Thought for the Day

25 MAY 26

I don’t really follow football but this past week there seemed to be a lot of it in the news. One of the most contentious stories has been that of Southampton who admitted to spying on their opponents training sessions. They’ve now lost their appeal against expulsion from the Championship play-offs, which they described as `manifestly disproportionate.’ For many of the fans who are hurt it may seem like an unfair and collective punishment. But while the fallout has been enormous, the issue isn’t really about the consequences for breaking a rule. Football survives mistakes, controversy and questionable refereeing decisions every week. What it can’t survive is the erosion of trust. Once clubs begin believing covert spying and deception are acceptable routes to competitive advantage, the integrity of the sport itself starts to erode. Competition in all areas of life must still have moral boundaries because if winning becomes the only value left, then every other principle gradually becomes negotiable. Whether in football, politics business or our relationships, a culture obsessed purely with outcomes eventually loses the moral language needed to restrain itself. Success begins to justify deception and eventually people no longer even recognise dishonesty because it has become so normalised by success. But if restraint is important so is the principle of proportionality. The Qur’an says, ` we have made you a middle nation’ a verse which inspired Muslim thinkers to regard balance and equilibrium as a spiritual act. A small wound shouldn’t become a lifelong bitterness, a mistake shouldn’t lead to total exile and justice should always be distinguishable from revenge. This isn’t weakness, its God consciousness contained in the sacred words, `By justice, the heavens and the earth endure.’ When so much of our culture encourages us towards extremes, cutting people off, letting disagreement turn to dehumanising, and destroying peoples reputations, the courage to remain fair even when you’re hurting or angry is a difficult but necessary virtue. On losing their appeal Southampton issued a statement apologising to their fans and supporters stating that `trust now needs to be rebuilt’ and that they were determined to act with humility and `put things right.” And in the end that is all any of us can hope to do whether in sport or in life in general. All of us carry a relationship we could mend, a trust we can uphold, and while its not always easy, perhaps one of the quietest forms of spiritual maturity is the ability to put something right before time makes the repair impossible.

Good morning. “Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out.” I was reminded of that quip from G. K. Chesterton last week, when I visited The Old Ferryboat Inn in Cambridgeshire, which not only claims to be the oldest pub in England (serving ale since 560AD, apparently), but also to have a resident ghost. A young woman took her life for love almost a thousand years ago and local legend has it she’s haunted the place ever since, appearing each year on the anniversary of her death: the 17th March. That date also happens to be St Patrick’s Day, which is perhaps not the ideal occasion for sober eyewitness testimony. But it’s easy to be sceptical…. According to a recent National Folklore Survey, more than a third of people in England believe in ghosts, and many like the idea of them too. “A haunted house at the top of your street is fantastic,” said Caroline Gibson from Pontefract in Yorkshire, speaking to the BBC about a poltergeist who is currently trending on social media, after featuring on the paranormal podcast, Uncanny. The occult does not sit easily with mainstream Christianity. The Church warns against séances, spirit-hunting and attempts to conjure the dead. Yet in an age inclined to explain everything materially, Christianity insists that the world does indeed have a spiritual dimension. A problem remains, however, of how to discern between spiritual reality versus superstition — or for that matter, between good versus evil spiritual forces. “Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out” doesn’t really help us with that discernment, but Chesterton, himself a Christian, followed up with another one-liner that might be more useful. “The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.” That gets us closer. Open the mind, just not endlessly, to no purpose: open it up to close it again. The risk of being open-minded is that you may sometimes look foolish or naïve. But there is risk too in being so determined never to be gulled, or seemingly unscientific, that you refuse in advance the richness that comes with leading a spiritual life. Ghost stories challenge us to believe that there’s more to the world than what we can understand in purely physical terms. Christianity goes further still, teaching that we ourselves are more than merely physical beings. If a haunted house in your street can be called fantastic, then why shouldn’t a church be called the same – in both meanings of the word? Fantastic in the modern sense of being great, but also in the older sense of being extra-ordinary. A place for open minds to shut down on something solid.

18 MAY 26

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.

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. 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.

05 MAY 26

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.

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.