I went for a walk up the hill, beyond the lake. It was deep twilight, almost dark, a tinge of a lighter sky in the far west. Here in the Lincolnshire wolds, all was quiet. There were sheep high upon the hill and I sat down on the cool grass beside them.

In the far distance upon the horizon, a bright light remained. Something quite prosaic no doubt, a barn door open, even a harsh security light, but here in this comfortable gloom it held a hint of hope.

Thus in an empty country, long ago, a vague questioning wind the only sound, most shepherds have sat long ago and seen a light and wondered what did it portend and, curiosity aroused, they walked towards it.

I for my part walked slowly back into the dark valley to the yellow light of my cottage.

We had to drive back to London for A-level results. So it was a long haul, ploughing up the motorway for twelve hours at 110 kmh, hardly stopping.

I looked longingly at the distant churches flashing by in the French countryside. Perhaps there was a nice mass going on there, but maybe not.

We ploughed on.

In today’s reading, Moses looks down on the Promised Land from Mount Nebo. In the past, I imagine him standing on a little hill looking over a green and pleasant land, beyond a good sized river.

Yet when one stands on Mount Nebo, the view in reality is intensely forbidding. There is no green: just a vast view of burning desert. One looks down from a great height over the Dead Sea and the Jordan is only a distant trickle. The mountains, white, yellow, bakingly hot and dry, rise out of the heat, haze before you.

But the vision of Moses is all the more profound for this. His imagination must have stared beyond what befell his eyes in to the future when his people would make a garden beyond this desert.

I went to mass in the local Augustinian hostel. A delightful small mass, very simple and, in its way, spiritual. The chapel is a modern one; the clear windows looking out over the Mont Blanc range.

This week is the feast day of St Jean Frances de Chantal (1572-1641), a mother of six children. When her husband died, she became a disciple of St Francis de Sales and founded the Order of the Visitation.

Strange to be sitting here in places where she must have walked and ridden, looking at the same countryside that she and Francis looked upon.

In today’s Gospel, we are told “Unless you change and become little children you will never enter the kingdom of Heaven” (Matthew 18). But what does that mean? A charming thought at first. It’s true that little children are spontaneous but they can also be, well, shall we say very difficult and self-absorbed too. But it is an honest self-absorption, a living in the present, an absence of regret for the past or ambition for the future.

I was lying awake as usual and, as usual, looking through the window at great skies and mountains. How absurd the notion of an Abrahamic God was. But then, why these signs all about us? Why the feeling of peace in the chapel this morning? The feeling we are not alone?

I thought of the dead being present. Immediately the unpleasant cold shiver came. But then I lay still and asked the dead to gently touch my palm, my right one. Immediately I felt a feeling of warmth in it. Then I asked them to touch the left and I felt a feeling of warmth there.

I feel asleep. I dreamt that I saw the Virgin Mary, a very rare sighting in my dreams. Then, unprecedented, she said something. But what? I woke up. I couldn’t remember except that it was something very ordinary.

For one like me whose faith is as great as a pathetic little pea, this is all I am granted.

But when people guided by a kind of insular reason claim the futility of faith, they should for a moment, in the still of the night, open their hearts.

We decided to miss Mass in packed Volterra: the underground car park, the noise, the clicking mobiles. Instead we set off on the road to a small, ordinary non-tourist local Italian town. For all that, a gem set upon a hill. I love the way that on Sunday morning the men sit in the cafes.

The first church was chiuso. So that was that. But then one persevered, rounded a corner and found Mass, at the Gospel. Try as I might I could not understand it. For the (long) sermon, a cafe beckoned outside. And then back for the Eucharistic Prayer. A confused way of attending Mass.

Why in England cannot life on Sunday proceed in a cultured way? No chain stores, a few cafes, people nipping in and out of Mass. What was the Gospel reading? No matter. I caught just enough. Have no fear.

I awoke before six to see the dawn and the sun breaking cover over the lake. I then went to help work the fields.

Our job was the Sisyphean one of looking for rocks in the field and mounting them in little piles for collection later.

The fields are covered with rocks. By eight, the sun is burning. There were four of us: my two sons, myself, and the farm manager. At first there was something soothing in the simple labour. Later it just got exhausting, but an experience to be savoured. Next year the rocks will rise up again and all our labour will be for nothing. And the year after that for aeons of time the rocks will keep rising.

Perhaps one day they will invent a little robot to walk the fields, picking up the rocks. And then something will be lost.

San Gimignano is a glorious little town. And in revenge, it is besieged by tourists, by the likes of me, the strangely anonymous.

Towers rise up in motley profusion, a tribute to vanity. What purpose do they serve? We were there are night. We touched another car while parking. A voluble argument ensued. Our Italian protagonist pointed exultantly to a blue mark on the front of our car. But his own car was green. “Voi machine e verde” had no response. We gave him our name and address and left him talking on his mobile phone. (To whom, I wonder).

Naturally the Duomo is closed at night, but on the side, by the ugly apparatus for collecting tickets, you can peer through the grill at the Annunciation. One presses one’s face against the metal and looks upon this peaceful joyous scene. No one else in the piazza seemed interested.

The angel holds her palm up to Mary, as if warning her of her awe-ful fate. What is the angel pointing to warn of? We know of course, yet we wonder. The angel is confident, serene, almost imperious, bearing the message of her Master. Mary sits demurely in her comfortable Italian home. She looks downwards, pondering. What will her answer be…

The scene through the distant grill is so enticing that I could barely tear myself away. The grill is the world that separates our understanding. I went off down the ramp to buy my ice cream.

I was in the Pitti Palace. Great swarms of us flowing through the great rooms, gorged on renaissance Holy Families, saints, and Madonnas. Huge groups barked at in Russian, world famous masterpieces stacked one above another. The senses dulled, I took refuge upstairs, here in the rooms devoted to nineteenth century Florentine art. In peace, the rooms empty, a few drift bored past monumental Risorgimento battles.

And then, in one quiet corner, I stopped. Here by Odoardo Borrani (1833-1905) was his Interno di Oratorio. It is painted in exquisite detail: the light plays on the polished wood of the Oratory, the walls are white and vaulted. Delicate prints are on the walls. And kneeling before was a Carthusian or Carmelite monk. His face is hidden under his hood. He is praying.

What is he saying? We do not know – it does not matter. We can feel his concentration, the intensity of his thought. This unknown picture by a forgotten artist in an unknown corner does more for me than all the Raphaels and Titians and Tintorettos.

It speaks of a certain presence, of a determination by an ordinary unknown man to see the divine. And now, when I look at it again, I see myself, ghostlike, reflected in the glass of the picture, and I line up my camera. I am barely there, but there all the same. As we all are, if we wished it.

I was climbing up the ladder out of the water, my feet upon the rings. By some queer trick of light as I looked down, the ladders rings were reflected as if in reality in the water. If I put my foot on the real ladder, it rested there on a solid thing. But if I place my foot upon the shadowy water, it just went straight through. This must be how a dead person places his feet. Where he walks, he walks through solid things as if they were not there. A dead person walks through solid walls, seeing them, but they have no effect. Thus for this fleeting moment of time in this one small spot, I was a dead person. But the effect was not unpleasing. Christ passed through walls, but He was not ghost – unlike any other dead person before or since. His friends could touch and feel Him.

Do dead people know the fact that they pass through our world with no effect? That they see but cannot be seen? Only sometimes felt? What an unbearable gulf there is between them and us. But I do not believe that they feel pain. But only if they can gain a greater thing than any of us, they can touch the hem of Christ and feel His wounds: we cannot. So after a while they must weary of this world, our world. They cannot change and drift away happily into that other: a world of no reality to them.

Hours later, alone in a quiet dark room, closing my eyes, I thought I detected an echo of a dead person. An illusion, no doubt, swiftly passed. But are they all around us? Even in this new house? Can they lead us kindly there?

The Duomo of Volterra. The tourists wander back and forth aimlessly, reading in bad translation a description of the minor masterpieces. Then, through a half-open door of a side chapel, I see a biretta’d priest shifting through a door, his gold vestments aglow in the half-light. Half guilty, I follow him through the door. He is saying Mass. Tridentine. Half a dozen in the chapel.

This Mass, half – almost wholly – forgotten, so rare. An image into boyhood past of vague memories and long silence. The priest is French but his homily so quiet, so distant. Like all this Mass that I scarcely hear, save an injunction to prayer, and talk of Elijah and tents. Does Peter want them there to pray in peace? The Mass continues in long silence and quiet Latin, the Host is raised. Communion taken reverently, kneeling on the tongue. I, the last of the six.

I leave past the aimless picture stores and out in the glaring heat of the piazza. I dodge out and think of the long silence in that chapel. I never saw the priest leave. Was he there?

Siena. Great shafts of hot sunlight break down on the Campo. The tourist groups move like starlings. They never disperse, always looking outward, not at each other, but never wandering. How do they avoid bumping into each other?

The Duomo is chiuso, naturally. A stolen peek around the shoulder of a bossy lady on the ‘No Entry’ sign. The picture gallery is chiuso.

Finally, I take refuge in a local church. It is empty. The cooled sun streams through a stained glass window. The crucifix is lit with a rainbow of light; shifting colours illumine it up. St Dominic, clothed in white, kneeling at the Cross.

Sunday, Week 18

I picked up a book by some American pastor full of certainties about the existence of God and the Bible as a user’s guide. All very interesting and perhaps true. Thirty million copies read. I saw he is pastor of a huge evangelical church in California.

But what of people who are not certain? The thought depressed me. Later, I stood in the upstairs window of the Castello and listened to the piano being played.

The effect of being in the cool room, looking through the stone window, the piano being played, the view of the Tuscan countryside, Volterra on its hill in the distance, the cypresses green and heavy, yet certain and quiet, was extraordinarily calming. The importunities of the American preacher faded away.

The Borgo Pignano stands high above the Tuscan valleys. Volterra is in the distance. I tried the door of the chapel, locked and chiuso. Here since the twelfth century, now quiet and seldom used.

Away from the wide expanse of Lerici town, the hotels, restaurants and cafes, and Shelley’s house, forgotten, lies a sheltered bay where many years ago we took young children.

Strange how only some memories survive: the narrow path down to the sea, one high rock where years ago, a small boy would jump from a great height, the narrow hot beach, the shady shadow under the cliff at the side, the Italian women on their mobiles, standing in three feet of water, a form of swimming.

We drove to Lerici on the Italian coast where Shelley lived and died, drowned in the bay. Hundreds of Italians pace up and down in the evening and morning through the calm surf of the bay.

Bluely tranquil, safe, amid the gaily painted houses, the crowded market, the deep cool of narrowed streets, refuge in the empty church, cool side chapels, Madonnas, and out again, swimming far out, right across the bay, the waves building, several figures on the distant shore

Why did Shelley die in this tranquil bay and not one of those moderns on their sun loungers care?

Mont Blanc is there in all its glory.

I took the chairlift up the Jaillet, then walked up to a stone cross. My Blackberry, for once, worked here and I could read the Mass readings for 31 July, the Feast of St Ignatius. I walked slowly back to Le Cuchet. I had taken the last lift up the mountain. All was quiet. A lovely castle, dark, situated against the vast bulk of glistening white. Mont Blanc, 4,000 metres up in the sky. Occasionally irritated by other walkers but otherwise alone with the readings.

The walk took me three hours and I arrived back exhausted.

Corpus Christi is a good opportunity to think on the central mystery of the Mass. So beautiful, yet so difficult to believe in.

But I still go back every day. But does the deer that yearns for the running stream know the chemical composition of the water it drinks?

I always think of this week as the week of Tobit. He’s rather a sympathetic figure. Day by day we hear of his sufferings. He has a nice meal and goes to sleep outside. A bird lets fall its droppings in his eyes and he gradually goes blind. Eventually he marries off his son to Sarah who has lost seven husbands, died on their wedding night.

Have I got that right? It doesn’t matter. The story is about perseverance and victory in it.

Today was Trinity Sunday, an opportunity for much intellectual religious positing on the nature of three-in-one. Perhaps we should be content with thought of God, not a lovely old man but a loving combination.

The Trinity can be a suitable excuse for a very boring theological disputation. And what has always particularly irritated me about it is the way that priests particularly state it to be true. How do they know? Faith, of course, authority. But for something as mathematical as this, how can faith be enough?

As I was thinking this, the concept seemed to chime in with my own doubts about our absolute individuality, as I lay awake I musing on this feeling that we are other people, were other people when younger, will be when older. And is not the Trinity a similar feeling? That God cannot be an absolute singleness.

This led me on Tuesday to wonder on whether a many-sidedness didn’t actually make survival after death of a single body more believable. A river does not die and nor do we.

I was in Eton College Lower Chapel for the first time on Wednesday. The chaplain reminded us that all this of which he was so proud would eventually fall into dust and only love would remain, for God is love and love not being a corporeal or even a spiritual being cannot have a beginning or an end. It is eternal.

At Mass on Thursday I had one of those moments during a reading that something gives one an immediate sense of confidence. It passes for a moment and then is gone but for the moment one has the confidence to speak one’s truth.

On Friday and Saturday I ran along the lane to our little medieval Anglican church in Lincolnshire. I decided to read through the Psalms, a new different one for every day. I was doing this, starting with Psalm 1 which I suppose is a hymn of the godly to Psalm 2 which is a denial of evil. You have to read through them in the King James Prayer Book for them to be anymore than arresting poetry but the truth sinks in or floats to the top.

We were at the Leavers’ Mass at Stonyhurst. The sermon was remarkable but we were asked to remember just three things: have gratitude for what you’ve got, have imagination, retain hope. This seems not bad advice.

Later I was lying in bed. Every time I thought about politics, I felt depressed. Every time I concentrated on some religious theme I felt content. And later still, in the bright Sunday sunshine of a terrace, I started reading a Sunday newspaper, feeling angry as it was designed to do.

I started reading on my blackberry something about St Philip Neri. It was his feast day 26 May. He is one of my favourite saints because of his sense of fun. He refused to take things too seriously. He told one of the more pompous people who came to him for confession “As your penance, carry a cat around Rome.”

We do take ourselves too seriously.

I have always had difficulties with tongues of flame and babbling tongues in many languages. But so be it, let’s assume for a moment.

On Wednesday I went with a friend to the Shrine of Our Lady of Aylesford in Kent. The Virgin appeared to St Simon Stock in the fourteenth century. She gave him the Scapular of the Carmelites. There is a lovely rosary way, the words gently seeped in. We came to a corner of the garden.

There was the third station of the Glorious Mysteries
The coming of the Holy Ghost on the Apostles
Behind the little shrine in enamel of tongues of flame
The Medway flowed gently past
brown and relentless
great trees in new green clad bending down
the M20 a murmur beyond it, of life rushing by relentless
It all fell into place
We moved on
The moment lost
the very river hidden in its trees found and lost
yet the memory of a momentary flame of belief remains, treasured.

A period of waiting. The disciples walk down the mountain. On 14 May is the feast of St Matthias Apostle. Interesting because he was chosen by lot after the betrayal of Judas. Perhaps we are all chosen by lot.

I had a dream last night that I was walking down a mountain. I don’t know what the significance of the mountain was. But the strange thing was that rather than just walking down in the open air every part of the descent was a different room with different exhibitions of life and history in them.

But neither the rooms nor the mountain had an end. Or perhaps I woke before I got to the bottom of the mountain. Or perhaps the point of all this was revealed in the dream but I have forgotten.

I have always been sceptical of Christ rising like a rocket into Heaven. It offends my rational mind. But this time I concentrated on the reading from the Acts of the Apostles.

“As he said this he was lifted up while they looked on, and a cloud took him from their sight.” (Acts 1:1-11)

What more natural?

I picked up by chance “The Song of Bernadette” by Franz Werfel. It is our extraordinarily intelligent book, written by a Jewish writer who took refuge in Lourdes in June 1940. It encapsulates and analyses the central dilemma of these writings and my feelings.

I have for ten days been reading a little every day and these ten days can be covered by the question posed by this book.

A fourteen-year-old girl, asthmatic, uneducated, impoverished with a vivid imagination says she sees a beautiful “lady” in a niche of a grotto where people dump rubbish. Nobody else sees the “lady”. The Lady speaks in dialect. She calls for “penitence”, for a chapel to be built and for people to come in procession. Eventually, when asked, she says she is “The Immaculate Conception”.

Surely the best course of action in life is to call for the obvious rational explanation.

What is more likely: that a pubescent girl is deluded or that the Virgin Mary if she still exists, hangs around for two thousand years then stands on a well with a rose on her bare feet and carrying a rosary.

The poet Lafite in the book, and many others, the imperial prosecutor, prefect, chief of police, even at first the priest of Lourdes, Fr Peyramale, have no doubts.

But.

The ecstasy is undoubtedly genuine. The Lady asks her to “go eat of the plants which you will find yonder”.

ANNAT MINGUIA AGUERO HIERBO QUE TROUBERET AQUIOU

And she says “Go to the spring yonder and wash yourself.”

ANNAT HEOUE EN A HOUN B’Y-LAOUA

The stream appears. First the boy Bouhouherts, on the point of death, then many others are cured.

Bernadette, despite numerous questionings, is obviously sincere. She leads a perfect life, full of humility. She dies at the age of 35 of an incurable disease.

I have been myself to Lourdes many times, like the poet Lafite I approach the grotto.

“The rhythmic murmur became a beneficent rustling. It was like a soft support against which one could lean one’s back. And with it came the feeling as though one were surrounded by a helpfulness, encircled taken into its core. The prayers of men took Hyacinthe de Lafite into their midst. Something like smiling irony came over him. Proud and without love? Yes! But am I really so deserted, so much more than others? Would it not suffice, seeing the vast incertitude of knowledge to be no vainer than these here? What’s the difference between myself and them?”

I sat and for a moment freed my thought
And looked upon the fireplace
The bright spring sun moved upon it
Yes in that great country cottage quiet
I could see my concentration so fixed
That sun and shadow do move
Yet a movement so slow
That it is both moving and unmoving
Fixed yet progressing
Determined, inflexible in the spinning earth
And every piece of browned rough cut wood
Every speck of ash
now light and dark
and now upon the yellow
wall the window frame
still yet in deep concentration moving.