On my journey to work I read some Schopenhauer to assuage my feelings of revenge. Arthur, who himself was conned out of a considerable income, writes:

When he suffers an injustice the natural man burns with a thirst for revenge, and it has often been said that revenge is sweet.

Ah, yes, I can certainly relate to that, having been conned out of my pension pot by an unscrupulous property company.

No suffering laid upon us by chance or nature or fate is so painful as that inflicted by a will of another, Arthur continues. This is so because we recognize nature and chance as the natural primal masters of the world and we can see what nature and chance do to us they would have done to anyone else… Suffering caused by the will of another, on the other hand, includes a quite peculiar and bitter addition to the pain or injury itself, namely the consciousness of someone else’s superiority, whether in a point of strength or of cunning, together with that of one’s own impotence.

Spot on Arthur, and you can see where Nietzsche derived his ideas about power, along with much else for that matter.

Revenge boils in me, revenge broils in me. The human dimension that Arthur identifies is key – one cannot feel a burning sense of injustice from a lightening strike. Only Man can be unjust. This is why Islam’s emphasis on justice is so powerful.

Elsewhere in his Essays and Aphorisms, Arthur wryly observes that if you try to define justice, you won’t get very far:

For the concept of justice is, like that of freedom, a negative concept: its content is pure negation. The concept of injustice is the positive one… It follows that the necessity for the state ultimately depends on the acknowledged injustice of the human race…

Islam recognizes this through God’s law – Sharia – implicitly acknowledging that only God can truly arbitrate justice. This is presumably why Islam encompasses both the divine and the human realm, in contrast to Christianity, which has traditionally separated the two.

The main problem with the Islamic concept is of course God’s law is mediated through Man who, according to Arthur, is inherently unjust.

I can get where it is coming from, however. Love and forgiveness are difficult to swallow when your life savings – and your future security – have been cynically stolen.

I plot and plan. Mostly I just want to hurt the perpetrators as much as they have hurt me.

But then an image of a stage comes to mind. More than twenty years ago, bathed blood red. Its the Jacobean Revenger’s Tragedy in which almost the entire cast end up butchered, including that of the initial avenger.

An eye for an eye, Mahatma Ghandi famously remarked, leaves the whole world blind.

Arthur too saw this danger, remarking:

As every fulfilled desire reveals itself more or less as a delusion, so does that for revenge.

Arthur’s advice for life, broadly-speaking, was to adopt a kind of Buddhist detachment from the impulses that drive us and are, as he saw it, at the root of our unhappiness.

But that didn’t prevent him from being a largely successful litigant. So I will accept the inherent injustice of Man, I decide, and the ultimate emptiness of revenge, and sue.

To many secular, non-Christians the current controversy over Pope Benedict’s “poaching” of conservative Anglicans may have succeeded in putting the mysticism back in to Christianity… in so much as it’s all pretty mystifying.

The sight of poor Rowan Williams torn spiritually asunder at the hurried press conference in response to the move was sad to see. He must have wondered if all the ecumenism of recent decades was just a bluff and the Catholic Church had simply been biding it’s time – 500 years to be precise – before putting the boot in.

Most Christian churches talk unity, but as the Times points out, it is usually on their own terms.

Yet I believe the problem is not really about Christianity so much as church: how the structures of Man struggle to accommodate the spiritual dimension.

Both Archbishop Rowan and Pope Benedict are doubtless true believers, but Rowan appears closer to heaven, while the Pope, officially, and literally, seems more down to Earth.

Rowan struggles to reconcile the cosmic message of Christ with the all-too-human limitations of his flock. Benedict begins with those limitations and works his way upwards, a version the old “top-down versus bottom-up” approach, if you like.

Ironically, for all his tarmac-kissing, Benedict’s predecessor John Paul was more like Rowan – he believed in the unity of faiths against the “faithless” and reached out to them accordingly. But Benedict sees things differently: according to Christopher Caldwell, a chief concern of the Pope’s is the threat of other faiths, and in particular Christianity’s chief competitor, as he sees it, Islam.

As part of Benedict’s, ahem, crusade to shore up Christendom, he has even reached out to atheists and secularists, staking claim to freedom of speech, democracy and human rights as uniquely Christian attributes, and has won their support.

So it is little surprise that Benedict should make a “land grab” for disgruntled Anglicans when one of his allies, Vittorio Messori, told the Times the Anglican Communion was already losing followers because of female and gay priests.

“More Muslims go to the mosques in London than Anglicans go to church” he said. “The exit of half a million Anglicans to Rome will only confirm a trend.”

Placed in this context, Rowan’s recent acceptance of Sharia in the UK also probably didn’t go down too well over breakfast at St Peters.

Ironically Unitarians like me, who I like to think of as being at the spiritual end of the spectrum, have experienced our most recent woes at the hands of Rowan’s church – it was the General Assembly’s expulsion from Chester Cathedral that alerted me to the movement in the first place.

So at first glance it might appear that Rowan is stuck between a rock and a hard place, yet I know many Christians who are not half as rigid as the doctrine of their church.

There are around 25 million people baptized in the Church of England, and 70 per cent called themselves “Christian” at the most recent census, but few go to Service on a Sunday, many, I fear, put off by its insistence on the literal truth of rigid dogma, along with the backward attitude to women and gays.

It makes God – who surely, if it indeed exists, must be considerably bigger than all that – seem meaningless, faintly ridiculous even.

The aisles of my local Unitarian church meanwhile are beginning to fill again, with people attracted by acceptance, not insistence; by the understanding that precisely because we are all-too-human, conversely we each have our unique experience of the spiritual.

Heavens, maybe the Church of England could even learn a thing or too from us.

And a good start would be by an invitation back to Chester.

The Conservative Party's Age of Austerity seems to particularly chime as the nights draw in. We're running out of light and warmth - we're running out of money. Whether their message maintains its resonance come next Spring when the sky, far from having fallen upon our heads, is breaking in to blue and with it the promise of a brighter future, remains to be seen.

But for now it feels as if time is running out, and as my friend Michael and I walk down Islington's Upper Street, our talk is about money.

Who ever has enough of it? I certainly don't, neither does Michael. But if, I say, I did, I wouldn't necessarily give up work (although, granted, I might take a few more holidays), I would simply have the confidence to work better. I would take more risks, stretch my neck out further. Money would arm me against the consequences. Money would give me power.

Power was everything to Friedrich Nietzsche; poor misunderstood, misrepresented Friedrich who rightly, in my view, identified it as a psychic charge that sparks our relationships with others, even with ourselves.

And little embodies that spark more in our society than money - each pound, each penny a small unit of power.

The need to keep a job, which confers security and status, promotes servility to those with the power to remove one from it. Even the most loving relationship risks imbalance if one earns, or spends, more than the other.

This is why Michael and I are anxious - not because we lust for more consumer durables... ok, we probably do, but this is not the source of our angst.

It is fear of losing power, to be forced in to increasing servility, to be less of who we can be, further from Friedrich's ideal of the Superman, a concept so hideously distorted by the Nazis but which embodied in his philosophy the human being unencumbered by powerlessness.

So Michael and I scrape and save and consider strategies and when it comes time to vote next Spring, if we vote at all, we will, I suppose, choose that party which, along with a host of other considerations no doubt, we think will most empower us.

Which, I suppose, brings spirituality back to the economy. But it has always been thus. I believe Jesus saw it clearly: his much-mocked reference to the meek inheriting the earth was not to make a fetish of weakness or poverty, rather in recognition of the manifestations of human power, and its limitations.

By explicitly rejecting these – monied wealth, displays of brute force – he sought to empower his followers with something greater, which he called the love of God.

Over the centuries Christians survived and largely succeeded, although they also suffered mightily.

No doubt about it – Michael and I want to keep our suffering to a minimum, yet as the rain comes and our wander reaches its end, we agree that we too must put our faith in a sense of something beyond the human, and beyond, therefore, pounds, shillings and pence, if indeed we aspire to become everything we can.

Michael’s new book, HOW TO BE AN ARTIST, is available at Amazon.

While most readers of this blog will have been drawn here by an interest in or expression of spirituality, most of us will not have suffered persecution because of what we believe in.

Persecution can define religions – the Christian church was shaped on the anvil of martyrdom, Judaism and Islam developed their unique characteristics simply to survive. Unitarianism even embodies its spirit of dissent in its name – an original rejection of the Holy Trinity.

Persecution can define countries and causes – intrinsic to Britain’s understanding of itself is the Summer of 1940 when it beat back the Nazis. Socialists still speak of the Tolpuddle Marchers, Irish Republicans Bloody Sunday.

Even today, in England, some individuals almost consciously seem to seek out persecution – the registrars who refuse to marry Gays, the niqab-clad school teachers.

Persecution can put our faith to the test. It can even, dare I say it, make us feel special. I remember as an awkward, oddball teenager being told by a girlfriend: the reason they don’t like you is because you’re different, and different is good – it means you are better than them.

It certainly lifted my spirits.

So persecution can cut both ways. It can seek us out, or we can seek it out.

What spirituality means to me is truth and I don’t mean – this piece of dogma over that, or the “true” story of creation. What I mean is what speaks to my soul, be it a work of art, a beautiful (or bleak) day, a moment of intimacy, or an insight that strips away all pretence.

So I seek to live in truth as best I can. To me, truth is an expression of holiness, a holiness some might call God.

It is also a useful way of cutting through the crap. What is a true persecution? Are we being faithful to a greater cause, or just striking a pose?

Christians still face genuine persecution in countries like India and Pakistan. Attacks on British Jews are at an all-time high, while in the Middle East, Bahais, who in many ways resemble a kind of Islam-influenced Unitarians, are regularly victimised. I was actually inspired to post by news that a date has now been set for October 18 for the “trial” of seven Bahais in Iran for the capital offences of “corrupting the earth” and “espionage for Israel”.

What can we do? What can you do? Not a great deal, it is true – there sometimes seems to be so much suffering in the world.

But as small as each of us is, in smallness we can do what we can – as individuals remember, pray even for these seven on the 18th.

As communities – reach out to local Bahais and join our small voice to theirs.

In their uninvited persecution is our fellowship – in their truth is our truth.

And truth is holy.

Amazing sand 'paintings' by Kseniya Simonova. Astounding. Just have to see it.

The amazing thing is that the people in the audience are actually moved to tears...