I HAVE a dread of underground car parks. It’s more than mild claustrophobia, more than a natural reaction against the grim brutalist architecture, the cold and forbidding slabs of concrete that always feature in such places. It’s a foreboding sense of something sinister, the feeling that I’m in the sort of place which has witnessed or will witness the violent denouement of some hideous gangster film.

I am happy to report, however, that this irrational dread has now had its proper liturgical cleansing, its own little exorcism, and that, rather surprisingly, this moment of deliverance occurred in an underground car park in Dallas.

Let me explain. I was in Dallas for a performance of “Ordinary Saints”, the composition combining poetry, painting, and music, on which I collaborated with the painter Bruce Herman and the composer J. A. C. Redford (Poet’s Corner, 16 November 2018). We were there for the whole weekend, taking part in services, giving talks, and leading a mini-retreat, as well as for the actual performance; and the day of the retreat concluded with a beautiful sung compline, which I was asked to lead, and which included Orlando Gibbons’s setting of the Nunc Dimittis and Palestrina’s “Sicut cervus”.

Then came the adventure. Although the church has a beautiful auditorium and sanctuary, the director of music felt that the best acoustic for this compline was to be found in the church’s underground car park. He had made this discovery, he told me, when his children had been delighted with the way the car park amplified their squeals and shouts. Then he tried singing, and was delighted with the result. “There’s no crude echo or ‘slapback’,” he told me. “just a wonderful bloom and expansion of the sound, a rich exfoliation. It’s going to be perfect for the Palestrina; in fact, it’s just like King’s College Chapel.” Perhaps the first and last time that that miracle of fan vaulting, delicate tracery, and light has been compared to an underground car park!

So, at the appointed time, I robed, and led the choir and congregation down into a place which, until then, had made me shudder. We were greeted by ushers as we entered, and given lighted candles. The choir formed up in a semicircle, incongruous against the backdrop of concrete ramps and grey forbidding walls, the circles of light from their candles flickering against the low ceiling. Then they drew breath, and the miracle happened, as music filled and transfigured the place:


Music to stir and call the sleeping soul,
And set a counterpoint to all our pain,
To bless our senses in their very essence
And undergird our sorrow in good ground.
Music to summon undeserved abundance,
Unlooked-for over-brimming, rich and strong;
The unexpected plenitude of sound
Becoming song.

Those words, which I had written years ago in an “Ode to St Cecilia”, came back to me as the sound of the choir so richly filled that bleak place and blessed it with beauty. It was transformed, and, as the service drew to a close, I was able to intone fully and finally the prayer I had often muttered under my breath in such places before: compline’s great collect of cleansing and deliverance.

“Visit we beseech thee, O Lord, this place, and drive from it all the snares of the enemy, may thy holy angels dwell herein to preserve us in peace, and may thy blessing be upon us evermore, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”