Thought for the Day

By BBC Radio 4Religion & Spirituality

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Thought for the Day episodes

January 24 The Rev Canon Dr Rob Marshall
Places where strangers become friends
Good morning. The pub in Oxford last week looked its usual, amazing self. I’d been doing a bit of teaching and was staying in a nearby college overnight. Outside was dark, cold and wet. But as I pushed the pub door open, I was met with a warm, candlelit cacophony of conversation. People were eating supper, playing board games, reading books. It was a glorious, uplifting sight.
We know that, for decades now, pub landlords have been facing multiple challenges in order simply to keep their doors open. In 2025, the equivalent of one pub a day in England and Wales had to close its doors permanently.
So it was good this week to hear Prince William talking about how much he loves everything a pub has to offer and urging us to do all we can to support our local. Pubs, he said, are the beating heart of many communities, where we can meet with friends and neighbours.2
Along with churches and other places of worship, many of which are also reimagining themselves simply to survive, pubs provide a radical alternative to the social isolation and loneliness affecting many groups in society. I observe this more and more in the course of my own work. Often unseen, people of all ages and backgrounds can unwittingly find themselves alone, without the meansor motivation to find a non-transactional space where they can simply “be” with other people. Many community cafes are also thriving like never before.
Christian theology has always celebrated hospitality. The Bible stresses the importance of people being together to meet as well as sharing food and drink. This is something Jesus is also frequently found doing in the gospels as he meets with an interesting range of people.
St Paul, whose feast day the Church celebrates tomorrow, wrote many letters to the early Church, stressing not only the importance of worship but also the spiritual benefits that fellowship with others brings. He regards this as an important ingredient towards spiritual renewal and happiness.
For centuries pubs have been at the centre of British culture. The Catholic writer Hillaire Belloc warned - “when you have lost your Inns drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England.” They've left their mark throughout literature, in Orwell and Dickens, Dylan Thomas and Chaucer. His pilgrims began their journey to Canterbury at the Tabard Inn!
As modern-day pilgrims, navigating an ever-complex world of conundrums and challenges [wherever our final destination might be] preserving spaces for conversation and friendship, where strangers can become friends, is surely an imperative.
4 min
January 23 Jayne Manfredi
“You’ve failed.”
Words spoken to me by a man with a clipboard, in a Renault Clio back in 1997. Failing my driving test seems trivial now, from the misty vantage point of nearly thirty years distance, but at age seventeen these were devastating words to hear. The unpleasant sting of failure is a lingering memory; the embarrassment, increasing with each friend calling to say they had passed. The sense of inadequacy. The desperation and the increasing certainty that I would never, ever pass myself.
Such is the stigma and social detriment of failure that some people will resort to nefarious means in order to pass. Cheating on driving tests has increased by nearly 50% over the past year; a dangerous form of deception which risks lives, and also severs the social contract which relies on us all following the rules in order to be safe. Failure is key both to character building and communal ethics.
The biblical record is littered with examples of human failure, and those who tried everything to avoid it. The Trickster is a common narrative trope, which includes a disreputable collection of characters who cheat and lie in order to succeed rather than risk the disgrace of failure. Abram who persuades Sarai to pose as his sister to dupe Pharoah. Laban who uses deception to ensnare Jacob into working longer for him. Rebekah, the trickster architect of the plan to fool Isaac into blessing her younger son Jacob over his brother Esau. These cheats appear to prosper, at least momentarily, in a moral universe which allowed deception, but the biblical record shows that their ethical misdeeds often came back to haunt them. Jacob, for example, so quick to be part of his mother’s schemes, ended up being deceived himself, tricked into marrying the wrong woman.
The book of Proverbs says that food gained by fraud tastes sweet, but one ends up with a mouth full of gravel. So it was for our biblical tricksters, whom God used to work out his divine purposes - not because God loves a cheater, but because God loves those who fail. It is in the failing and the striving and the trying again that we learn our best lessons.
Elizabeth Day has written that “if you’ve survived it, failure has taught you something.” I finally passed my driving test, but it was in the failure to do so that I learned how to be a good driver. The taste of failure is bitter indeed, hard to swallow and takes a long time to uncomfortably digest, but it’s what feeds our character and helps us to grow, and however horrible it tastes, at least it’s not gravel.
4 min
January 22 Jasvir Singh
22 JAN 26
3 min
January 21 Rev Lucy Winkett
21 JAN 26
4 min
January 20 Rev Dr Sam Wells
20 JAN 26
3 min
January 19 Bishop Philip North
19 JAN 26
3 min
January 17 Chine McDonald
17 JAN 26
4 min
January 16 Bishop Richard Harries
Good morning. There is deep sadness in Tehran and other Iranian cities today as more that 2,500 dead are mourned and it appears that the regime is in control of the streets again. It looks as though the brave attempt of the protestors to bring about change has ended in nothing but more cruel repression. It must be easy to lose heart, not just here but in so many places of the world, and to think that things will always go on in much the same way. So it is good to remind ourselves that things can change. I did not think Apartheid would end without civil war but in 1994 a democratic government was elected in South Africa. I did not think the cold war would end in my lifetime but in 1989 the Berlin wall came tumbling down, whilst in 1979 in Iran the Shah was toppled suddenly and surprisingly. But for those suffering it always seems so long. In the last book of the Bible, written when Christians were being killed for their faith, the author pictures them sheltering under the altar, crying out ‘How long O Lord?’ – how long before justice is established. A cry that goes up every day.
In response to this cry Jesus told one of his surprising stories. A woman who had a legal case against someone kept pestering a hard hearted judge. The judge had no sympathy for the woman and kept sending her away. Eventually he could stand it no longer and granted what she wanted. Jesus told the story to urge us not to give up. However hopeless things appear we are not to cease to pray and work for a world which is just. We are not simply to resign ourselves to things always being as they are now. I love the words of the American playwright Tennessee Williams. He said:
I've met many people that seemed well-adjusted, but …I'm not sure I would want to be well-adjusted to things as they are. I would prefer to be racked by desire for things better than what they are, even for things which are unattainable, than to be satisfied with things as they are.
Those words always bring to my mind one of the Beatitudes of Jesus ‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst that right might prevail’. Hunger and thirst are strong words but they reflect the longing of those not only in Iran but in so many places of the world where people are suffering - and the longing of those who stand in solidarity with them.
3 min
January 15 The Rev Canon Dr Jennifer Smith
Good morning. On my shelf sits a battered US Navy Bible— my American grandfather carried it as he crossed and re-crossed the icy waters of the north Atlantic in the convoys of World War two. When peace came, he was convinced that only nations standing together could prevent humanity tearing itself apart again. In 1947, a lifelong Republican, he ran for Congress on a bold platform: world government. He lost—but the hope for peace guaranteed by shared responsibility continued.
Peace making through collective security, if not world government, found one expression in the first meeting of the United Nations, 80 years ago this week in 1946. It met in the heart of war-ravaged London, at Methodist Central Hall Westminster. As Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevan said at the time, ‘What better place than a house of prayer to search for peace?’
So the church offered its Great Hall to the most powerful dignitaries in the post war world, as it had offered the shelter of its cellars to some of the least powerful during the bombing of the war years.
This coming Saturday the Secretary General of the UN Antonio Gutteres will join others including British Royalty and Cardinal Vincent Nichols in that same Great Hall for a service of thanksgiving, to re-commit to the values that drove the UN’s first formation.
If it was the reality of war that brought nations to the table to form the UN 80 years ago, they’ve perhaps been kept there by the hard-headed calculation that however imperfect, its work in development, education, healthcare, and military engagement, was less costly than the alternative.
When Jesus said ‘Blessed are the peace makers,’ his words reflected the equally hard-headed observation that peace of any kind whether in households or between nations has to be made – it does not happen by accident. To say ‘Christ died for all’ is to say that justice and safety are for all – certainly not for any one nation, and certainly not only for the strong. Because power to act may not align with insight about what will help, all Christian security is by definition collective security.
As we gather this week and give thanks for the work of the United Nations, I will be remembering my grandfather and his Navy-issue Bible; I will remember how frightened he was whenever the prospect of war returned during his long life.
War comes quickly: peace takes slow and patient work, empathy, truth telling and deep commitment to one another. And the cost of failure, if we are honest, is still likely to be borne by the ones who hide from bombs in church cellars, not the ones who make the decisions in the Great Halls above.
3 min
January 14 Mona Siddiqui
14 JAN 26
4 min