Another dream to finish the week. Someone asked me to go somewhere I didn’t want to go but I embarked on the journey. Suddenly an extraordinary landscape opened up before me. A fantastical landscape of pre-history, with great valleys and mountains with strange creatures. What did it mean? That the rational does not explain everything. That beauty can follow from something we don’t want to do but have to do?

I was thinking of someone in the middle of the night who peculiarly irritates me. This sort of corrosive irritation is actually as debilitating to the mind as anything. I tried an experiment to pray for him. To ask God to help him do what he wanted to do, to help him succeed. Immediately I was faced with a kind of wave of intense resistance. An ugly wall, rough, seemingly made of asbestos. I am far too rational, I hope, to believe that the Devil, if he exists, works in this way, but the feeling was so immediate, it was as if some force was preventing me from doing the right thing, but I persevered. I had nothing else to do and the wall dissolved gradually, as did my feeling of irritation. Perhaps the trick works.

I was walking at night over the Wolds. It had been a long day and a long drive. The moon was bright, great vistas spread away for miles, the stars overhead unclouded. In a sense it was like the dream, no heat or weariness. Yet it was not because I was alive yet content and free and with William as a companion padding beside me.

I was reading St. Josemaria with a friend. He makes the point that in a machine even the tiniest bolt is essential. If it falls out, it may set off a chain reaction that takes down everything. So the smallness of our lives has value. Yet we are not machines. The better analogy is that we spend all our lives trying to move from where we are to there but if the smallest bone in our body attempted it, there would be chaos.

I was looking forward to a small mass in the Holy Souls Chapel in the Cathedral where the dark reds and browns of the mosaics are curiously restful. But instead we had a large Mass in the Nave with the school. Yet a most beautiful hymn poem was sung in Italian, which was just as good as a Latin Mass.

Tu sei la mia vita
Altro io non ho.
Tu sei la mia strada
La mia verita.
Nella tua parola,
Io camminero,
Finche avro rispiro –
Fino a quando tu vorrai.
Non avro paurra sai
Se tu sei con me,
Io ti prego, resta con me.

You are my life
I have no one but you.
You are my path
And you are my truth.
In your word
I will always walk
From the first breath I took –
Until I take my last.
I will not be frightened
If you are with me
My prayer is that you’ll stay beside me.

Are we all saints? No. Can we be? I fear not. Perhaps Calvin was right. Fear very few can manage it. Except in the desert.