Thought for the Day

By BBC Radio 4Religion & Spirituality

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Thought for the Day episodes

July 07 Rhidian Brook
07 JULY 26
4 min
July 06 Bishop Philip North
06 JULY 26
3 min
July 04 Martin Wroe
04 JULY 26
3 min
July 03 Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg
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.
4 min
July 02 Mona Siddiqui
03 JULY 26
3 min
July 01 Chine McDonald
01 JULY 26
3 min
June 30 Jayne Manfredi
30 JUNE 26
4 min
June 29 Bishop Nick Baines
29 JUNE 26
3 min
June 27 Brian Draper
27 JUNE 26
4 min
June 26 Catherine Pepinster
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.
4 min