On Sunday I listened to the Provincial of the Jesuit order in England give one of the finest sermons I have heard. The reading was about Jesus flinging the money changers out of the Temple. But we were asked to visualise the different courtyards of the Temple. The outer, open to gentiles, and many changes, and the inner courtyards ending with the Holy of Holies. We have in Lent to look at these inner courtyards of our soul. What is it that is going wrong, that is selfish? What is keeping us from God?

In Monday’s reading, Jesus reminds us that a prophet is never listened to in “his own country”. That night I was thinking on this and in a half doze had my “wall” dream to follow on from the “room dream”. I stopped for a moment and looked hard at an old wall, only a small part of it, at the delicate colouring of the brickwork, the loose bits, the clumps of growth, and stayed for some time in front of that wall. I have no idea if God exists or if we really exist as entities or are we just part of everything, but in reality the wall does not exist.

Therefore whether or not God exists, this is a pointless ‘rational’ argument. For us, in our minds, He exists. The passage in this week’s psalms that stayed with me was the ninety-fourth – in particular these words: “O that today you would listen to his voice! Harden not your hearts as at Meribah, as on that day at Massah in the desert.”

It seems to me that the worst thing we can be guilty of is indifference. If we feel depressed, start grumbling like those Israelites who grumbled at Moses at their fate, that is the worst outcome. Never despair.

On Thursday the reading of the Gospel dealt with the two people who come into the Temple: the tax collector who beats his chest and the satisfied one who thinks he is virtuous. Which one are we? I fell at the first step because I am still not blessed with faith absolute in its certainty. And do we love other people as ourselves? No, but we can start to love them as individuals, if not yet as groups or impersonal objects.

I was thinking of this on Friday when meeting people and on Saturday visiting a college. Everyone, individually you meet has a worth, an interest, but I am still a longer way from even aiming at the first two steps: loving God with all my heart and loving my neighbour as myself. Perhaps the soothing balm of the water of the Samarian well on Wednesday is the only hope. This is surely a potent image. The water from the physical well that sustains our thirst for a time, the water from the spiritual well that is everlasting.

On Saturday evening there was a programme about the novelist William Golding. One thing he said struck me as true: there is a division between the spiritual and material self but neither ever goes away. In Lord of the Flies he investigates the power of evil in all of us, lurking below the conventions of society but perhaps also there is another way at looking at it – the power of good is in all of us.