Here’s the text for the 14 September 2026 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Sara Cox Breakfast Show on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

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The first CD I ever got, a Christmas gift in 1990, was by the American folk-rock band, Indigo Girls. I hadn’t known them before, but when I played the CD, their lyrics hooked right into my soul. And over time, their music became the soundtrack of my young life.

The first festival I ever went to, a few years later, was to hear them play live. I can still feel the energy pumping through us, thousands of young adults singing our hearts out in sunny rainy muddy fields, jumping and stretching our bodies to the stars, to the stage, to each other.

Meeting other kids as in love with their music as I was was a revelation, a homecoming.

I love that festival experience: when your own personal journey intersects with masses of other people whose journeys share the same tracks. Like everybody dancing in Stirling this weekend, united by the music of Lulu and Chaka Khan.

But for me, the miracle of a festival is way more than just loads of individuals having loads of individual experiences next to each other in the same field. The miracle is that Something Extraordinary might happen to us together: as a whole community, as one body, we might open up to some equal mystery.

When I’m lost in the music, the defensive lines I sometimes keep around my heart blur a bit. I feel more porous to others, more open and permeable to the transcendence I call God.

As a Christian, I think we humans spend way too much time imagining ourselves as tightly-defended, self-contained individuals. I believe in our hearts we’re made for relationship. Actually, it’s more than that: we *are* a relationship. We are invisibly connected to every person and all of life.

As the Indigo Girls sing it: “Don’t know where it all begins, don’t know where it all will end, we’re better off for all that we let in”.

I went to hear them play a few summers ago at another festival, Greenbelt, in the UK. And in another field, in another country, I found that community again. We weren’t young adults anymore: definitely more wrinkled. The music filled the air, some of us dancing, some of us sitting at the edges of the crowd, but all of us still pulsing with the connection and joy of Something Extraordinary.