Thought for the Day

Good morning.
Desmond Morris the zoologist, tv presenter and best-selling author who died at the weekend at the age of 98, owed his fame to his book, The Naked Ape. The book was published close on 60 years ago and was a runaway success - it was translated into at least 23 languages and sold more than 20 million copies. Not everyone loved it - though controversy is never bad for sales - and Morris himself used to like to tell the tale of a heated confrontation with a group of clergyman in Canada over whether humans and/or chimpanzees possessed a soul. Morris's slogan was that 'man is a risen ape and not a fallen angel' and certain Christian groups were said to have burnt the book.
The funny thing about that slogan is that it is certainly no part of mainline Christian teaching that humans are fallen angels. The person most often thought of in such terms is the devil, and even that notion was a fringe one - ironically perhaps, some of the outliers who seem to have thought that the devil and humans might be fallen angels, such as the Cathars, were themselves burnt as heretics, with or without any books.
So if we take away the false dichotomy in Morris's slogan, we are left with the assertion that 'man is a risen ape'. But as I look around me at the world we humans are making, I'm not sure how risen we are - in fact the main problem for our self-understanding is not that Darwin and his later followers have caused us to think too little of ourselves, but that in spite of Darwin - and in fact in spite of Christian teaching too - we are still inclined to think too much of ourselves.
The most central and crucial affirmation of the myths of creation in the book of Genesis is that humans - along with everything else in the cosmos - are creatures. We talk about bringing someone who is getting a bit high and mighty down to earth - and the line in Genesis chapter 2, 'the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground', is meant to do just that. No hint of angelic origins here - we are made from the stuff that we wash from our feet and swill down the drain. Humility - originally from the Latin, humus, for ground or earth - is the right disposition for someone who knows the stuff from which they are made.
Apes we may well be, but we are the only apes who, with an overweening sense of our own capacities lord it over each other and over the rest of the created order, bending them and it to our purposes, producing political dystopias on the one hand, and threatening environmental disaster on the other. It turns out in fact, then, that Desmond Morris was not doing us humans down, but perhaps sugaring the pill - we are not so much risen apes as fallen ones.

Good morning. There have been some notable anniversaries in the news recently.
Fighter plane extraordinaire, the Spitfire – star of the Battle of Britain – turned 90 this year. One former RAF air controller described the aircraft as epitomising “the spirit, backbone and sheer bloody-mindedness of a tiny island whose people would not give up and would never surrender”. Rousing stuff.
There have been other rheumy-eyed retrospectives too. Queen Elizabeth II was born 100 years ago this year, and it has plausibly been said of her late Majesty that she represented the very last stable myth of this nation.
Beyond these shores, this year marks 250 years since the founding of the United States of America, and 25 years since the attacks of 9/11. Two very different kinds of anniversary, for sure. But both have come freshly into view over the last few months, since the war with Iran.
The word “anniversary” comes from the Latin anniversarius, meaning “returning yearly”. It names those moments in the year when time circles back on itself. Originally, in medieval Christian usage, anniversaries referred to a death: an anniversary Mass. But arguably, even the most joyful commemoration is a kind of mourning, in recognising that something has now passed into history.
Perhaps that sounds a bit bleak. But I make the observation with feeling, as someone who’s just turned fifty. I marked that personal milestone with a dinner that brought together loved ones from each decade of my life: earliest school friends; others from university, work, and beyond; my three daughters too, who are (to my slight astonishment) now grown up enough to help host.
It was wonderful. But taking stock at my fiftieth, it struck me that all anniversaries, whether public or private, involve a curious kind of double vision. They obviously ask us to look backwards, which can be a heady business, given that even sharing happy memories may be a way of feeling sad, for reminding us of good times now gone.
Less obviously, though, anniversaries invite us to look forwards. They’re more than an occasion for nostalgia or handwringing. Recollection is also about reckoning. By pausing our ever-hectic lives, anniversaries allow us to think about the future through lessons we have learned from the past: as individuals, a society, a whole human race. They might, in that sense, be seen as calendared response to the psalmist’s prayer: ““Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom”.
Remembering may fill us with gratitude or regret, but it also sharpens our sense of what’s still worth doing and preserving – as well as, what is yet worth striving for.

Good morning. This week will mark the centenary of the birth of Queen Elizabeth II and a new charity is being established in her honour. Its work will focus on restoring shared spaces in communities, based on her belief that ‘everyone is our neighbour’.

She articulated this view in her 2004 Christmas broadcast, drawing on Jesus’ story of the Good Samaritan, which he told in response to a lawyer who asks with typical legal precision ‘Who is my neighbour’. The story is of a man who is attacked and left for dead at the side of a road. First a priest passes by on the other side. Then a Levite, another religious official, also passed by. At this point I think many in the crowd, listening to the story, had a knowing smile on their faces. They had heard this story many times before. Next would come the hero, a Jewish lay person who would help the man. This was an anti-clerical story and people like a story which makes a mockery of religious hypocrisy. But Jesus said a Samaritan came along, got his hands dirty by tending to the man’s wounds, put him on his donkey and booked him int the local hotel, breakfast included, for the next month. I think now smiles faded and mutterings began. ‘Did he say Samaritan? Doesn’t he know the historic hatred between Jews and those foreigner Samaritans. This preacher should keep out of politics!’

The late Queen commented that ‘the implication….. is clear. Everyone is our neighbour, no matter what race, creed or colour. The need to look after a fellow human being is far more important than any cultural or religious differences.’

I was working in the US last week, and in the midst of media and one to one discussions about Presidents and Popes, war and gas prices, and conduct in public office, I was struck by how an increasingly polarised culture uses religion and race to withdraw from shared spaces and to demonise the other. Yet, one evening I shared dinner with both a Jewish scholar and an African American scholar. Both spoke about their traumatic experiences of prejudice and oppression in racism and antisemitism. Both disagreed with each other vehemently on the current political situation and way forward. But both had faith in a God of justice and grace, and had discovered that in the shared space of mutual hospitality of meals together what it meant to be neighbours.

It gave me hope and demonstrated to me that a broken world can be healed not only by big political solutions but also by one meal at a time.

18 APRIL 26

I found myself not long ago in a courtroom as a witness for a person claiming asylum in the UK on the grounds that they had converted to Christianity, and would be persecuted in the country they had been born in if they returned. I’d got to know him well, prepared him to be baptised and he was a regular member of our congregation. We had even eaten mustard seeds together as we discussed the meaning of Jesus’s teaching in the gospels about the kingdom of God.
In court, he was asked to name the 12 apostles. He got to 5 before mistakenly mentioning Isaiah. The following Sunday I asked our own congregation, some of whom had been going to church for 50 years, to name the 12 apostles. No one could, and it was gently pointed out that the gospels themselves don’t quite agree on the precise 12 with a question over Thaddeus. Back in the courtroom, I was also asked whether I thought it was possible to be Christian without being able to read. Our congregation member was not literate. I refrained from commenting that for hundreds of years, nothing in Christian doctrine was written down until the formation of the Creeds in the 4th century, and simply answered yes, in my opinion I thought it was possible to be Christian without being able to read.
The system was working as it should, the lawyers were doing what the state required them to do. The court had to determine whether this conversion to Christianity was legitimate or not. But learning the apostles’ names or being able to read was not, and could never be, the place where true and deep lived faith would breathe and flourish.
The discovery that there is, in the words of the BBC reporters, a ‘sham industry’, providing assistance to people to enter the UK illegally on the grounds of sexuality or belief, is not very surprising. Enormous efforts are made by people trying to get around the housing or benefits systems for example, and huge sums are spent employing accountants to minimise the amount – legally or illegally - an individual has to pay in tax. For every bureaucratic system put in place to try to organise society for the good of the whole, there will be a shadow system, dedicated to get around it for personal gain.
In such shadow systems, the state’s attempt at fairness, however imperfectly or carelessly expressed sometimes, is replaced with active cruelty towards the most vulnerable in our society: by traffickers, or any who exploit the desperation of those whose life circumstances have placed them at the mercy of the system. State instruments will always be blunt, and political fashions come and go as to which issues attract the most attention. But the collective commitment to compassion, fair judgement, mercy and care towards those who are most in need of help, will never, can never, go out of fashion.