Thought for the Day

03 AUG 26

'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'

Good morning, If you're feeling in need of a little nostalgia for the 1980s, then the film, Wham! 10 Days in China that opened in cinemas this week might be just the thing. It's a documentary about the 10 day tour of China that Wham!, featuring George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley, made in 1985. They were the first pop act to visit the Communist country and it was devised by their manager as a way of garnering publicity for Wham!. In that it was ultimately successful. But as the documentary shows, there were other more profound consequences too from this encounter between cultures. In an interview this week Andrew Ridgeley talked about a behind-the-scenes clash between band members about China. He recalled that backing singer, Shirlie Kemp, was unhappy. At the time she told the music press that the tour was unfair to the Chinese because it threw a spotlight on freedoms they didn't have. But for Ridgeley, it showed the Chinese that Western values were about freedom and a chance to fulfil dreams and aspirations. The Chinese agreed to let Wham! Into the country as evidence that it was opening up but the concerts were tightly policed. They have taken a similar approach to Christianity, creating an official Protestant and an official Catholic church, both regulated by the Government. Even then they view Christianity with great suspicion. When I visited official churches a few years ago, for example, my group was followed by government officials everywhere. Other Christian churches do exist, though they operate underground. And like those who follow other religions in China, their members face abuse and constant harassment. Part of the tension over Christianity is that even though there is evidence that Christianity first arrived in China around 625 in the Christian era, and today there are at least 44 million Christians, probably more, Chinese officials see Christianity as Western and alien to their culture. But Christianity does not belong to one nation or one continent; God does not have a passport identifying his nationality. It is as much for the Chinese as it is for anyone else. It offers dreams and aspirations, as Andrew Ridgeley said of music. But it needs a place to start. Four years after the Wham! tour, one of those who attended a show at the Beijing Workers' Gymnasium, Cui Juan wrote a song Nothing To My Name, that became an anthem for student protesters at Tiananmen Square. What begins as a small lifting of the curtain to another world, can be a route to calling for far greater change. It may well cause some initial frustration, as Shirlie from Wham! feared, but it can lead to seeking something, whether music or faith that offers meaning, sometimes triggering a desire for liberty. It's a chink of light in the darkness.

30 JULY 26

Good Morning, ‘Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people:' these beautiful words from Isaiah open the Seven Weeks of Consolation which begin now, and lead up to the Jewish New Year. Yet only days ago was the bleakest date in the Jewish calendar, the Fast of the Ninth of Av, marking the destruction of Jerusalem. The embers of the fires that devoured God's temple were still red hot in memory; the surrounding hills, once forested, were devastated. Yet the rabbis insisted on proclaiming Isaiah's words of comfort. How dared they? How could they be so brazen! Would we say, “Take comfort!” while the flames near Madrid and Bordeaux are burning, bringing horror to the people, fire-fighters, animals? But the prophetic message was not: ‘Don't worry. It'll all be okay.' Rather, it is ‘We must look on disaster, then take hope, not by turning away, but by living differently. ‘Prepare a highway for God,' Isaiah continues: ‘Make the world better,' he demands. I thought of his words as I cut turfs to help Tracy and Roger Mclachlan rewild their 91 acres at Bac Dhub in the Highlands. We were building leaky dams to raise the water level of a stream so that it would rewet and restore the peatland. In short, we were doing what beavers do naturally. ‘The peat will regrow one millimetre per year,' Tracy explained. ‘But it'll absorb more carbon than trees.' It's her pledge to the future. I compare that one millimetre per year to the forest fires raging forward and shudder. Where's your comfort, Isaiah? But I know that countless local groups worldwide are saying: ‘This is our place, our park, trees, birds. We're determined to do everything we can for our world, our children, our future.' I speak to Simon Oldridge, Co-founder of the National Emergency Briefing UK, in which the country's leading experts on security, health, food and weather tell the climate crisis as it is. The film of the briefing has already been screened to over 2,000 groups. ‘People feel better when they've seen it,' Simon explains. They say, ‘The issues aren't being boxed away. There are things we can do. People feel motivated.' Action from the bottom up is great, Simon acknowledges. ‘But we need urgent, galvanising leadership from top down,' because this is about everything: energy, agriculture, how we eat, travel, insulate homes. That's Isaiah's message. ‘Look up and see!' he insists. This is God's world. Take comfort, not by turning away, but by treating creation with the love, justice and respect it demands.

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The stunningly beautiful goddess Calypso offers Odysseus something that you might think no human being could ever refuse: never to age and never to die. Stay with me on this Island and you will achieve immortality. And yet refuse it he does. I am really excited to see the new Christopher Nolan film version of The Odyssey. Last summer holidays I read it to my boys whilst we were holidaying on the next island along from Ithica. And there are so many fascinating philosophical and theological issues it raised: not least, what are we to make of Odysseus' preference for risk and death over immortality and agelessness. Earlier this year the American tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson launched his Immortals programme; at a cost to the individual of a million dollars a year, it offers a promise held out in its strap line “don't die”. In a fascinating essay on why Odysseus is right to refuse this, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that there are some things that the immortal Gods are not able to do that human beings are: not least amongst them is to show courage. If you can't risk anything because you cannot die, then how can you possibly be courageous? What sort of life would the hero Odysseus have if he stayed with Calypso on her deathless realm, and gave up any need for his famous craft and resourcefulness? And what would love itself mean if you could never put anything on the line for others? That's why we cheer Odysseus on as he decides to refuse Calyspso her seemingly unrefusable offer. Despite being a convert from Christianity to Judaism, Nussbaum intriguingly suggests that there is something about this giving up of immortality that explains one of the key features of Christian theology: of God becoming human, of a God who is prepared to suffer and die in the name of love. What is attractive about both Odysseus and Jesus is that they are both prepared to have skin in the game, which is pretty much the very definition of incarnation. Personally, I don't buy the idea that that science could one day make us immortal. But, and here's the point, even if it were true, I think we should refuse it. Indeed, I don't think we often fully grasp what immortality of this sort would mean. Because to live beyond the realm of suffering and death is to live in a way that is no longer human – without the possibility of heroism, without the possibility of risking all for love. Why is it, for instance, that so often in Greek mythology, perfect Gods fall in love with imperfect human beings rather than their own kind? Because fragile humanity can exhibit exciting virtues, risky love-soaked courage in the way that the gods just cannot. Of course we don't want those we love to be taken from us. Yet also, death is what makes life valuable and precious. In the words of the late Queen Elizabeth II, “grief is the price we pay for love”. What Odysseus discovers on Calypso's Island, is that without death, life will be drained of its meaning.

Good morning. This week France's parliament approved a bill banning social media access for children under fifteen. They can still use messaging services like WhatsApp, but not platforms like TikTok and Snapchat. It's part of a global movement that saw Australia ban social media for under-sixteens last year, and the UK plans something similar for next spring, potentially adding an overnight ban for sixteen-to-seventeen year-olds. We've heard the arguments many times: on one side the experience of parents and the studies linking childhood social media use to bullying, sleep deprivation and mental health problems. On the other, concerns about free speech and the difficulty of enforcing a ban. But governments are now moving from consultation to action, and this feels like a turning point. We're realising that social media apps aren't just tools. They take hold of our attention, direct it, shape who we become. Buddhism has always taught this. A mind trained on outrage becomes quicker to outrage. A mind trained on comparison becomes quicker to feel lacking. Social media platforms are built, deliberately, to exploit these mechanics — offering stimulation to prompt a feeling, knowing that feelings of liking and disliking impel us to act. They maximise the very reactivity Buddhist practice has always tried to loosen. And the attention economy links that reactivity to money: every second of captured attention is monetised, which means the pressure to capture more of it will only intensify. Without a response, we risk being overwhelmed by tech-powered reactivity. Buddhism calls us conditioned beings — shaped, moment by moment, by what we attend to — and places the responsibility for that squarely with us. Not blame for being conditioned, which none of us chose, but responsibility for what we do about it. I think we are gradually understanding that living well with tech-driven conditioning is a central challenge of our time, and the response has to work at both levels: the personal discipline of noticing where attention goes, and the collective willingness to set limits on what is being done to it. That's what France's parliament has just attempted. Children are especially vulnerable, but the deeper question doesn't stop at fifteen or sixteen. What am I training my mind to become, simply by what I let it rest on? Technology raises the stakes because it conditions us faster and more relentlessly than anything the Buddha could have imagined. The least we owe ourselves is to know that it's happening.

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Good morning.Like millions of others, I stayed up late on Saturday, watching the England men's team play Norway. It's actually the first live game I've watched this World Cup, and not just because time differences make for very late finishes. What attracted me was that I would be watching it in a crowded bar alongside several hundred of the Church of England's most committed members, bishops, vicars and lay people, gathered in York for the summer meeting of the General Synod. From the moment we roared out “God save the King”, with a raucous enthusiasm sufficient to send any self respecting choir leader running for cover, to the joyful air punching which greeted the final whistle, we were bound together in a common cause.Watching the match in York with my colleagues brought home to me that neither following Jesus nor following the England team are things I'm satisfied doing on my own. My faith is far more than a combination of private beliefs and personal moral practices. Yesterday morning, along with most of my fellow Synod members, or at least those of us who had recovered from the match, I attended the main Sunday Service in York Minster. The hymns we sang differed somewhat from the chants I hear on a Saturday afternoon, as a season ticket holder at Salford City's home fixtures, but both are an expression of a shared commitment and belonging. So, whilst there are plenty of churches whose services I could follow on line, some of them with Premier League quality preachers, the moment Covid restrictions were lifted, I was straight back in church. I need to be worshipping God as part of a congregation gathered physically together. That's where I belong. But gathering in church is not the end of the matter. The final prayers of the Church of England Holy Communion Service often include the plea, “Send us out in the power of your Spirit, to live and work to your praise and glory”. It's a powerful commissioning, one that underpins how Christian faith breaks out beyond the church doors, equipping us to serve both our communities and the whole creation. It's a reminder too that we are not simply sent on private missions, but to work together, tackling the inequalities and injustices so visible in the world around us. That, for me, is a faith worth belonging to. A faith that needs to gather together.By Wednesday's semi-final, Synod will be over. I'll be with another of my tribes, in Parliament. And with all due respect to the other home nations, who are no longer contenders for the cup, I think Britain will be better governed if the palace authorities can match York University and find us a big screen, so we too can watch the game together.

11 JULY 26

Good Morning. The Government recently published its draft Bill to ban abusive conversion practices that aim to change someone sexual orientation or trans gender identity. Parliament will debate the detail, as it should. Laws matter. They define the standards by which we choose to live together and, at their best, they protect those who have too often been left vulnerable. Just a few days later, I found myself walking through central London at Pride as one of the Co-Leads of the Movement for Progressive Judaism. It was the first time our new Movement had marched together, and the first visible Jewish presence in the parade since the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023. The new law and Pride belong together. One asks what a society will protect, the other asks what kind of society we hope to become. After the parade, someone sent me a message. They wrote that, growing up as a gay Jew, they could never have imagined their rabbis marching at Pride. They said seeing rabbis there would make it easier for people to believe they don't have to choose between their faith and who they are. I've carried those words with me all week. As a student at rabbinic college, I had the privilege of being taught by Rabbi Lionel Blue, whose warm, wise voice became so familiar to generations of Radio 4 listeners through Thought for the Day. He was the first openly gay British rabbi. Long before inclusion became part of our public vocabulary, Lionel simply lived his life with humour, honesty and deep faith. In doing so, he quietly expanded people's imagination of who could speak with religious authority. Perhaps that is how change really happens. Laws matter because they protect people from harm. They draw a line around what a society will no longer tolerate. But communities have a different responsibility. The law tells us what is unacceptable. Communities show us what is possible. The Torah repeatedly tells us to “walk” in God's ways. Faith is not simply about believing the right things. It is about choosing where we stand and alongside whom we walk. That may be why Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, after marching for civil rights alongside Martin Luther King, that he felt as though he was “praying with my feet.” Sometimes our feet say something our words cannot. Perhaps somewhere on the streets of London last Saturday, someone looked up and saw something they had never imagined before: rabbis walking at Pride, openly and joyfully. If so, then perhaps they also caught a glimpse of something else. That while the law can protect us from harm, a community, at its best, can help us imagine a future in which we truly belong.

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Good Morning. Last Wednesday I conducted Annabel's funeral. Diagnosed with cancer five years ago, Annabel took the attitude: ‘Whatever time I've got left, I'm going to use to make the world more beautiful.' I'm taking her resolve with me as we enter a bleak period in the Jewish year, three weeks of mourning, culminating in the Fast of the Ninth of Av. We remember the sacking of the Jerusalem Temple, the destruction of Jewish life across history, and all the destructiveness in our world today. I love people, animals, birds and trees. When I see how we kill each other and treat nature with contempt, how forests burn and waters are poisoned, my heart aches with fear and grief. That's when I remember Annabel, and the wonderful Matt Biggs of Gardener's Question Time. Looking out on a piece of wasteland during chemo, he redesigned it into a gorgeous garden so that others would find solace while having their infusions. ‘Every cloud has a silver lining,' he said in his final broadcast, ‘but if it doesn't have one, make it!' He saw nature as God's home, and understood its healing powers. There's a rabbinic maxim: When your heart is broken, try to cling to creativity, not destruction. So many people do just that. There's Gabrielle, who breeds turtle doves, a lovely bird with rust-and-black wing feathers, almost extinct in Britain. She's inspired twenty-eight local farms to grow hedgerows with the seeds these doves need. Now hundreds are flying and nesting free. Across our faiths, EcoJudaism, Eco Church, Eco Sikh, Eco Mosque and Eco Temple, we're working together to plant and restore. It's the opposite of climate crisis denial, and we're doing it with love. Malini Mehra, of London Climate Action Week, which just ended, writes how ‘in the big story of climate, love is underrated…[T]hat's a mistake. People protect what they love. It's the single most powerful driver of action.' ‘I don't love only hedgehogs,' says Hugh Warwick, trustee of the British Hedgehog Society and author of A Prickly Affair. But you start with what you love. The love that drives us is fierce. It's deep love for people, nature, the whole interdependent community of life and above all for the children, to whom we're determined to leave a thriving, wonderful world. Destructiveness, taught the rabbis, comes from causeless hatred. It's causeless because it brings only more hate. Creativity comes from causeless love, love whose only purpose is to make the world more caring, just and beautiful.

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With the re-emergence of Andy Burnham as a Westminster politician, people have become fascinated by his backstory. The most recent episode is his time as Mayor of Manchester – responsible not just for the city of Manchester but also towns like Bolton and Rochdale and Manchester's immediate neighbour, the City of Salford. One idea Burnham mentions frequently in connection with his time as Mayor is what he calls the politics of place – the idea that politics must concentrate on meeting local needs. One reason why I find this so fascinating is because of the years I spent studying and working in both Manchester and Salford. For some of the time I lived in Manchester, and the rest in a Salford tower block that used to appear in the opening credits of Coronation Street. Much of the old Salford I knew has gone. The docks have been turned into Salford Quays with the Lowry Centre there paying homage to the painter who made recording industrial Salford his personal vocation. Row upon row of houses have been lost and old communities with them. Some things stay the same, though. Poverty is still visible but in post-industrial Salford there are different employers. It's not only politicians but faith groups too who have to think about meeting local needs in conventional or different ways. Salford Roman Catholic Cathedral, where I used to worship on Sundays and has just reopened after a three year restoration, was built in the 1850s. It served a huge, mostly Irish, migrant community attracted to jobs in the north west. Catholic bishops then were criticised for being triumphalist as they were restored to Britain but Cardinal Wiseman riposted that all he wanted was to serve the poor, living in squalor, wretchedness and disease. Yet for all that the Catholic Church wanted to make buildings beautiful for God. There was a tension there between serving the poor and honouring God. Nowadays there's another tension as somewhere like Salford Cathedral seeks to work out its future role. Should it restore past glory or reinvent new ways of doing things? Churches have to do this to survive. There's a new, vital requirement to focus on safeguarding to protect children. At Salford, the cathedral continues to serve the poor but nowadays that means a foodbank. Now, as well as the traditional parishioners living alongside the cathedral there are more office workers . The cathedral still has Mass on Sunday but now there are daily lunch time services for the local workforce. It's a simple way of showing that even when life changes, churches and cathedrals can still find a way to inspire, welcome and console those who pass their doors – a kind of theology of place.

25 JUNE 26

Good morning. If you've ever seen the musical ‘Godspell' – and yes, it's still in the repertoire for colleges and theatre companies round the world – you'll remember the catchy opening chorus: ‘Pre…ee, pare ye, the way of the Lord…' – I'm tempted but I'm not going to sing it – the point of the chorus is to accompany the arrival of John the Baptist, the herald, of Jesus. Today, the 24th June, the Church celebrates the birth of this extraordinary figure of Jewish history, who appears not only in the Gospels but in the writings of the first century Jewish historian, Josephus. John's birth is traditionally the 24th June, 6 months before Christmas, and it also comes just after the Summer Solstice – and that has symbolic meaning too, because John reportedly said of Jesus Christ. ‘He must increase but I must decrease'. However bright the sun is in today's sky and however long the day, we're on the way down to long nights and shorter days. John the Baptist is known as the forerunner, the one who, as the chorus insists, prepared the way of the Lord. Yet he did not see his hopes fulfilled, at least not in the way he expected. He was arrested by the local puppet King, Herod Antipas, and beheaded in prison in a macabre episode when Herod's niece, Salome, danced so fetchingly before Herod that he offered her any reward she would like – and she asked for the prophet's head on a platter. Yuk. Oscar Wilde wrote a one-act play about it, and I remember playing Salome's evil mother who had prompted the request. So John the forerunner, the herald, ended up disgraced, confused, betrayed – and was never quite sure whether Jesus was the one whose coming he had prophesied or whether it would turn out to be someone else. John's story makes me realise how little we understand the significance of our own lives. We're all part of a stream of history, we come and go, but the stream goes on. There's so much in society that tells us we can be who we like and achieve what we want, that our sole purpose is to maximise our own significance. The story of John comes as a corrective. We are not Messiahs, World Kings, or even as one world leader puts it, ‘Very Stable Geniuses'. Yet we all have some capacity for discernment. We can practise truthfulness and generosity and be humble before God and one another. What comes after us we cannot know but all of us we can hope and pray the days ahead will bring flourishing and peace to ourselves and our overheating planet.

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Good morning, There's much discussion over flags and marches and what it means to be British at the moment. This has meant the legitimate concerns of some have led to my own legitimate concerns for my family's safety. As an immigrant and a visible ethnic minority in the town in which I live, I can feel a sense of dis-ease and fear about whether or not I'm welcome in the nation which I have called home my whole life. It's within this climate of hyper-vigilance that I boarded a local bus and braced myself for some racist words from one particular man – someone I had judged based on the colour of his skin. To me, he looked like the type of person who might not like me. I thought he might shout some abuse, or tell me to go back to where I came from. Instead he showed me kindness. He held my son's buggy for me as I struggled with mine and my kids' belongings, giving up his seat so we could sit down. I could have wept at the simple humanity of it. And the shame of me pre-emptively judging another based on a perceived difference. All around us we see evidence that our society is fractured and fragmented and polarised. The horror of the scenes in Northern Ireland, and the sadness as we remember MP Jo Cox's murder 10 years ago this week. We're told time and again that we have more in common than what divides us. But I wonder whether this suggests we need to find our commonality before feeling a shared humanity. Maybe it's recognising our difference and choosing decency, kindness, and even love despite those differences that we should value. The Christian tradition can help us here in the example of the early Church – people from many different backgrounds and cultural and religious traditions – came together, sharing everything they had, not because they were the same, but because of a commonality found outside their individual circumstances and characteristics. Their differences were the point. This week, I attended the Sandford St Martin awards honouring the best in religious broadcasting, where a special award went to the BBC's Pilgrimage. The show takes well-known figures in British life with different beliefs – the devoutly religious, the agnostic, and the vehemently atheist – on a journey towards sacred sites including Santiago de Compostela, Holy Island and the Vatican. Perhaps the show's beauty lies not in the pilgrims' sameness, but in their difference. The commonality is not in their beliefs, but in their shared purpose, getting through a gruelling journey; spiritual and personal transformation taking place along the way. I find this a beautiful metaphor for this moment in which we find ourselves - One which might help us to meet the challenges ahead of us, where we might see our differences, and choose kindness and togetherness, anyway.

The headline simply says: ‘All I have left is a burnt bag.' These are the words of a parent in a recent Sky News investigation. The report has identified the faces of most of the children and teachers who were killed in Iran when a US missile struck a primary school in Minab at the start of the US-Israel war in Iran. At the time, the world reacted with shock, leaders made statements, but then the cameras moved on, and another tragedy replaced the last. That these children never returned home was a reality lost in the politics of war. As we hopefully reach an agreement to end the conflict this week, the photos of these school children are a poignant reminder that while deaths are reported as numbers in the news headlines, behind every face is a name, behind every name is a family and behind every family is a world that changed forever when that child was killed. Whether it's news of a school shooting in America, children killed in war and conflict or the thousands dying from the slow tragedy of famine, I sometimes wonder whether too often children's deaths have become headlines we just ignore or scroll past – they are over there, far away, someone else's problem. Because we live in a time where tragedy can appear on our screens, compete for attention, and disappear within hours. But I think that if religious faith means anything it demands that we ask ourselves what happens to our own humanity when another person's suffering no longer moves us. Faith shouldn't make us complacent; it should make us care. If as Islamic thought tells us children are an amanah, a trust from God, the moral weight of this trust is that it can be broken not only by violence but also by silence. As adults, we don't own their future but we are responsible for protecting it. Seeing children as evidence of hope, the Indian poet and writer Rabindranath Tagore once said: ‘Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of humanity.' Perhaps that's the hope we can all hold onto, that however terrible war is, we don't reduce or dismiss the deaths of children to collateral damage. Good journalism can't explain everything but it can refuse to let everything be forgotten. And yes, at a time when so much of the news media is contested, this story shows us that the world depends on journalists to turn distance into attention and hopefully attention, at its best, into conscience.

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