We are here for Mass at Holy Rood with Sophia playing in the back of the church.

“Your words are spirit, Lord, and they are life.”

In the evening I go to our church. Vicky is locking up but she allows me to sit for a moment in the darkened church.

I read Psalm 6 by the light of my phone.

“O Lord, rebuke me not in thy anger, nor chasten me in thy wrath. Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am languishing; O Lord, heal me, for my bones are troubled.”

We drive Sophia up after 8:00 am Mass.

Delightfully, in the chapel of St Paul in the cathedral, the priest faces the altar, which is more spiritual.

I go to Mass in the Cathedral. I have had difficulty in recent months with the Church. But now I sit during Vespers and the chanting gradually sinks in. I feel once again a sense of joy and fulfilment. Something utterly different from church politics and more than soothing. Joy.

I went as usual to read a psalm in our village church. The psalm of the day is Ps 99 – “Cry out with joy all the earth” – but it is more beautiful in the King James Version.

The little church was as usual empty and utterly quiet. There was a heaviness in the air and in that heaviness I felt a distant echo of something else. God or joy or the eternal, I know not what…