Unfortunately I missed writing in May because I was on the road nearly all the time. How exquisite the country is in late spring. Everything was new and clean, fields already deep in some crops, trees heavy with leaf like green clouds over the land, whispering and murmuring in the sun. In so many places, earlier in May, the woodland floor was sheeted in bluebells. In the south the hawthorns are so covered in blossom they seem to be mounded with snow. And of course the perfume of it is dizzying. Bees everywhere, I think a little drunk.

Now, in the beginning of June, it is a golden year. The dandelions have gone from the verges of the roads and are replaced by buttercups. Some fields are so bright with them they must surely have been sown as a crop at an earlier time. You couldn't put your foot between them. In others it is more as if someone grazed the banks with a brush of gold across the green. In the car we passed one field where five piebald horses were up to their knees in the flowers.

In my garden at the moment there are irises, pansies, aubretia, the first snow-in-summer (I don't know its botanical name), tall blue Jacob's Ladder, aquilegia, scarlet and blood red oriental poppies with huge, flaring heads, armies of lupins, mostly shades of pink from palish to deep wine. The lilac is in heavy bloom and smells like heaven, as is the darkest pink hawthorn which has pink clematis woven through it, and there is more clematis of one sort or another everywhere you look, some of it twenty feet high on walls or through trees. On the pergola it hangs in streams like a scented waterfall.

The tree peonies are looking a little blowsy now, great flower heads a foot across (I measured them) in deepest pink, paler pink and white.

In the courtyard the Maigold climbing rose half covers the wall – it is always the first. The early peach and apricot roses are beginning. The ordinary peonies are in heavy bud.

Beyond it all, the sea is deep, bright blue. Sometimes it is ALMOST too much.

The very small time I was at home in May was because of a badly infected tooth. But I could write pages on how grateful I am for modern dentistry, and even more than that for the Priesthood to turn to in times of fear, pain or anxiety – or any other trouble, for that matter. I was afraid because the infection, which had been diagnosed as something different, was one for which the treatment is medicine with pretty wretched side effects.

I hope the time does not come when I forget to be grateful that the dentist appears to have solved the problem. How easy it is to forget pain, and with that relief to forget how desperate we were to find an end to it, and how grateful when it came. Other events sweep us up and we get caught in the moment, and worries and concerns for the future.

I have a friend who says: 'If you can say 'please', you can say 'thank you'.' But just saying is not enough. Most of us are willing to go to the ends of the earth for 'please'. Which is as it must be. But it seems to be in the nature of most of us to value too lightly what we gain without price. Just as we seldom learn from the experience of others. So many mistakes we either have to make ourselves, or see at close hand, to realize the ugliness and the cost of such errors.

A whole lifetime seems to be sufficient only to get a taste of all that there is to learn, to do, to make and to love.

On my one Sunday at home I was given, at fairly short notice, the opportunity to speak in Sacrament, with the freedom to choose my own subject. There have been so many things I have wanted to say when I had such a chance, and funnily enough none of them seemed right to me at this time. Instead something else came forcefully into my mind.

One of my very favourite stories from the scriptures is that of the disciples on the road to Emmaus, shortly after the crucifixion. It was a walk of about seven miles. They were joined by a man whom they did not recognize. He enquired why they were so downcast. They asked him where he had come from, that he did not know of the death of the prophet whom so many had believed would save the Jews.

He expounded the scriptures to them, explaining and prophesying what would happen, and that all had been fulfilled. Of course it was the risen Saviour, but they did not recognize Him. Only when they stopped for the evening and invited Him to stay with them, and He broke bread and blessed it, did they know who He was.

'Did not our hearts burn within us?' they asked each other.

We read that story, and ask the same question. How could they walk with Christ, listen to His teaching, and not know who He was?

But are we sure we know Him well enough that we wouldn't make the same error? Are we sometimes looking at the details and missing the larger heart of the picture?

I picked out a few stories from the New Testament which I thought showed particular qualities of his character. He seemed to be no respector of persons. A Roman centurion came to Him to ask that his sick servant might be healed. Christ said he would go and heal the man, even though he was the servant of a Roman, a soldier who was one of the occupying force in Judea .

The centurion said it was not necessary for him to go. He was a soldier, a man in command, and that those under his rule would obey. He knew that Christ was ruler over all things, and the disease would leave the man if Christ commanded it to. And of course it was so.

Have we such faith?

And the Greek woman who asked His help for her daughter, and was told that Christ had come to the Jews, not to her people. But she knew who He was, and begged for even the crumbs from His table – and was given them. Her daughter was healed from that moment.

Or the woman at the well in Samaria . She was one of the people the Jews most despised, because of their pollution of the faith, yet she recognized the Messiah when He spoke to her and offered her the water of life, which once we have drunk, we will never thirst again.

One of my favourite stories since childhood has been that of Jairus, the Ruler of the Synagogue whose young daughter was very ill. He came to Jesus to ask Him to save her. Jesus agreed, and while He was on His way a multitude of people thronged around Him. One woman had been ill with an issue of blood for many years. She had spent all the money she had on doctors, and was no better. She believed if she could do no more than touch the hem of His robe, she would be healed.

She touched it, and the illness left her.

He knew power had gone out of Him, and turned to ask who had touched Him. His disciples laughed, because so many were pushing and shoving. But the woman came forward and said what she had done, and why.

His answer was: 'Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole'.

Then He continued on His way, but friends came from the house of Jairus and said that Jairus should not trouble Him any more, his daughter had died.

Christ went anyway, saying that she only slept. He touched her and she arose and He asked that they give her something to eat.

With Lazarus, of course, it was harder. He had been dead four days, and had already begun to decompose.

Yet Jesus loved Mary, Martha and Lazarus – two sisters and a brother – of whom no other family is mentioned. He waited only because He wished to show the power of God.

We all know the words 'Lazarus, come forth'. And Lazarus rose from the dead.

Christ spoke to, ate with, taught and healed all sorts of people, even Zacchaeus, the tax gatherer who climbed the sycamore tree, because he was short and could not see over the heads of the crowd. Jesus knew his heart. Zacchaeus repented, gave half his goods to the poor, and returned with interest many times over all those from whom he had taken taxes unjustly.

I ended with what surely must be one of everyone's most deeply-loved stories – that of Mary Magdalene in the garden on Easter morning. She sees a man whom she takes to be the gardener, and asks him where they have taken Jesus' body.

He says just one word – 'Mary'.

She knows who He is, and answers – 'Rabboni' – or Master – Lord.

I want to be among those who know Him well enough that I will not walk beside Him and not know who he is, nor understand what he says. And one day I hope He will speak my name, and that will be enough – that I will have learned all that matters for this part of my life.

To know the Saviour is the beginning of learning to know God. Can anything at all matter more? Or be more marvellous, more beautiful, more totally uplifting?

I think perhaps we do not think of Him enough. We get lost in the details, and He is the heart of it all. He is the centre to which our thoughts should always return, as we hope our souls will when the time is come.

P.S. Yesterday afternoon, Sunday, a friend drove me over to the west coast, just meandering wherever the road led us. Again, the fields were gold with buttercups, but the beauty that overwhelmed me was the rhododendrons. They go wild here, and there were literally thousands of them in bloom, hedges, walls, whole hillsides of them in the sun, purple, amethyst, a few pink, colour dazzling the eyes. And occasionally there were late laburnums – streamers of gold in among the purple and new green of the bracken.