As usual when at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, I sought out the 6:30 Mass in the Cathedral. I was told they were about to have their first ever ecumenical service. The Protestant Pastor gave the sermon. It was on the text of Jesus saying we must be like little children to enter the Kingdom of God.

He described the story of two boys climbing a ladder to scale a small cliff. The ladder fell down: a man came up. Jump, he said. One of the boys did, the other did not. Why? Because the first boy was the son of the man who came up. In other words, we have to have confidence and jump into our father’s arms, from whatever height. But he was saying something else. That if we could be more like little children, our problems and dissatisfaction and jealousy would fade away. It seems that this problem of conflict, of comparing ourselves with others is our greatest human weakness.

Next day at Mass the priest was describing how in the war, as a small boy, he had to ride his bicycle without lights because of the blackout. Suddenly he was told by someone or something to stop. By inches he missed an enormous hole in the road left by workmen. The day was the feast of the Guardian Angels. Are they always there? Do we have our own one watching over us? It is a lovely idea.

I went to a service in Nairobi. I could not find a Catholic Mass. It was upstairs, an unlikely ‘church’ with a corrugated tin roof and open sides. 6,000 feet up the sky was cloudless, the air coming through the open sides cool. I was the only white person there.

The sermon was in Swahili and English. I wasn’t sure I understood the English any more than the Swahili. At the end of the long sermon I left but, in the road, heard them singing. I returned. The chant was endless, repeating, rhythmic. I went with flow. I was wondering whether to put my last 1,000 Kenyan shillings note in the box. I left, then returned to do so. As I walked down the stairs, they were singing ‘Jesus is the Truth’ or something like it. That service was more memorable and did more for me than two dozen traditional liturgies in England.

I was steering a small dhow made entirely of bits of wood attached to a hollowed-out tree trunk, the sail with many holes. A young man was balancing gracefully on the outrigger. For some reason religion came up. This young Mombasa fisherman seemed very well informed. He said ‘The human race is the tree, religions the branches, and we are the leaves.’ I suppose it is a cliché, I don’t know. I have not heard the phrase before. It seemed remarkably apposite and full of wisdom to me. We are all a unity. The human race is one great tree and all religions stream from us and flow back to the same roots.

Photo by Stephanie Kalber (copyright)

A pilgrimage even to Walsingham always takes off slowly in the mind. I was wondering whether to go to confession and didn’t really have the energy. Sitting in the rebuilt church of St Mary’s, an acceptance slowly came to me. I went and talked about my inability to accept things as they are and my place in it. The priest was kind. He said something which made a deep impression on me. “Man is measured not by what he can be but by what he is.”

In other words we should accept that. Yesterday indeed is history tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift. But we have to ask ourselves what do we really want. I was thinking of this that night in the pilgrims’ hostel.

I don’t really want to “do God’s will”. I find that trite, but I do want to find God. The emphasis being on the word “find”. I don’t yet with all my belief believe in a transcendent God and therefore the most important thing to do is to find him. It might happen tomorrow or it may happen as I lie dying but that is the most important thing. And then we can concentrate on what is the most important “ambition”. All the other disappointments fall into place. They are merely busy byways along the main road.

We think we come to a place like Walsingham by accident but such perceptions and insights are vouchsafed to us in a place like this that perhaps Our Lady did really appear to Lady Richeldis in 1081. Certainly Richeldis believed so; and in a very real sense we feel her here.

As we lighted our candles and processed home down the quiet high street and said our night prayers in the garden, a deep happiness and peace descended on all of us. I went to bed and the others went to the pub!

My son was working in the British Museum and showed me round the back areas. In one of the rooms, under an old polythene sheet one of the curators showed me an ancient bronze door. He thinks it might have come from the Temple in Jerusalem and been looted by the Babylonians. It still has the axe mark where it was cut in half. It was strangely moving to look at this. What had it seen?

We went to the Cathedral in Sion in the Valois of Switzerland. The church is up a hill with a small opening into the choir. It has an ancient simple Romanesque air. We were visiting an old lady in a nursing home. She is very old, inside the room it was silent, outside children could be heard playing. The end and the beginning of life, connected by a slender thread. We were travelling through Dijon. In the cathedral there is an ancient medieval statue of Our Lady of Dijon. She is credited with saving the main town from destruction as the Germans withdrew in 1944. She seems worth praying to and I have tried it. It seems to work.

A friend in London was asked me during the day as a device for useful meditation to think on the presence of God. It seems to work.

I sat on a tree trunk in high fell country and tried to settle my mind. Every time I got angry or felt resentment or jealousy. I would say ten Hail Marys. That would be a lot of Hail Marys but the fear of it seems to work a bit.

I went to the small Westminster chapel of ease near our home. For many the concept of the Body of Christ being in the bread of the Communion is absurd. Rationally it is, but why when one goes into a Catholic church do you feel a kind of strange presence or power? Is it real, is it illusion, but the feeling is there. On Monday I went to a reception at Speakers’ House raise money for the new museum of Catholic history at Stonyhurst. A reliquary cross belonging to Thomas More was on display together with a Book of Hours that one of Mary Queen of Scots’ ladies in waiting carried at her execution.

I touched the cross. People scoff at relics but some bones turned up recently in Bulgaria by legend those of John the Baptist, absurd yet recent carbon dating puts them as coming from the first century.

Anyway the search for proof is tiring and pointless. That this relic has been handled for three, four, five hundred years is enough.

On Tuesday I went to a pray-in in the crypt where a multitude had assembled to pray for guidance for the nation. It sounds corny but I have never sat for so long in any meeting in Parliament with no one saying anything. It was curiously powerful. Perhaps there is something commendable in silent politicians and silent politics or just thinking instead of doing and talking.

Wednesday was the feast day (13 June) of St Anthony of Padua. He seems a charming chap. He sort of wandered into the Franciscans as St Francis was getting going. A good theologian, they put him to use. We all have our uses.

For the rest of the week I had to test Spinoza’s theory. Is bobbing and down in a small boat, walking high fells or opening the Lindsey Trail with a two-hour carriage drive behind two lorries as good as going to church? Of course it is!

I will not forget this Pentecost in a hurry. Perhaps it has always passed me by a little. The facts are well-known: wind, tongues of flame, the Holy Spirit descending. The drive was long. Up early to drive to the Abbey from Lincolnshire, but it was not the dignified service and its well-known readings that was memorable but the “Fun Sunday” at the local village. The churches had come together to put it or to explain Whitsunday. It was all free, homemade, and rather moving. In the ‘interactive’ part we were asked to wait awhile in the porch as the Apostles waited. There were bits of paper to represent wind and fire, a little earth in a pot to represent planting the seed. But at the end it had more resonance than just seedings. The show was packed. I liked the Christian bikers too.

In the City of London opposite Mansion House tube station I came across St Mary Aldermary. The City is noisy outside. The doors were open, people chatting. Inside, it is quiet. The church is built on its medieval foundations. The ceiling is intricate in tracery. The yacht Belem was moored in the Pool of London for the Jubilee. Standing on one of these, the last of the great sailing ships, the great masts rising up, the great wheel – what an experience!

On Friday we were at Stonyhurst listening to Zadok the Priest. Can you imagine this type of music being composed for a modern Jubilee? But it never fails to inspire. I think Stonyhurst does the best Mass. It is the combination of a full church of young people, a brilliant choir, and rousing hymns that does it.

Before watching the Queen’s River Pageant on Sunday, I calmed down in the Sunday Mass in Westminster Cathedral. This is austere and traditional but moving all the same. Is the Royal Family England’s religion? No. But it does provide a cement, a focus, a feeling of togetherness that all can feel part of. There is no republican equivalent. President Hollande may be a good chap but when on his inauguration day he was soaked to the skin, he didn’t have the same appeal as the singers in the boat serenading the Queen with ‘Rule, Britannia’.

In its sheer eccentric Britishness this was the highlight of the whole Jubilee. On Monday & Tuesday I went to seven Jubilee fetes in Lincolnshire. Away from the high pomp and massed crowds, this is community.

On Monday I stood in front of Walesby church on the edge of the wolds. As sunset fell looking at over thirty miles of Lincolnshire plain one could see new pinpricks of light coming up as beacons were lit. Perhaps not quite as impressive as the beacons lit in The Lord of the Rings, but impressive anyway. I can’t remember which day but one of the readings this week was the familiar two central commandments. This always makes me feel woefully inadequate. I find great difficulty in loving everybody, particularly people different from myself. But, we were told, the important thing is to try. I have tried. I have been found wanting.

Waiting to pick up a son from Air Cadets, I spent an ideal half an hour listening to Radio Four, a programme on moral dilemmas. I never knew that Blaise Pascal coined my fundamental view. No one, he said, can rationally prove or disprove the existence of God. But if you were going to bet it makes sense to bet on him. Why? Because if he exists and you deny him, you might spend an eternity in the doghouse. If he doesn’t exist and you die, then nothing is lost. I think it was Pascal who suggested too that it is only in trying, in praying, that we can gradually become more convinced. Spinoza also expressed another fundamental belief of mine that if God exists, he made everything. If God is in everything so that we can achieve almost as much walking in a wood for an hour than going to church. The light failing then on a summer evening or the edge of the woods is almost as valuable a religious experience or spiritual experience than turning round and going into the church for an hour.

Ascension is about going but leaving a message. Better to think on those terms than Christ rising like a rocket which jars with modern sensibilities. After Mass at Stonyhurst chapel, I walked from Hurst Green for eight miles in a great circle up and over Longbridge Fell and back again. This countryside is glorious. You could be in Switzerland. Vast panoramas shade into woods fells rising high out of the green shaded valleys. The fells blooming, greying, vanishing into mist and rearing up into bright sunlight, far away the smudge of Blackburn. The rushing rivers of Hodder & Ribble, white ribbons, no great prairie fields of wheat and barley here. It is a countryside of gentle fields, crumbling stone walls, young lambs, ancient farmsteads, and the silence of great woods of conifer.

This is the countryside of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Tolkien. Is that the Ribble there or the Brandywine? The path really did seem to go ever on. After eight miles, I was exhausted. Without the dog even more so.

By Monday I was back in Market Rasen in our small weekday Mass. Our priest was telling us of his chicks he keeps in his garden and about how the mother hen covers them with her wing when alarmed by strangers. A delightful rural appreciation of today’s Gospel:

“Listen, the tune will come. In fact it has come already when for will be scattered.” [John 16]

On Tuesday I was late for Mass at the Oratory and too late to put aside a wafer for Holy Communion. Did I dare go to Communion? But leaving it so I was the last, there were still five to spare. There is always something of everything to spare.

On Wednesday I was asked to do the first reading. I don’t like to put any emotion into readings in church but this text is so moving it speaks for itself:

“When he had finished speaking, he knelt down with them all and prayed. By now they were all in tears: they put their arms round Paul’s neck and kissed him; What saddened them most was his saying they would never see his face again.”

No time for Mass on Thursday only a long drive through traffic to Lincolnshire. Church was walking over the highest peak in Lincolnshire – a staggeringly high four-hundred feet! A great hot vast sky of blue ahead, the fields brightly yellow and poor William crushed by heat.

Saturday. I am reading Malcolm Brown’s Imperial War Museum Book of the Somme. It is a very moving and balanced account and despite its awfulness we shouldn’t doubt that many or perhaps most who fought in it felt they were doing the necessary and right thing. But there is a sad chapter about two brothers killed – Willie and Percy Robins. Willie killed age 21 and Percy only 19. Their distraught parents bound together a little memoir of their letters home. This is the true awfulness of war: those that are left behind.

I dislike having to spend Sundays in London normally but it gave us an opportunity to go to Mass at St Patrick’s Soho Square. Afterwards we processed the Virgin around Soho Square to celebrate SOS Soho. Our little procession had an archbishop, the papal nuncio to Ireland visiting, and all types, ages, races. We passed by a group of leather jackets celebrating lunch with a lot of alcohol, some old ladies watercolouring – a charming stream of London life.

Monday: Confession is a strange thing. Irrational but we feel so much better after it. I was thinking of the two commandments and confessing to a lack of success in these simple but not easy tasks – Love one another and believe in Jesus Christ – and the priest reminded me of what was also in John’s gospel: that we all fall short.

Tuesday: I was dreaming that I was with a well-known politician – a household name – approaching a cricket match. I was pleased that at last I would be able to give him my idea. I started expounding, no doubt in a very boring way. He barely paused and carried on to an enthusiastic welcome from those waiting by the main stand. I veered off to the boundary where an official shoved me off on account of being with my dog William!

On Wednesday in this week, John’s Jesus says “I still have many things to say to you but they would be too much for you now.”

Indeed, I found myself asleep at Mass.

There is a priest at Mass in the Cathedral who merely in his homily repeats and re-repeats aspects of the Gospel very slowly. He was doing this on Thursday. But it works well with the great speech of Jesus in John 16:16-20 – “We don’t know what he means. … You will be sorrowful but your sorrow will turn to joy.”

We should take note when strangers come up to us on the street. You never know who they are, however odd, they might be an angel.

On Friday, someone came up to me and said this: “I think this is much more important to you than politics.” But when we are lying in our coffin, this is all that is important. Let’s not be too dramatic. I had just heard the combined choirs of Westminster Abbey and Westminster Cathedral sing evening vespers. At one level, beautiful, even inspiring. At another, deeper level… perhaps the only thing that is really important.

So many fields round our home in Lincolnshire have young lambs at the moment. On a long walk on Saturday I stood by one. He looked at me for some time, before gambling off. Perhaps they are more intelligent than we think. They are certainly timeless. The village of Kirmond comes from a Norman name. Chevre Le Mont – Goat’s Hill – shortened to Kevremond, then Kirmond, then Kirmond le Mire (it is by a muddy stream). The Norman conqueror has left few names, unlike the Anglo-Saxons, Stainton, or the Danish Tealby.

And on the hill are terraces, lynchets, remains of medieval farming. As I was walking through the village and a coach bounced past me at great speed. I wonder how many stop and think of the centuries accumulating in our countryside and the virtue of history and tradition and knowledge of things past.

I was in Mass in the Cathedral on Sunday and it started to make sense. If I was to take this advice and open each day with asking God what He wanted. But what He wants is in the words of the Gospel. God will give us what we want if we give Him what He wants. What does He want? That we recognise the name of His son, Jesus Christ, and that we love one another. Simple, obvious, right, but not easy. Still, at least I know what to ask for…

The readings are from John this week and they compliment that of Sunday.

If we give God what He wants we will receive what John offers us in Tuesday’s reading: “Peace I give to you, peace I bequeath you.” And as in Wednesday’s reading we will receive it as a branch on the vine. I am the true vine.

Tuesday. Peace I bequeath to you, Peace I give you. Wednesday. I am the vine and my father is the vinedresser.

I see all the readings from John this week as interconnected with the vine, so Tuesday leads into Wednesday and into Thursday so the vine connects us to each other and then to his father.

“As the Father has love me, so I have loved you.”

And then into Friday:

“This is my commandment: love one another as I have loved you.”

And then finally into Saturday: the challenge “if the world hates you, remember that is hated me before you.”

On Friday I walked over two hours from Market Rasen station, over the Wolds, to Stainton le Vale, or Stainton in the Hole as it was known in previous centuries. And then on Saturday I walked back to the station. The sun was blazing, the fields yellow with oilseed rape, huge distances versed in tinges of blue and green. Distant smudges of power station smoke far into the horizon. Drying wet earth beneath the feet. Sheep providing life, cars hurtling back on an occasional road crossed.

Intent on business while tired miles toiled by, the dry flinty road from Walesby leading on into the shade of Willingham Woods, the small one-carriage train coming up its straight line, from the thin line of hills past the new temple of Tesco.

Monday: A long drive down. Was there time to go to Mass? No, I had to vote. But I missed the vote anyway. Always go to Mass first – it’s more important.

But on Tuesday I was so involved in my own thoughts that I couldn’t remember at all what was in the readings. I wanted desperately to go into the sacristy after Mass and peer at the book but the little gate was locked and I didn’t dare. How often are we deterred from seeking the truth by a little locked gate about one foot high.

Anyway, when the verger came to extinguish the candles and take away the book, he pushed the gate open with his foot. It was unlocked!

On Wednesday I was on the boat so I only had sky and sea for a church, which is as good.

I decided to go to confession on Thursday and the priest gave me some useful advice: “Remember, one morning you won’t wake up.” Indeed, I had felt a bit ill that day.

Open the day every day with a prayer: What can I do for you, God? How can I dedicate my day more to you? How can I think more of others and then close the day with a little review of how much you have achieved.

I had told him of my experience of the Sunday before. So certain when I was reading of the Resurrection experience of the Apostles; that they could not have lied, or been misguided, they must have been feeling the truth. Then beset with doubts, confounded with the enormity of the universe, I was tired by the time I arrived at the monastery on Friday.

I couldn’t find my place at Vespers; the Compline book had gone missing. It was only when the darkening abbey church was completely empty that sitting in front of the Crucifix and peering down, the stones seemed to merge into a greyness, that reality in the form of the stones was merging with unreality in the shape of the Crucifixion, where they were all one reality and there forever.

By Saturday I was like the crowd at Antioch in the reading. I could not accept that we, I, are worthy, capable of eternal life but we can only take refuge in what Jesus tells Philip today: Ask of Christ and he will grant you what you want. What do I want? To believe.

The Sunday bulletin from the previous week was lying around. Therefore this was another opportunity to look at Luke’s reading and the reaction of the Apostles to Jesus’s resurrected form before them.

Again as I sat there in the empty church I thought on this paradox. Were the Apostles lying, unlikely, misguided, difficult in the face of such certainty, or were they telling the truth? If they were telling the truth and in that moment in that quiet chapel I believe they were then Christianity in time, so that even if the Milky Way is 120,00 light years across, then any doubts about the enormity of the universe against one man’s life doesn’t matter.

It is time and then perhaps for the first time I truly believe this is the truth.

Another view onto a plain, this time, driving up into the hills near Verdun to Fort Vaux. Here in these hills in 1916 nearly six hundred thousand French and Germans died, battling over a few square kilometres. A photograph of Forts Vaux and Douamont shows them completely obliterated by shell holes.

On Thursday in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe I had spoken up about the plight of Christians in Syria, increasingly under threat, the first Christian community in the world outside the Holy Land, yet war goes on even after Verdun. People said never again.

On Saturday back in a small country church in Lincolnshire, I read of the local vicar agreeing to spend five nights under canvas without any home comforts in order to raise £500 for the Alzheimers Society. £500 is enough to pay for one researcher for one day. Hundreds of thousands of Britons have their lives blighted by Alzheimers.

The great tide of John flows on, unstoppable, irresistible.

“I am the bread of life… everybody who believes in me has eternal life.”

I stood on the edge of the Black Forest, looking west into the afternoon sun, the Rhine glistening a distant sliver of silver, forests of lovely pines tumbling down into the plain. On a day like this, one would like to walk for hours.

The words from John 6:35-40 are repeated:

“I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never be hungry.”

But now is added:

“He who believes in me will never thirst.”

The Masses said at 6:30 in the evening and 7:30 in the morning in Strasbourg Cathedral are beautiful. Hearing the Gospel read in French, slowly and carefully, somehow makes them resonate more, as if they are in Latin.

I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never be hungry.

I cannot remember the French words but as I lay awake long into the night I repeated them again and again until by morning I had forgotten the correct usage. This is how the message comes with clarity then as the world crowds in, indistinctly:

Je suis le pain de vie. Qui vient à moi n’aura jamais faim.

I had three dreams in one night. In the first, I was in a tube station. I got out of the train but instead of a long platform with exits at either end, it was short with walls at both ends shutting them off with just a small window high up and a man laughing at me. I took this to be life. Then I woke and fell asleep again.

Then I dreamt that I was kneeling next to the Virgin Mary but neither she nor I had any physical form; we were no more than transient shadows of light. I took this to be what I aspired to.

Then I woke up and fell asleep again. Now I was trying again and again to knit something out of a thread that kept falling away and refused to complete the job. This was the attempt at this diary, like faith it keeps falling away. The thread was as a ruler. Each time I picked it up and attempted to thread it, I failed.

A twenty-kilometre ride, then the steepest climb on a wold I have ever attempted in England – before me a vast panorama of Lancashire leading to the great bulk of the Forest of Bowland, under sudden, distant clouds. A cathedral of open air.

After a long journey it was enough to sit in the empty church.

In one sense this is a disappointing week. The great Resurrection readings are over. All of faith is held together by such a slender hope, these four short Resurrection readings. If they are not valid, then faith is not valid.

The two readings were a contrast. In the first, from the Acts of the Apostles, the disciples are hard pressed to justify their claims. Weren’t there other “messiahs” before whose movements collapsed once they were executed? In the second, Jesus performs one of his most remarkable miracles: the feeding of the five thousand. Which is true?

I was talking with a friend. He gave one piece of advice: be thankful.

The previous week’s triumphant Resurrection readings open now with the amazing claim to Nicodemus on which all stands:

“God so love the world that He gave His only begotten son to save it.”

This I always think is my reading, because it is about doubting Thomas or perhaps, as we were told at Mass, it should be “believing” Thomas for his wonderful statement – My Lord and My God. Jesus is right: “Happy indeed is the man who believes without seeing.”

I don’t have that certainty but seeing is not just with the mind’s eye. When John enters the tomb, “He saw and he believed.” It wasn’t necessarily that he saw anything much with his eyes except an empty tomb which could be explained away but that he saw in the sense of understanding.

I see the point at last of what somebody has been telling me all along. So we don’t have to see concrete physical evidence, we can see and understand and believe that way, we can see the argument or even more so the inevitable conclusion of what we have been told. Perhaps I am and many of us are at that stage. By Monday, sadly, the Resurrection studies are at an end but we have instead Nicodemus.

I know that now for many Easter is over. Well that’s it then for another year but I love going to Mass this week because every day we have the great readings of the Resurrection. Previously I have taken them one by one, but this time I have tried to view them as a whole, an unfolding acceptance that Christ is risen.

First, on Monday, the women “filled with awe and great joy” meet Jesus. “Do not be afraid,” He tells them. For many, perhaps most, this is myth or legend but equally the story concocted by the chief priests by which soldiers are bribed to say Jesus’s body has been stolen by his disciples can be viewed as myth and legend. Darkness against light, lies against truth.

The Cathedral is beautiful, bedecked with white and yellow flowers, the vestments white and gold.

Then on Tuesday, Mary Magdalene “stayed outside near the tomb, weeping,” and fails to recognise Jesus till he calls her name, as we fail still, constantly, to recognise him. Whenever I think of this passage, I see Titian’s painting, ‘Noli Me Tangere’ (below).

But it is Wednesday’s reading – Jesus’s encounter on the road to Emmaus – which usually reduces me to tears. “It is nearly evening, they said, and the day is almost over… He took the bread… then He broke it… and their eyes were opened.” If there was any Gospel reading I would like read at my funeral it is that one.

I heard the Wednesday Mass with a young priest, a small gathering locally, five or six of us. There is something particularly beautiful about a new utterly committed young priest giving Mass to a small gathering, in the simplest of services. You feel closer to the beginning.

Then on Thursday, Jesus suddenly appears to all the disciples. I suppose an atheist will try to explain the Resurrection through a misunderstanding, surely all these people cannot have been lying or be deluded or perhaps, they say, he never died, but he is alive yet transfigured, different, appearing suddenly and vanishing; and finally on Friday another beautiful reading when Christ appears by the lakeside. “It is the Lord. … Come and have breakfast.”

And then in Saturday’s reading, Mark, short and to the point as usual sums it all up.

Holy Thursday, the Mass of the Lord’s Supper in the Abbey is a spectacular affair. It is a lovely moment arriving at the retreat: the remembered smell of polish, tea, after the rush from London. The Blessed Sacrament taken in procession, the familiar hymns.

Exhausted by the nine-mile cross walk and the long Passion reading, standing up, I tried to go to confession, but nothing came. Eventually I ended up by the picture of the raising of Lazarus by Bassano. I went back to first principles, what does one really want? To be raised up like Lazarus. I stared at him in the darkened abbey, his face hidden in shadow, emerging from a black cave, the face of Christ, calm, looking on. Then if this is true, if like Lazarus we will emerge into light and see the face of Christ after death, then everything else here on earth, ups and downs, disasters, is inconsequential.

But when one goes to confession and repeats the same dreary list, anger, jealousy, impatience; dealing with them only makes sense in the context of this experience of Lazarus. After an hour or so I was now ready or had something to say at confession but by that time the Abbey was empty, everyone gone.

On Holy Saturday we studied lectio divina. When all the emphasis is on reading quickly, how do we read slowly? How do we look at any text and ask what is its meaning? How would I put it in my own words? What title would I give it? What does it mean for me? What is its echo as received by different people?

At the Vigil, it was long and suddenly as my consciousness the psalm broke through:

“You have the message of eternal life, O Lord.”

The darkened ceiling, the great east window lit from outside seemed to swell in my mind with joy to be replaced with a comforting sweet melancholy with the next psalm:

“Like the deer that yearns for running streams, so my soul is yearning for you, my god.”

Three hours of this is not too long.

For a change on Easter Sunday to the childrens’ folk Mass. We are asked to accept change and disappointment, both are inevitable. With a stab of pain I has woken in the night. How do we find happiness when we do not get what we want? Is the secret to do always what others want, or what displeases us byt that is the way of the saint and most decidedly we are not saints, we are too selfish surely. Perhaps the only solution is to set our will against the experiences of Lazarus. That is all that matters.