I HAVE just returned from the Festival of Preaching in Cambridge, and I must say that it was a really encouraging event (Feature, 20 September). There was, of course, the additional pleasure for me of returning to my old haunts, walking along streets and visiting pubs where the layers of memory and the riches of association lie almost 50 years deep.

There was the pleasure, too, of seeing familiar faces and rekindling old friendships; but the real encouragement came not in what was familiar, but in so much that was new. The new faces, the sheer range and diversity of the assembled preachers — Readers, lay ministers, clergy of every stripe and hue — and, among the many who were middle-aged or older, an encouraging number of the young: ordinands, and curates let loose by their training incumbents.

The speakers, too, offered a real diversity and a wide spectrum of approaches; but what they all shared, speakers and those attending alike, was that rarest of things in the current ecclesial climate: enthusiasm, and — dare I say it — optimism. For all their differences of culture and background, everyone seemed energised by the vocation of preaching itself, the privilege and opportunity of doing it, and a real sense of how vital it is to share the hope that is in us, to anticipate — even in the midst of what can feel like a long Good Friday — something of the joy of resurrection.

There was plenty to take away and ponder. Sometimes, one remembers only phrases from an address, but the remembered phrases are usually the “phrases that feed the soul” (to borrow a phrase of Seamus Heaney’s).

A phrase that I have brought home with me from Mark Oakley’s intriguingly titled address, “Waddling Geese: Does preaching make anything happen?”, was this: “Don’t strive to be relevant, but do try to be resonant.” I appreciated the wordplay, of course, but I also found the distinction between relevance and resonance very helpful.

Relevance is always bound up with the spirit of the age, the pressing issues of the moment, the latest news cycle — all of which must sometimes be engaged with and addressed. But whatever is “up to date” is very soon “dated”. The news cycle moves on; the pressing issues of the moment come and go; the national mood changes. And, of course, trying to be relevant almost always involves an appeal to the head rather than the heart.

Resonance, on the other hand, draws its metaphor from music, the art form that speaks to the soul. An image in a sermon, like one in a poem, may resonate: set up a sympathetic vibration, sound a new music, perhaps with a better tuning. In the soul of the listener, it may sound and resound with insights or beauty that the preacher may never have guessed at. “Poetry speaks to the head through the heart”: that was another of Dr Oakley’s phrases in the same address — and, again, helpful and relevant to preaching. It’s far better than simply saying “poetry is the language of the heart,” which then confines it to emotion rather than reason.

But to reach the head through the heart is to deepen and unify our experience, and to avoid the worst pitfall of mere relevance — which is that it becomes no more than trading sound-bites or catchphrases. Indeed, my overall experience of the festival was that my heart was as much engaged throughout as my head, and that thought and feeling were being reintegrated. It was, in that sense, a very heartening experience.