Thought for the Day

Good morning. I recently came across a new term - ‘chronically terminal’. Janis Chen, has stage four lung cancer and writing in the Guardian, she describes how every day is a struggle to go on. She lives in what she calls ‘The long middle’, the period between first diagnosis and the time when she will finally pass from this life; a time that is ‘chronically terminal’. But still a time for living, of living as best she can. As 3.5 million people in the UK live with cancer and there are 420,000 new cases a year, many will resonate with her situation.
In this beautifully written piece she describes the effect of illness on people’s religious belief or lack of belief. She said that she found herself back in church on Sundays. ‘Faith furnished me with a different architecture for endurance: it offered a vocabulary of hope’. But she also notes that a member of her support group who previously had a faith totally lost it as a result of the illness. They could not understand why it had happened to them. ‘To some, the diagnosis is a clarifying fire that burns away the trivial, leaving a refined spiritual core. To others, it is an acid dissolving everything they once held.’
What the illness has done for her more than anything else has sharpened her discernment. As she put it:
It leaves only the essential, revealing that meaning resides entirely in the quality of our attention. To walk through a park, to watch the sunlight catch a river or to register the laughter of children against the thrum of a passing bus is to realise these are no longer background noise; they are the destination.
Particularly at this time of year with trees budding and blossom coming out what she writes seems particularly pertinent and it brought to mind a famous interview between Melvyn Bragg and the playwright Dennis Potter as he was dying. Dennis Potter said that when he looked out of the window he did not just say ‘Oh that’s nice blossom’.
I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it. the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous.
It is this living in the moment that the discipline of mindfulness is trying to achieve, whatever stage of life we are at. Father Pierre de Caussade, in the first half of the 18th century, wrote about it and called it ‘the Sacrament of the present moment’. For him however it was not just about experiencing the present more intensely, but being open and receptive to what might be being asked of us in that moment-in every now there was, he taught, a providence to be discerned and responded to.

26 MAR 26

25 MAR 26

In an interview on this programme yesterday, the former national security adviser Peter Ricketts; was asked ‘what about that old thing…. Wisdom’? it was in the contemporary context of the war between the US, Israel and Iran. It’s a modern question that echoes the question in the Book of Proverbs: Where can wisdom be found?
Good question. Difficult question. The search for wisdom today is in the context of the escalation of violence in the Middle East, and in the counting of over 60 active state-based conflicts and wars worldwide, the highest number since (records began in) 1946. And in the context of another escalation; the exponential growth in the capability and reach of artificial intelligence, which scientists are now calling the ‘Intelligence Explosion’ predicted back in the 1960s, when human beings cede control of the growth and development of AI.
In both of these enormous endeavours, the speed and scale of revolutionary action is disorientating for many populations around the world. And in both the prosecution of global war, and the ceding of the growth of AI to AI itself, the illusion of human control over events is both inaccurate and has the potential to be ultimately destructive for, well, everyone.
In short: it’s easier to light the spark of AI than to control the spread of its flames. And it’s easier to start a war than to end it.
It is a question for our time – what is it in human beings that is served by our need for speed and escalation? As a species, we seem to give free reign to these instincts, sometimes useful of course, but also with the capacity to brutalise and crush us. These instincts leave little room for creativity, kindness and selflessness that take more time than we seem to think we have. But the search for wisdom in Scripture is characterised by the taking of time, by a commitment to restraint, self-discipline, and closely linked not so much to the acquisition of more knowledge but a desire to understand.
Tomorrow, the first woman to be Archbishop of Canterbury will begin her public ministry with prayer, music, silence and the gathering of community in a house of prayer that has stood for 1400 years. In gathering to sing and pray, it might look as if the church is fiddling while Rome is burning. But the ancient liturgies and symbolic actions form a different sort of public statement: that wisdom matters. And that even in the perilous times that we are in, humility and grace point the way to another vision of what it is to be human before God.

23 MAR 26