SUNDAY
We drive all the way to St Quentin, mile after mile, hour after hour, traffic ebbing and flowing.
If you drive you should concentrate on the present; it is a way of fuelling the mind. And if in the passenger seat I close my eyes and fall asleep.
MONDAY
I am in Strasbourg and go to Mass in the Seminary. Always a nice experience with beautiful singing. I move my report in the Legal Affairs Committee on religious freedom. A Dutch MP amends the report to delete my criticism of the countries France, Belgium, and the Netherlands which have banned the full-face veil.
TUESDAY – St Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael
The priest in the seminary Mass said some people have difficulty in believing in angels. I’m not sure but the idea of a guardian angel looking after one is a lovely thought.
“In the presence of the angels I will bless you, O Lord.” (Psalm 137)
“You will see heaven, land open, and above the Son of Man, the angels of God ascending and descending.” (John 1:47-51)
WEDNESDAY – St Jerome
For the first time and perhaps the last I am rapporteur of a report on the floor of the hemicycle.
St Jerome is not an easy man to like. Respected, yes, as the translator of the Bible into Latin, but prone to anger. An intellectual perhaps who worried too much about the nature of truth and the future.
THURSDAY – St Therese of the Child Jesus
St Therese is truly centred in the present. Because the present is about small things. And it needn’t be a candle or a flower, something beautiful. It could be the stillness of the absence of thought. Every little step counts.
I spoke in the hemicycle on the right to free speech. Probably, maybe my last time.
FRIDAY – The Holy Guardian Angels
Before leaving Strasbourg, I went to the early morning mass – appropriately my last event there. Do you believe in guardian angels?
Jesus says: “See that you never despise any of these little ones, for I tell you that their angels in Heaven always gaze on the face of my Father in Heaven.”
I like this idea because it expenses the idea of unity – that somehow we are all in this together. In some indefinable way, we are connected to Heaven.
But is there some entity who gazes on the face of our God and ourselves at all times? That is more difficult to believe or even to grasp.
SATURDAY
We sail, perhaps for the last time, in Naomi to Chichester Harbour. Of course wind and tide turn against us – doesn’t that always happen? – and progress becomes a silent crawl.
Yet we arrive in the mysterious dark, through wide marshlands of wildlife, prosaically to get to the pub just in time to watch the rugby.
“I bless you Father, lord of heaven and earth, for hiding these things from the learned and clever.” (Luke 10:17-24)
What I like about this is that we intellectualise things too much. It is not just in pouring over texts that we will gain enlightenment. It is by delving down, thinking on our soul, over real being deep within us. We only live in one body. It is there so it must surely be a key to this mystery and finding our soul which is all that is imperishable in us and all that links us to everything.