CLICK to listen to the audio version of this Daily Paradox

Although mentoring is about management and the business of life here and now many Mentees ask me about God and the life of the spirit. Some had no religious education. Others want to handle a spirituality within them and relate it to the world or to something less vulnerable to life’s vicissitudes.

They are all searching for answers, the noblest thing we can do.

I do not proselytize or promote either the idea of a God or a particular brand of worship. I do try to reflect their questions back to them. And I am always willing to tell them where I stand – at least as far as I know it – for the time being.

Brought up a Roman Catholic, I attended two good Catholic schools and questioned the inconsistencies that were offered as ‘mysteries’ I was told I could not understand until dead. My need for a religious belief was possibly enhanced by my mother’s death when I was just one year old. My father was a naval officer whose career demanded that he spend most of the next few years at sea.

So my early years were spent with kindly Aunts and Uncles, as a visitor.

I never questioned the existence of some Force or Power, perhaps Energy, that created the universe – the world then thought there was only one – although what created the Force itself remained puzzling. More confusing was the supposedly kindly nature of the Force.

Arguments used to convince me of this Benign God included the absence of traffic jams – yes, really. Pre WWII the reason was actually more prosaic – people couldn’t afford cars. But dear Miss Whitwell at my Prep School, one of the kindest, sweetest people I have ever met, claimed the orderly procession of the roads as irrefutable proof of this God for Good.

Like most young men I needed much forgiveness and Catholicism was always there with confessional and ritual to endorse it. There is something very calming about chanting mantra and the monks’ singing of the Benedictine Daily Office in choir was an excellent and high quality version of this.

That many of the monks taught us things not actually written into his modus vivendi by St Benedict merely made the ‘C’ in Catholic lower case – more universal than religious. They were the monks who became the best friends and actually gave us the exceptional education for which our parents paid.

The venality of the institution, and, indeed, of most religious institutions, over the years never made my faith in a God waver, only in his or her choice of earthly representatives. So where do I see God today?

The influences of my upbringing, undoubtedly mostly for good, gave me a basis for personal discovery for which I am truly grateful. My concerns about life after death, somewhat obtusely, have drifted into the background and become of little importance. I do see God, all the time, in the eyes of those I meet and care about. Even the less desirable members of society have for me an element of God in them. That is why I do not see someone who does wicked things as inherently wicked, merely a perpetrator of some wrong deeds.

In short, you are my God and will remain so for the rest of my life.

And the Devil can go to Hell!