But seconds later, in burst a military policeman yelling “WHO FIRED THOSE SHOTS?”As smoke was curling from my barrels, I realised I was in a tight corner But with a flash of inspiration I said, “I dunno. One of those bastards got hold of my gun.” Miraculously, the man believed me, and rushed out.After joining my battalion in London, I was posted to Germany, and again landed in the country, near the Rhineland city of Dusseldorf. There in winter we went out with farmers on hare shoots, and guardsmen acting as beaters had a high old time, for the locals were inclined to drop not merely their aitches, but word endings as well. Whenever a hare got up, instead of shouting the two-syllable “Hase! Hase!”, they would yell “Arse! Arse!”, provoking a riot of imitations.Yet all memories pale beside that of my first outing on a German horse. At that stage I had ridden very little, but one afternoon I agreed to accompany a colleague – and did quite well until my horse apparently took leave of its senses.What I did not know was that it had been trained for dressage. As we were passing a field of cabbages I must have inadvertently given it some signal, for it went into a high, mincing, sideways gait which carried both of us into the middle of the crop.On the far side stood the farmer, at first speechless with incredulity, then roaring “Raus!” he yelled.

“Weg!” Both of us turned purple in the face, he with rage, I with embarrassment I heaved on the reins, then let them go. I kicked and squeezed and shouted “Whoa!” Whatever I did, the horse pranced ever higher and more stylishly, shredding cabbage after cabbage into muddy coleslaw I saluted I raised my hat I tried, in faltering German, to apologise “Raus!” roared the farmer. “Ganz grosse Scheisse!”The farce ended abruptly when, at no signal from me, the horse shot forward and galloped under a tree, by whose branches, Absalom-like, I was swept off. So the brute sped back to barracks with nobody in the plate.I cannot say that during my two years in the Army I did much for my country. But the experience toughened me, widened my vocabulary and left me well enough trained to defend the realm, had the need arisen.The exhibition is open daily, 10am-5pm, at the Custom House, Gloucester Docks, until the end of this year.. “It’s a bit like being asked about your sex life – if you say you have a good one, people get envious.” The writer and theologian Monica Furlong gave the least predictable answer of anyone I asked about their experience of God – and in some ways one of the most illuminating.

For most of human history, an experience of God has been something to be treasured: it has given status as well as meaning to its possessors. Only in modern Europe is it regarded as a sort of affliction or pathology. Even then, it gets right down to the roots of personality. Clive Calver, the Secretary of the Evangelical Alliance, tells a story about his mother dying: “Mum had lost language, she had forgotten how to speak, and she was so upset. The last coherent thing she ever said was a prayer: `Dear Lord, I don’t know who I am; I don’t know what I am; and I don’t know where I am. But please love me.’
“And it strikes me that when your body is riddled with cancer, as hers was, and your mind is scrambled by Alzheimer’s, you can still know and love God, and he’s still there, and that’s why I’m sure I know God.”Everyone I spoke to for this article is a leader of some constituency, whose experience of God is trusted by others. Monica Furlong has been a hugely influential campaigner for feminist understandings of Christianity.

Akram Khan Cheema has led the fight for Muslim schools in Bradford, and organised what will probably be the first Muslim school to get government funding. Clive Calver claims to speak for more than a million evangelical Christians – certainly the most self-confident religious lobby in Britain at the moment. John McIndoe, as Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, heads a sort of Government-in-exile of the Scottish people: the Church of Scotland is simultaneously closer to the nation and further from the state than the established Church of England.A sense of God is notoriously not the same as the sense of God. In fact, the same sense may lead people to diametrically different conclusions and bitter rivalry. Four of our subjects are men whose religious convictions must put them perpetually at loggerheads with each other. Dr Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of the United Synagogue, may be at peace with Akram Khan Cheema, the Muslim; but with his cousin David Goldberg, the senior rabbi of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue, relations are distinctly frosty. And Ian Paisley finds himself here among men he believes will burn forever.Religions are communities of the imagination, and communities have always had boundaries, beyond which dangerous strangers dwell.