Yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the death of John Lennon, and by coincidence earlier this week, in New York, I found myself staying in the hotel where the Beatles used to stay on their American trips. In London almost every day I pass Abbey Road where they recorded most of their music, and you can still see the tourists coming to walk across what must be the world's most famous zebra crossing.

It's hard to recapture those Beatles days of innocence when all you needed was love and all we were saying was give peace a chance. In fact one of the few things my children envy me for is that I was actually there in the sixties when bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.

More than almost anything else, popular music seems to sum up an era and its mood. There was something we could all relate to in that dazzlingly creative partnership between Lennon and McCartney. And when they began to drift apart and go their separate ways, above all when Lennon was shot in the streets of Manhattan in 1980, you could sense the end of innocence and the start of an altogether darker, more confused and confusing age.

Early on, Lennon became notorious for his statement that the Beatles were more famous than the founder of Christianity, not one of the more modest remarks of the twentieth century, but it's not accidental that pop stars have become iconic figures, because music does one thing religion itself aspires to do, lifting us beyond the narrow world to a realm of its own where we can do what Lennon asked us to do: imagine. Music, said Rilke, "builds in useless space its godly home."

In fact some of the most memorable interfaith encounters I've had came when we stopped talking and started singing, because words are the language of the mind but music is the language of what once we called the soul.

Pop or classic, sacred or secular, music is close to what makes us more than just a handful of dust. I for one will never forget that final recording the Beatles made one wintry day on a London rooftop in 1969. When the music was over, Lennon said the words that are probably the best any of us can hope for by way of an obituary. "On behalf of the group and myself, I'd like to say thank you, and I hope we passed the audition." You did, John, you really did.

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