We had a Cornerstone dinner for Conservative MPs today and for the first time ever at a Conservative dinner — and I have been to countless ones over the last forty years — someone, not me, suggested that we say grace. No one minded, we just stood up and said it.

The readings of Easter are coming to a head. They are like a wave or swiftly running water, wearing away our disbelief, lapping insistently at our worldlinesss, asking, confronting the uncertainty of history with real people, with wounds being touched and food grilled and eaten before our eyes.

So we wonder at our questioning and then as the readings draw to a close question again. Appropriately, today’s reading is the walk from Emmaus and the blindness of the followers until their eyes are opened.

Seve Ballesteros, the golfer has died. There were wonderful pictures of him on television, a kind of God, good looking, smiling, doing the most amazing shots, winning, then rarely but movingly shown of him in hospital at the end, desperately weak, a huge horrible tumour on the side of his bald head.

It comes to us all, however strong.

That night, pleasantly exhausted, after a nine-mile walk from Market Rasen, I thought again of these mysteries.

I still don’t believe utterly, but where do all our notions of a mighty cosmos lead us? Just to an inflexible pitiless and unknowing machine governed by the laws of physics. But at least religion brings us art, beauty, hope, and ultimately – if we are lucky – belief.

Do I believe that Jesus walked the earth, died and subsequently showed himself to his friends? Yes, I think I do. But do I believe that he made personally these billions of stars? That I do not know, but I will go trying to believe and assume belief.

But secondly, exhausted, I felt again even more strongly, especially after watching the fate of Ballesteros, the difference between body and spirit.

That the body was slipping away, a useless envelope, much posted and soiled, but the letter inside, the inner message remained as yet barely read.

NOW AT LAST we arrive at its proper place at the end of these great speeches the feeding of the 5,000.

Trains, meetings, polling stations, and late-night counts but a quiet moment in the tiny local church in the gathering gloom before it was locked.

Today is the day of the great speech to Nicodemus:

“God gives him the spirit without reserve.”

I went to Mass expecting readings for Wednesday of the second week in Easter and I got instead the feast of SS Philip and James, Apostles and Martyrs and the first words of the Gospel:

Jesus said to Thomas, “I am the way the truth and the life. If you know me you know my father too.”

The day was full of meetings but ultimately the question most worth asking is contained in these simple lines.

I asked a question today of the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary. They were essentially the same. In Libya, we should pursue peace and a ceasefire rather than regime change, even if the country ends up divided which of course it was for many centuries anyway until the Italians united it in the 1930s.

That, I suspect, is what most Libyans want anyway: peace rather than any particular regime. And in my view it is only a just and moral war to the extent that it promotes peace. I believe that most of the world’s miseries in history are down to people thinking that they have a superior moral right to determine what governments foreigners should live under.

In the reading today (John 14:27-31), Jesus starts with these words

Peace I bequeath to you
My own peace I give you.

On Sunday evening I stood next to Walesby Old Church and watched one of the most perfect sunsets that I have ever seen.

The light all day had been brilliantly clear, almost translucent. The Laburnam in the garden was the brightest yellow I have ever seen it, the Lilac the mauvest of mauves. Now at exactly 8.30 in the evening the sun, a huge orange globe sunk directly into the horizon, something one sees very rarely around here. The whole sky gradually changed into a bluish grey colour.

It was intensely quiet and I walked slowly home over the Wolds waiting for the first stars to appear, the nearest street lamps five miles away there is no light pollution.

Today, Monday, we heard that Osama bin Laden had met his violent end.

In the readings this week Nicodemus seems to speak to all of us doubters. For him the practical and the seen is reality:

Nicodemus said “How can a grown man be born again? Can he go back into his mother’s womb and be born again?”

Jesus replies that we have to be born of the spirit.

Unless we can plumb the spirit within us we will never make progress.

All too soon and with great sadness the weekday readings of the encounter with Christ will come to an end. Why can’t they go on and on? Doubt gnaws at me. Could He not have shown Himself to hundred and thousands, to Pilate and Caiphas, to remove all doubt? Staying weeks, months, who knows.

Fellow doubter, just accept. As we read today (Mark 16:9-15):

But they did not believe her when they heard her say that He was alive and that she had seen Him.

The day of the Royal Wedding. I must confess to some excitement before the event – but as I stood on the pavement and saw the bridge and groom being driven past I felt profoundly moved.

As I was at the 8 a.m. Mass this reading of the meeting by the Sea of Galilee compared with the meeting on the road to Emmaus with its greatness and profundity. Unlike the two previous days, there are no sudden openings and understandings during the reading but a quiet acceptance of the beauty of holiness of the fish being grilled at the side of the lake.

As soon as they came ashore, they saw that there was some bread there, and a charcoal fire with fish cooking on it.

John 21: 1-15

It happened to me again. I was at Mass and at one point, only one part of the Gospel reading, my eyes were opened. I actually profoundly and absolutely believed and then as quickly as a bird flying above one’s head it was gone. How strange but reassuring.

It came as the reading described Jesus suddenly appearing asking the disciples:

Why are you agitated, and why are there doubts rising in your hearts? Look at my hands and feet.

Luke 24:35-48

Fellow doubters, I can only advise you: just have an open mind and heart. Who knows what might happen.

Now comes what is for so many including myself our favourite reading. We are so like the disciples on the road to Emmaus. We recognise in fits & starts.

Now while he was with them at table he took the bread and said the blessing: then he broke it and handed it to them. And their eyes were opened and they recognised him.

Luke 24: 13-35

As this reading progressed at Mass today, at one moment in the passage I absolutely suddenly and completely believed. And then my eyes closed again for the moment and the belief passed.

Then he said to them: you foolish men! So slow to believe the full message of the prophets.

I always get mixed up this week with what Marys are seeing and doing. Here on Easter Tuesday, Mary of Magdala does not immediately recognise Jesus.

Jesus said ‘Mary!’ She knew him then and saw and said in Hebrew ‘Rabbuni’ which means ‘Master’.

John 20:11-13

But of course the whole point is that we don’t immediately recognise Jesus. Indeed for a natural doubter like myself it comes in fits and starts. You just have to go with the flow.

The readings of the Mass in this week are truly inspiring but all too quickly over. This is why they cannot just be read, every word has to be mulled over and considered. What does it actually say? What does it say to me? What do I say in reply?

But what caught my eye in the Office of readings today was the glorious hymn we sang at the end of the great Easter Vigil. I started to learn the words, repeat them, and sing them to myself. They bring back happy memories of the Easter Triduum and a depth of religious feeling rarely if ever surpassed for the rest of the year.

Why cannot this single moment, the triumph of life over death, endlessly repeat itself? But as I heard in the homily today, the Easter story is not just an historical event, it is for here and now repeated every day in our minds.

Finished the strife of battle now,
Gloriously crowned the victor’s brow:
Hence with sadness, sing with gladness:
Alleluia, alleluia.
After sharp death that him befell,
Jesus Christ hath harrowed hell:
Sing we lauding, and applauding:
Alleluia, alleluia.
On Easter morning he arose,
Shining with victory o’er his foes:
Earth is singing, heaven is ringing:
Alleluia, alleluia.

The liturgy in the Abbey is magnificent, culminating in a three-hour-long Easter vigil, complete with baptism.

An echo of the early church; but in the much smaller children’s service of Easter Sunday, one comment from the homily remains: As Mother Teresa said “love consumes the ego within”.

I had been concerned the evening before with the ego of the ceaseless certainty of the brain and the deeper true self beneath, this comment seemed particularly appropriate.

Despite the feelings of life revealed the evening before, I woke up in the night with the usual worries. Again, at Lauds, some nasty thought had entered my head, but at that precise moment I looked down at psalm 146,

Do not put your trust in princes, in human beings, who cannot save.
When their spirit departs, they return to the ground; on that very day their plans come to nothing.
Blessed are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the LORD their God.
He is the Maker of heaven and earth, the sea, and everything in them.

Later, during the Easter Vigil, I again had this sense that I was not just two people in one – a body and a soul – but other people as well. I wondered if our extended form is, indeed, completely separate.

The choir were singing the psalm ‘Preserve me O God, I take refuge in you’ as the last psalm of the Vigil. ‘Like the Deer that yearns for the running streams, so my soul is yearning for you O God.’ I felt an unbelievable calm and cleaner essence.

I always find the Good Friday service in the Abbey tiring. All that standing during the Passion and the Intercessions. How pathetic we are compared to the suffering we are remembering. But my legs were weak after our walk, carrying the cross seven miles from Wells. So my senses were dulled a bit as I came face to face with at the end at the end of the queue with the cross during the veneration.

‘Behold, the cross on which hung the savior of the world.’

I was over come with emotion. As I bent down to kiss the nails at the feet, I wanted to linger with my love and adoration, but the queue was moving. It seemed an allegory for the process of life.

Later I decided, as usual, reluctantly to try to go to confession. I never know what to say apart from the obvious anger or laziness. But why, I wondered, am I not more content? Perhaps, in my case, because I am in love with ideas, both in religion and in life, and not people. I wondered if this, then, was the problem. After confession, I sat for a long time. I remembered my continuing doubts about whether God exists at all, compiled with the feeling of joy I had encountered in the cross that day. I wondered if there were two selves – the ego; the ‘I,’ formed by the skin and bones and the soul within. That any other feeling of envy or anger or laziness was cooped up in the body and that the bliss of spiritual encounter was deeper within.

As I sat there in the darkness of the emptying Abbey, I felt quite alone. I felt as if the skin and body were gradually disintegrating and, for a time, I could feel my soul like a burning round ball of fire under me and others. That God is alive in all of us. And that in that home anywhere in the world is different. After about two hours, I got up. But after my meditation, where was the bliss? I could only feel the death of the body. But then I remembered that this was Good Friday, and this is what happens on Good Friday.

At Downside Abbey in Somerset for the Easter retreat.

One of the nicest moments of the whole year owing to the smell of polished wood and the calm of the four-day long retreat for the Tridium. The Mass of the Last Supper and the triumphant last hymn.

The turn of the Evangelicals.

I wish I could have their faith in Jesus and their passion. I fear I never will.

After the Times featured Anglicanism yesterday, today is the turn of the Catholics.

There was a lovely piece about Mother Teresa of Calcutta. I am enormously comforted that she too was a doubter.

‘Holiness is not the luxury of the few; it is a simple duty’ – Mother Teresa

The Times were running a story each day on Christianity. Today was the turn of the Anglicans.

I doubt Anglicanism is flourishing. Peculiarly, doubting people like myself need religions to be certain and strangely, young people want certainty more than anyone.

The tide was turning against us and I was let off the boat at Gravesend, named after the point where dead bodies could safely be buried Thames and washed out to sea. After the empty calm of the sea, Gravesend was hot. I walked past a church which seemed empty and closed, but opening the door revealed it as a full Catholic church and the Passion of Our Lord had just been read.

In St. John’s Passion, there is a wonderful moment when Judas leaves and there is that simple phrase ‘As soon as Judas had taken the bread, he went out. And it was night.’

This seems to be a point where all history converges. All good and evil, past and present, a decision delayed is now acted upon. It will change the whole of human history.

I was speaking in a debate in the Council of Europe on the ‘Religious Dimension of Intercultural Dialogue.’ Representatives from many religious backgrounds were there. Speakers included the Orthodox Patriarch of Romania, the Chief Rabbi of Russia, a cardinal, and a Lutheran. I have to say that the Chief Rabbi, who really spoke from the heart, was the best speaker of all.

I made the point that it was not so much religion that was threatened as the freedom of speech which religion preaches. (Click here to read the speech).

I was traveling by train across France, the spring landscape rushing by. It was a glorious mixture of colours. Time seemed to stand still for a moment.

We walked down the edge of the Wolds. The hillside around Otby was dappled with sheep. The lambs had arrived.

The air was so clear that one could see thirty miles to Lincoln Cathedral. Soon we walked past the remains of an old water well. It was a timeless scene.