When I first picked up a Bible, the year I left school – surreptitiously, a little shamefacedly, telling myself it was for research purposes only – I assumed that the narrative of the Gospels would be largely alien to me.…I had braced myself to enter new territory, and yet I found myself in a country I had visited before. There were landmarks I recognized: the Magi were from “We Three Kings of Orient Are”; the angels were from “What Child Is This”; Mary I had met in “Silent Night.” But there was something else I recognized – my own interior sense that something astounding was taking place. It was a sense I had first encountered, first received, as a small child singing in school assembly.

Singing carols in the British state school system had paved the way for faith.