Let us ignore the mantras of modernity and dance the sacred dances
Credo by Geoffrey Rowell

CHILDREN’S definitions of church are always fascinating. One of my favourites is that of the child who said that a church was “a place where people sing a lot of hymns and walk about in patterns”.

For those contemporary expressions of church which owe more to the conversational idiom of the television chat show and where worship takes place in bland settings more analogous to lecture rooms than sacred space (with a corresponding loss of those essential elements of worship — awe, reverence and mystery), it is a description that may seem outdated.

Nonetheless, what processions and hymns represent is deeply rooted. Laps of honour as victorious sports teams are welcomed home or carnivals and even marathons, let alone the more traditional forms of regimental marches or the Lord Mayor’s Show, many accompanied by music, show that there is something archetypal about a human need to join in a symbolic movement from place to place. the rest