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'Passion plays': "Gently the channels close. Businesslike as ever, the flesh deals with the shaking spirit, blood goes, resignedly, in search of different pathways, and settles in unsightly pools on cheek and throat, and the air vibrates embarrassingly through stiffened pipes. The turbulence is kettled in the hot plaza where the ribs bend in the dark, trees bowed by wind at night. 'Thumos', the Greeks said, anger is what happens in your chest, when roads up and down are blocked, and the noise gets thinner and the blood builds up behind the dams, the kettle shrieks and rattles on its flame. You cannot sing in anger: only when a steady drum settles the pulse, and the police go home, when it is possible to walk, steadily, around the square where arguments are sifted and the passion flows, now loud, now soft, like notes, a word, an answer, beating a path through black lanes where the walls ring as the feet fall and the music ricochets." It's quite likely that in the last few days more of us than usual have been singing - or at least been in the neighbourhood of someone singing. It may not come naturally to everyone - in spite of Gareth Malone - but there's some quite good evidence that singing was something human beings did before they started to talk. In other words before we began to exchange useful information, we joined in making celebratory sounds in rhythmic patterns, seeking to capture or crystallise something of the abundant life around us. And if that's what it means, it's not surprising that religion involves singing, trying to find a way of letting the life around come alive in us. If - as we hear at Christmas - 'In the beginning was the Word', maybe we could also say, 'In the beginning was the Song', something whose echoes and harmonies we're still exploring centuries later. And we've all noticed that while music carries strong emotion, really raw feeling chokes us. We need a little distance on how we feel before we can express it in patterns of words and sounds. Take anger: we speak of being choked by anger. If the world is to change we need the energy of anger - but not in its raw state. We need to let it find its way into a pattern we can hear, look at, reflect on. We make patterns of our feelings, not to suppress or distort them, but to set them free for thought and constructive action. It's why poetry and song are so essential to good politics as well as religion; why the song of the angels we've been hearing so much about really does have something to do with building peace on earth.