AS THIS ADVENT SEASON invites us to ponder the mystery of Jesus’s coming at Christmas, I’m sharing a series of reflections inspired by Listening to the Music of the Soul, the Archbishop of York’s Advent book for 2025 by Bishop Guli Francis-Dehqani.
In her exploration of faith, identity, beauty and vulnerability, Bishop Guli invites us to listen for the melodies that shape our inner lives and connect us more deeply with God and one another.
In the first post in this series I shared Bishop Guli’s invitation to compile our own Desert Island Discs – eight pieces of music
‘to help you better understand yourself and the things that are important to you… [and] remind you of seminal moments in your life’.
This challenged me to reflect on the ‘music of my soul’ and the stories it evokes that tell me something about who I am now and how I came to be here. In the days up to Christmas Eve I will share one of those reflections – pieces of music and moments of meaning. Here’s my sixth:
Miserere mei, Deus – Allegri
In 1638, Gregorio Allegri, a singer in the Sistine Chapel choir, composed a sublime nine-voice choral setting of Psalm 51 to be performed only in Holy Week – the seven days before Easter Sunday – in the Vatican.
It was considered so beautiful that the Pope forbade anyone from transcribing it, on pain of excommunication, and for more than a century its genius was kept safe by being kept secret.
Then, in 1770, the story goes that the 14-year-old Mozart heard the Miserere in the Sistine Chapel and wrote it down from memory. The story is almost certainly not literally true – The story is almost certainly not literally true – yet it continues to be told, as stories with truth in them often do. Perhaps, like a parable, it points to a deeper wisdom.
The words sung by the choir are a Latin translation of Psalm 51, sometimes known as the ‘Sorry Psalm’, expressing a heartfelt prayer of deep remorse, confession, repentance, and a plea for forgiveness. Two verses of the psalm stand out for me:
‘Indeed you desire truth about that which is hidden; teach me wisdom about secret things.’
– Psalm 51:6*‘Fashion a pure heart for me, O God; create in me a steadfast spirit.’
– Psalm 51:10*
The performance of this piece with which I am most familiar was recorded by the Choir of New College, Oxford, on the album Agnus Dei: Music of Inner Harmony. It was released in September 1996, just as I began my second of three years training for priesthood in a Catholic seminary. I got half way through training for ordination, before leaving when I came to realise that my images of myself and of God were false. I was hiding my sexuality, and that secrecy led me to crisis. I have written more about this journey here.
I don’t recall when I encountered this recording, but by the time I had begun this blog in 2012 it had become a regular accompaniment for prayer, meditation and journalling. Hearing the words in Latin meant I wasn’t focused on their meaning so much as on the beauty of the sound – especially the soaring high C sung by a treble soloist, perhaps the highest note found in the entire choral repertoire.
Ed Newton-Rex notes that this most famous and moving moment in the Miserere is the result of an accident. A fragment of a higher transcription by Mendelssohn, mistakenly inserted into a later publication, was copied and recopied until it became the version we now know. What has pierced so many hearts, and accompanied so many prayers, exists because something went wrong.
There is something hopeful in that. The Pope tried to keep this music safe by keeping it secret. Tradition tried to preserve it by guarding its purity and controlling its transmission. Yet its power seems to lie not in being protected from error, but in being released into the world – vulnerable to memory, misunderstanding, and human imperfection. Perhaps that is what Psalm 51 is really asking for: not moral perfection, but truth; not faultlessness, but a heart re-created.
As I listen now, I hear in this music an echo of my own story. What finally brought me life was not getting things right, but letting go of what could no longer be sustained. What sounded most like God was not certainty, but honesty. And what continues to draw me back to this piece is the way beauty has emerged – unexpectedly, through imperfection.
Perhaps that is the Advent wisdom this music carries: that grace does not wait for everything to be in order. It enters through cracks, mistakes, and unguarded moments – and in doing so, makes something new.
Tune in tomorrow for my seventh Desert Island Disc!
* This translation is from The Jewish Publication Society Tanakh, Gender-Sensitive Edition (University of Nebraska Press, 2023). The Jewish text numbers verses differently – here I have used verse numbers consistent with the psalm as included in Christian Bibles.
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