Thought for the Day

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.

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.

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.