I was swept along in a big group past Leonardo’s “Salvator Mundi” – Saviour of the World – in the National Gallery exhibition. Then everyone for a short time moved on and I was left staring straight into the eyes of this extraordinary picture staring back.

Thus we are swept along in a great tide of humanity, barely pausing, remaining for an instant on His beauty and then moving on. But it is entirely impossible to pause, to stand still, and be alone with Him (certainly not in the National Gallery).

In the reading today, Jesus was asked:

‘Why is it that John’s disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not?’ [Mark 2:18-22]

I sometimes wonder why we place so much emphasis on fasting being good for you. We look at two people who are fat, are thin, and think that somehow this is virtuous. Is it? Perhaps fasting in the mind is more useful than fasting of the body. Keeping the mind quiet for a time from being fed on new things, new noise, new commotion.

Dear Gabriel,

We really take our features too seriously. I was sitting in the car on a long journey and felt my nose, my ear. They really are absurd things. Everyone has them. They look silly but are so necessary. Animals have them. But are they our real self or part of our real spiritual self? Obviously not the latter.

The walk was tiring me. I nearly cut a corner and turned back. But the brilliant, low-slung, white winter sun led me on, past a tiny country church. Again on returning I was tired, but turned back to read these words, or something like them, next to the door:

God be with me in my coming and going.
God be with me in my leisure and in my work.
God be with me in company and solitude.
God be with me in the hills and the valleys of life.
God be with me at my passing.

I’m glad I walked that little bit further to savour these words.

In today’s first reading, the Israelites beg Samuel for a king. He tries to resist them to no avail. Nothing changes. Why are people obsessed with the need for authority? Why are we obsessed with authority: kings, presidents, prime ministers. Samuel warns his people that they will be oppressed once they have their precious king, to no avail. Even now, newspapers are obsessed with ‘leaders’. Where is the virtue of Republican Rome before corrupted by the Caesars?

The Archbishop was taking Mass. His homily was very simple. We are back in Ordinary Time after all the excitement of the great feasts of Christmas and Epiphany. All we can do is to, day by day, try and be better people.

A friend showed me today these words from Catherine of Siena:

“The soul can only love me in truth, and in the same truth it serves its neighbour.

And it cannot be otherwise, because love of me and of one’s neighbour are one and the same thing; and, so far as the soul loves me, it loves its neighbour, because love towards one’s neighbour issues from me.

This is the means I have given you, so that you may exercise and prove your virtue; because inasmuch as you can do me no profit, you should do good to your neighbour.”

They portray sharply that we can do nothing practically useful to God save possibly our attitude to our neighbour.

I only had time to visit the Cathedral as the door was closing. It was my briefest visit to a church, perhaps thirty seconds, but much can be packed into thirty seconds: a sight of an altar, the poetic sound of the Rosary in a side chapel. It is enough.

Why do we insulate ourselves from the grandeur of nature about us?

If you sail into Chichester Harbour at sunset around 5.00pm on a winter’s January day, you are alone in a watery wilderness, greeted by hundreds of birds rising from and resting in the water. The light is a steely grey, flecked with orange.

Lights come on, orange in distant houses, but how in southern England with hundreds of thousands of people within a few miles, you are alone.

I heard three Epiphany sermons this weekend but the best equated us with the seeking wise men. The shepherds rushed in with joyous delight. The ‘wise’ men, like us, take years wandering on the road: wandering, seeking, when the truth is and always has been straight there, in front of us.

Dear Gabriel,

It is perhaps possible to dwell upon these words again: “A man with many possessions has many needs”. But to view it not just in terms of material possessions but personal emotional possession. We cling to our emotional pride and threats or assaults in even a small degree make us unhappy. The more we possess appreciation, the more we need it. So does our success in fact make us any happier or just more demanding?

The first line of the first reading from Isaiah 60:1-6 is so instructive for one reading the bloody history of Jerusalem.

“Arise, shine out, Jerusalem, for your light has come.”

The priest at Mass today said “A man with many possessions has many needs.” I was rereading Thomas Merton’s Elected Silence. This passage grabbed my attention in his chapter The Harrowing of Hell, when he is torn by doubts:

“I was in my room. It was night. The light was on. Suddenly it seemed to me that Father, who had been dead for more than a year, was with me. The sense of his presence was as vivid and real and as startling as if he had touched my arm or spoken to me.”

I certainly get these fleeting intense impressions of a loved one. For years you can forget almost the pictures of a dead mother or brother and suddenly they are there, absolutely clear cut and familiar in their features. By what power of some hidden recess of the mind are they conjured up or perhaps they are there? But often their “presence” here is a profound feeling or thought.

Merton continues:

“The whole thing passed in a flash, but in that flash, instantly, I was overwhelmed with a sudden insight into the misery of my own soul. … And how I think for the first time in my whole life I really began to pray.”

I was in the Abbey in the same place I had been some weeks before. And once again I lit a candle before the wonderful statue of Christ in the dark church. I have been reading Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Jerusalem: the Biography. It is vaguely depressing to see the life of Christ dissected by an academic author, reduced to footnotes. Did He have brothers and sisters? Did Mary re-marry? In fact, the attraction of Christ is a supernatural quality that cannot be grasped.

That night, re-reading my notes, I saw that in front of this same image I had been gripped by both a spiritual sense and a rational one that this was not just illusion – a mere wooden statue. This time as the candle flickered in the gloom. I felt no conflicting emotions at all, only a sense, however temporary, of acceptance.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus asks “What do you seek?”

Is this not the ultimate question? What do we seek?

Faith. We seek faith, belief, self-belief, belief in a purpose, belief in eternity.

But the seeking can of itself be the purpose, even if we can never for sure find or be given the answer. Unless we are lucky enough to be given faith.

What is in a name? Everything. Because the name of Jesus means Saviour (or literally the anointed one). Is it that we all seek a saviour? A saviour from death, from doubt?

And His very enigmatic Self, half lost in barely recorded history is a question. How do we seek Him?

This feast is about friendship. In the evening we watched by mistake the film New Year’s Day. Apparently the Guardian film critic has panned it. True, it is cheesy and corny, but also life-enhancing. There is one line that no doubt irritated the too-intellectual critics. “Think of something you are afraid to do because you might fail, then do it.” The daughter returning to the dying man (Robert de Niro) may be predictable but the power of love is not lessened for being predictable.

The cult of Mary is a strange phenomenon which never ceases to amaze.

At Mass today in the bulletin there was a modern picture of Mary at the top of a short flight of steps waiting to hold a supplicant. That is what Mary is to many people. To the Atheist this is all absurd posturing, a whim of the human need for maternal reassurance. But like so many atheistical arguments, while they are instantly recognisable and indeed appeal in their rationality. They are quietly stated and as quietly come to an end. There is no more save the statement. But Mary is also continuing history and a personal presence.

If you pray to her, there does seem to be a response. So what if this is only a product of our imagination? To those who pray it, it is real. It works. It produces results.

So as the year comes to its end, you might be disappointed with this year and some missed opportunities.

But remember how lucky you are – we are.

I found this passage in Leningrad:

“28 Dec 1941 at 12.30 – Zhenya died. 25 Jan 1942 at 3pm – Granny died. 17 March at 5am – Lyoka died. 13 April at 2am – Uncle Vanya died. 10 May at 4pm – Unlce Gyoosha died. 13 May at 7.30am – Maria died. The Savichevs are dead. Everyone is dead. Only Tanya is left.”

Written by 12-year-old Tanya Savicheva. What extraordinary resilience and suffering. So always look on the bright side. Be humane.

I am reading Anna Reid’s book Leningrad about the three-year siege from 1941 to 1944. The suffering of these people was appalling. Mass starvation and reduction of people’s lives to a primitive struggle for a few grains of bread.

Of course, any problems you might have pale in comparison with such suffering. Certainly aged 61 I am lucky to have health, job, and family.

But what it drives home too is the terrible point: lessons of war. Hitler’s invasion of Russia was manic and cruel. What was he hoping to gain by invading a country just to destroy it? But all wars are terrible. They all have unforeseen consequences, however ‘just’ they seem at the time. Why can’t countries just mind their own business and manage their budget.

Today I went to a Eucharistic service in our local church. No priest was free. It was curiously simple and moving, just five or six of us, the laity doing, of course, everything apart from the Eucharistic prayer, but creating something beautiful. It is enough.

When you dream, things become indistinct. Objects look like a piece of wood that has been left too long outside in the rain. I had a dream tonight that whilst I was looking at an altar and the Blessed Sacrament above it, the whole assembly had grown indistinct like wood left too long outside. Like my belief, hazy and indistinct.

The choir being on holiday there was no Evensong in the cathedral at Lincoln, only evening prayer. But in a sense it was more beautiful. In this vast, empty space, the sole voice of the priest rose up in plainchant – ‘Come down oh God from Heaven’. Thus hundreds of years ago, the monks must have sung the same thing. As the sound rose, did God indeed come down to meet it halfway? In our minds, yes. In reality, we hope.

I was looking out of the window. It was pitch black outside, the bare branches silvery in the light from the window, swaying in the wind and brushing the glass. A cold, unpleasant sight, like death breaching the warmness of the room. Inside the fire blazed, comforting like life after death, and elsewhere in the house people moving, arguing, joking, like life itself, a phase between life and death.

You think Boxing Day should be part of the Christmas season. Instead it is all blood and gore, the story of St. Stephen’s martyrdom. As he dies, he forgives his enemies. How difficult it is ever to forgive the most minor slights and irritations.

Outside Our Lady of Victories Church in Kensington is a little fish tank with some water dribbling into it but on the wall is written these words to Mary:

Torrent of Compassion
River of Peace and Grace
Splendour of Purity, like the Dew of the Valley
Dear to God, Beloved to All

I memorised it and the words often came back to me. And worked.

But why should they? Doesn’t reason tell us that Mary was first a peasant girl, long dead, mother of a Man long since executed?

But the words “Torrent of Compassion” kept coming back to me. If one prays to her, it is as if a tower of compassion is staring over one. And after the tower, great masses of water cascade over one’s fears, you enter a slow-moving river of peace and grace.

Normally if you want to get a seat in the Cathedral for Midnight Mass you have to get there by 10.30. Today I had been asked to do the reading at Matins before the Mass. Of course I had read this beautiful passage from Isaiah several times but when I stood up before this huge church to read it, I was so nervous I had not a clue what I was reading. A mere automaton but this is all one needs, an instrument for poetry of a majestic kind. What sort of man living in a tent in a primitive society could produce such writing? Who was he and how inspired?