Maybe this was the reaction when the producers ran the theme song past the Monkees for the first time…”Hey hey, we’re the Monkees, and people say we monkey around. But we’re too busy singing to put anybody down.” Nice. Or maybe they’re pretending to be choir members when the choir leader introduces a song with god in it somewhere.

Who was your favourite? I liked Davy because I was a short kid too and I knew I’d be one of the few girls who wouldn’t be taller than him, so it would be ok if we ever met and liked each other. But I knew Micky was cooler. And Mike wasn’t as cool but ok. And Peter.... And they had 2 songs with the word “Believer” in the title but I didn’t know what either of them was about, partly because I couldn’t quite hear the lyrics.

This was well before (like, the previous century before) you could look up lyrics online, and my sister and I used to sit up in bed at night, listening to the radio and trying to write down the words. One of my favourites was Ma Shoe Da Pong by Sandy Shaw (clue: the title was actually in French), which I thought had something to do with a footwear freshness emergency. It must’ve been bad: “I don’t ever wanna go home any more”, I recall her singing. It must’ve been terrible.

“Daydream Believer”, I thought it was something like: “Do I daydream believe I’m under home? Come in, queen!” I never could quite make it out, possibly because “homecoming queen” wasn’t familiar vocabulary, and possibly because of Davy’s cute accent. Watching it on Youtube now, it still sounds garbled, but at least I can look up the lyrics and see that it’s a song about suburban ennui. And I can also see that Micky isn’t really the cool one, just the cynical one sending the whole thing up. I completely missed that when I was a kid.

And, also in my innocence, I thought that “I’m a Believer”, the Neil Diamond song made refamous (I don’t care that it’s not a word - it is now) by Shrek, was a song about someone knowing for sure that they’re in love. Complete with a fairytale ending. When I read the lyrics now, I’m not so sure.

But that’s the mixed bag of love and belief anyway, isn’t it? Especially now it’s mixed up with intervening years of experience so that I know that’s it’s a mixed bag, with the love and the disappointment and the hope and the aching sadness and the quiet joy and the acceptance and the loss and the gains all mixed in together. No trajectory of anticipation and longing followed by fulfilment and gentle decline. Neither in life, nor love, nor belief - not in my experience anyway, and I imagine not in yours either.

And that’s partly why we continue to sing some songs with a bit of god in them in choir. It’s partly because they form a huge part of the western choral tradition and it would just be odd to leave them all out. But partly it’s because songs which have come from spiritual traditions of various kinds tend to carry some sense of that gritty, mixed-bag nature of human experience. They might express ideas which don’t quite fit with everything I think, but if you look below the culturally-specific words (eg “Jesus” in a gospel song) there’s mostly a sense that things are hard but also wonderful, and a longing for life to be better. Or a call to be part of that trend. I’ve said before that I believe that most of us in the room in a choir rehearsal are people who hope for things to be better.

Now, I know that it is a problem for some people when we sing songs from various religious traditions, for all sorts of reasons. People get hurt by religion, mainly by the wielding of religious dogma in an attempt to control others. I understand that these words are loaded with history and geography, and also that we need to treat all cultures with respect. I’ve talked about this before, too.

But I’m not for throwing out the baby with the bathwater. We’re not a religious choir, but we are working with the art form which probably more than any other has been used to express human spirituality. We don’t want to overload our repertoire with these songs but some of the richest music for group singing sits within the Christian religion. And sometimes, especially at Christmas, it can feel like it does get a bit much. Those of you who have sung with us for a while will know that our Christmas repertoire has often included songs from other religions which call for peace, which I believe is the central message of Christmas anyway.

My view is that we can take songs which express religious or spiritual ideas and transpose them into our own individual framework, and this is generally what I suggest singers do. If we’re singing a gospel song, and we don’t believe in Jesus, in our minds we can substitute various options: the divine, the universe, the human spirit, the spirit of music… whatever aligns with our own views. And if we don’t believe in anything beyond material existence, then these songs are simply cultural artefacts. (And, by the way, because they are that as well as anything else, I won’t usually change original words - so we do sing “god” and not “love”, for instance, if that was how the song was written. )

In the end, many of us come to singing and music with a sense that there is something transcendent happening, especially when we make music together. Does it mean there is anything actually transcendent, beyond what we create as human beings? I don’t really know. I was brought up to think so and I couldn’t manage to hang onto that quite as tightly as I would have liked. Experience takes us all differently, and it took me that way. But I can’t completely shake it, either - experience led me there, too.

So when I was asked recently by a choir member what I personally believe, my answer was...something. It depends on which day you ask me.