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Last Sunday I went up to one of those lovely arts festivals that increasingly mark these glorious summer months. Set in a country house at Neville Holt in the Leicestershire countryside, the programme included opera, popular comedians and thinky conversations with public intellectuals. I was there to do God – or, at least, to talk about a service of the Church of England that has been going strong since 1549, Evensong. A group of young people from schools in Northampton and Skegness sang the service - and very beautifully - and I sat down to discuss all this with Ralph Allwood, the man who taught me and generations of schoolboys like me to sing in the choir.

And I have always been extremely grateful to him for this. For I picked up so many life skills in the choir stalls: the ability to listen to others, to find my place within a cacophony of sound, to work as a team, and the sheer joy of producing something that lifts the spirits. For not only does the service of Choral Evensong help format my fidgety anxious self with the calming rhythms of centuries of contemplation, it also diverts my attention from the never-ending demands of my diary – or worse, my addiction to social media - to something so much more calming and peaceful. The God that I find in this space, or rather the God that finds me, is not one that’s bossing me about or telling me what I must think, neither is it trying to sell me anything, but rather, it exists as a kind of emotional cradling. Here I can bring so many of the concerns that my diary doesn’t find a place for: a birth to celebrate, a death to mourn, a world to cry over.

Evensong was originally designed by Thomas Cranmer as a mash up of the evening monastic offices for those who were not themselves professionally religious - and so couldn’t spend eight hours a day in prayer. It always includes a passage by a young pregnant woman saying what great stuff God has done for her (the Magnificat) and an old man saying he can now die in peace because he has seen what he needs to have seen (the Nunc Dimittis). It works because it draws upon the alpha and the omega of human existence and sets it to the most beautiful of music: Tallis, Byrd, Stanford.

This year, choral evensong celebrates a century of being broadcast on the Â鶹Éç, making it the longest running outside broadcast on the radio. It’s not an easy time for the Â鶹Éç, with job cuts being announced this week, and long running programmes axed. So why does Choral Evensong have such longevity in the context of a hard-pressed schedule? Because, I believe, it speaks to a need that transcends the ever-churning gyre of the news cycle. Choral Evensong reminds me of a calm centre to things that holds me together. It is the most important hour of my week.

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