Thought for the Day

Sometimes, digging into the origins of a word can help with real insights into a contemporary issue. Take the meaning of the word person. The ancient Greeks used the word for face – prosopon – to mean a person, while in Latin, the word persona, from which we get the English person, owes its origins to sonare, which means to sound. So ideas about a person in these ancient languages focused on what can be seen and heard – the face and the voice. They’re integral to how people connect with one another. This importance of the person came to mind when I read reports this week that the revamped NHS app, sold to the public as providing patients with a doctor in their pocket by digitising services, has had a distressing unforeseen drawback. Some patients, according to these reports, discovered test results for serious illnesses, such as cancer, by them being uploaded on the app. The NHS has said it has reissued guidance to stop this happening, confirming the importance of the soothing voice of a doctor breaking bad news. As one patient who says this happened to them, put it: “Seeing someone face to face is so important”. Technology can speed life up and be super-efficient, but there are clearly alienating, impersonal drawbacks too. When Pope Leo was elected a year ago, he said he was going to make artificial intelligence a key priority of his work. He’s about to release his first encyclical, or teaching document on AI, focusing on the importance of human dignity as the world undergoes such profound technological change. He’s also released a message on AI for the Catholic Church’s annual World Communications Day, being marked this Sunday. It warns AI can erode people’s ability to think analytically and creatively. Not that Pope Leo is a Luddite opposed to change. He’s comfortable with technology. One of his brothers told a reporter that when he got locked out of his computer recently, he phoned the Pope who quickly told him what to do to get back in. But Leo’s concern is that if AI takes over areas of life where human interaction used to be essential, it damages the deepest levels of human communication. People of faith, like Pope Leo, believe that faces and voices are sacred because God created humanity in his image and likeness. Back in the fourth century, St Gregory of Nyssa said that preserving human faces and voices means preserving an indelible reflection of divine love. It’s as true today as it was then. For a patient facing bad news, a gentle voice and a consoling look can mean the difference between what you can bear and what you cannot.

14 MAY 26

Good morning, In Monday’s speech, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer used the word ‘hope’ 14 times. He said the country would see hope reflected in government policy, and that “people need hope.” Today, faith groups and civil society organisations have launched a week-long initiative called A Million Acts of Hope – a nationwide invitation to celebrate the everyday acts of kindness, care and connection happening across the UK to combat the growing sense of division and polarisation so many feel. Many of us in Britain today can’t help but sense a growing hope-lessness. Perhaps it’s long been there and it’s the ever-present drum of social media and a 24-hour news cycle that have made it feel like it’s taken root. Politicians of all parties have long employed the language of hope in their speeches. It’s an appeal to the very human instinct to believe there’s a future state or condition that will be better in some way. But as a Christian, I believe hope is something much deeper than optimism, more than a sometimes blinkered decision to always look on the bright side. When in the book of Jeremiah God speaks of giving “a hope and a future”, it’s a profound promise of what’s to come, regardless of current circumstances. Hope itself is also active and not static. As Emily Dickinson described in her 1861 poem, it’s like a bird, a thing with feathers, that “perches in the soul” and “never stops at all”. As a nation – and as a world – we’ve been through so much in recent years: the worsening climate crisis, a pandemic, economic instability and turbulent politics. It feels like the nation can’t catch a break, and that we are breaking apart. But by engaging in these million acts of hope, those participating are offering an alternative narrative. As American episcopal priest Fleming Rutledge said this week, stories of acts of kindness across political divides help foster hope. For her, such illustrations “arouse feelings of neighbourliness where there might otherwise be only estrangement”. The sense of us all being in this together needs to be supported “not with morality lectures but with examples”. Don’t tell me! Show me!” There’s an active selflessness to these hopeful acts of kindness – the millions we see and experience every day. A reminder that we as a nation are capable of acting beyond our own self-interest to look at the needs of those around us, to participate in hope-making. In these turbulent times, I find hope when I encounter others who show profound kindness. I feel most hopeful when those acts come from a group I’ve been told are ‘other’ to me in some way. None of us should put our hope in politics alone, but perhaps each of us might see the face of God in the million small kindnesses of others that together point to a hope that’s much bigger, and much more profound.

Good morning. A German holiday maker has successfully sued his tour operator alleging that he had spent 20 minutes every morning trying, without success, to find sun loungers by the pool. He was on the case at 6 a.m. but the loungers were already covered in towels, though they often remained unoccupied through the day whilst he and his family lay on the ground. The Court awarded him damages. Another tourist commenting on this story gleefully recalls an alternative solution to the problem: 'it soon stopped when some lads were going down in the middle of the night and throwing all the towels into the pool.' But our more law abiding litigant hopes that the fear of legal action will spur tour operators and hotels to devise fair and rational allocation systems for these highly contested spaces. As far as I know, Thomas Hobbes never took a package holiday, but having lived through the turmoil of the English civil war and its aftermath, he would not have been surprised by stories of so called 'sunbed wars': 'during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe' so he tells us in his great work Leviathan, 'they are in that condition called war'. Hobbes' father was a vicar, and his relationship to Christianity is complicated, as is perhaps not uncommon in such circumstances. But Hobbes' views are not so different from Augustine's, who was in the habit of noting that just as divine history begins with the story of Cain killing Abel, so world history begins with the story of Romulus killing Remus. For Augustine, it is 'every man against every man' as Hobbes puts it, and not just poolside. I know nothing about the personal beliefs of our German litigant, but I think he is a bit of a hero for spurning two obvious but unhelpful responses to this gloomy diagnosis of the human condition. One is to take the law into your own hands - throwing the towels in the pool - which could end rather badly of course. The other is just to grumble - and who doesn't enjoy a good grumble? Of all the things in the world which are unfairly and irrationally distributed, sun loungers are by no means the most significant. Houses lie empty, while children sleep on the streets. Food goes to waste while there is hunger. Medicines expire on shelves, and diseases go untreated. Christians have never needed to be told that humans can be deeply selfish, but everywhere the faith is truly alive there have been dreamers and prophets, from St Francis to Martin Luther King, who have contended that the world doesn't have to be determined by our flawed natures, even if we need to reckon with their existence and character. Who knows whether the sunbed wars will come to an end, but Mr Eggert - let's give him his name and due credit – by pushing the tour operators and hotels into action has given us hope for bloodless revolutions.

Good morning.Ocean transport has rarely left our news headlines over these last few weeks. The ongoing efforts of the USA and Iran to block or open up the Strait of Hormuz now being joined by the plight of passengers on a virus struck cruise ship, finally docked in Tenerife.It’s tempting then, to think of the world’s oceans primarily as means of transporting travellers and goods. Yet, as ocean naturalists, from Rachel Carson to David Attenborough, have repeatedly reminded us, the seas are home to a vast array of amazing species. The wonders of our oceans are however, now at significant risk from two direct consequences of human activity, climate change and pollution. Indeed, it’s widely argued by scientists that, for the seas to recover, a minimum of 30% of the world’s oceans will need to be protected by 2030.The challenge, as so often with regard to environmental damage, is our human reluctance to take short term sacrifices for longer term gain. Or else we so frame the actions required by way of sacrifice that they fall disproportionately on the poorest among our communities and nations. It is here that two core aspects of my own faith come together.First, as Psalm 95 in the Hebrew Scriptures asserts, “The sea is his, and he made it”. That tells me, our human accountability to God extends to our treatment of the oceans just as much as it does the dry land.Second, those of us with greater wealth or assets are expected to shoulder the heavier burden. As Jesus says in Luke 12: 48, “From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded.”Governments have a vital part to play. The High Seas Treaty, which came into force earlier this year, and the UK Parliament has now legislated to ratify, affords opportunity for safeguarding large swathes of the oceans. The Sargasso Sea, surrounding the Island of Bermuda, and home to a rich and diverse range of species, is a prime candidate for environmental protection measures that avoid destroying the livelihoods of local fishing communitiesI’m grateful too for the work of campaigning organisations, such as Greenpeace, whose ship Witness, I was privileged to visit, with other parliamentarians, recently. Along with sister vessels, it monitors biodiversity and plastic pollution in sensitive areas, exposing behaviours that jeopardise the seas and challenging us all to do better. Together, treaties and campaigners offer me hope that we can yet treasure the world’s oceans for their true value, a value far far beyond their immediate usefulness as means to transport the world’s supplies of oil. But, as Jesus stated so bluntly, our own individual practices matter too.

Good morning. After another tense night watching football in the pub, my friend reminded me of how different the experience is to when we were younger. How do you mean I asked. Well, we don’t reek of smoke, he said. And I remembered what it used to be like. How after going to a gig, or a bar, everyone stank of someone else’s smoke afterwards. And now we never do.It was twenty years ago this year that the Health Act passed, banning smoking in enclosed spaces… and today we take it for granted.Last month, almost under the radar, another law passed so that anyone born since January 2009 will never legally be able to buy tobacco products. Smoking will become rarer and rarer…but so gradually that we won’t realise.We don’t notice change as it’s happening, it’s absorbed into the new normal.If the morning news is immediate and dramatic, history is often incremental and invisible. It happens on the quiet.Until you stop to notice that it’s hiding in plain sight. Or you measure it against a greater span than a news cycle. A life span, for example, a centurion like David Attenborough.Penicillin, discovered when Attenborough was two, has a reasonable claim to being the best invention since sliced bread… except that sliced bread was also invented in 1928.My uncle Dave, who died the other day, was the last of my mothers eleven siblings. One didn’t survive into adulthood due to polio, a disease almost eradicated today. People no longer have 12 children like my grandparents, - the NHS, born when Attenborough was 22, introduced the contraceptive pill and family sizes fell.Then there’s electrification or the mobile phone - when Attenborough was 50 … as well as, on the down side, the atom bomb and global warming.Just as we might wonder how our ancestors tolerated slavery or hanging maybe our descendants will wonder how we tolerated the industrial production of animals for food or tearing down rainforests. The American essayist Rebecca Solnit, who calls herself, in a winning phrase, an ‘ambient Buddhist,’ says that it’s not heroic leaders who change history but the seeds planted quietly by communities acting together… who may not live to see those seeds flower. Seeds of equality or justice or peace which, once planted, may seem to disappear. In her new book, The Beginning Comes After The End, Solnit calls these seeds ‘imaginal cells’ which hold ‘the instructions for transformation’. Or as Jesus of Nazareth told his friends, ‘unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.’

Good morning. If you live to be one hundred, will you still be the same person inside who you’ve always been? Will the same things still make you laugh? Will you remember the best moments of your life…and the worst? Will you still care about the world and will it still care about you, if you live to be one hundred? Let’s ask Sir David Attenborough, who today reaches one hundred. He’s helped create some of the most beloved and respected nature programmes ever made. But he’s a mere whippersnapper in comparison with some of the antediluvian patriarchs from the book of Genesis. There is Methuselah, of course, who is listed as living 969 years. He appears in the genealogy from Adam to Noah, who only lived for 950 years. After the flood, the patriarchs got younger. Moses, for example, only lived for a mere 120 years. There are symbolic and literary interpretations for why these men were described as being extraordinarily long-lived. These stories tell us that ageing should not be feared but revered. That the older a person was, the more respected they were, the more important they were, and crucially, the closer they were to God. Today, ageing is more feared than ever before. We have an obsession with artificially preserving youth to an unnatural degree, as if ageing were a shameful secret. The middle-aged are spoken of with a hint of derision. Our parents dismissed as privileged, clueless boomers. And the generation before them? Silent. Of course, old age doesn’t always lead to wisdom, but anti-ageing rhetoric, however subtle, does lead to a disquieting erosion of worth. To see the elderly as God sees them would be to regard ageing as a privilege, and to see those older than us as repositories of wisdom and experience, instead of a burden on public resources. It is the elderly who engage most in public service, making up an army of volunteers who do everything from maintaining communal outdoor space, helping run various social groups, and caring for grandchildren. They are the custodians of the Christian faith, valued elders who play a vital role in the life of the church. Psalm 92 speaks of cedars planted in the house of the Lord, how in old age they’re still green and produce fruit. In every community there are to be found inspiring archetypes of ageing. We place all our hopes in the young, for they represent the future, but our elders don’t just belong to the past, they are the present too. They still have the ability to take the world by surprise. Happy 100th birthday Sir David. If I live to be one hundred, may I too be green and full of fruit.

07 MAY 26

Early one morning last week, I was taking a walk from the church to the park in central London where I live. I walked down Waterloo Place, named after the battle more than 200 years ago when on a June Sunday, 60,000 casualties and thousands of horses were killed on a muddy field in present day Belgium. Past the memorial to the war in Crimea fought three decades later when hundreds of thousands of men died, many from infected wounds. Historic acknowledgement of terrible bloodshed collided with the present day as I noticed a new statue, as yet without too many crowds to see it, had appeared overnight. We now know it was put there by Banksy. Up on a plinth is a well fed man, dressed in a western style business suit. In his right hand, he holds high a huge flag. His other hand is in a fist. He is marching forward. But the flag he’s carrying has blown into his face and he can’t see where he’s going. As the viewer, we witness his next step taking him off the plinth, marching into thin air. One more step and he will fall. The man’s distinctive posture lionises individual autonomy, allied with what seems to be a determination to dominate in the name of whatever’s on the flag he’s holding. But the flag, presumably the reason he’s marching in the first place, is itself the very reason he can’t see the way ahead. I found myself addressing the man as he towered over me…. Sir – you’re holding your flag up proudly but you can’t see where you’re going. I don’t know what made you think you should be up there, but you don’t have to stay. Now, the only way is down. But when you’re scrambling to get up - in the mud of the wars similar to the ones that are commemorated all around you – there’s a chance you could recover yourself, and turn your flag, no doubt colourful and vibrant, into a symbol of a different kind of unity. You could use it to bind the wounds of war, to wipe the face of Christ on his way to be crucified. You could use it to make shade in the heat, bring warmth in the cold. In addressing the man in my mind, I thought of the prodigal son in Jesus’s parable, leaving his community to seek autonomy, marching off his own particular plinth, finding to his surprise, off his pedestal, that his father still welcomed him home. I found myself feeling compassion for hubristic and lonely humanity, as we consistently choose domination over cooperation, clenched fists not open hands. And for evoking these reflections, I thanked God for the inventiveness of artists, who in these bellicose and dysregulated times, powerfully and provocatively show us another way.

05 MAY 26

05 MAY 26

I don’t know about you, but May is my favourite month: spring in its pomp and the blessing of light, warm days to come! And with ‘international dawn-chorus day’ tomorrow, too, it’s an invitation to hear nature’s songs of praise sung from the treetops afresh.If you struggle to rise early, you could follow the advice of journalist Henry Porter and drink a lot of water before you go to bed.Though some may not have been to bed at all! — a report out this week says that birdwatching is now the second most popular hobby among “Gen Z”. Almost three quarters of a million 16-29 year-olds bird-watch regularly, which has to be good news. A young woman called Jess Painter, of the RSPB youth council, said that by pausing “to be curious, to watch, listen and learn, you open yourself up to endless small moments of wonder.”With so much strife in the world, it’s surely one profound way of clearing our heads.Yet as Jess hints, getting out to watch the birds, or to listen to the dawn chorus, is not merely escape from what’s wrong, but embrace of what’s right: nature calls to our own better nature, too — to give the gift of our attention, so desperately fought over by the tech giants, to what’s natural, beautiful. And as a Christian I’d say to sense the Creator’s presence, too, within the awe-inspiring symphony of Creation.Such awe is so good for us — our ego knows it can’t possibly compete with a choir of blackbirds, robins, warblers, even a nightingale if we’re very lucky — so it quietens, and lets the soul stir to become part of ‘the family of things’ again, as the poet Mary Oliver puts it.And in such moments, shift happens. Recently, I interviewed the eminent ecologist Tom Crowther, who says that nature is filled with feedback loops — some of which are destructive, when the balance of an ecosystem has been upset (so often by humans); while other loops are restorative, regenerative — and we can be part of them.As a scientist, he said that it’s crucial his discipline learns spiritual practices of contemplation, meditation, prayer, as ways to help break the circuit, to step out of our personal feedback loops of despair, into ones of hopeful uplift instead.Take joy in nature, as we rediscover our own nature singing its song, too. Watch the birds of the air, as Jesus said for good reason.It may start simply with setting an alarm for tomorrow — or by drinking that large glass of water tonight. Whatever helps us best to catch this polyphonic wake up for the soul.

Good morning. 75 years ago this weekend saw the Festival of Britain open to much fanfare. In 1951, cities were being rebuilt from the rubble of war, there were food shortages and rationing, and there was uncertainty in everyday life. But instead of retreating into itself and just focusing on the practicalities of post-war life, Britain decided to do something remarkable and celebrate itself. The Festival saw the SouthBank of the Thames in Central London transformed into a cultural and entertainment hub, much as it had been centuries earlier, and it left a lasting imprint, shaping modern British design, architecture, and public art for decades to come. But perhaps its most powerful legacy was in creating a shared collective national experience, a moment in time where people felt like belonged to something far greater than themselves. We’ve had glimpses of that more recently, and the London 2012 Olympics carried a similar energy. I vividly remember how, for those few weeks, there was a real sense of shared joy and excitement across the country, no matter who we were. The opening ceremony showed a Britain that reflected its modern identity, whimsical, eccentric, confident and diverse, with a keen sense of our history and an eye for what the future may hold. Collective moments like this matter, because they bring the nation together and remind us of who we are and who we can be. Sadly, that sense of togetherness is perhaps more fragile today. Differences feel more pronounced, more obvious than ever. Some seem more inclined to destroy rather than build bridges, and we have seen the horrible consequences of that this week in Golders Green. In the Sikh scriptures, one of the revered saints of the faith, Bhagat Kabir, says “When the difference between myself and others is removed, then wherever I look, I see only You, the Divine”. At a time of polarised communities both here and abroad, some minorities feel under threat, particularly when it’s easier to withdraw into our own perspectives than it is to convene with those who may see the world differently. But if we look beyond those differences, I believe we are far stronger as a country than some – both inside and outside the UK - might give us credit for. 75 years ago, the Festival of Britain was special because of its spirit of hope and togetherness. Likewise with London 2012. They weren’t times of perfect agreement, in fact far from it, but they remained moments of shared experience nonetheless because they celebrated us – every single one of us – in our United Kingdom.

30 APRIL 26

Good morning I’m a bit biased, but the River Wear might be my favourite river in Britain. Winding through the city of Durham and connecting the Pennines to the sea, it has witnessed some of my happiest moments and easily absorbed any personal crises I might wish to throw at it. This week marks the completion of a major restoration project for the Wear; 1,700 saplings have been planted along its banks, in the hope that the new trees will safeguard both the health of the water and the creatures who live in and alongside it. The project is welcome news in an otherwise bleak picture for our rivers, many of which are in an active state of decline. This is not unique to Britain – around the world, rivers are not flourishing as they used to do. In his book Is A River Alive, Robert Macfarlane has proposed that this global decline in river health is not just a failure of legislation, but a failure of imagination. If we imagine a river as an isolated resource for our use and disposal, we will treat it that way. But if we imagine a river as a living being amongst other living beings, we will not only better protect and nurture our rivers. We will also better see the ways rivers protect and nurture us. Can we really think of a river as living? It certainly feels like a linguistic stretch. But it isn’t a new idea. Cultures all over the world treat rivers as having a life of their own, with a particular power to sustain and restore both human and nonhuman creatures. This includes my own tradition. The Bible is rich with images of rivers as the source of blessing and renewal for the people. For the first Christians, it was no coincidence that Jesus chose to be baptised in a river. This vital act of initiation belongs in water that moves and brings life. Early Church teaching encouraged Christ’s disciples to follow his example; where possible, their baptisms should likewise take place in running or living water. And while baptisms have since moved indoors, there are still Christians around the world who gather by rivers to welcome new members into the Church. They understand something that we have, perhaps, forgotten; rivers can and do spiritually and physically bless us – if only we can let them live.

28 APRIL 26

27 APRIL 26

25 APRIL 26

24 APRIL 26

During my many years of teaching undergraduates I always invited my honours students to give an oral presentation on a chosen topic. In a particular course that explored a variety of social and ethical questions, a young female student asked if she could do her presentation on abortion. She said, I come from a Christian family and don’t believe that abortion is moral.’ I told her she had every right to argue and defend her position as long as she was prepared to be challenged by her peers - including other Christian students who might well hold very different views – I remember the discussion after her presentations as one of the most respectful but intellectually robust – the best of what a university should be. We want universities to be places where knowledge and freedom of thought is prized and nurtured. Perhaps this is the goal of the new freedom of speech complaints system which comes into force in England's universities in the next academic year. The system will allow academics and other staff to take their complaints directly to the Office for Students if they feel their freedom of speech or academic research has been stifled. And if they fail to protect speech, universities could face fines of up to half a million pounds. But I wonder whether this kind of state intervention might have the unintended consequence of politicising not only free speech but learning itself. Regulations and penalties can force compliance but can’t guarantee a commitment to critical thinking. Rather than becoming places of greater freedom, universities might become even more risk averse, curating and managing what can be said and heard in invisible and insidious ways. If that shift happens, something deeper is lost. Learning becomes narrower. Thinking becomes strategic. And the university loses its edge as a place where knowledge is valued for its own sake. Knowledge matters—not only for what it gives us, but for what it demands of us. To know something isn’t simply to possess information; it’s to be changed by it. This is why the Islamic tradition sees learning as a trust, connecting the pursuit of knowledge to prayer and even the afterlife in scriptural texts such as ` Lord increase me in my knowledge’ and `Whoever travels a path in search of knowledge, God will make easy for him a path to Paradise.’ It may sound idealistic but for me, the purpose of a university isn’t to echo the world as it is, but to question and imagine what it might become.

Good morning. Desmond Morris the zoologist, tv presenter and best-selling author who died at the weekend at the age of 98, owed his fame to his book, The Naked Ape. The book was published close on 60 years ago and was a runaway success - it was translated into at least 23 languages and sold more than 20 million copies. Not everyone loved it - though controversy is never bad for sales - and Morris himself used to like to tell the tale of a heated confrontation with a group of clergyman in Canada over whether humans and/or chimpanzees possessed a soul. Morris's slogan was that 'man is a risen ape and not a fallen angel' and certain Christian groups were said to have burnt the book. The funny thing about that slogan is that it is certainly no part of mainline Christian teaching that humans are fallen angels. The person most often thought of in such terms is the devil, and even that notion was a fringe one - ironically perhaps, some of the outliers who seem to have thought that the devil and humans might be fallen angels, such as the Cathars, were themselves burnt as heretics, with or without any books. So if we take away the false dichotomy in Morris's slogan, we are left with the assertion that 'man is a risen ape'. But as I look around me at the world we humans are making, I'm not sure how risen we are - in fact the main problem for our self-understanding is not that Darwin and his later followers have caused us to think too little of ourselves, but that in spite of Darwin - and in fact in spite of Christian teaching too - we are still inclined to think too much of ourselves. The most central and crucial affirmation of the myths of creation in the book of Genesis is that humans - along with everything else in the cosmos - are creatures. We talk about bringing someone who is getting a bit high and mighty down to earth - and the line in Genesis chapter 2, 'the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground', is meant to do just that. No hint of angelic origins here - we are made from the stuff that we wash from our feet and swill down the drain. Humility - originally from the Latin, humus, for ground or earth - is the right disposition for someone who knows the stuff from which they are made. Apes we may well be, but we are the only apes who, with an overweening sense of our own capacities lord it over each other and over the rest of the created order, bending them and it to our purposes, producing political dystopias on the one hand, and threatening environmental disaster on the other. It turns out in fact, then, that Desmond Morris was not doing us humans down, but perhaps sugaring the pill - we are not so much risen apes as fallen ones.

Good morning. There have been some notable anniversaries in the news recently. Fighter plane extraordinaire, the Spitfire – star of the Battle of Britain – turned 90 this year. One former RAF air controller described the aircraft as epitomising “the spirit, backbone and sheer bloody-mindedness of a tiny island whose people would not give up and would never surrender”. Rousing stuff. There have been other rheumy-eyed retrospectives too. Queen Elizabeth II was born 100 years ago this year, and it has plausibly been said of her late Majesty that she represented the very last stable myth of this nation. Beyond these shores, this year marks 250 years since the founding of the United States of America, and 25 years since the attacks of 9/11. Two very different kinds of anniversary, for sure. But both have come freshly into view over the last few months, since the war with Iran. The word “anniversary” comes from the Latin anniversarius, meaning “returning yearly”. It names those moments in the year when time circles back on itself. Originally, in medieval Christian usage, anniversaries referred to a death: an anniversary Mass. But arguably, even the most joyful commemoration is a kind of mourning, in recognising that something has now passed into history. Perhaps that sounds a bit bleak. But I make the observation with feeling, as someone who’s just turned fifty. I marked that personal milestone with a dinner that brought together loved ones from each decade of my life: earliest school friends; others from university, work, and beyond; my three daughters too, who are (to my slight astonishment) now grown up enough to help host. It was wonderful. But taking stock at my fiftieth, it struck me that all anniversaries, whether public or private, involve a curious kind of double vision. They obviously ask us to look backwards, which can be a heady business, given that even sharing happy memories may be a way of feeling sad, for reminding us of good times now gone. Less obviously, though, anniversaries invite us to look forwards. They’re more than an occasion for nostalgia or handwringing. Recollection is also about reckoning. By pausing our ever-hectic lives, anniversaries allow us to think about the future through lessons we have learned from the past: as individuals, a society, a whole human race. They might, in that sense, be seen as calendared response to the psalmist’s prayer: ““Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom”. Remembering may fill us with gratitude or regret, but it also sharpens our sense of what’s still worth doing and preserving – as well as, what is yet worth striving for.

Good morning. This week will mark the centenary of the birth of Queen Elizabeth II and a new charity is being established in her honour. Its work will focus on restoring shared spaces in communities, based on her belief that ‘everyone is our neighbour’. She articulated this view in her 2004 Christmas broadcast, drawing on Jesus’ story of the Good Samaritan, which he told in response to a lawyer who asks with typical legal precision ‘Who is my neighbour’. The story is of a man who is attacked and left for dead at the side of a road. First a priest passes by on the other side. Then a Levite, another religious official, also passed by. At this point I think many in the crowd, listening to the story, had a knowing smile on their faces. They had heard this story many times before. Next would come the hero, a Jewish lay person who would help the man. This was an anti-clerical story and people like a story which makes a mockery of religious hypocrisy. But Jesus said a Samaritan came along, got his hands dirty by tending to the man’s wounds, put him on his donkey and booked him int the local hotel, breakfast included, for the next month. I think now smiles faded and mutterings began. ‘Did he say Samaritan? Doesn’t he know the historic hatred between Jews and those foreigner Samaritans. This preacher should keep out of politics!’ The late Queen commented that ‘the implication….. is clear. Everyone is our neighbour, no matter what race, creed or colour. The need to look after a fellow human being is far more important than any cultural or religious differences.’ I was working in the US last week, and in the midst of media and one to one discussions about Presidents and Popes, war and gas prices, and conduct in public office, I was struck by how an increasingly polarised culture uses religion and race to withdraw from shared spaces and to demonise the other. Yet, one evening I shared dinner with both a Jewish scholar and an African American scholar. Both spoke about their traumatic experiences of prejudice and oppression in racism and antisemitism. Both disagreed with each other vehemently on the current political situation and way forward. But both had faith in a God of justice and grace, and had discovered that in the shared space of mutual hospitality of meals together what it meant to be neighbours. It gave me hope and demonstrated to me that a broken world can be healed not only by big political solutions but also by one meal at a time.

18 APRIL 26

I found myself not long ago in a courtroom as a witness for a person claiming asylum in the UK on the grounds that they had converted to Christianity, and would be persecuted in the country they had been born in if they returned. I’d got to know him well, prepared him to be baptised and he was a regular member of our congregation. We had even eaten mustard seeds together as we discussed the meaning of Jesus’s teaching in the gospels about the kingdom of God. In court, he was asked to name the 12 apostles. He got to 5 before mistakenly mentioning Isaiah. The following Sunday I asked our own congregation, some of whom had been going to church for 50 years, to name the 12 apostles. No one could, and it was gently pointed out that the gospels themselves don’t quite agree on the precise 12 with a question over Thaddeus. Back in the courtroom, I was also asked whether I thought it was possible to be Christian without being able to read. Our congregation member was not literate. I refrained from commenting that for hundreds of years, nothing in Christian doctrine was written down until the formation of the Creeds in the 4th century, and simply answered yes, in my opinion I thought it was possible to be Christian without being able to read. The system was working as it should, the lawyers were doing what the state required them to do. The court had to determine whether this conversion to Christianity was legitimate or not. But learning the apostles’ names or being able to read was not, and could never be, the place where true and deep lived faith would breathe and flourish. The discovery that there is, in the words of the BBC reporters, a ‘sham industry’, providing assistance to people to enter the UK illegally on the grounds of sexuality or belief, is not very surprising. Enormous efforts are made by people trying to get around the housing or benefits systems for example, and huge sums are spent employing accountants to minimise the amount – legally or illegally - an individual has to pay in tax. For every bureaucratic system put in place to try to organise society for the good of the whole, there will be a shadow system, dedicated to get around it for personal gain. In such shadow systems, the state’s attempt at fairness, however imperfectly or carelessly expressed sometimes, is replaced with active cruelty towards the most vulnerable in our society: by traffickers, or any who exploit the desperation of those whose life circumstances have placed them at the mercy of the system. State instruments will always be blunt, and political fashions come and go as to which issues attract the most attention. But the collective commitment to compassion, fair judgement, mercy and care towards those who are most in need of help, will never, can never, go out of fashion.

16 APRIL 26

Good morning. They say that religion and politics don’t mix, but it’s impossible to separate the two when the Pope and the American President have gone head-to-head over the war in Iran. In a social media post, President Trump accused Pope Leo of being weak and advised that he should “focus on being a Great Pope, not a Politician”. Pope Leo responded by insisting that he’s not a politician, but that the message of the Gospel, “‘Blessed are the peacemakers’, is a message that the world needs to hear today”. This confrontation has catapulted the Pope onto the front pages of the world’s media, but he’s not the first modern pope to speak out against war. In 2003, when then Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, was asked to comment on the Iraq war, he said that “There were not sufficient reasons to unleash a war against Iraq.” He went on to ask “if it is still licit to admit the very existence of a ‘just war’.” St Augustine gave a Christian interpretation to the idea of the just war in the early 5th century. He argued that, terrible though war always is, it is sometimes necessary to defend the innocent and preserve peace. However, it must seek the future well-being of the enemy, and be free from the lust for power or desire to dominate. These ideas were developed by St Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, and they continued to shape western politics and international law long after Christianity ceased to be a major political influence. However ineffectual it might sometimes have become in the heat of battle, just war theory provided a restraining influence on the waging of war, especially with regard to the need to avoid the intentional targeting of non-combatants. Today, the nature of modern weapons and the bombing of densely populated areas means that civilian casualties, including children, usually far outnumber military deaths. This is the context in which the Catholic Church’s opposition to war must be interpreted. Pope Leo is continuing a tradition set by all modern popes since the 1960s. In his Palm Sunday address, he quoted the prophet Isaiah when he said that Jesus “does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: ‘Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood’.” This is religious language, but it holds politicians accountable for shedding innocent blood. How could it do otherwise, when Christians worship a crucified God?

14 APRIL 26

Good Morning. Resilience has been the watchword of the last few days, politicians across the parties choosing to follow up the Prime Minister’s recent focus on the idea. For some, the key dilemma is military resilience - how should Britain defend itself in an age when the USA is no longer a certain ally? For others, the question is energy resilience, shielding ourselves from the volatility of world oil prices. Both are important questions. But for me there is a deeper dimension to this word of the moment, one that requires urgent attention. Put simply, how do nations, including the UK, shore up, and indeed improve, their moral resilience? Moral resilience is the willingness and ability to hold on to core ethical values under pressure. In his passage on love, often read at weddings, St Paul enumerates some of the qualities that I see lying at its heart: patience; kindness; lack of rudeness, boastfulness, envy or arrogance; delighting in truth. Sadly, these are qualities I and many others now find lacking, not least at international level. Few, if any, moral constraints appear to inhibit the actions of those who have both unrestricted power and the willingness to use it. Meanwhile, within nations, the so-called Overton window, describing what ideas and opinions are considered acceptable in society, has shifted dramatically towards anger, hatred and abuse. Yet, despite institutions of all types falling short, there are examples to the contrary. I saw moral resilience vividly on a recent visit to Manila with the global Anglican Mission agency I chair. Over the last 125 or so years, what began as a small working people’s church has not only survived but thrived. At the same time, it has continued to speak up boldly against the abuse of human rights so endemic among the Philippines ruling classes. Bishops have been murdered, church workers imprisoned without trial, but the Iglesia Filipina Independiente has not only remained resilient in the face of all its trials but has grown to a six million strong denomination. From its motto, “Love our God and love our country”, emerges a theology that is fiercely inclusive of sexual and gender identities, alongside roundly rejecting the racial and social hierarchies it was founded to resist. Its social projects are among some of the most inspiring I have seen on my travels. If it sounds like Christian Nationalism, then it springs from a very different foundation from what those words often describe elsewhere. Faith is not the excuse to reject and demean others, but rather to embrace and affirm them. For me, this is what love of Christ and love of one’s country should be about. Well beyond churchgoers, this is the moral resilience that I believe Britain as a nation now needs more than ever.

11 APRIL 26

Good morning. The strike by resident doctors highlights the severe tensions faced by the National Health Service. The tragedy of the dispute, and any disruption experienced by patients, is that all sides involved no doubt very much want health services to improve. So as resolution is sought can this also be a moment to ask again an increasingly pressing question. What exactly is health? The issue often came to the fore when I worked in the NHS. My role was as a psychotherapist in a psychiatric hospital. We worked with older adults who had often suffered for not just years but decades. Their pain was substantial and entrenched. What could be offered to such folk? What did we mental health professionals think we were doing? There were no easy answers. Suffering is hard. But a light might flicker in the darkness when a patient felt heard. They realised, even momentarily, that they were with someone who didn’t have any immediate remedy but did appreciate the depth of their torment. Many doctors will know such moments. There is a glimpse of connection that is potentially healing and powerful. But why? The answer provides a clue to a notion of health that is not only about an absence of symptoms, valuable though that most certainly is. With a patient who feels heard, you together enter a field of existence that is wider than the previously isolated, suffering soul knew was possible. A dimension of life, not determined by having solutions, is discovered as a release or expansion. The word “health” itself recognises the possibility as it comes from the old English for “whole”. Believers in God will recognise that wholeness as an intuition: our existence as individuals is actually a sharing in the existence of God. We are as many reflections of the one divine light. A shift of perspective, a kind of conversion, is required for this transcendent awareness to become a steady part of life. The difference with this fuller notion of health or wholeness is that you don’t privately possess it, let alone control it, but rather it holds you and you might collaborate with it more fully. The NHS will likely continue to struggle with the demands it faces, even as - and perhaps because - remarkable improvements in treatments will continue, too. In this context, a cultural and spiritual conversation about the wider nature of health is crucial. Like the patient who feels better because they are heard, a more expansive vision of what health entails, and indeed what it is to live well, will alleviate stresses on us all.

09 APRIL 26

08 APRIL 26

Along with joy, there’s a lot of fear in the days after Easter – no less for Jesus’ disciples than in our news today. It has made me think about doors. The door behind which Jesus’ disciples hid after his death, the heavy stone that blocked the tomb where he’d been laid, the doors today that keep people out, or in, or protect property or borders. And symbolic doors – to peace or security – that still feel so definitely closed. This morning the metal-shuttered door at the Whitechapel Mission in the east end of London opened as it always does at 6 AM – exactly on time so guests can count on it. Breakfast service will start in a few minutes at 8, and it’s likely over 200 will eat a full English, complete with mushrooms and bacon, sausage, egg and hashbrowns. Today these homeless guests will be served by wonderful volunteers who left their own doors well before dawn. Having a key to open my front door and a safe place to live is a real blessing – I like being safe. And yet I think about the women who went up to Jesus’ tomb to anoint his body on Easter morning: wisdom would say stay home hiding with the men. And having left the safety provided by one door, they didn’t know how they’d get through the next. The Gospel records their conversation: who would move the stone to open the tomb ? Yet, they went. We might think of Jesus’ resurrection as a miracle, but it was actually just what he said would happen, even if no one had understood. God will redeem the world. However these women going out while the danger was still present - that feels to me a miracle no less real, hiding in plain sight. And it gives me hope. Easter is not about things being safe, but about things being different. Doors open where we do not expect. The power to do miracles given to people forgotten by headlines – women and men who go out in faith and change history. On Saturday I heard the BBC’s Lyse Doucet speculate about one possible turn of events in Iran: ‘…God help the world,’ she said with real emphasis. …God help the world indeed … because, I fear, nothing else has.’ Maybe, this Monday, the beginnings of the miracles we hope for are in our power already. Long term solutions to intractable problems – they are not cost free. But in the end real safety doesn’t come from bigger doors or stronger locks.

Thought for the Day