A few months ago, while making a radio documentary, I stood face to face with something I had never laid eyes on before: a Black Madonna. I was in Neuilly-sur-Seine, just outside Paris, with Dr Christena Cleveland, author of God Is A Black Woman, and we were stood in front of Our Lady of Good Deliverance (Notre Dame de la Bonne Délivrance). She took my breath away.

Though this was exactly what we had come to France for, I was taken aback by the realisation that I had never been in a sacred space where a Black woman was the centrepiece, the one we were all supposed to have our eyes on. Both this Black Madonna and the nuns of the Congregation of the Sisters of St Thomas of Villeneuve, who seemed like their duty was to protect her at all costs, looked a little bit like me; or at least like my mum or my aunties.

I was stunned at how unique a space this was – stepping into a church and seeing not images of white Jesus or a porcelain-skinned Mary revered, but a Holy Mother and her Christ-child, both with dark skin. Black Madonnas, as Dr Christena Cleveland, puts it, are ‘unapologetically Black’.