Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My cast away this Christmas week is the Archbishop of Canterbury, the most Reverend Justin Welby.

Ordained as a priest in 1993, 19 years later he was appointed to lead the Anglican Communion of some 77 million people,

spread across 167 countries.

Hardly a front runner when the job vacancy came up, he himself said it would be a joke and perfectly

absurd if he were appointed. Does that mean then that the Almighty has a pretty good sense of

humour? His faith has brought him high office, but could it be that in the

beginning when he found God at university, it gave him something a good deal more significant,

a sense of much-needed comfort and security after an often turbulent and uncertain childhood.

Although his mother's side of the family provided love and stability, his father was something of a playboy and an alcoholic and his childhood was punctuated by his

parents early divorce and significant money worries.

One particular Christmas was spent hungrily staring out of the window as his father lay in bed all day.

He says, when the church is working, it is the most mind-bogglingly amazingly extraordinarily

beautiful community on earth.

It heals, it transforms, it loves, it changes society.

So Justin Welby, you flew in from where this morning? Sierra Leone.

You landed at 5 a.m. and you're sitting in my studio just a matter of a few hours later.

How do we find you?

Confused?

In terms of managing to carve out any time for yourself, where you are able to be just in a space in your own head without people requiring things of you, do you manage to do that in a week or in a day? Yes, when I'm in

...