At the end of last Friday's House Points I mentioned going to Evensong in York Minster. I have never felt holy enough to do something like that before; I now realise that the point is that you feel holy afterwards.
It reminded me in a way of cricket's county championship. Here were people who devote their lives to the activity and a few enthusiasts to watch them. Meanwhile the rest of the city went on with its business, quite indifferent.
The experience did not seem quintessentially English, as I expected. Instead it was exotic, even Eastern. Incense, resonant language, beautiful music, incomparable architecture, grave children in long robes.
The Church of England is obsessed with relevance to the modern world. Only today there is a story on the BBC about plans to rename Southwell diocese and move the bishop from its incomparable Minster.
Maybe the Church is right, but we live in a world with an enormous hunger for spirituality. And ten minutes of Evensong in York Minster is worth a lifetime of crystals, feng shui and Carol Caplin.
And if you remove all the emotive elements from Christianity and attempt to make a wholly rational case for it, you have to admit it sounds pretty unlikely.
It was Gregory Bateson who pointed out in the 1960s that the Catholic Church abandoned holding services in Latin just at the point that young people took up chanting in Sanskrit.
