Cranham. Foggy nights, but no icy chill. We’ve the window open, and an owl calls on and off through the small hours. And the next night. Distant, and then closer. There’s an almost palpable sense of distance in the silence. Back in west London, the mist closes in, shrouds the last quarter moon, and this time it’s the song of a robin, sustained through the night.

There’s always that background of traffic noise in London. I read recently of an Icelander returning home, and wanting the sound of traffic for company. It gave him reassurance that there were people nearby.  

Iceland is of course a land of supreme quiet, but Reykjavik functions as a thriving city, with traffic noise, rush hours, building sites. (And music, good food, atmosphere, warm welcomes – and high prices!) We escaped three times …. 

To swim in the Blue Lagoon, where the steam and cloud and chill damped down any hubbub.  

To geysers and waterfalls, where a flurry of tourists takes the mind off silence. But not quite – snow shrouded the waterfalls at Gullfoss, and, yes, there were tourists, but we each had our own silence, and I stood and watched the glacier waters smashed into foam by the rocks, and disappear into a chasm in the earth. 

To a hillside a hour’s drive from the city, where on a full-moon night we hoped to see the Northern Lights. The sky was opaque rather than clear, and thicker cloud drifted across too frequently. We failed, no aurora. But I felt the silence of the land, with snow on the mountains, a lake nearby, and the sea beyond, and a sense that nothing separated me from the North Pole, nothing separated me from emptiness. Looking up it seemed as if the sky turning above me was more real than the earth on which I stood. 

With the silence came aloneness. This is what I seek out (not all the time, lest you wonder!), and it’s what others flee from. There must be music all the time, or radio, or voices in the next room. Someone mentioned, and I sympathise, that noise tempers tinnitus.  

Iceland was only settled in the 9th century. Isolated communities of a remarkable sophistication given the circumstances dotted the shores, especially to the west and north. The Norse gods and then the Christian God were omnipresent. Silence would have been, and still is, borne in on the wind and rain and snow. Silence lives within the winter ice and the year-round ice-caps.  

Heimdall (I’m quoting from the Prose Edda) understood silence: 

‘He hears the grass growing on the earth and the wool on sheep…’ 

There is no permanence on this earth. Rome, Constantinople, Delhi. And now Aleppo.

Rome, the sack of Rome, by Alaric in 410. Having stormed the city his soldiers pillaged rather than torched. He didn’t attempt to rule – he didn’t have the resources to do so. But the damage was done. Over years and decades Rome crumbled, literally – invincibility and old imperial order forever undermined.

Constantinople, in 1453, the foreboding of the inhabitants when the Ottomans finally breached the walls – their sense that seemingly God-given civilisation had come to a brutal end, after more than 1100 years.  (Compare also Alexandria when it capitulated to the forces of Mohammed, 800 years earlier.)

Delhi, in 1857. The recapture of Delhi, last remnant of Mughal civilisation, under which Hindu and Muslim, and indeed Christian, had successfully coexisted, by British forces seeking to revenge the Indian Mutiny. The aftermath was brutal.

We imagine permanence, and most of us will be spared that moment when walls come crushing done, and our faith (or simply our belief system) is crushed by another. But we ought all to be aware. Beware arrogance. One irony is how Erdogun, as president of Turkey, now acts out all the arrogance of power, even though Istanbul should be a reminder of what might befall him.

Aleppo. Aleppo, which has somehow survived intact over 3000 years, and which we now destroy in our own time. And we are in great part to blame. We made promises to the rebels of support we did not – arguably, we could not – provide.

We assumed our Western democracy has history on its side, and many of us still do, despite the terrible aftermath of the Arab Spring. Aleppo had its own unique dynamic, driven by lifestyles and habits and emotions both traditional and modern. We assumed that the modern, in terms of politics, would somehow emerge victorious, while tradition, in terms of daily life and custom, would remain intact.

We assumed inevitability, and we were wrong. We would be the champions of democracy, but if it is destined (and there are no certainties in history) to advance, and that advance be permanent, it will be by increments. Not by armed force, or by revolution.

It’s 5 o’clock and the service from King’s, Cambridge has finished. Outside the wind has dropped and the sky cleared, and over the park there’s a full moon, still low, but it will rise high tonight, amid the winter stars. Not ‘amid the winter snow’, although it’s Christmas Eve. Flood not snow is this winter’s story. But if the air stays still and the sky clear there there’ll be a dew which will rest  heavy on the grass, and the fields and the park will shine silver – and we’ll imagine the shepherds and the snow. 

Keep a distance away from the nightclubs and pubs which insist on opening on Christmas Eve and there will be peace over the land, so peaceful that a single bell will carry a mile, and if the dew gathers and drops from a nearby tree maybe we’ll hear that too. We don’t need heavenly choirs, we need silence – and we’re back in a stable 2000 years ago, and witness an event that has been celebrated by every age and generation since.

There will be bright stars tonight, and maybe Sirius rising will pass for a star in east. The stars in the southern sky on a winter’s night would confuse the wisest of men.

More than bright stars…by mid-evening high cloud lies across the moon, ice crystals in the upper atmosphere – where the angels might have been – scatter the moonlight to create a luminous halo.

I’d like to think this signifies, but if it does – only God knows!

A star over a stable …. no mention in the bible of a full moon. This was the humblest and lowliest of births, and would have been one of the quietest, had not the heavenly host (a little bit noisy?) appeared to the shepherds. 

Jesus came not in glory but as an outcast. 

Shout his glory from the rooftops if you will, but not tonight.

From the Economist’s Charlemagne column:  ‘Somewhere in a parallel universe exists an alternative renegotiation that Britain would be well-placed to lead, focused on the EU’s persistent economic torpor and its weak fragmented foreign policy…Instead the EU must grapple with Mr Cameron’s parochial concerns…’

Compare Charles Moore’s apparently reasonable comment: ‘They (the Eurosceptics) need voices (that is, not Nigel Farage) which can show that voting to stay, far from being a safe status-quo vote, is to sign up for a journey as yet unfinished to a destination most British people do not want.’

This destination, and I assume he means a federal Europe, however that’s defined, won’t happen because European electorates and European leaders don’t want it. It’s ‘unfinished’ to my mind in that it could be a damn sight more efficient – and more accountable at an individual parliamentary level.

Britain could and should be a leader in this debate, a renegotiation in which everyone is involved, and which helps re-position all of Europe, not just the UK. If the referendum focuses minds on this possibility, and helps make it a reality, it will have – in the end, and despite all my misgivings – have been worthwhile.

It’s odd how Cameron’s remark on Britain as a Christian country attracted the attention of our diehard atheists. He probably expected it, they’re waiting for whatever they see as any provocation. They accuse Cameron of being divisive and they are plain wrong on that. 59% defined themselves as Christian in the 2011 census. That’s a key finding. (How many defined themselves as of other faiths, a sizeable percentage – how many atheists?) Much more importantly – any claim we’re not Christian is simply unhistorical.

It’s argued the golden rule – treat others as you wish they treat you – predates Christianity. Christianity is of course part of a continuum, born out of Judaism, its gospels written down in Greek, and our Western understanding of Christianity heavily influenced by ancient Greek ideas. It’s also shares an ethical understanding with all the world’s great religions. But it’s our Christian tradition that’s woven it into our society.

Likewise the sense we have of the worth of each individual – we are all equal before God – that’s a powerful idea, central to Christian belief, and at the core of our society and democracy. (Less so arguably in right-wing politics where the idea of human worth tends to be localised down to a community or social group, whereas human worth is a universal concept if it’s anything.) Enlightenment ideas built on that belief. Christianity as with every institution produces its own elites, but there’s a sense of human worth woven into our history, promoted by reformers, suppressed by elites, but always there. That’s the core Christian message, not, for example, 16^th and 17^th century persecutions. There would be no enlightenment without that Christian tradition, ironically no humanists either.

What also of ideas of compassion, responsibility, service, all woven into our society. And free will. And indeed Calvinist rejection of free will – back to Max Weber and links between religion and the rise of capitalism – rest easy if you’re member of the elect, because it’s predestined you should be.

Why do humanists waste their time on all this bile, why so short-fused? They are passionate about many social issues. AC Grayling is spot on in this month’s Prospect about intolerance. We should all of us who share liberal ideas and ideals – and we all come from that same background of Christian idealism – we should all be working together, and taking on bigotry – and practising love – wherever and whenever we can. We share a profound sense of human worth and we should be taking up that cause together, not squabbling.

There’s a marvellous charity my daughter made me aware of, Compassion in World Farming. That’s something else this blog is about – compassion to all creatures, not just the human kind. We are of course desperately poor at showing compassion to other human beings much of the time, so we can hardly expect animals en masse to get a look in. Family of course is another matter, and pets are part of family, so our compassion there is absolute.

Compassion as an attitude, a state of mind, compassion toward the world, toward all of life, is transformative.

3000 pigs died earlier this week in a fire in Northern Ireland – scarcely a footnote in the news. It’s indicative of the way we keep animals. Three sheds, I assume 1000 pigs per shed.

Some piggeries are out in the open – they catch your eye as your driving – for example, on a hill above the M4 in the wilder bit of Berkshire, near Blythburgh in Suffolk. They’re not especially attractive to look out, and pigs and green grass don’t co-exist easily. The animals providing most of our meat we never see, and they hardly see daylight, so green grass or no I love to see piggeries.

What should a Zenpolitics blog be about? Believing in good in the world, that we are naturally good rather than evil or violent at heart. There’s a battle between two natures but human fulfilment lies in finding the goodness within, and the compassion and love that’s an expression of that. All a bit simple and lovey-dovey, but your attitude to the world is fundamental. I quoted Michael Ignatieff in an earlier blog, sounding disillusioned with human nature. High politics and international conflict can challenge the most stalwart campaigner for peace, justice and love. But  you have to believe it’s there inside you, inside all of us.

One starting point is to understand the other side. The other person, the other country. Why do Russians dislike the West and fall in behind Putin? Why do Iranians not thrown off the ayatollahs and embrace Western democracy? Why has the Arab spring not unleashed beneficent democracies on the Arab world?

It looks different from the other side. In terms of boundaries the West and its colonial legacy has laid out the boundaries of much of the modern world outside of East Asia but our legacy is domineering rather than democratic, our identity is not their identity. Our press is singularly unable to get its head round that simple fact. This doesn’t mean, for example, that we kowtow to Putin, but it brings more wisdom to our arguments.

I met a publisher from Belgrade at a recent book fair. She was looking to buy the rights for a book on Vladimir Putin. Books exist, she said, but they are all hostile. ‘He is a hero in Serbia.’

There is another side.