http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/programme ... y_worship/
Yesterday morning I heard a fascinating programme about the composer Vaughan Williams, and his faith, or lack of it. You can 'listen again' to this by going to the above web site, which also suggests that there will be a written transcript available, but it isn't yet. The Listen Again facility is usually only available for 7 days.
I did not know before that Vaughan Williams wrote an opera based on Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.
The son of a vicar (at Down Ampney, which he used as the name for his famous hymn tune for Come Down O Love divine) at Cambridge he called himself an atheist, and later he described himself as an agnostic with spiritual leanings, (or something of the ilk, can't quite remember the exact words now). Apparently he wrote hymn tunes, a setting for the mass and the like, because he thought that churchgoers should be exposed to good music. He used the word 'pilgrim' rather than more definite terms such as 'believer'.
There was a moving description, from a recent staging of the opera, of Pilgrim's torment (using his pilgrim staff to restrain his arms) and a bit from the Psalm 22 aria (My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?) which made me think of the lows that we sometimes discern from blogs and lostings from pilgrims en route which sometimes sound to us, responding from the comfort of home and our keyboards, as a bit over the top!
I have to confess that I have not ever read Pilgrim's Progress all through, although I think bits were read to us at my primary school. I must give it a go.