If anyone had predicted what I would miss the England/Argentina match for, I wouldn't have believed them. The thought that I might be in the company of a group praying at Drumcree - outside the church itself - and then walking along the bit of country road which leads to the Garvaghy Road, and then walking along the road through the housing estates, never crossed my mind.
What is involved at Drumcree is a complex socio-political situation bred in a conflict over economic resources and still expressive of the property and power relationships between the two communities in Northern Ireland. That is the unspoken analysis behind respectable commentary on Drumcree. If a few people want to go there to claim the place for the Lord, in the sure expectation that His grace will in some way enter the situation, that's their, so to speak, problem.
If respectable commentators ever have to mention such people - and they very much don't want to - they dismiss them. As sweet but dim. As dupes of a self-interested Christian patriarchy. As needing their heads examined. So sure is the contemporary commentating establishment that everything is about money and politics, that it never occurs to it to ask whether there might not be other forces at work which also have power.
The assumption is that the people on both sides of the conflict at Drumcree - and throughout Northern Ireland - are mere actors of the roles laid down for them by economic history. Yet that is not at all how people experience themselves and their lives. And like most people, the people of Northern Ireland have views on what is right and wrong, and would prefer to do right in their lives, if only because it feels more comfortable than the alternative.
In Northern Ireland, the prevailing concepts of right and wrong have been shaped by Christianity, often in the form of direct and vivid relationships with Christ hardly mediated by institutions.
The conscious Christianity of so many of its people has had an effect on the Northern Troubles. It has been on one level malign: the local streak of popular anti-Catholicism, made evident again in last week's burnings of churches, has been fomented to increase aggression.
But Christianity has also had a benign influence. Something, after all, stopped the place from becoming one huge Drumcree. Something stopped it sliding towards being a Bosnia. People with faith, such as the people I was with at Drumcree, would see that something as being the work of the Lord.
I don't have that faith. But I certainly do think that the deep seriousness with which certain Christian imperatives are taken by faithful Christians - imperatives such as forgiving those who trespass against you as you hope to be forgiven yourself - has counted in preventing total civil war and will count in making the peace.
It could hardly be more unfashionable to say so. But then, how good a guide is fashion? I have been listening, for instance, for a long time to socialist doctrines, such as that what needs to be done to combat sectarianism is for working people to come together, workplace by workplace, to bring about the overthrow of the unjust capitalist system which depends on sectarianism.
But socialist ideologies don't seem to have had much influence on the course of events in the North. There has been very little expression of cross-community workplace solidarity. Yet it is virile to talk about socialism. Whereas it is wet to say that the same workers would readily call themselves Christians. They would identify Christianity as the ideology of their choice. They would listen to what it says to them about sectarianism sooner than they would listen to any secular socialist thinker.
A week ago, I went to a Sunday evening forum in east Belfast run by "a group of ordinary people who have come to know Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour". Usually, I'd feel more sceptical than ever in the presence of ecstatic certainty. But the evening turned out to be a keen discussion between men and women from all kinds of religious and social backgrounds of a very difficult relationship - the relationship between individual conviction and the wide socio-political realities with which it must deal.
They talked about how close a view of good as righteousness is to an excessive attachment to "law and order". They talked about the difference between forgiveness and not bearing ill-will - with particular reference to Gordon Wilson and to a woman at the forum whose husband was shot dead in front of her.
They talked about the limits of the influence of personal sincerity. Even the jokes led to useful discussion. They talked, in no warm terms, about the media.
One of this Christian Fellowship Church's commitments is to unity. "It is difficult to see," its literature says, "how God can honour the Church in Ireland while its divisions, exposed to the whole world, bring such dishonour to His name and cause confusion among those who are genuinely seeking the truth . . . As a church we must seek to respond to the Holy Spirit's impulse to love our brother, be he Catholic or Protestant, unionist or republican . . . "
The woman whose husband had been murdered mentioned that she was meeting some friends from Catholic and Baptist prayer groups during the week to walk and pray at Drumcree, as they had done last year. And so, having met up in Belfast and prayed, right there on the pavement, for God's blessing on the enterprise, a small group of us went down in the grey evening to Portadown.
Someone had painted this message on the road just down from Drumcree church: "F--- Off Dickheads Go Home." There were men and boys guarding the church. A car ostentatiously followed us when we were near the church.
Yet it was just an ordinary evening on the outskirts of an ordinary town. Through the windows you could see the images of the England football match. An old man coming away from the chip shop gave my dog his sausage roll.
The houses off Garvaghy Road are no tenements: they are neat homes, with bedding plants out the front and elaborate curtains upstairs. Like anywhere.
It even seemed ordinary that the people I had come with almost inaudibly talked to the Lord as they went along. Opposite the filling station, one of the Catholic men sang a Taize hymn under his breath. It is nothing to those people to talk about miracles. It seemed to them that a miracle might happen, and violence be turned away from Drumcree.
It seemed to me that they and their like are miracle enough to be going on with. In the face of a history designed to make them hate each other, the vast majority of people in Northern Ireland do not hate each other. They believe that hatred is wrong. The personal is political. In the end, prayer is political.