Just in case I'm wrong and there IS a God, I went to church at Easter

If everyone went to church, as they did in Australia in the olden days, one's churchgoing would make one just another sheep in the flock.

As it is, though, censuses show that ours is an increasingly secular nation while the latest Australian Community Survey finds that just 15 per cent of Christian believers attend church "frequently".

It would not surprise if Canberrans, notoriously over-educated and over-enlightened, are the most Godless and church-ignoring Australians of all.

But it was with quiet delight that I bustled into St Paul's on Palm Sunday.

Yes, I am a sort of atheist, but l am what the poet Philip Larkin called (describing himself) "an Anglican atheist", brought up in a very C of E corner place in England and thus sentimentally-culturally attached for ever and ever (Amen) to beautiful churches and to beautiful church music.

So this Palm Sunday in Canberra brought the fine Protestant double whammy of visiting a ripper Anglican church (ripperly redbrick St Paul's) and of there attending a performance of Bach's Palm Sunday cantata Himmelsknig, sei willkommen (King of Heaven, welcome).

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Bustling from my car to the church one noticed that the brilliant blue of Canberra's sky was exactly the brilliant blue of the sky of Giotto's great painting Christ Entering Jerusalem (1305), his rendering of the momentous event that Palm Sunday observes.

In the painting the sky's brilliant blue frames Our Redeemer's haloed head as he rides, humbly, on a donkey, towards the ordeal he knows awaits him.

And to digress a little, what a contrast Christ's choice of the donkey to express lowliness and simplicity makes with today's Australians' sudden fondness for gigantic glossy ostentatious look at me! look at me! SUVs.

Out of Anglican habit and just in case I am wrong and there is a God, I had no sooner settled into my pew than I offered up a shy suite of prayers. I asked for Trump's defeat in the USA's November election and for the Canberra Liberals' as-humiliating-as-possible defeat in the ACT October election. I asked God to forgive Australia for rejecting the Voice (something I personally am not superhuman enough to forgive), to forgive those contemporary Australian Pharisees buying and driving enormous and environment-damaging SUVs and to forgive me my own wicked and narcissistic trespasses.

The performance of the cantata by the always excellent Igitur Nos ensemble was quite wonderful.

I am a JS Bach devotee and loved the time-travelling sensation of somehow being there in the pew of the church in Weimar on March 25, 1714 (310 years ago almost to the day of this Canberra concert) when it was first performed.

Proceedings got under way with a brief welcome from the avuncular rector of St Paul's in which he somehow avoided any mention of God or of Christ or of it being Easter.

This was somehow strange and yet somehow very Anglican. Anglicans seldom carry on like pork chops about their faith and it is often said, only half in jest, that most Anglican clerics, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, are not entirely certain of the existence of God and so don't like to make a song and dance about faith.

Moments before the cantata began, a middle-aged woman alighted in the pew beside me and for the whole performance kept up a busy texting conversation on her device, seldom looking up to pay any attention to the performance. How busy her texting fingers!

I marvelled at her ability to ignore the spiritual event she was attending and thought of giving her one of my withering glares.

But then, mellowing, appreciating that her texting was silent and was scarcely interfering with my experience of the concert, it occurred to me that even at the first performance in Weimar there would surely have been irritating people in the congregation doing irritating, distracting things.

People's foibles are an element of the mixed magic of being part of a live audience at a live event.

But the using of devices in our schools and while driving is banned now. Should they too be banned from church? Fines for offending drivers begin at $514 and three demerit points. It amused me to think of my texting pew-neighbour being given a ticket (perhaps by the frowning rector) as she left the church, her forfeited $514 going to one of the church's Christian causes.

The device-in-church incident reminded me of how everywhere on the internet now there are slightly blasphemous but often very clever insertions of mobile phones into paintings of biblical events. Digitally altered versions of Leonardo da Vinci's Easter-themed The Last Supper sometimes show the disciples' phones on the table, next to the bread.

Leaving the church after the concert, early evening upon us now, one found the aforementioned hitherto brilliant Giotto blue of the Canberra sky muted now. Now the sky was the lighter Leonardo blues of the garments worn by almost everyone, including Jesus, at the table in Leonardo's true, unaltered The Last Supper.

Here endeth this lesson of an eerily religious Easter afternoon in the notoriously irreligious federal capital city of post-Christian Australia.