Nicodemus seems to speak to all of us doubters. For him the practical and the seen is reality:

Nicodemus said “How can a grown man be born again? Can he go back into his mother’s womb and be born again?”

Jesus replies that we have to be born of the spirit.

Unless we can plumb the spirit within us we will never make progress.