Dear Gabriel,

How do we make a good confession? I never know what to say. But I remember once when I expressed my inability to accept my lot, the priest said simply “Listen, listen to the words of the absolution.” Normally we are so grateful to have garbled off a few inadequate words that we barely listen to these words which are full of poetry and meaning for us.

Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis in nomine Patris, et Filii, + et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.

I absolve you of your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In Jordan near Amman there are the most extraordinary Roman ruins at Jerash. I reckon they cover as large an area as Hyde Park, four times the area of the Roman Forum, with ten times more monuments at least. They are truly stunning, with great temples, a pillared road, mighty steps leading up to the Temple of Artemis. In one’s mind’s eye one can peer into the past as part of the crowd seeing the Emperor Hadrian striding through these great arches.

There are mighty ruined Byzantine churches to St Theodore amongst others but what struck me most was what a boy showed me. One can tip ever so slightly with just a key ring a huge stone pillar. This movement is a defence against earthquakes. And some of the cornices atop the pillars are hollow. They play music when moved. Thus the Romans had musical warning of an earthquake. How arrogant and stupid we are building vast layers of concrete which crush people by the thousand in earthquakes.

Why can we not learn the wisdom of people who lived two thousand years ago? To pause, consider, and build for beauty and safety and not just for profit.

I had to get somewhere on time but I made myself go to Mass. Going to Mass is supposed to calm you down, but it just made me late and agitated. The truth is that for most of us the rush of present events, moving time, is so important that we find it naturally impossible to concentrate on anything we should.

My daughter came back from a far-away place.

That’s more important than anything in politics.

Dear Gabriel,

Remember ‘Nothing matters very much and most things don’t matter at all’ and in British politics at least. No-one dies and that’s the important thing. My Chamberlain remark was printed in every newspaper with the unfortunate interpretation that the present Prime Minister was Chamberlain. But “Never apologise, never resign, never complain!” The main thing is to keep telling the truth as one sees it.

In the end, the Prime Minister did the right and just said no to the new treaty. He told his truth as he saw it.

The Christmas Carol Service at St Peter’s, Stonyhurst. We go to so many carol services. They are a bit formulaic. What marks this one out is not so much the breaks in the carols with the choir singing ancient traditional melodies but the Benediction at the end. It is a true religious service. A service with an end, a point, and a statement.

Dear Gabriel,

Sometimes it is better to know when to hold your peace. This day I had things to do all day but still found time to go to the 12.30 Mass. Perhaps I should have stayed there. But I had to come back to speak. My remarks, inoffensive as they were, were too easily taken out of context. I said too many British Prime Ministers had come back from European Summit meetings holding a scrap of paper claiming victory. And we didn’t want this to happen again.

There was Mass in the Crypt and I had to leave early for a meeting. As I climbed the steps, depressed, the words followed me up.

O come, thou dayspring, come and cheer
Our spirits by thine advent here
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,
And death’s dark shadows put to flight

The Archbishop of Canterbury was holding his annual advent service for parliamentarians. One anthem struck me:

Adam lay ybounden
Bounden in a bond
Four thousand winters
Thought he not too long

As the Archbishop said: maybe more like 40 million years than four thousand but the point is made Adam was eventually released.

I was in Durham in the morning after a speech at the university the night before. Standing on the hills to the south of the City on a winter’s late dawn, the whole cathedral shone in an amber light. Is there any such city where in moments you can climb out of the city into open country?

We went to Mass in the newly restored St Peter’s Church at Stonyhurst, Lancashire. This is a splendid renovation. All the fabulous ornate over-the-top ornamentation glistening as if it was brand new, a triumph of nineteenth-century art. Pity the heating was turned off.

We went to the Sound of Music, a school musical. Precisely because we all know every scene because we have seen the film half a dozen times, it has a comforting quality of familiarity, like a liturgy. But the Sound of Music and the real story of the von Trapp family are as compelling a morality play as any.

Again, only time to attend a fragment of Mass but what divine poetry from Isaiah:

“For tyrants shall be no more, and scoffers vanish.”

(Isaiah 29:17-24)

I could only attend a fragment of Mass but is not a fragment better than nothing?

That night I dreamt that I was completely alone in a featureless open space on a bare board with writing, having nothing, going nowhere.

It was strangely comforting as must be the moments before death.

At the Council we were discussing a moral hazard question. A boatload of refugees from Africa had been left to starve in the Mediterranean between Tripoli and Malta. No one went to help them because they and their country would be responsible.

Clearly the right thing to do is to pick up every boatload but then there will be more and more boatloads. What is the answer?

My answer was that they should all be picked up, helped, fed, and given water, and then towed back to Tripoli. Is this a Christian response or merely a pragmatic one? Anyway, it didn’t go down very well in public at least.

I was in the church on the Place St. Cloud in Paris. I went in for a few moments to catch breath from the Council of Europe. It is a modern church, large, empty. Out of sight, a group was praying the Rosary. I suddenly felt a profound sense of depression that all this religion was an illusion. It was only by sitting still and listening to the distant, indistinct French words that some sense of acceptance returned. Have patience, dear Gabriel.

I was enjoying the Mass in Latin, beautifully pronounced in Latin by our resident Italian priest. It is extraordinary, however, that our minds are so weak that almost anything can lead us astray. Then not a word of the homily remained with me because a lady behind was tapping her feet against my seat – completely inadvertently. I am sure this is a kind of allegory on our religious lives – that any kind of material event, however inconsequential, can divert us from following a religious reading or attempt at concentration.

That evening I was in the Abbey alone after the last service and I lit a candle in front of the wooden crucifix. The Abbey was dark apart from the flickering candles. There was an intensity of religious feeling yet I felt it was balanced by an equal rational belief that what was represented by this mere wooden image could not be the source of these billions of stars in a vast universe – Christ could not encompass the Universe, it was just too vast. I felt as if there were two beating opposing forces yet somehow this slim, inconsequential figure was winning the battle, that mere ideas could, if not defeat, go beyond material forces however vast.

I had gone down for the launch of the Abbot’s book on the architectural history of the Abbey.

Vespers was passing me by and my mind wandered into the failures of our lives. Then a passage from Psalm 138 struck me: “The Lord is high yet He looks on the lowly. And the haughty he knows from afar.”

Our troubles or unfulfilled ambitions are brought into perspective by Him.

The view of earth from a lowly level is very different from an aeroplane. From above everything is flattened. But if God looks down all of us high and low are foreshortened, of the same height in His gaze.

Daniel sees visions in the night:

“I gazed into the visions of the night. And I saw coming on the clouds of heaven one like the son of man…”

I was clearing out an old shed and came across a manifesto I had written when trying to become secretary of the Durham Union. It was fairly ridiculous. Full of the self-deprecatory style of a self-conscious student. I lost. And I took the long train home to be consoled. Once again, I emerged from that train forty years ago. London was the same yet different. Grimier. Routemaster buses and a double-decked No. 9 plying its way all the way from the West End to Barnes suburb. Now it is merely a West End attraction.

But I dreamt that when I went to that terraced house in Barnes, my mother was there as she always had been when I came back from school, comforting and secure.

But there is hope yet. The king puts Daniel into the lion’s den. He cannot sleep but in the first light of dawn he hurries there to find Daniel safe.

Daniel replied: My God sent an angel who sealed the lions’ jaws.

“Mene, mene, tekel upharsin.”

The writing on the wall in King Balshazzar’s court.

Mene – God has measured your sovereignty and put an end of it
Tekel – You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting
Upharsin – Your kingdom has been divided and given to the Medes and the Persians

As I walked away from Mass in the Crypt of the House of Commons I couldn’t help comparing this perhaps over apocalyptic vision with our weakness and that of one of two senior politicians I know with regard to Europe. Are we ‘upharsin’?

And I thought too of John Martin’s great picture of the scene at the Tate (below). Everywhere feasting but the writing is on the wall.

I love this vision that Daniel told Nebuchadnezzar of:

Thou, O king, sawest, and behold there was as it were a great statue: this statue, which was great and high, tall of stature, stood before thee, and the look thereof was terrible. The head of this statue was of fine gold, but the breast and the arms of silver, and the belly and the thighs of brass: And the legs of iron, the feet part of iron and part of clay. Thus thou sawest, till a stone was cut out of a mountain without hands: and it struck the statue upon the feet thereof that were of iron and of clay, and broke them in pieces. Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold broken to pieces together, and became like the chaff of a summer’s threshingfloor, and they were carried away by the wind: and there was no place found for them: but the stone that struck the statue, became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth.

There has been much talk this week of the endgame of the Euro. I am reminded of Daniel’s statue.

This is a week of last things: the last week of the Church’s year, when we read of Daniel at Nebuchadnezzar’s court.

Daniel’s small rebellions give us hope of the small things that triumph against the seemingly mighty and inevitable.

I was thinking more on my conversation with my friend on the train. I asked him what he thought of as God and how we can accept His existence because like you, dear Gabriel, I have my doubts.

He views God as an Act, from the Latin actus. That He is unchanging and has no potential. In this sense, a glass has potential to be also be a glass of water. It can change. God never changes.