In the readings today, the question asked is what is the Kingdom of Heaven like? “Like a pearl found in a field.” But what is the Kingdom of Heaven really like? Obviously something worth giving up everything else for, but what is it really like? Tomorrow we start a pilgrimage to help find out.

There’s been a horrible outrage in Norway. The truth is that some kind of latent racism lurks in all of us. I look at it this way: would I really enjoy a world composed entirely of people like me? Wouldn’t it be rather boring? And what happens in Heaven? Is there a heavenly England with cricket fields and mock tudor houses and in another part a heavenly Saudi Arabia of sand and mosques? Heaven is a single unity or it is nothing.

My mind was elsewhere crossing the road through roadworks at the Brompton Oratory. I looked the wrong way and suddenly a great blaring of horns, a motorcycle swerved past me. If it had been a buss I might have been flattened in that incident. Then the dream I had had before of stepping out of the back of the church into a beautiful open country would have been fulfilled.

So think of the present and don’t worry about the future, Gabriel, but look where you’re going!

Physicists at CERN in Switzerland believe that they have found the ‘God Particle’ that turns matter into mass – Higgs Boson. No doubt this will be used to defeat the prime mover argument – that God is necessary to create something out of nothing. But matter, mass, energy all must come from somewhere. So, dear Gabriel, persevere, have hope.

I was in a Mass for the dead. The priest was clothed in black. The service was so dignified that one could not conceive that the hopes expressed were in vain.

The thought came to me in conversation with an atheist friend that really all we are is a few electrical currents in the soft tissue of the brain connected to an inanimate body composed largely of water maintained by a muscular pump. But do we have to base our belief on such a depressing dead end? Cannot fact be turned by belief?

Dear Gabriel,

Yesterday I had this view of the huge fields of barley swinging in the wind. By coincidence, today’s reading is about the Kingdom of the Lord being a field of wheat sown with darnel. My advice is always try and visualise.

I was now in a field of barley on a windy day. It was bending in the breeze and was as profound a statement and as beautiful as any choir.

I had a dream that I was in a well-known church in the middle of London. There was some outdoor event going on and I went out of the back. To my amazement, I was in open country. There were great crowds and I had difficulty in getting a place to see anything. I climbed into a stand which didn’t have a very good view. I was about to climb out of the back but couldn’t find my shoe.

Then, to my delight, the stand moved off. First, it was a kind of open-air bus. Then it became a boat and plunged into a huge lake with a wonderful view of what was happening on the lake. I was not quite sure what but some sort of interesting religious event. The boat now careered off up a mountain path and in a trice we were far above the lake and the crowds. I could still see the London church but it was in a beautiful landscape, more like one of the Italian lakes than anything else. Then, unfortunately, I woke.

Apparently in former times, when we relied so heavily on healthy oxen to do our work for us, each yoke had to be tailor made for the animal lest it develop blisters. Thus when Jesus in today’s reading says “Shoulder my yoke” (Matthew 11:28-30), the burden he knows really will not so much be “easy” as in the modern English translation but be well fitted, as in the Greek, to our needs.

The reading today is from Exodus 3:1-6,9-12 and is about the burning bush.

“Moses looked; there was a bush blazing but it was not being burnt up.”

To me the moral of this story is not just that some miracle is taking place but that reality is suspended, that the spirit is everlasting and is not burned up by the fires of nature.

I was not on the sea this week again but on the water, the Thames in the annual rowing race between Lords and Commons. We had practiced and little went right but people just turned up on the day and they were good. I asked one if he had ever rowed before and he replied “Yes, only the Atlantic!”

The boat fairly singed through the rough water. Again as in sailing there is something spiritual about an eight moving in unison, then one of us caught a crab and with shouts we came to a juddering halt.

We imagine Saint Benedict, the Patron Saint of Europe and the founder of the hugely influential Benedictine Order as a great man in his time, but the truth is that he didn’t found anything. Born in about 480 he simply set off into the countryside to pray alone, was joined by a very few companions and jotted down on the equivalent of a piece of paper a few ideas as to how they might live. This is the rule of Saint Benedict.

We needn’t worry about what the people with big jobs are doing. Most jobs are unimportant. It’s ideas that count. The very first word of the Rule is: Listen.

Listen.

This is the Sunday that we acknowledge the travails of seafarers. Appropriately, I was sailing this weekend, but I am hardly the last of the great mariners, I’m so timid that in a strong breeze I didn’t get out of Portsmouth Harbour and only with my mainsail up! But I was on my own, and handling even a small ancient little boat like mine alone in a breeze is hard work

Alone, with the water creaming down the side of the boat, there is something spiritual about sailing. If all goes well, for a few moments one is at one with nature and then you have to go about, ropes have to be pulled, the deck tilts alarmingly and the moment is lost but he important thing is that you are in the moment, in The Power of Now.

I met someone who is doing a physics PhD next year. I was asking him about quantum mechanics which fascinates me; in particular the notion that by observation we change reality. I feel this shows that ‘reality’ is not as real as it seems and may be governed by non-reality. We were talking about the milliseconds after the Big Bang being investigated by CERN in Switzerland. Apparently the latest theory is that external force got things going. “Who was it?” I asked. “Could it be God?”

I love the touching scene in today’s reading when Israel at last is reunited with his son.

Israel said to Joseph, ‘Now I can die, now that I have seen you again, and seen you alive.
(Genesis 46:1-7,28-30)

It was my son’s last day at his school. And we had Benediction in the Little Oratory. The service in Latin is so short, so beautiful, that it is intensely emotional. I left the school forty-eight years ago and now my son has left. I will go back. There will be other boys in their light blue jackets, but no son. Time passes. That is the only inevitability and if we cannot rejoice in it we can accept it, with, with not, a little tear two.

After Mass in the crypt chapel of the House of Commons, I sat alone. Above the chapel is St Stephen’s Hall, the site of the old House of Commons. As I sat alone in this ancient medieval crypt chapel I could hear the rumble of feet above me, heading about their business through the Hall. Somehow the business of the noise above me and the emptiness of the silence of the chapel summons up the two words of spirit and reality. One so much more sought after than the other.

Jacob’s adventures continue but at the end of today’s Mass in the Cathedral, the choir sang Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring by Bach. It was so beautiful that tears rolled down my cheeks.

I love today’s reading from Genesis. It is of Jacob’s ladder.

He had a dream: a ladder was there, standing on the ground with its top reaching to Heaven and there were angels of God going up it and coming down and the Lord was there standing over him, saying ‘I am the Lord the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac. I will give to you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. (Genesis 28:10-22)

I don’t know why I love it so much. It’s just a wonderful poetic image of angels climbing the ladder.

In another year, this is the feast day of Thomas. Doubting Thomas the Apostle I feel closest to. I dedicate this week to him.

I went to Mass at Westminster Cathedral and stumbled by chance across a two-hour ordination Mass. Expecting to be in and out in half an hour, I was a bit miffed. I had never been to one before. It is quite awe-inspiring seeing four young men sacrificing everything. I just know I could never do it but when they announced the places these four young men were saying their first masses the following day, I just knew that on Sunday I would not be able to match their joy.

Again a day juggling things, but I noticed that I was quite happy to dish Mass when everything else was in. Perhaps the dream was already fading.

It was my son’s school’s sports day and I had been asked specifically to speak in a debate that day. What to put first? I just did both: staying til the end of the sports day then before the prize-giving rushing like a mad thing by car and tube to arrive breathless ten minutes into the debate. I was forgiven.

It was the last Mass at my son’s school. I was asked at the same time to call on a cabinet minister. My wife knows me too well. She said that I would not want to miss the Mass, and I didn’t.