LAST weekend, I left behind the heraldic bears of Berne (2 August) and travelled to Worcester Cathedral, where I enjoyed some distinctively English heraldry, ceremony, and, of course, glorious music.

I was there to preach at the opening service of the Three Choirs Festival, closely associated with Edward Elgar. I had never before attended it, and I was deeply impressed. The cathedral was packed for the service, which began with a procession featuring the civic dignitaries from three cathedral cities — Worcester, Gloucester, and Hereford — in their gold chains and full regalia, including no fewer than three ceremonial swords, borne with a steadiness and aplomb that would have done Penny Mordaunt proud.

Then came the choirs, the clergy of various ranks, wearing magnificent copes, and, finally, the three bishops themselves. It could, of course, all have been rather ponderous and stuffy, “pomp and circumstance” in the worst sense; but, actually, the whole thing was done with a kind of zest and lightness that made it hugely enjoyable, and yet didn’t diminish the splendour.

I had chosen a reading of the creation narrative in Genesis, to reflect a little on how our own creativity, the creative gifts of the composers, singers, and musicians gathered for the festival, is all, in some sense, a part of the image and likeness in each of us of the creator God. Music is an especially telling aspect of this likeness, because it is a collaborative and communal act of creation, bearing witness to the triune God, something that I had reflected on in my poem “Trinity Sunday”:

. . . In three in one and one in three, in rhyme,
In music, in the whole creation story,
In His own image, His imagination,
The Triune Poet makes us for His glory,
And makes us each the other’s inspiration. . .

I reflected, too, not only on how music echoes and celebrates the primal creation, but on how it comforts us in sorrow and voices our grief with a beauty that makes that grief bearable. Indeed, it seems to me that there is, in most English music and poetry, an element of elegy, an undersong of loss and yearning.

Elegy and lament are also key elements in the Psalter, and so much of the great church music sung by those three choirs consisted in settings of the Psalms. For this reason, I concluded my sermon with this response to the poetry of the Psalter:

LXXV Confitebimur tibi

When darkness fled before your holy Word
You brought a world of beauty into being.
The sons of morning sang, creation heard

The song of heaven, and its echoes fleeing
Still stir a kind of music in our hearts,
As traces of that light transform our seeing.

And when we hear those echoes, heaven starts
A song in us that lifts us into praise.
You show us how the wickedness that hurts,

The sin that harms creation, the dark maze
Of our confusions, will be broken up
And cast aside. We lift our heads and gaze

At you in wonder, for we see the cup
The psalmist feared, so full of blood red wine,
Is now a cup of blessing, life and hope.