George Pitcher

Of many abiding memories from the Jethro Tull Christmas Concert, there's a vignette that set me thinking about the nature of prayer. Two unreconstructed old hippies had just cleared our state-of-the-art ticketing desk and slick security and were blinking around them at St Bride's opulent interior. 1st UROH: "Looks like a bloody church." 2nd UROH: "That's cos it is a church, you idiot." In that exchange is what personnel officers called "managed expectations". Churches do prayer and worship. Rock bands don't go there.

Jethro Tull's lifelong ringmaster, Ian Anderson, wrote this in the concert programme:

"I'm afraid I'm still as jaundiced and sceptical of some aspects of organised religion as I ever was. But, I am, I fancy, a rather spiritual person...[and] feel no sharp practical divide or contradiction between my broad views and the main tenets of Christianity. So I'm always more than happy to perform in a church, or any place of worship, if that place is happy to have me."

So there is Ian happy to join us. And we're happy to have him and his friends. At its best, too, the Church is happy to go wherever it is invited and welcomed - the founder of our faith did so. Respecting, though not necessarily sharing, each other's traditions doesn't seem to be a problem.

So why do we seem to be so many miles, even light years, apart sometimes? Why are the sceptical-yet-spiritual deemed to be outsiders? Why is a UROH so surprised to find Jethro Tull in a church? Is music as worship so different from music as art? What is the difference between what people find in the transcendence of the music they love and what we, the Church, call prayer? Part of the answer is in our track-records. Someone who, as a newly established rock icon in the early Seventies, sang "You can excommunicate me on my way to Sunday School" might not be the Bishop's first choice to lead Bible Fellowship. Likewise, the Church presents itself (unintentionally, I hope) as a stiff and rigid enterprise, hands together and eyes closed.

We share a spirituality, but we are separated by a common language. Perhaps the universal language of music can do something to bridge that gap. And, for our part, perhaps we can be a bit less transactional about our prayer life. A significant barrier between (for want of better terminology) the churched and unchurched is the central proposition that Christians pray for stuff. This is a major block to Christian mission - the perception is that we pray for comforts, for our children to be spared suffering, for success and happiness, even for prosperity. And that does happen. But it's not a model of prayer that I like. Along with the sceptical, I would want to know why our God listens to and answers some prayers and not others; why children go hungry and suffer, whether they are prayed for or not; whether those caught in a natural disaster are in some way less deserving of God's love than others. Even the most basic theodicy would demonstrate that a God who distributes deliverance discriminately on the quality of prayer is not a God worth worshipping.

What makes more sense for me - and, as it happens, is at the heart of the Christian narrative - is a God who seeks to participate wholly in the human experiment, if we allow that God to do so. It doesn't make sense of human suffering, but it begins to make sense of the simple and infinitely ambiguous psalmic prayer "Be still, and know that I am God". It's an invitation and an insight into unconditional trust and love. Yes, I still pray that my children will be safe, healthy and happy. But really I'm offering up my hopes and fears for their future, praying that they will know a divine presence in whatever befalls them and hoping for our continued participation in this co-venture of creation.

So what's all this got to do with a Jethro Tull gig at church? Well, I would argue that music that touches our soul is a continued participation with the divine in this co-venture of creation. So, ipso facto as we say, music is a form of prayer - no, music is prayer. You just need to find the musical language that gets you there. "There" being a glimpse of the almighty, the eternal, what made you. That's music not only as prayer, but as communion. And that's a long way from the kind of deal-making prayers - save the righteous and to hell with the rest - that we're alleged to offer. Translating that into the Tull canon, it's not the "endless whining sounds" of Mr Anderson's aggressive theology in the Tull track My God, so much as the little moments of epiphany such as his moment of insight on Preston railway station in Cheap Day Return: "...then you sadly wonder/ does the nurse treat your old man/ the way she should?" Now, that's a prayer.

Likewise, the wonderful Ann Marie Calhoun, who plays violin with Jethro Tull (and regulates Ian's profanities on stage) wrote a really beautiful prayer that she read during the St Bride's concert. Both she and I have been asked for copies of it by members of the audience since. But, to my mind, the sounds with which she filled our Sussex home, as she practised her violin composition next to a log fire in our dining room the night before the gig, spoke more eloquently of communion with the divine than anything that words could produce. Ann Marie might consider that she has a full prayer life; Ian perhaps less so. I'd wager, however, that both of them are more prayerful in music than they may realise.

Enough already. Be still. We can over-analyse. We find our own ways to pray and they're personal. Ian Anderson followed Cheap Day Return on the night with the pagan imagery of Dun Ringill and I'm happy that the last words are his, that this was a communion as well as a concert and that our white sea of hopes and fears continue to snap "at the heels of a soft prayer, whispered."