Reflections from a faith perspective on issues and people in the news.
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At last, a few showers. They've never been more welcome in this strange, uncomfortable, record-breaking summer. Day after day of sunshine, held fitfully at bay by air conditioning on overtime, cooling drinks, and the drawn curtains which to an earlier generation would have signalled a community in mourning. Today they might be reminding us of lost gardens, parched lawns, and blazing hillsides, threatening some homes directly, and sending a choking warning over great distances. At the same time, the heat has taken a grim toll among people seeking to cool off in rivers, lakes and at the seaside - this week a couple and their 14-year-old daughter in the sea off Shoreham, in Sussex. Understandably there's been a huge outpouring of sympathy. The emergency response included coastguards, lifeboat and ambulance services and police, and I think it's good to pause occasionally to honour men and women who give themselves to rescue services of all kinds. Leading the battle against the wildfires across the country, of course, have been firefighters. We marvel at their willingness to get up close, putting their own lives in jeopardy. How they must sweat before those flames, wearing their heavy protective gear, as conscious of the risk they're taking as the volunteers crewing a lifeboat in a stormy sea. And how their families must share the anxiety. I believe the would-be rescuers reflect something of the character of a God who is also in the business of rescue – often getting people out of scrapes of their own making. It was while we were still helpless, powerless, says St.Paul, that Jesus Christ died for us. There's regular debate about how we should treat people in difficulties because of what they've consumed, knowing it could harm them. Within the rescue services, I suspect there's occasional irritation, anger maybe, at those who put themselves at risk needlessly…sailing the channel in bathtubs, attempting to scale serious peaks wearing flip flops. But those who've trained for this mission still do it, because they might be the only hope. On a glorious sunny day sixty years ago, I ventured into the sea from a popular beach in Jersey, with big waves and wonderful surf. Hardly a swimmer at all, I was soon in trouble. Currents I knew nothing of sucked me under, and no matter how I fought, I was helpless. I really thought I would drown….before I was fished out by a team of lifesavers, feeling shaken, foolish and very grateful, one of a dozen rescued that day. It's not how I usually put it, but I understand why some people finding faith in Jesus talk of being saved. I've been rescued, and I'm glad today's rescue services remind me.
What does it mean to erase a woman? You don't have to kill her. You can simply make her invisible. Tell her she can't get a higher education, she can't work freely, tell her where she can go, who she can speak to, and how loudly she can speak. Eventually, you don't need to silence her because her absence has been made normal. Five years after the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan, women and girls have told the BBC their lives are unrecognisable under the rule of the regime. The Taliban's foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, was asked by the BBC about education for girls in Afghanistan, to which he replied that "it is not correct to say everything is banned for women", "Women are not totally restricted on all walks of life... Only one small part (of their affairs) is restricted until further notice." And while there is some disagreement within the Taliban as well as condemnation from many Muslim voices and organisations, those who rule say they are doing this in the name of Islam. But a government that needs to control the movement, clothing, education and voice of women in the name of morality, a morality that requires women to disappear isn't showing strength; it's showing fear dressed as piety. Because often across all faiths, religious authority which says `We know what God wants' always conveniently discovers that what God wants looks remarkably like what we want. And that's why gradually the word woman is ignored from the Qur'anic verses which speak of the moral agency of “the believing men and believing women, the devout men and devout women, the truthful men and truthful women.” Today the women of Afghanistan have become a political and theological test. But perhaps the most dangerous thing is the possibility that the world will eventually become accustomed to it. Because oppression has a final victory. Not when people are silenced, but when their silence no longer disturbs us. And yet despite all of this, many women tell the BBC, `One day, everything will change... but we must continue with patience, and we will not lose hope." A government can close a school, it can close a university, it can close a woman's workplace but it can't destroy the future she imagines.' In the words of the Afghan poet, Nadia Anjuman, who wrote in her poem `My Garden': `I will trust the meaning of hope, I will shut the door on grief and find another path.'
Good morning. I have spent about half my life in England and half in Australia. Watching the television news over the past few weeks has been somewhat confusing. I think of England as a place where nature is more or less under control, a ‘green and pleasant land', mild in climate, with a landscape shaped by generations of human hands. Raging wildfires, the terrifying unpredictability of nature out of control, railway engineering disrupted by scorching heat, that seems part of a different place. That reminds me of my childhood, driving through areas destroyed by bushfire, areas in which, as the poet Judith Wright put it , “Charred death upon the rock leans his charred bone and stares at death from sockets black with flame.”Reflecting on nature ‘under control' as opposed to ‘out of control', I wonder if this notion of ‘control' isn't exactly where the problem lies. At least since the industrial revolution, we have tended to see the natural world as brute matter for moulding to our will, as so much ‘stuff' to be exploited, to be consumed. That approach has brought progress, but also the damage to our planet and the climate change from which we now suffer. Our thirst for ‘control' has led us to a place where many young people, faced with an ecological crisis, feel more ‘out of control' than ever before. The bewitching vision of the writer of the book of Genesis is so very different. In the garden story, the relationship between the human and the natural world is not one of ‘control' but of ‘authority', of rule with a delegated responsibility for the natural world. Nature in this tradition is both an essentially good gift, and one damaged by rebellion against its giver, the Creator. It is therefore to be treasured, but not to be worshipped, nor even simply affirmed. So, we are right to be grateful for fire when it warms, and to be repelled by it when it kills. The human responsibility is not to ‘control' nature but to tend it as one tends a garden, to work with it when we can, and to work for its healing when we can't. In this vein, for example, science has recently affirmed the wisdom of ancient Aboriginal Australian practices of fire management, practices that by contained burning, by working with, rather than against ‘country', limit the occurrence of more devastating fire. Had we listened more carefully to the Genesis story over the last two hundred and fifty years, and less to the logic of consumption and control, we might now be in a better place ecologically. Reflecting on the story at this point, may just give our planet a chance.
TODAY, AUGUST 15, is traditionally the day that Catholics celebrate the feast of the Assumption, that marks Mary, mother of Jesus, being taken both body and soul into heaven. Countless Catholics even before the Church made it official dogma, believed it. What intrigues me, though, is when the Church did make the Assumption dogma. It was confirmed by Pope Pius XII in 1950. So just five years after the end of the Second World War, when millions of Jewish people lost their lives in the Holocaust, the Catholic Church officially endorsed a Jewish woman as Queen of Heaven. There's still controversy about Pius XII, elected Pope in 1939. Some historians argue that he didn't do enough for the Jewish people, while others say he worked behind the scenes to help save Jews from the Nazis. Before he became Pope, as Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the Vatican Secretary of State, he signed on behalf of his predecessor, Pius XI, the 1933 concordat that guaranteed the rights of the Catholic Church to operate in Germany. What is less well-known is that four years later, horrified by what was happening in Germany – and monitored by Pacelli – the Vatican issued a papal teaching document or encyclical on the situation there. Called With Burning Anxiety, it was written in German, not the usual Latin, and read out in all Catholic Churches in Germany on Palm Sunday, 1937. It endorsed the Jewish scriptures as worthy of respect and condemned the exaltation of race – in other words the Nazi obsession with the Aryan race. This so infuriated the Nazis they tried to confiscate copies of the encyclical. While that document was published by Pius XI and probably authored by Pacelli, it was also probably influenced by the thinking of a Jewish woman, Edith Stein. Stein, a philosopher, converted to Catholicism and became a Carmelite nun. Stein was later arrested and died in Auschwitz in 1942. Her extensive body of writing, including the substantial letter she wrote to Pius XI, warning of the Nazis' desire to destroy the Jews and their idolising of race and power, as well as her thinking on Mary, survives. Stein saw Mary as the ideal woman, nurturing and sustaining others. A woman imitate Mary, not only in the home but in the workplace, Stein wrote, “conscious of where there is want and where help is needed, intervening and regulating as far as it is possible….Then will she, like a good spirit, spread blessing everywhere.”A good spirit that spreads blessings everywhere – that is an aspiration inspired by one Jewish woman writing of another and one I cherish on the feast of the Assumption.
Good morning. I've lived in Wales for the best part of two decades and slowly felt less of an outsider. But last week I found myself in deepest Cymru, at the Eisteddfod: the annual festival of Welsh language, music and literature, which this year took place near Cardigan framed by the Preseli hills. The Eisteddfod is a cultural celebration but it draws on druidic ceremonies. My friend became a member of the Gorsedd: imagine a combination of getting an MBE and a druid initiation. She swore on a sword to uphold Welsh culture, and received a kind of blessing from the Archdruid, the First Minister looking on in his druid robes. It was a moment of pride in Welsh identity but sometimes nationalist narratives make me uneasy. I can't help but wonder who it excludes. My discomfort no doubt stems from being the son of a Jewish refugee from Nazism. The universality of Buddhist teachings was always part of its draw — but even that can be co-opted by nationalist politics. And yet, as a Jewish Buddhist from Croydon, I respond to the powerful rootedness that's so palpable at the Eisteddfod. My friend runs a small meeting space in the festival, and I crowded in with a few dozen others for a performance featuring a storyteller and Catrin Finch, the harpist – a celebration of awen: of the land and its tales. I don't speak Welsh, but I could roughly follow the stories, which came from the Mabinogion, the compendium of Welsh myths, many about this part of Wales. One featured Rhiannon, a queen wrongly accused of killing her child. As a penance she must sit at the castle gates, tell visitors her story and offer to carry them across the threshold. In the performance, Rhiannon's passionate cry declared the love and hope still burning within her. But she sets her fury aside, carries strangers on her back, and becomes larger than the pattern of blame and revenge. Buddhism calls this the deepest freedom — not escaping suffering but refusing to be imprisoned by it. The awen I respond to transcends borders. The Preseli rocks were taken east to build Stonehenge — raised partly to track the sun's movements. This week, as the sky darkened over the whole of Britain, it struck me that this magic was never only Wales's to possess. It belongs to anyone willing to receive it.
Good morning. In a twist I had not anticipated, it would appear that for some young people at least, digital cameras and wired earphones are back. The technology of my youth — iPods and Walkmans — is being embraced by Gen Z. Indeed, social media is full of people talking about why they're going back to basics, using devices that many of us consigned to the bin years ago.As someone who loves shiny new tech I've been left wondering what is going on. Well, while some have said that older tech is higher quality, others have expressed a strong sense of nostalgia for reminders of simpler times.Nostalgia is an idea with a rich and complex history. The historian Agnes Arnold-Forster has written brilliantly about how modern ideas of nostalgia emerged in seventeenth-century Switzerland where it was held to be a disease of home sickness which could quite literally kill you. These days nostalgia is just as likely to be co-opted by advertising agencies to sell us stuff or by politicians to pitch their latest policies.The Bible treats nostalgia with suspicion. In the book of Ecclesiastes it says, ‘Do not say, ‘Why were the former days better than these?' For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.' Its writer challenges the rose-tinted glow we can feel when looking back on the past. This view chimes with the famous story of the Israelites who, lost in the desert on the way to the promised land, look back fondly on their days of bondage in Egypt. Their leader Moses shakes them out of their reverie and gets them to start looking forward again.Certainly, nostalgia can be understood as sentimental and regressive. The poet Billy Collins captures this brilliantly in his satirical poem ‘Nostalgia' in which the speaker is so enamoured with the past that he ends up believing that even a few hours ago is better than now. However, I don't think looking back fondly is necessarily retrograde or bad. Agnes Arnold-Forster also says, ‘Nostalgia can help us re-enchant the past'. On Sunday I worshipped at a Book of Common Prayer service. I felt a wave of nostalgia for its exquisite seventeenth-century language, but I also felt profoundly connected to God in the present. The old language quieted me. I was freed from the frenetic and distracting shape of my ordinary life. The past came alive but so did my present. In their own way, perhaps those young people using older tech might also feel freed from the frenetic modern world. Certainly, I am reminded that while I find the challenge of the new compelling, there are riches to be found in how the present is illuminated by looking back to the past.
Good morning. You're listening to this, so the chances are you're not on holiday. You may be enjoying a staycation and devoted to early-morning radio, even when you don't have to go to work; but for many Brits this is the peak season for getting out of the country, and indulging the luxury of a lie-in, as the summer loosens our usual routines. I really feel for those whose holidaying plans have been disrupted recently by travel companies collapsing into bankruptcy. Holidays are good for us, psychologically and physically; and though it's less often noted, spiritually too. In which context, it's worth remembering those countless other people around the world for whom they are simply an impossibility. The word holiday comes from the Old English and literally means “holy day”; and in a colloquial sense, many of us continue to think of our holidays as something sacred. But the old Christian holy days meant more than just time off work. They included formal worship, processions, pilgrimage. Their moods varied – from fasting and mourning, as on Good Friday, to feasting and celebration, as at Christmas or a saint's day – but they all had a definite religious focus. A world away, in other words, from pina coladas on a sun-drenched beach, the cliché contemporary breakaway that's focused instead on personal pleasure. That said, supposedly secular forms of escapism can sometimes offer spiritual nourishment too. J. R. R. Tolkien made the point that escaping from the immediate demands of your life can take very different forms. Whereas we might deplore the military deserter who abandons the fight he ought to face, Tolkien says, the flight of the person who's been falsely imprisoned might be courageous and good. Reading certain works of fiction can, he thought, offer that positive sort of escapism. So too, it might be argued, can a beautiful walk, an intimate conversation, laughing with friends. Imaginative flights of all sorts grant glimpses of truth and goodness, refreshment for our souls. Andy Burnham has been criticised by some for taking a holiday this week – just six weeks after taking office. But his escape with his family on Monday may well provide him more than leisure, in the sense of doing nothing. His flight from Downing Street might, as Tolkien understood it, offer the kind of freedom that's positively enabling. Whimsically, given that he's Britain's first Catholic prime minister, I like to think he'll spend at least some of his holiday plotting a revival of merry old England's medieval holy days. More seriously, and leaving all party-politics aside, perhaps everyone who loves this country should hope that time relaxing with loved ones will nourish his soul as well as his mind and body. There will surely be work requiring moral leadership awaiting him on his return.
Good morning. August is the month of exam results and education is in the news again. Each year, young people find themselves at the centre of debates about standards, academic versus vocational. Reform, opportunity and social mobility. And governments struggle with how we can equip young people for the economy of tomorrow and still give them a balanced education. But I wonder if we're asking one question often enough – what kind of human beings do we hope they'll become? A couple of days ago my son phoned in the morning from his regular coffee shop. I could hear the chatter and tinkling in the background. "The coffee here is so good," he said. I replied, "Is this your little moment of joy before you start the day, settle down to work?" He said “joy - that's a nice way of looking at it.” Afterwards I thought to myself: Why did I call it a little moment of joy? Why do we think that joy belongs only in the margins of life - before work begins or after success has finally been achieved? And I think that our education system reflects that assumption. We make so much effort to prepare children for exams, employment and success that it's hardly surprising that many end up feeling their value is something they must constantly earn. The pressure and anxiety has made many incapable of seeing or letting any joy into their life – as if joy has now become a luxury. In a world where cynicism and pessimism is everywhere, even encouraged, devastating news a daily feature, to find joy for yourself, and to try to inspire it in others is an act of courage, even resistance. As a Belgian surrealist artist Rene Magritte pointed out it's a waste when life is made more frightening precisely because that's easy to do. For him, finding beauty was harder and because of that more important – as he said: ‘it's much easier to terrorise than to charm.' Perhaps this is what faith tries to remind us, that to ponder on the world means finding love and enchantment amidst our struggles and sorrows. The Qur'an invites us to look, to reflect and to marvel at the changing seasons, the stars, the diversity of humanity. The words `do they not see' pull us constantly to what can be observed, imagined and made possible. Whether it's in a morning coffee or a quiet walk, perhaps joy accompanies us all the time – we are simply too busy to notice.
'Good morning. “August angst” has begun. The phrase describes the stress caused by psychotherapists taking their summer break over the month beginning today. Actually, breaks are part of the therapeutic work - and that explains why August angst is felt by more people than just those in therapy. Breaks of any kind can be challenging. The summer break from work was longed for and then feels unsettling. A personal break from your phone feels positively alarming. So what's with breaks? An interruption to the usual pattern throws you on yourself and, psychotherapy says, recalls anxieties from the earliest periods of life. For there was a time during which routine with no breaks was a matter of life and death: when you were a baby. Then, with luck, you had someone ready, 24 7, to respond to your every beck and call. Sigmund Freud referred to “His Majesty the Baby” because the little darlings ensure that mum and dad never get a break. Continuity of care back then was vital, of course. When toddlers, we might have played peekaboo, to toy with the possibility that we can survive a break. There is also the developmental stage when a child realises that a ball rolling under the sofa isn't lost forever but has temporarily disappeared. Curiosity replaces tears. To put it another way, to grow up is to transition from a frictionless world, in which needs are seamlessly met, to a world of friction, disruption. It's demanding but we develop. So August angst is a recapitulation of that phase. When the external routine stops, what will you find inside? The phenomenon explains something else: therapists worry about social media because it is designed to be frictionless, infantile you might say. The infinite scroll offers you a constant feed, like a bottle always close to the baby's mouth. Nowadays apps even offer 24 7 access to an online therapist and the effect is regressive. Go online, cultivate infantile states of mind. Breaks disrupt that slip back which is why they are built into spiritual traditions. Jesus told his disciples that he was to leave them, and that they would weep. But then another would come: the spirit of God who would dwell within them. After the disruption, which was traumatic, they would look inside and find more than they had ever expected. But they had to have the break. No friction, no discovery. So, the month of August and August angst. Take a break from your therapist. Take one from your phone, from work. And feel how the break from your usual routine upsets and then expands your soul'
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