Music. Competence and Artistry. Faith Too!

About 15 years ago, I used to play Irish music (one of my passions) at a local pub which had sessions on Sunday afternoons. I played flute, competently, and fiddle feebly. The 20 or so very middle-class people who came and played were largely highly competent, but not Irish. There was a very good uilleann (Irish pipes) player. I thought that their playing tended to lack passion.

One day, I arrived early to find only two men waiting, each with his pipes in a box. It turned out that they were the real thing - Irish navvies who were brothers, working on a local road. They asked me to play something on the fiddle, and I obliged with "Boulavogue". Their over-generous comment was, "It's fine - just needs a bit more elbow."

When the session started, they unpacked their pipes, and revealed themselves to be absolute maestros on that most difficult instrument. I have never heard anyone play with such grace and passion.

The other players were very put out. The English uilleann player most of all. Musical navvies? There was something wrong here. They fell silent

For the English players, folk music was something whose perfection they could only, with rather joyless determination, strive towards. For the two Irishmen, it was a lark. They were doing something they loved, and with the joy which springs from love. Their playing was full of beef and wit, as it should be. One of them even played a shortened version of Bach's Cantata and Fugue in B minor. It was a tour de force.

One of them sang. I forget the song, a sad one, but the delivery was perfect.

Sadly, the very English welcome they received was too much for them. They left after about 40 minutes, never to return.

As Chesterton remarked, "a job worth doing is worth doing badly". If it's worth doing, do it, as best you can, but with joy and enthusiasm.

This is as true, I believe, of our Faith as it is of music.

Corpus Christi in Poland

Just back from Mass In the tiny Polish town where I have the good fortune and joy to live, I am reflecting on what I have just seen and done.

The main square has been transformed: four beautifully decorated altars set up in the street, and the pavement is a one-sided avenue of waist-high branches, cut from trees, and jammed upright into the cracks between paving stones.

The church is packed for Mass, with about a hundred people standing, kneeling in the churchyard, where loudspeakers relay the liturgy. Children of all ages stand, kneel, respond like adults.

After Mass, the Host is carried in procession round the town square, with four uniformed firemen carrying the baldachin. Most of the town’s one thousand population follow, recent first communicant children dressed in white, little girls like brides, boys like little Popes, everyone singing hymns and answering responses.

At each of the temporary altars there is a reading from one of the four Gospels, followed by prayers, with everyone kneeling in the road, which is still damp from last night’s rain.

It’s a national holiday, the roads to the square blocked from traffic by police, and everyone dignified and seemingly seriously happy.

And I think of how it was in England, before Henry VIII and the Great Fraud.

And I thank God for Poland, "Christ among the nations".