I went to the Carmelite Church in the evening.
They do a lovely young adult’s service with Taize chants. If you listen to a really good preacher, he seems to be looking at you, addressing his remarks to you. It was the Lord – “There was a feeling of expectancy.”
We should have this sense of excitement about life, thinking that today not only is something exciting going to happen, but it is happening now.
I was talking to someone whose life, he said, had been ruined by a neighbour’s tree overhanging across his garden.
I tried to reason with him. Why not just cut down the branches overhanging your garden? You’re entitled to do that. No, it was all too difficult. Send a solicitors letter? No, he couldn’t afford it.
Our own problems seem so much greater than they do to others. My advice, Gabriel, with any problem is to imagine the same problem is someone else’s. How would you?
Dear Gabriel,
We must learn to think of death and learn by it. I was reading a book commenting on the dead of the Second World War. A small school with sometime perhaps not more than two hundred boys in the 1930s and 20s. Over one hundred names – a picture and a brief description of a short life on each page. One family had lost an only child, another two brothers lost on consequent pages – some killed in May/June 1940. Then a trickle and finally a little flood in the Bocage campaign of the 1944 Normandy invasion.
I came away with a profound sense of depression of the wake of war; these young men staring out at me, none old and none more tragic than a young man with a German Father and British Mother and British life working in London in 1938/9 who decided to return to Germany in the Summer when war became inevitable and was killed on the Eastern Front in 1941.
At the front of the book is a beautiful preface by Lord Peter Rawlinson saying how a group of old men returned for the refurbishment of the war memorial where he had been at school sixty-one years before. The memorial said that in his short life, the German officers’ happiest times were at school. How sad.
A chance to go quietly to our local church.
I had put down an urgent question to the Secretary of State on same-sex marriage. The media were on the warpath and I had numerous requests to appear. Instead I went to the 5:30 Mass in the Cathedral. It was more soothing.
The day at last: the launching of my book, The Monastery of the Mind. It has taken fifteen years to publish. A reasonable turnout but the high point for me was the kind words of Father Nick King SJ and Archbishop Vincent Nichols.
I was in Paris for our amitié group with the French parliament. With total separation of church and state and education and religion, they seem less fussed by our debates over opt-outs for the church.
We went to the carol service at Downside. In the darkened huge abbey with perhaps a thousand people present it is magnificent. It is the power of the plainchant and Benediction with true Advent, not Christmas, readings which impresses.
I went to a funeral of an old lady and friend in Lincolnshire. The simple dignity of the service, the medieval church cold against the warmth of the congregation. A lady without an enemy in the world.
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.