THE other evening, Maggie and I took part in an acoustic-music evening, hosted by the drama and singing group to which she belongs, at one of our local pubs. It was an opportunity to blow the dust off my guitar and give an airing to one or two of my old songs.

I used to play regularly when I was in Cambridge, both solo and with my band, but now that the band have retired to various corners of the Kingdom, and my own “retirement” has been so active that I haven’t had time or space to join the local music scene. In fact, returning to something I used to do so often that I took it for granted made me reflect on it a little more deeply.

My first reflection was sheer thankfulness that music-making has not been entirely swallowed up into the digital realm: that it’s still there, in real life: ordinary people, in their locals, singing songs that are clearly in a lineage with the ballads of old.

I thought, too, about the songs that I was singing that night, about being a Christian singing in an avowedly “secular” setting. I write songs about all kinds of things and in many different genres. Since I am a Christian, however, they often have a Christian perspective, or at least a sacral and sometimes specifically scriptural range of reference; but I write them to sing in the public square (or at least the public house).

Remarkably, it tends to be precisely the songs with sacral reference that get the best response. So, on this occasion, I sang my song “Angels Unawares”. It is an extended riff on the verse in Hebrews 13.2: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares”; and that verse itself alludes to the encounter between Abraham and the angels under the oaks at Mamre. In one verse of the song, I take that story as the starting point for a series of glancing allusions to other angelic encounters or dreams:

Abraham is down by the oaks of Mamre
And Joseph dreams beside an empty barn.
There’s a woman by the well with dreams no man can tell
Though a broken man might keep her safe from harm.
There’s somebody else inside my fiery furnace
And Jacob gazes up those endless stairs,
We are all wounded on this road, but we share each other’s load,
And make each other angels unawares.

People always want to talk about angels after they’ve heard this song, even though the main burden of the song is not supernatural encounter, but the way in which we become angels, God’s messengers and ministers, to one another.

It is something of a paradox that the presence of angels, — the very thing that the demythologisers wanted to downplay, so as to make the gospel more acceptable in a secular age — is the very thing to which the secular age is drawn. Not for the first time, the world suddenly becomes interested just at the point at which the Church has become embarrassed.