This prompted me to read Meditations by St John Vianney. His whole life was centred around the Eucharist.

The carol service at Stonyhurst ends with Benediction.

This is a thoughtful moment: the service is no longer just a series of readings about a distant myth or pretty folk songs about a legend. This is real here, the real incarnate God amongst us.

At mass, we were told to thank God in all things. How rarely we do this and to view all material things with indifference. We think complacently that we do this.

True, I may not care much about clothes, or money, or well-appointed houses but I care about lack of any political power. We are all held in sway by one material thing. We must fight it.

After Vespers, the church clothed in darkness. The Psalmist some three thousand years before had come from those yellow, pink hills I had seen the day before, sandy and rugged. The Psalms were they very sands of time.

What a moving experience it was to stand on the east side of the Dead Sea and look over into the Promised Land. It had been raining, the sky was setting, the sea darkening. Eventually as one drove up the hill we could see the lights of Jericho, the oldest city of the world.

Whereas in the West, the High Street would be dominated by large chains, here was all a lively bustle of small shops. Crowds everywhere. Whereas in the West, the church, a relic of Victoriana, would be locked and closed, here the mosque was open to the street, its courtyard full of men standing, meeting, sitting, praying. Islam has the great advantage of the injunction to all to pray five times a day.

Early morning

I woke to the sound of morning prayers. What a moving experience: prayers ringing out of the city. What is moving is awaking to find it is coming out of the dark into the bedroom. I say awake but I was dozing, saying the Rosary. The two sounds merged as all prayers do.

At the Campion Day Mass at Stonyhurst, the pupils bring in the cart which drew St Edmund Campion to his martyrdom at Tyburn. He had to create a printing press from scratch to publish his “Brag” against the government. Now with all our vast outpourings on this, the internet, we have no more impact individually than he with his four dozen hand-printed copies.

We were hearing about the Saint Catherine Labouré who created the cult of Mary’s medallion. Mother Teresa left one under a potted plant when she visited Mrs Thatcher at Downing Street. In a sense, a magical medallion seems ridiculous. I’m not so sure. If you believe, anything is possible.

The reading is about the poor widow putting her last two pennies in the offering bowl. I was taken with what the priest told us at mass that we have to give our last two pence in love. I thought how impossible with strangers that is though.

I happened to be reading about Mary, Queen of Scots, and noticed it was the feast day of Margaret of Scotland. Her main feature seemed to be that she had had a happy marriage.

Again, a place to start.

I went to a lovely Remembrance Sunday parade in Gainsborough. The prayers of intercession were sung. “O Lord, hear my prayer, O Lord, hear my prayer, When I call answer me. O Lord, hear my prayer, O Lord, hear my prayer, When I call answer me.”

I was trying to remember the words in the middle of the night and could not. Eventually I got up and did so. It was a nice way of getting back to sleep.

Yet all this praying to God and begging him to listen. Does he want all this stuff? I know I wouldn’t. But I tried an authentic prayer – “O Lord I know you’re not there. When I call, there’ll be no answer.” Immediately, I had a horrible, almost painful feeling as if I was doing something wrong. I reverted to the Christian prayer and immediately felt much better. To me this is part of my theory that we can only know God rationally by his shadow by his effect on us through the cloud of unknowing that separates us.

As usual when I lit the candle before the statue of Jesus after Compline in the great, dark, empty abbey church, I felt inexplicably moved as I said my prayer dutifully.

But one of my recurring doubts about whether God exists is doesn’t he find all these prayers rather tedious? All those importunate requests, like demanding disaffected clients. All those people never saying thank you. Would he prefer us not to ask for anything, just say thank you politely and be done with us?

Father Alexander told us this rather good story in our oblates meeting. There were some grubs living in the bottom of the murky pond. Every time one would climb up the stem of a plant into the light above it would never be seen again. Eventually one promised to come back and tell the others what it was like up there.

The grub climbed up and went to sleep in the sun. He awoke to horrible pain. He was dying, his skin peeling away but suddenly he realised that the skin was growing a wing. He was transformed. He took off in great delight.

He looked down at the dark surface of the water. I cannot go back. Firstly, he couldn’t. Second, they would never believe him if he could. Of course, it’s what the rich man was told in the story of Lazarus.

I did get to confession and for my penance I was asked to think of four good things God has given me. I can think of four easily. Health, wife and family, a job, and faith (if a bit questioning).

A replica of the famous icon was visiting Westminster Cathedral. I thought it was going to be a normal quiet day and I could go to confession. No chance of that: the place was seething with Poles! The queue was enormous. Actually I quite like Poles, but another thing to confess thwarted by the enthusiasm of others.

The House of Commons was in recess. There were only four of us at mass in the crypt. The reading was from Luke about the ten lepers whom Jesus cured: only one, “The Man was a Samaritan”, turned back to thank him.

The nature of humans is a vague regret about something which is different for all of us. Perhaps one antidote is a thank you.

The first reading today ends with the great Hebrew prayer, the Shema. Listen. What a pity we Christians (sic) don’t have a similar tradition of reading this essential bit of our religion three times a day: “Listen, Israel: the Lord our God is the Lord.”

The priest at Mass reminded us that Jesus draws together this belief from Deuteronomy with his teaching to love your neighbour as yourself. He said something important which struck me and marked a milestone for my spiritual journey. It is not enough to believe in God, you must also love him.

I realise that I have no difficulty in loving God, only in believing in him. But through the cloud of unknowing is this not a start? We can never prove our belief or otherwise in God, but we can feel the effects of his presence through that cloud.

Once again, I read this week that most people nowadays crave spirituality but reject religion. I am the opposite. I have difficulty with unquestionable belief in God. I love religion. We must not agonise too much over belief, only accept the effect.

By chance I went to a full sung mass for All Saints’ and the next day, early in the morning, a small mass for All Souls’. This seemed appropriate.

On All Souls’ I felt everyone in the small congregation was concentrating on their own loved ones. I have a long list: parents, grandparents, friends, a brother. We all do.

In the mass we Catholics have a great gift. Sometimes a tear rolls down my cheek with the emotion of what is presented to us. The real presence of our Creator in our midst. Literally to Hell with rational doubts: enjoy.

I was dreaming that I was on a long walk. I came to a house and for some reason, as dreamers do, I just walked through it. The owners didn’t mind as I tramped through their sitting room but as I was lost coming out of the house I asked the owner the directions.

He pointed back to a huge signpost on the corner of the house where I had entered pointing left and right and straight on. But I don’t think the signpost was there before; or perhaps it was. How does the creator of our dreams work out the end before the dream starts and is the truth and the end always in sight and not just in dreams?

The priest at communion told a powerful story. Perhaps an old one but I have not heard it before.

Some rabbis were spared the gas chambers in a wartime concentration camp for one day. They spent the night, their last night, putting God on trial for having deserted them into bondage and death. After a trial of learned disputation lasting all night, they found God guilty.

But as they were led to their deaths they sang out the psalms joyously. But God is not for us a love, his ways are unknowable. I am who I am. But God exists and that is what is important.

A friend of mine told me this story which illustrates how science cannot answer all our questions. Often a scientist can look at a woman on baking a cake, he can use every kind of sophisticated measurement to find out the ingredients of the cake. But no science will tell why she is baking the cake, that it’s for her son’s birthday.

At Mass in the Abbey the priest told a story which sums up my attitude to faith.

A woman went to stay with her cousin. Arriving on Saturday, her cousin asked her if she would like to go to Mass. No, she wanted to go skiing which she did.

The next Sunday she couldn’t go skiing so she did go to Mass. The priest told how in ancient times if a lamb was prone to straying the shepherd might break its leg and carry it for a time. Then it would never stray again.

At that moment, the woman knew in her heart that God was speaking to her. In truth, God may not direct our lives directly but if we look out for them, there are signs everywhere of His presence.

The politician on the television was very irritating, not so much in what he said but in the gulf between the rhetoric and the action. Looking over the waves breaking against the green banked cliffs of Petrie Point was an antidote. Thinking of this later I thought that religion and its effects has three of the four halves. Let me explain.

No doubter, no atheist could doubt that this Petrie Point and the sea at its feet exist. Nor could they doubt the calming pleasant mental effect they evoke. Equally no atheist could doubt that religion can cause similar feelings. They just doubt whether their cause actually exists. Therefore we have four parts and only one of the four is in doubt.

1) Petrie Point and the sea;
2) Contemplation produced of the same is pleasant;
3) Religion/God;
4) Contemplation of the same is pleasant.

Why do we agonise so much about whether God exists? Religion exists. Can we not assume on our contemplation that religion exists and enjoy the feelings it engenders?

Evangelicals

I was flipping through channels on the television and came across an American evangelical channel. Of course it was delightfully over the top. Jesus lives and all that. All this is fine for people with belief and certainty but what of the others, like myself? I think we have to concentrate not on religion as a fact but as a means. Not as a finished product but as a journey.

St Agnes, Cornwall

Set at a stunning location, a creek running down to the sea. Old photographs show it as an intensely industrial landscape of miners and shipbuilding. What is the true reality? Industrial past or present quaint beauty?

Polzeath

The talk at the “tube station” church was on the theme of faith. I have always before seen faith as an insurmountable problem. Faith in God, a certainty I lack, but faith as the story from Luke of the foaming of the waters of Galilee as also about having faith that things will be alright and having faith that one can make a difference. That’s about faith in one’s mind, less of a mountain to climb, more knowable. Do not worry about faith in the existence of God, concentrate on faith in your existence.

Our oblate master was telling us how our attachment to “things” just brings unhappiness. He had given away some gold cufflinks someone had given him and a valuable watch.

The trouble is that we all have a thing which we find hard to give up. I may have no interest in smart clothes or watches and am happy to give them up; but maybe I am more attached to political power. Not that I have ever had that either.

So we can be high and mighty saying “things” mean nothing to us, but we all have a thing.