IT STARTED when the author, the Bishop of Chelmsford, was invited on to Desert Island Discs last year, and experienced the power of our personal musical favourites. “Memories came flooding back . . . reconnecting me with people, places and emotions, and bringing to the fore experiences that have shaped me profoundly.”
In this attractive book, Guli Francis-Dehqani takes us through Advent from Magnificat to Light, with Flight and Angels, Silence and Darkness along the way. At the end of each chapter, she introduces one of her eight musical choices — they range from Pergolesi to Nick Cave — and links them to her themes.
As the Archbishop of York’s Advent Book, Listening to the Music of the Soul aims at the general reader and is pastoral in tone. It does not offer novel theology or musical analysis, but seasoned Christian wisdom. “The journey from woundedness to wholeness is never linear. . . I wonder if it involves the following: the desire to move forward well and an openness towards the possibility of forgiveness and transformation, courage to get through the hard days, willingness to seek help when necessary, the ability to put yourself in the shoes of others and the capacity to notice the blessings and beauty of life”.
This is a personal book. We hear about the author’s favourite programmes on Radio 4, with a candid self-portrait “As someone well familiar with everyday anxiety myself”. More distinctively, she draws on her family’s tragic experience of lethal violence and of exile from Iran. Much of this will be familiar to those who know her earlier book of Passiontide reflections, though she is able to add a poignant coda about the expropriation of her beloved childhood home by the state. It is now a museum, and a recent promotional video enabled her, as someone unable to go back, to revisit the familiar rooms: “if it has helped me move from a place of resignation to surrender, it has also paved the way for a deeper sense of reconciliation.”
The book may be personal, but it touches on public issues: the global refugee crisis, the domestic housing problem and, quite pointedly, the situation in Gaza, “where the international community is largely turning a blind eye and continuing to provide arms to Israel”.
As for the Church, Francis-Dehqani repeats the vital plea that she has voiced for some time: “in the current drive towards an agenda of church growth . . . might we be missing something essential about Christian identity and call?”
Running through the book is the author’s insistence that black-and-white solutions can never do justice to the reality of human experience and to the depth of God’s love. “In faith . . . we are often searching for clarity and simplicity, but we cannot find it without first engaging with the mysterious and the complex.” Listening to the Music of the Soul will be a congenial companion through the coming season of darkness and light, judgement and hope.
The Revd Philip Welsh is a retired priest in the diocese of London.
Listening to the Music of the Soul (The Archbishop of York’s Advent Book 2025)
Guli Francis-Dehqani
SPCK £10.99
(978-0-281-09133-1)
Church Times Bookshop £8.79
