We paid a visit to another old school of mine (I have several), the Reading Oratory in Berkshire. This is the only school to be founded by a Saint – Cardinal Newman. At first he only had seven boys. One of his ideas in education was that the headmaster should know all his boys’ names – not too hard with just seven! I paid a visit to Norris House where I was a boy. It was sad to see a picture of my late brother there. Underneath it, there seemed to be a picture of my youngest son – but it was me forty-five years ago. Anxious, serious and surprisingly neat.

We were taken to the old chapel. In my day, we had a choice at 7:30 of prep or Mass. Mass was preferable, because one could go to sleep there. It seemed as old and as unchanged as ever.

Thank you to Clive Dytor, the Headmaster, for taking us round and for turning the school around to become one of the best Catholic schools in the Country. Newmanesque, he knows the names of all the boys. In my day, the head was a kindly but fierce Benedictine Monk who, for some reason, wouldn’t let me go to Winston Churchill’s lying-in-state, He thought my studies should come first and that it wasn’t fair on the other boys who didn’t have a ticket… Fair enough.

At school, I went into the bottom set – 4d (yes, there was a 4a, 4b and a 4c). They told us that Latin was beyond us, so I led a revolt, saying we should be allowed to do it. To the credit of the authorities, they let us. It was my earliest political victory. There haven’t been many since.

Edward Leigh, leading a revolt of Oratory School students.

I went to the Confirmation service of my son at the Brompton Oratory. It was sobering and almost uncanny to see the children in the same place, in the same uniforms, reciting the same things as I had done nearly half a century previously.

I even remember the Bishop asking us all a question. My hand shot up – my first political act – and typically, I got the answer wrong! After the Confirmation in Latin we had Benediction, all according to the rite. The timeless words drifted in and out of my mind. Whether they penetrated the minds of the boys is debatable, but they will not forget the experience, even in fifty years time.

Tantum ergo Sacramentum
Veneremur cernui:
Et antiquum documentum
Novo cedat ritui:
Praestet fides supplementum
Sensuum defectui.

Walking from a constituency engagement in Market Rasen to my home, I descended the valley and was faced with an extraordinary contrast of shades of green, pale blue, browns and an utterly still lake, shining like glass. It was a scene of extraordinary beauty and peace. If felt almost like nature’s response to the woes of the world.

I went to confession and confessed that I was too easily irritated by other people. Within a few minutes of penance, I went to mass and was soon irritated by the person in front of me talking. My sin free period had lasted precisely ten minutes.

At Mass this week we were reminded that Mass can come in many different forms. Latin or English, traditional music or guitars – but ultimately it is a tool to achieve a numinous experience and a path to experience the divine.

I went to the Stonyhurst dinner. There was an excellent talk by the curator of the museum.

Objects have a wonderful power which words don’t, as we saw in the ‘History of the World in A Hundred Objects.’ The collection at Stonyhurst is wonderfully eclectic: a beautiful book of hours, capes, and even the eye of a Matyr. History is here under one’s hands.

November is a month of praying for the dead. A humanist sees this as a pointless exercise. Even as a religious person, I feel it difficult.

What, precisely, are we trying to achieve for the dead person? A quicker passage through Purgatory, perhaps? Reading this month’s Oratory Magazine, we are told that it is one of the most important things we can do. I tried it out with initial reluctance.

Curiously, once I had prayed for three friends that had died, I felt a lot better – as if I had achieved something.

I went to the Civic Service at Gainsborough for Rememberance Sunday. This always a dignified and moving occasion. This year, I noticed that the minister had added a Taizé chant.

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
Come and listen to me

This was sung as the bidding prayers were made. I thought it beautifully done and added a spiritual element to a civic occasion.

Perhaps it is a good sign of the times that a purely spiritual chant is considered appropriate at this sort of occasion. Certainly, the church was packed.

I came upon the footbridge
And stopped to listen there
and all stood still but the gurgling brook
And the fading leaves in the Autumn air

I heard my boys’ voices distant accross the field
My daughters’ footsteps approaching
A distant dog bark
A machine far away

But here in the wold surrounded valley
Our own noise was muted; our thoughts stopped too
And the Water moved on under the footbridge
Never changing, always new

Past and future had never been
Only the gently swaying leaf above,
And lapping below the wooden bridge;
This moving stream

This moment was the only news
The only event and reality
Bursting upon the silence
But gently, slowly; sweetly

A shot; the brass clad Pheasant rises
From the woods to the top of the hill

To a view of many miles beneath
Deep ploughed brown furrows
and a short, green clad figure on the heath

Far away I glimpse the marsh and plain.
And the quiet church of Tetford is hidden yet present
Ancient stones and many generations.

Before travelling up to Lincolnshire I went to the Gauguin exhibition at the Tate Modern. Always when I go around these exhibitions I feel inspired to carry on painting. One’s own lack of any talent or skill means that there is nothing one has to prove; just to try.

The exhibition includes Gauguin’s “Yellow Christ”. What is interesting about this crucifixion scene is that contains Breton Women. There is, therefore, something contemporary within this rendition of an otherwise ancient image.

I went to the Requiem Mass for the deceased of my old school, the Oratory. The usual list of diseased Oratorians from before and around the time I was there was read out, but also mentioned was a brave young officer killed in Afghanistan.

War is never just a matter of numbers and policy – it is the terrible impact of death to individuals and the bereavement of those left behind.

Faure’s music and the words of the Requiem were hauntingly soothing:

Requiem aeternam dona eis.
Domine, et lux perpetua,
Requiem aeternam,
Aeternam dona eis.
Perpetua luceat.

We are reminded of Newman’s Dream of Gerontius. All of us will make this journey with trepidation, or even with acceptance.

I was having a most interesting conversation with a friend about science.

Apparently – and I am badly versed in all this – the spaceships launched out of the Solar System in the ’70s are not slowing down and coming to a stop, as Physics would predict, but rather they are speeding up. Physics has had to invent Dark Matter to explain this phenomenon.

Science, then, is never still. It is always expanding and moving. It is not like slowly building a rigid house of knowledge, making God redundant the moment the roof is complete. I suspect that Science will no more do this in a hundred or a thousand years than the next ten, or last hundred.

This is an interesting feast, because the Basilica di San Giovanni, Laterano, is the Mother Church – founded, incredibly, as long ago as 324. But what I love about today is the reading from Ezekiel. It is the beautiful imagery of the water flowing down to the sea which is so enchanting.

Then he brought me back to the entrance of the temple; there, water was flowing from below the threshold of the temple towards the east (for the temple faced east); and the water was flowing down from below the south end of the threshold of the temple, south of the altar. Then he brought me out by way of the north gate, and led me round on the outside to the outer gate that faces towards the east; and the water was coming out on the south side.”

He said to me, ‘This water flows towards the eastern region and goes down into the Arabah; and when it enters the sea, the sea of stagnant waters, the water will become fresh. Wherever the river goes, every living creature that swarms will live, and there will be very many fish, once these waters reach there. It will become fresh; and everything will live where the river goes. People will stand fishing beside the sea from En-gedi to En-eglaim; it will be a place for the spreading of nets; its fish will be of a great many kinds, like the fish of the Great Sea. But its swamps and marshes will not become fresh; they are to be left for salt. On the banks, on both sides of the river, there will grow all kinds of trees for food. Their leaves will not wither nor their fruit fail, but they will bear fresh fruit every month, because the water for them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing.

(Ezekiel 47: 1-2 & 8-10)

If you go to the 1:05 Mass at the Cathedral, there is Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament afterwards. To the rationalist, this is absurd. What is being worshipped is a piece of bread – no more, no less. But the believing Catholic believes it is something utterly different – the body and blood of Christ and the presence of God.

As I stood there, I still could not make the mental leap into utter certainty, but I know that a wonderful numinous sense of being in a presence was there. Could this emotional feeling of itself be proof? Of course not, but it was real, it was there and it was enough.

Its amazing how at a place like Downside all problems seem solvable. Suddenly one’s appointed role at work seems doable and worthwhile. At our oblates talk we were discussing the devil. Even his existence is very unfashionable at present. But it seems to me that as all things have an obverse, then if God exists then so too must an anti God or devil. And the devil, if he exists, must hate prayer with a vengence and attack it with feelings of coldness and depression.

Certainly prayer comes so much easier in a place like this. As our Oblate Master puts it, if God exists there must be an encounter with him. As I sat alone in the Abbey Church I had day dreams, of course, but I also had an impression of the devil’s wings beating uselessly on the outside of the Abbey walls, like the Dementors at Hogwarts. A hundred years’ worth of prayer here are driving him away.

I arrived in the Guests Wing of Downside Abbey for an Oblates weekend and by chance picked up a sheet about the life of a missionary – Bishop Alain Marie de Boismenu. A remarkable man, one the last things he said was:

I am a cripple and nothing works any more but my heart, which now has the time to love deeply. It is good to be able to say that one is able to love more and more, and that one day we will receive the gift of being able to love fully.

By chance, this comment was also in a newsletter from the Abbaye Saint Joseph de Clairval at Flavigny. Suddenly, on this damp November afternoon in Somerset, with the golden leaves falling in the blustery wind, I remembered a warm evening in Burgundy this Summer, and the monks trooping into Compline by candlelight.

Later, the afternoon light in the darkening Abbey was so heavy and mysterious that one could almost hold it. I set a candle in front of a statue of Christ and received in return one of those moments when one knows it is all true.

After that, walking in the grounds, it struck me that maybe the reason one has these feelings is because it is true!

I spent a busy day in the House of Commons, speaking in the defence debate. We all had fun knocking spots off each others’ arguments. It amused me afterwards to find this in today’s readings from St. Paul to the Romans, 14:

You should never pass judgement on a brother or treat him with contempt as some of you have done.

…Or as I have done, and do, I thought!

The priest at Mass quoted St Teresa of Calcutta. “God cannot see crowds, only individuals.” This must be true if there is a knowing God, otherwise he would be overwhelmed. But as an expression of the truth – that we should be happy because we are loved individually – it is beautiful.

My son’s school put on a Tridentine Mass at the Little Oratory. Of course it was beautiful but what struck me was how much that is said in the Novus Ordo is silent in the old Mass.

For all that, it is more spitual. All this is such a mystery and so unknowable that words cannot express it.

We stayed in London for my daughter and I went to the Saturday morning mass. Sung in Latin and with the dazzling morning sun streaming through the windows behind the altar, this mass is particularly beautiful.

I was in such a contented, numinous haze that I had a lovely sleep during the sermon! These are some of the most contented sleeps that I know, especially after an early morning swim in the Serpentine amid the glorious Autumn colours with a rainbow thrown in for good measure.

Today’s reading was “Christ is proclaimed and that makes me happy, and I shall continue being happy.” [St Paul to the Philippians 1:18-26], even though I was trying to cope with typing this up on a laptop – something I do very slowly!

“Great are the works of the Lord.” We went to a play based on the novel by Tom Winton, Cloudstreet, stagemanaged by my daughter. I enjoyed it, but there was an especially lovely moment when church bells rang out.

It is strange how some people are moved by religious moments while others left completely bored. Is it something in us?

Jesus went out into the hills to pray.

It is so much easier to pray in a lonely place. As I find when I am out to sea in my small boat – although then it’s normally a prayer to stay upright!

At Mass today we heard the now politically incorrect letter of St Paul to the Ephesians 5:21-23, about wives owing obedience to their husbands and husbands owing love. However, the reading only makes sence in the context of mutual love. “Try then to imitate Christ by loving as he loved you.”

Be friends with one another, and kind, forgiving each other as readily as God forgave you in Christ.

(St Paul to the Ephesians 4:32-5:8)

My daughter has recently been hit by a car and was in hospital with a broken leg. It’s strange how this sort of accident puts everything into perspective.

Lying awake at night I wondered again at our own individuality and who we are. I have been trying to understand Descartes and his maxim “cogito ergo sum” which translates into “I think therefore I am” and what it means.

I think it means that there is only one thing one can be certain of, one’s own consciousness.

So I tried to focus all my thoughts in the quietness of the night on the reality of my awareness that “I think therefore I am”.

Then not to think and thus not have my mind invaded with all the worries of daily life.

Then to allow something else, whether God or an underlying reality that binds all human beings, to fill the space.

I thought I had discovered something useful. I call it now “Concentrate into consciousness then stop thinking!”

Every night now as I lie awake I try this process. I have read the Book “The power of Now” but the author’s approach seems to me to seem unsatisfactory because whilst he tries to empty his mind of clutter, he does not fill it with anything else.

To me the utility of this approach seems to be to create a space for God to enter.