Dear Tatiana,

I watched Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose” again. There is a scene where there is a philosophical dispute between priests and friars as to whether Christ offered the clothes he wore, in other words whether the Church should be poor. It struck me that when men argue, the argument is often an excuse for a kind of power play to promote themselves, but not openly.

In recent weeks we have been arguing about the Euro but how genuine is the argument and how much is positioning for position?

On Remembrance Sunday we remember men killed but also the victims in war of men’s arguments: of women and children. In the Second World War 62,000 British civilians, 187,000 French civilians, 800,000 German civilians, 3,000,000 Polish civilians, and 2,500,000 Russian civilians died.

Dear Gabriel,

We went today to the enthronement of the new Bishop of Lincoln. What a magnificent celebration. Two and a half hours long, with echoes of the great medieval ceremonies that ushered in the present incumbent’s seventy-one predecessors. The previous evening I went to the 100th anniversary of the Grimsby Fish Merchants and gave a talk. We think a lot, rightly, of soldiers killed this weekend but I thought today of the 300 trawlers based at Grimsby 100 years ago and of the generations of men who had gone away for weeks at a time to the freezing waters off Iceland. They worked hard and when they came home they worked hard but some never did come home from the mountainous seas.

That night I dreamt I was in a strange town. For some reason, unexplained, there were some dead birds on the ground. It worried me. Then I looked up and saw what I had never noticed before, which can only happen in a dream. Beyond the town was a great circle of precipitous cliffs like the Cirque de Gavarnie in the Pyranees but much higher and more impressive even than that: cleft after cleft, waterfalls, pinnacles rising up to unimagined heights.

Dear Tatiana,

What an extraordinary combination. The eleventh hour of the eleventh month of the eleventh year of our century, not I am afraid the eleventh century. I might have looked out for Edward the Confessor walking Westminster.

But we were on the A1 travelling north. We put on the radio but rightly it was observing silence. The tracking device of the radio was sent mad by this sacrilege. Silence. It kept racing back and forth between the bands. I suppose an allegory of modern life. Later, talking to some people with some problems I realise how miserable we can make ourselves because we cannot let go. Learn, Tatiana, to let go and live in the silence of the present.

Dear Gabriel,

Try not to be distracted by passing time. I went to the Requiem Mass for old boys of the Oratory School, Reading who had died that year. It was depressing to see the name of an exact contemporary of mine. There were the dates he was at school, 1965-1967.

But during Faure’s Pie Jesu and its haunting melody. I can’t say that suddenly I had faith in Resurrection. That would be too corny but I marvelled at its beauty. In other words, for a moment I was in the cusp of the present, balanced in an exact moment of time.

Dear Gabriel,

Try to find some response whenever you can find it.

I was dreaming that I was in a room in the House of Commons. It was surrounded on both sides by stairs but the stairs leading in different directions were not connected at the top of the building. The division bell went off and I tried to make my way to vote but the locked doors barred me and it took a devil of a time. Far below me after some minutes I saw someone running in. I got down the stairs and then had to cross a bridge. It was quite beautiful like that near Magdalen College in Oxford but all this took time. Then before I could make the final. I kept up. I had to descend again into a rocky port by the river. I wasn’t going to make it. I woke.

That evening I watched a programme about Simon and Garfunkel. It brought back happy memories of listening to ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ and drinking coffee in a mug, great excitement with Coffeemate, listening to a young tutor I had lunch with today. He seemed a lot older than us but was only 29 then. Now he is nearer 70. But when I listened again to ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ the intensity of religious feeling and awe and joy was as great as in most religious services.

Sometimes we just have to put things into their relative context.

I was very cross walking back from the bank. Someone had paid £200 into the wrong bank account without telling me and as a result the one they should have paid into went into overdraft and I was faced with a £200 bank charge.

Then I walked back alongside Westminster Abbey in the dark. Seeing those hundreds of little wooden crosses together made me realise how petty are our little problems compared to the greater sacrifice and sacrifices.

I was reading that the nearest star is four light years away but if somebody in a spaceship travelled there at 25,000 miles per hour faster than any human has travelled before, it would take him 100,000 years. Yet this distance is dwarfed by the fact that our own galaxy could be 100,000 light years across. Somehow I felt this knowledge depressing for my religious hopes. How could God, the creator of this vastness, have been the same Jesus Christ Who was an itinerant preacher and faith healer two-thousand years ago?

Then I realised that faith and religious conviction have nothing to do with material distance or time. Justice, faith, love are entirely the same 100,00 light years away at the other end of the Milky Way as they are here.

As I lay awake I found this truth comforting. I feel my faith coming into port with the same relief as I take my small boat from choppy seas into Portsmouth Harbour and I could pray in peace.

A proud day: I saw my son singing at Mass and that night.

I sat alone in the Abbey Church. It was dark and shadows reared up into the extraordinary high gothic arches; everything completely silent.

Another dream to finish the week. Someone asked me to go somewhere I didn’t want to go but I embarked on the journey. Suddenly an extraordinary landscape opened up before me. A fantastical landscape of pre-history, with great valleys and mountains with strange creatures. What did it mean? That the rational does not explain everything. That beauty can follow from something we don’t want to do but have to do?

I was thinking of someone in the middle of the night who peculiarly irritates me. This sort of corrosive irritation is actually as debilitating to the mind as anything. I tried an experiment to pray for him. To ask God to help him do what he wanted to do, to help him succeed. Immediately I was faced with a kind of wave of intense resistance. An ugly wall, rough, seemingly made of asbestos. I am far too rational, I hope, to believe that the Devil, if he exists, works in this way, but the feeling was so immediate, it was as if some force was preventing me from doing the right thing, but I persevered. I had nothing else to do and the wall dissolved gradually, as did my feeling of irritation. Perhaps the trick works.

I was walking at night over the Wolds. It had been a long day and a long drive. The moon was bright, great vistas spread away for miles, the stars overhead unclouded. In a sense it was like the dream, no heat or weariness. Yet it was not because I was alive yet content and free and with William as a companion padding beside me.

I was reading St. Josemaria with a friend. He makes the point that in a machine even the tiniest bolt is essential. If it falls out, it may set off a chain reaction that takes down everything. So the smallness of our lives has value. Yet we are not machines. The better analogy is that we spend all our lives trying to move from where we are to there but if the smallest bone in our body attempted it, there would be chaos.

I was looking forward to a small mass in the Holy Souls Chapel in the Cathedral where the dark reds and browns of the mosaics are curiously restful. But instead we had a large Mass in the Nave with the school. Yet a most beautiful hymn poem was sung in Italian, which was just as good as a Latin Mass.

Tu sei la mia vita
Altro io non ho.
Tu sei la mia strada
La mia verita.
Nella tua parola,
Io camminero,
Finche avro rispiro –
Fino a quando tu vorrai.
Non avro paurra sai
Se tu sei con me,
Io ti prego, resta con me.

You are my life
I have no one but you.
You are my path
And you are my truth.
In your word
I will always walk
From the first breath I took –
Until I take my last.
I will not be frightened
If you are with me
My prayer is that you’ll stay beside me.

Are we all saints? No. Can we be? I fear not. Perhaps Calvin was right. Fear very few can manage it. Except in the desert.

I was walking to Mass. Here was a moment for calm reflection. Yet here I was in a rage about something absurdly ridiculous which actually didn’t affect me at all. I had woken from my dreams.

I had a dream today. I was walking in a desert. The sky was a perfect cerulean blue. The desert sand utterly flat. I was in a vast plain. A great sun beat down. I was alive because I could feel the sand beneath my feet. But I was not alive. The Sun did not burn me. I was not thirsty or hot. I was comfortable as I paced this great desert.

The point was that there was nothing in it. I had nothing. Everywhere was completely empty. I was walking from life to death.

Yet I was entirely happy. With no possessions or fears or hopes. No past or future. I realised that for happiness nothing was needed. There was no bright light in the distance, no voice, no direction or time in my travel. I was walking off the incubus of life.

I went to the exhibition of John Martin’s works at the Tate Britain. It is superb. I was very struck with the contrast between his ‘Pandemonium’ and ‘The Celestial City and River of Bliss’. We seem to have lost what the Victorians had: powerful means of expressing visually religious truths.

Religion need not be something abstract: it can feel and be seen.

These are interesting saints. They have had, as two of the original apostles, an enormous influence on human history. But absolutely nothing is known about them. I suppose that’s what we should all aim for: complete anonymity, great effect, a variation of the old theme. You can achieve whatever you want in life as long as you don’t try and claim the credit.

I was listening to a talk and one comment struck me: the two greatest things that the Church can offer are beauty and her saints. True, but what can atheism offer? No liturgy, no cathedral architecture, no quiet parish country churches, no saints, and no beauty.

What then is its attraction? A kind of intellectual curiosity. A full stop. I doubt; therefore I am. I am free. Not bound by any tie to some traditional form of reasoning. True, but where are the saints? Where is the beauty?

“Try your best to enter by the narrow door.” Luke 13:22-30

Try your best.

I thought of this as I looked very carefully at the Cezanne pictures in the National Gallery.

There is one – “An avenue of trees at Chantilly” – that struck me very forcibly.

I try in my painting to get in the countryside this same subtle shade of green, blue, yellow, and brown.

I have no ambition in art, no talent, no career, therefore no jealousy of anyone; no frustrated ambition.

I try my best. It is inadequate and no one cares. What a pity one cannot achieve this equanimity in the rest of life.

There was a programme on television about some young women becoming nuns.

I can quite understand the impulse but can we not be just as committed in ordinary lay life? No, almost certainly not, but for half an hour a day, yes.

Does an athlete have to run all day and live in an athletic camp? No, he can run half an hour a day and in that half an hour have as intense an experience as any Olympic athlete.

I was struck at Mass by one phrase in the letter of St Paul to the Romans.

“My brothers, there is no necessity for us to obey our unspiritual selves.”

But we do, all the time.

The reading from Matthew today always seems to me so simple yet so impossible to implement.

“…to love the Lord your God with all your heart with all your soul and with all your mind.”

The second even more impossible.

“You must love your neighbour as yourself.” (Matthew 22:34-40)

Does anyone do it?

St Paul continues his discourse on the spiritual and inspirational.

“It is death to limit oneself to what is unspiritual.”

Surely no one can contend that notion, for the atheist accepts that life ends in death.

St Paul today talks of the struggle that is always within us between the spirit and the world.

“Every single time I want to do good it is something evil that comes to mind.” (Romans)

But in a small, simple, existential pleasure like hoisting a spinnaker up a mast, that angst seems dissipated.

I always find these words difficult, powerful yet alarmingly and no doubt true:

“Jesus said to his disciples… Do you suppose that I am here to bring peace on Earth? No, I tell you but rather division.” (Luke 12:49-53)