Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast Thought for the Day

A friend relates the stresses of getting up in the morning. Her child has stubbed a toe but is it broken, poor kid? Simultaneously, the radio on, there is news of bombs again in the Middle East. And then, another worry: the erratic weather and what that might mean for a shifting climate. On top of that again, a background of disturbed domestic politics. Where is that leading? A hotch-potch of anxieties mount up. My friend and I talked about how to handle these confused concerns, some smaller, some massive; some nearer, some afar. They crash in on us. Little wonder that some people become politically frazzled or mentally fatigued – or over-stimulated or drop out altogether. The wisdom traditions offer advice on how to deal with such turbulence. A label often given to this advice is non-attachment. The idea is not to not care. But rather to learn a skilfulness in how you care. Jesus was one figure who taught as much, captured in sayings such as: “Give no thought for the morrow.” To be preoccupied with what might happen, or how things might go, is paralysing. And freezing in the present moment, or conversely over-reacting, is a disaster because the present moment is the only one to which you can respond well. The advice continues with caring for the soul, or how we are in the world, which effects how we act in the world. Or to put it another way: tend to the jostling facets of ourselves, what might be called our temperamental inner community. That internal unrest shapes our interactions with the wider community that exists around and about us. How we are inside will much effect how we are in the outside world. Cultivating a non-attached attention also opens up awareness of something spiritual. Staying with what is present is an admission that there are many things that we cannot control and, crucially, that we will let them be. This is not a failure but the gaining of a wider perspective. And then, it is possible to see that the modest good we can do is part of a wider good, which can be called God. There is a mental cost to feeling trapped in myriad troubles, but there is a spiritual liberty to find. Care with our attention brings that freedom – which is what I found with my friend. Her child with the stubbed toe was OK. The wider world certainly knows suffering, but there is also a goodness in the world that we can find and amplify.

Good morning. For followers of football, this is an important day. The FIFA men’s World Cup begins, and all around the world, fans are preparing themselves to cheer on their favourite team. Although the real stars of the competition are the talented players and their coaches, we should not underestimate the importance of supporters. Numerous pieces of research have shown that the presence of fans does have a positive impact on how well a team plays. So much so, in fact, that they’re often called the twelfth player. This became particularly clear during covid when football matches were played without anyone else present. When this happened, the home team advantage melted away. Without a crowd in the stands to cheer them on, the footballers struggled to play their best. The sudden lack of the presence of supporters at games highlighted that fans really do make a difference to how teams play. Today, churches around the world celebrate the feast of St Barnabas. Born in Cyprus, he was originally called Joseph but was renamed Barnabas by the earliest Christians, a name which means ‘son of encouragement’. Stories in the Acts of the Apostles show that Barnabas dedicated his life to encouraging others. He was generous and supportive, brave and compassionate, so much so, in fact, that he is the patron saint of encouragement. This doesn’t mean that Barnabas spent his life simply being nice to people. He was courageous. When the apostle Paul first converted, many other Christians were frightened of him and Barnabas stood up for him; but when Paul later fell out with John Mark, for abandoning his missionary journey and returning to Jerusalem, Barnabas supported John Mark against the more powerful Paul. An encourager stands up for you when you need it most. Everyone needs encouragement. We all need people on our side, cheering us on and giving us hope, confidence and the strength to continue. The people who have been most important my life are not the ones who have, entirely correctly, pointed out the many things I’ve done wrong, but the ones who have given me the vision of who I could be and the things I could do. We need people to believe in us; it is what enables us to do our best. Over the next five weeks, whether you are a football fan or not, perhaps you can take a moment to pause and give thanks for the people who have been your biggest fans in life, and to remember that no matter what form it takes, encouragement really does make a difference.

01 JUNE 26

30 MAY 26

29 MAY 26

Good morning. The late rock singer Ozzy Osbourne’s son, Jack, spoke recently about the fact that the family have worked with an AI provider to make a digital version of his father a year after his death. Digital Ozzy, an AI generated life-sized avatar, will be able, from beyond the grave, to talk, laugh, answer questions from and tease whoever wants to speak with him; just as Ozzy Osborne did when he was alive. The CEO of the AI company making this, commented that the avatar’s created from ‘authenticated source material, consented and controlled by those who love him most’. His choice of language is striking. Love and control. Living and consent. There is a growing market – estimated at more than £100 billion worldwide for the ‘grief tech’ industry, including what are called griefbots: an AI tool that recreates the dead as a comfort for the living. Organised religion, until recent decades, exercising a near-monopoly on the rituals and processes around death, might reasonably be supposed to be against this. But as evidenced by Pope Leo’s first encyclical released on Monday, which addresses humanity’s relationship with AI, the need for public debate about the ethics and morality of the use of AI is urgent, given the speed of change in its capabilities. The starting point for the consideration of a grief bot is that the inalienable dignity of a human being who’s lived, according to Christian teaching, as someone created in the image of God, continues after death. But we know too that at the point of death, we no longer have any control over how we’re spoken about, how our past actions are interpreted. We’re no longer able to explain ourselves or surprise even the ones who love us best and miss us most. We are, in a curious way, at our most vulnerable, to exploitation or misuse by anyone who might make money from our memory. In this way, dying is the ultimate act of trust - not only in God - but in the people we leave behind. We can ask them to promise us that they will say certain things, scatter our ashes in certain places, live a certain way themselves. But we can’t make them, we have to trust them. Perhaps we begin by recognising that the messy, contradictory, heartache of grief is tender territory whenever it’s invaded by commercialising forces. And in the use of a griefbot, the inalienable dignity of a person is under question at precisely the time when the person who’s died has no voice to contest what’s being done in their name. Love and control. Living and consent. The choices of individuals who have the funds to do this for the people they’ve lost raise fundamental questions not just for them but for all the rest of us in society – who, inevitably, will die one day too.

On Monday over one and a half million Muslims from around the world began filling a vast tent city in Mecca for the annual hajj pilgrimage. Each year this religious practice which Muslims hope to perform at least once in their life, tests people’s faith and physical stamina. But this year, there’s another more sobering reality. Air defence batteries are positioned on the outskirts of Mecca, responsible for protecting the skies over the holy sites. And this is a consequence of the continued US-Israeli war in Iran and the most recent Israeli military strikes in eastern Lebanon, wars which are reconfiguring who gets to travel, how they get there, and at what cost. And amidst the hopes for an end to the war, I wonder how people living and affected by it think about such momentous rituals as Hajj, how they plan, save and travel only to return to continued uncertainty once the pilgrimage is over. Perhaps people have learned how to live beside ruins without letting the ruins destroy their soul. It is said that Lebanon in particular has always sung while burning. Its poets turned ruins into hymns and mourning into the resistance of stubborn hope. But it seems to me that wherever there is war and destruction in the world people learn to live with both grief and hope. Cafés and shops reopen after explosions, children play on the streets, weddings happen during ceasefires, cities still wake up to make coffee by the sea; survival itself becomes a kind of ritual. Maybe that is why so many people want to perform Hajj this year - ritual isn’t escapism from the world’s violence. It is resistance against becoming spiritually shaped by that violence. People who live close to loss ask deeper questions about God, justice, and meaning. The pilgrimage is a kind of surrender to a greater reality – everyone moves in the same direction, recites the same prayers, dressed in similar garments, and despite their different burdens, the crowds repeat the simple but powerful call ` here I am O Lord, here I am.’ And for one suspended moment, as the pilgrims stand as the guests of God, they begin to realise something terrifying and beautiful- that every empire, every militia, every border, every war will one day become dust. That it isn’t suffering but the need for divine mercy for us all which is the final truth about humanity.

Good morning. An odd group gathered this weekend at the Hay Festival for a simple but moving ceremony. Local authority officials joined storytellers and puppeteers beside the River Wye to launch a charter declaring that the river has rights – rights to perform its natural functions and be free from pollution. It’s the latest expression of a global movement demanding that the law sees ecosystems as living entities rather than human property. I love walking the Wye. It winds 150 miles along the Wales-England border through lush pastures and rocky gorges. Yet, there are concerns that some industrial farming practices while not necessarily illegal are polluting the river and that species like salmon and native crayfish that depend on it are disappearing. The charter recognises an ecologist as the river’s official representative at rive r management meetings. The Wye can’t tell us what it wants, so she’s charged to present what the river needs to flourish, setting aside human interests and preferences. This legal arrangement gives form to something we’ve long felt but struggled to enact. The poet William Wordsworth, who celebrated the Wye, sensed that people and rivers belong to something more fundamental, "more deeply interfused" as he writes. But I think the thirteenth century Japanese Buddhist teacher Dōgen Zenji saw most clearly what that perception really means. Dōgen knew that a river can be seen as a resource, a place of inspiration, and presumably it’s something quite different to the fish. But all these perceptions fall short of a more elusive reality. As Dōgen writes, “It's not only that there is water in the world, but there’s a world in water.” We typically live as though we were separate — each of us the centre of our own world, bending what surrounds us to our interests. Buddhism calls this the core delusion and the source of our suffering. So our response to nature is also a call to look at ourselves more deeply, asking not just whether a river is alive, but what it means for us to be alive, within a vast universe on which we entirely depend. The Wye is one of the most loved rivers in Britain, and one of the most damaged. The charter gives it rights. But the rights of nature return to us as duties of attention, restraint, and repair — not just in beautiful places, but at every point where our lives touch the world that sustains them.

25 MAY 26

Good morning. Those attending the National Cathedrals Conference in Bristol this week were asked a simple question: what is the role of a cathedral today? They reflected on a specially commissioned report Living Stones which offered some sobering conclusions about the future of English cathedrals. There was some good news. 77% of adults have visited a cathedral in the past three years. This suggests that many people still see cathedrals as “thin places” where they can glimpse heaven on earth and, as one of the Psalms says, “be still and know”. But the more worrying statistic is that three quarters of England’s 42 Anglican cathedrals are in debt. The growing gap between income and repair costs is difficult to ignore. In his book How Buildings Learn, the American writer Stewart Brand argues that buildings survive by adapting to the people who use them. Cathedrals have done this for centuries. And, in a noisy digital age, they face a new challenge: how once again to reimagine themselves. Many cathedrals now rely on admission charges, concerts, exhibitions, cafés and other attractions to help cover their costs. . For some, this feels like an attack on the essential quality of what is after all a sacred building. It’s a fine balancing act to be sure. My experience of cathedrals has shaped much of my ministry. York Minster was my home cathedral. I studied near Durham, I was ordained in Ripon, and now serve as an Honorary Canon of St Albans Cathedral. This has given me a closer understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing cathedral clergy and their lay colleagues today. Perhaps the real question isn’t how cathedrals can survive, but why they still matter. When in the Cathedral, I often notice that many visitors still come looking for a moment - to pause, to light a candle to pray. I see people of all ages — including many young adults — wanting to stop, to rest, to listen to the silence, if only for a little while. The medieval builders of these vast places — vividly imagined in Ben Hopkins’ novel Cathedral — could never have foreseen the technologies that now shape almost every aspect of modern life. But I’m pretty certain they understood that people would always seek out their wonderful creations: as a calm sanctuary in stark contrast to the world outside. That, perhaps more than anything else, is what our cathedrals are still for today and why we need them to survive.

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.

21 MAY 26

Good morning. What would you do if you came across a man in a park, sitting in front of a typewriter, offering to write a poem with you? I would avoid eye contact and walk away as quickly as possible. After all, the offer might just be a ruse to rob me, or worse. And even if its genuine, I suspect the outcome of our poetic collaboration would be cringingly bad. But there is such a man in the park, and I have, on reflection, come to think he’s doing a good thing. Patrick Kruse, a Master’s student in Belfast, has set himself up in the city’s botanic gardens, encouraging passersby to write poems – every day for the next year. Perfect strangers report being charmed and moved by the experience. AI offers something similar, of course. Feed it key words and it can spit out verses in any style you like. So, what’s the difference? Most discussions about AI focus on its supposed capabilities. But another approach would be to ask what it means for us humans when we give up certain of our own capabilities so that AI can perform them instead. Pope Leo XIV recently published an encyclical warning against creating a technological “Tower of Babel”. He emphasized that human dignity does not derive from productivity, that no machine can replace “the grandeur of humanity” revealed in the human heart. It’s very well said. Yet there is, it seems to me, much more that still needs to said; in particular, on how AI is changing the way human beings relate to language. One of the greatest minds and prose stylists of the 19th century, Cardinal (now Saint) John Henry Newman described writing as a “thinking out into language”. Writing is not, he believed, simply a matter of expressing thoughts that are already in our heads. The act of writing is itself a form of thinking. As humans, we don’t passively transcribe ideas into words on the page; we actively test, explore, refine, reimagine our ideas as we go. Writing is in that sense a unique and powerful tool not simply for communication, but for reasoning. Having machines write for us may be quicker, easier, slicker. But by outsourcing our struggles to find the right words, we also outsource the essential human struggle known as thinking. The new bard of Belfast’s botanic gardens may not be producing high poetry, but his eccentric efforts are surely welcome in an age obsessed with efficiency and outcomes. It’s good to be reminded that all of us have something worthwhile to say, including things we cannot fully know until we set our minds to dance with language.

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.

Good morning. As the sun finally begins to coax flowers into bloom, the Chelsea Flower Show will open its gates today. The Royal Horticultural Society’s annual event sees organisations create beautiful planted spaces, which inspire and educate visitors. With our news headlines full of unremitting contempt and calamity, millions of us will tune into coverage of Chelsea this week for relief. I’d like to think this is more than just a comforting distraction.

Christian writer CS Lewis wrote about his vision of hell in the novella ‘the great divorce’. Hell was a place of continual twilight where people moved further and further apart into infinite space, driven by mutual suspicion and a sense of time ticking down. Paradise, by contrast was a place of colour, fruitfulness, and sunshine – open to anyone bold enough to stay. In paradise, people were unafraid of each other or the future. They sought out newcomers, working to convince them to remain.

The show gardens at Chelsea may be sanctuaries of beauty, but they are also about shared spaces and living well together. Many, like the Trussell ‘together’ garden, are inspired specifically by the way communities deal with hardship – the Trussel Trust’s foodbanks tackle food poverty. Like Lewis’ paradise, communal gardens like this one combat the notion that safety and solace can only be had by building walls and retreating from the world.

John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, wrote a collection of health remedies based on what people could grow or source themselves. Titled ‘Primitive Physick’ and published in 1747 it would run to 23 editions during his life. Although his remedies were of their day, his commitment to people’s access to healthcare and use of what was readily available still bears weight. Today, the rooftop garden of the national Methodist offices in London is planted with herbs and flowers used in Primitive Physick, recognising the importance of gardens to our collective mental and physical well-being.

A reality of life in Britain today is that access to outdoor space is not equal: many do not have gardens. A Christian vision for good community still resists the notion that beautiful outdoor spaces are only the preserve of private wealth.

After the show, all of the Chelsea gardens will find their way out into communities around the country – plants will go to balconies, windowsills and neglected urban spaces, gardens to hospices, schools, and the verges of motorways. They will join many other community gardens schemes, allowing even those of us who live surrounded by pavement, to put our hands in soil and see something grow. These gardens are places of retreat, yes: but also places of truth telling about the quiet work of living peacefully together.

18 MAY 26

09 JUNE 26

08 JUNE 26

06 JUNE 26

Good morning. Economists, climate scientists and delegates are gathered in Paris to address what’s called the polycrisis: climate breakdown, political extremism and rising social tension. They’re considering taxes on billionaires, reductions in working hours, a change in diets and transfering investment from industry to education and health. Right now, attention is focusing on tech bros. Some believe a few geniuses will invent our way out of our multiple crises, and are entitled to the rewards. Others maintain only a flattening of wealth across our whole society will make life sustainable beyond this generation. It seems like a face-off between liberty and equality. What’s seldom recognised is that these are originally theological notions. Liberty says we’re fundamentally solitary creatures. Our well-being is for ourselves to determine; sin is a personal failure: repentance is a chance for individual renewal. It’s an imposition for the state to inhibit that. By contrast equality says we’re fundamentally collective beings. Our situation in life is profoundly shaped by the social, economic and psychological conditions around us; sin is about structural and systemic forces beyond our individual ability to withstand: by combining with one another we find power to address them. The state rightly steps in to assist and protect when we’re struggling, and to catalyse and redistribute to make society fairer. There’s plenty of support for both positions in the Bible and theology. But another thing that’s often overlooked is how these rival perspectives shaped the most basic things about early Christianity. Women and slaves flocked to the first-century church because there they found dignity and security in the face of the predations of their masters. Early Christians shared material goods and supported the needy. These were significant practices of equality. But the church also called for individual conversion. It never forgot the centrality of personal relationships and discipline. Most tangibly, it created a weekly event in which each person, based on their individual income and material affluence, brought their respective gift to a common table; whereupon a priest described the personal and social transformation made possible by Christ; after which everyone gathered ate and drank – but crucially, each received the same. Over the centuries this came to be called the eucharist or the mass, and was ritualised into an elaborate ceremony. But originally it was a vivid social practice that harmonised a focus on the individual in their gifts as well as their need for repentance, with the collective ideal that all could flourish and none need be left behind. To get through the polycrisis we’re going to need all the wisdom we can get. But sometimes that wisdom lies in the past, not just the future.

04 JUNE 26

Good morning. One of the clichés of the media industry is that the public have a ‘right to know’ especially when things go wrong. It’s often true. Think of the post office scandal or the recent investigations into some of our privatised water companies. It’s important for the public to know when rules are being broken and when there’s manifest injustice. But the right to know must be balanced by prudence. On issues of security or defence, or when vital decisions are waiting, secrecy can be important. The whole point of a democratic system is that it’s for us to choose who we trust, who we allow to keep secrets on our behalf. And all this is fine of course, until it goes wrong. In recent days many files relating to Peter Mandelson have been made public. We’ve learnt of indiscreet remarks between him and the then Work and Pensions Secretary, Pat McFadden. There are scathing comments about the Prime Minister and other leading politicians which were never meant to see the light of day, and come across now as disloyal. Reading them I can’t help but suspect part of this was simply letting off steam. Politicians have a right, as we all do, to trust that casual remarks sometimes made in frustration won’t go any further. But of course they sometimes do and in the days of smart phones this trust is coming to seem naïve. Perhaps these days we could reflect that Jesus’ prophecy: ‘What you have said in the dark will be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in an inner chamber will be proclaimed on the housetops’. This is very challenging. Who hasn’t said something disparaging behind someone’s back and then interacted with them as if they’d never spoken? Hypocrisy is part of the human condition. And Jesus himself warns against it. ‘Let your yea be yea and your no be no’. That leaves it up to us to make judgments about who we trust and why, who we can safely let off steam to and who it is better to avoid. The public’s right to know has to be balanced by common sense, because in the case of secrecy, context is all: another journalistic cliché of course. But it’s true. And perhaps we should extend our sympathy to those who carry the burden of secrecy on our behalf. Not everything is a plot. Not everything said in private actually matters that much, though its exposure can be deeply embarrassing. Jesus told his disciples to be innocent as doves but I don’t think he was telling them to take everything at face value. In the same sentence he had advised them to be as wise as serpents.

02 JUNE 26

15 JUNE 26

13 JUNE 26