One of the new joys of the age-old custom of going to church (I mused to my agnostic self as I settled into my pew in Canberra's St Paul's church on Palm Sunday) is that it has become an eccentric thing to do.

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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........

© Canberra Times