Bishop Andrew Nakamura, the Anglican Bishop of Kobe, was presented with a tiny, old bamboo cross, under the gaze not only of the congregation but of, from her place nearby in a stained glass window, Sister May Hayman. She was a Canberra missionary and nurse (St John's was her parish church) killed by Japanese soldiers in New Guinea during World War II.

Are you sitting comfortably (more comfortably than this columnist was on Wednesday on one of St John's hard, but character-building pews)? Then I'll explain.

In 1950 Bishop Michael Yashiro of Kobe became (it is said) the first Japanese citizen to visit Australia after the war in which Japan and Australia had been bitter enemies. Bishop Michael, head of the Anglican church in Japan and ashamed of Japan's behaviour in the war, came to Australia on a mission of reconciliation and repentance. He came to Canberra and to St John's on 9 June 1950 and presented the church with a little bamboo cross made, with the words "Reconciliation and Repentance" written on it in Japanese, as a memorial to Sister Hayman, a victim of his nation's wartime ugliness.

Today that cross is on shy display in one of the brilliant little sandstone and bluestone church's shadowy nooks, almost within touching distance of your columnist in his pew during Wednesday's service designed to ask God to continue to vouchsafe His blessing on today's friendship between Australia and Japan.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported the 1950 service at John's, during which Bishop Michael dedicated the memorial bamboo cross to Sister Hayman, killed in 1942.

"Beside him [Bishop Michael] sat Padre H.F. Bashford, chaplain of the Royal Military College, Duntroon, who during the war witnessed the execution [by Japanese soldiers] of eight Australian soldiers. Two police, from behind the cover of a clump of pine trees, screened all people entering the church [presumably in fear of people still hostile to Japan so soon after the war, trying to attack the visitor]."

"Bishop Michael Yashiro, in slow, halting, but correct English, expressed to the congregation his 'sincere regret' for his countries participation in the Second World War.

" 'We have had a terrible experience in the last 10 years,' he said. 'It is dangerous to be governed by politicians who are not guided by the Holy Spirit. 'Why can I stand in this pulpit in such a miserable condition of mind? It is because I have deep within me a wonderful power of Christian faith.' "

Now, it has since emerged that in 1950 Bishop Michael brought with him a second bamboo cross very like the one just described. He presented it then to a clergyman who had been the slain Sister Hayman's pastor in Canberra. By a set of curious chances this second, significance-packed cross, came into the possession of St John's Schoolhouse Museum, and at Wednesday's service it was reverently and emotionally presented to Bishop Andrew. When he takes the well-travelled little treasure back to Japan its return will, as he said at Wednesday's service, "complete the cycle of reconciliation and repentance" that it symbolises so stylishly.

He was also, at Wednesday's service, given some soft made in Australia toys for his grandchildren. "This is a wombat," it was explained to him as he was given a cuddly version of one of God's creatures he, the Bishop, has surely never seen before.

On Wednesday at St John's and in slow, halting but correct English, Bishop Andrew gave heartfelt praise of Sister Hayman, of her Christian selflessness. After he'd finished his talk there was a sweet spontaneous burst of sincere Anglican applause, something never allowed in a church in my severe old days of churchgoing.

Wednesday's applause was shared by Bishop Stuart Robinson, Bishop of Canberra and Goulburn, who with his craggy Anglican features and brandishing his ornate pastoral staff with conviction is like someone, someone perfect, sent from Central Casting to convincingly portray a Bishop of Canberra and Goulburn.

Earlier, among the hymns sung (the muscular organ making the small building thrum) there was the splendid Hymn 133 O Worship the King. What a tuneful old 18th century masterpiece it is, in words and in melody. Do other readers, once believers but atheists now, notice how some of the most beautiful hymns engrave themselves on the memory even if you've not sung them since your schooldays? Somehow I knew, hardly needing to look at the hymn book, all of the powerful, meteorology-charged words ("His chariots of wrath, the deep thunder clouds form,/ And dark is His path on the wings of the storm") of all six verses.

It pains me to think that there are Canberrans who don't know of ancient St John's (consecrated in 1845) and who never go there, not to worship (unless they want to) but just to ogle the nation's best church, one of the nation's Ten Best Buildings. It is profoundly lovely. Mingling outside the church on Wednesday one noticed again the honey-coloured sandstone (quarried from Black Mountain) of its walls glowing in the sun and making the old building look like an edible, gingerbread church.