These are the scripts for my contribution to Prayer for the Day – BBC Radio 4, Saturday, June 4th to Friday, June 10th. (Please note that the scripts were lightly edited prior to recording, so they are not verbatim transcripts of the recorded programmes).
Saturday, June 4th
Good morning. Today marks two significant anniversaries in humanity’s ongoing struggle against tyranny. The Dunkirk evacuation of Allied troops from France ended on the 4th of June, 1940, when the war against Nazi Germany looked close to failure. On the 4th of June 1989, the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing were violently crushed. In each of these cases, the longing for justice and freedom inspired people to great acts of courage and sacrifice, even when there appeared to be little hope of immediate success. It’s that same spirit which is inspiring people across the Middle East today, to risk their lives in the name of freedom.On the 4th of June, 1957, Martin Luther King delivered a famous speech in which he referred to the ‘cosmic companionship’ that is possible if one believes that ‘the universe is on the side of justice.’
That belief has sustained many people through failure and persecution. Justice is the most indestructible of values, but it’s also elusive and easily betrayed. Power can be its greatest ally, when the powerful stand in solidarity with the oppressed. But too often power becomes the enemy of justice, when it muffles the voice of conscience and closes our hearts to suffering and need.
Each of us has to decide which side we’re on in the struggle for justice, however great or small our power might be. Justice is sometimes achieved by great heroic acts, but more often it presents itself as the myriad opportunities woven into our daily encounters and relationships. The quest for justice is discovered within the mosaic of all our human interactions. Today we pray in the words of the prophet Micah, that we might act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with our God. Amen.
Monday, June 6th
Good morning. In 1979, the Boomtown Rats had a hit single with a song called ‘I don’t like Mondays’. Bob Geldof wrote the song after hearing an interview with a sixteen year old girl who had been on a shooting spree in a children’s playground. Asked why she did it, she said, ‘I don’t like Mondays; this livens up the day.’
Thankfully, few people are so extreme in their dislike of Mondays, but I suspect it’s the rare and lucky person who faces the start of another working week without some sense of apprehension. For some of us, the week crowds in with too many demands and expectations. For others, it yawns ahead, empty and tedious.
We live in a culture which has distorted our sense of what work is about. There is a dignity and beauty to human life which is never reducible to productivity and economics. Exploitation, forced unemployment and poor working conditions violate the dignity of the human made in the image of God. Through our work, paid or unpaid, we’re called to participate in the work of God’s creation, to become co-creators with God. That means balancing work and rest, doing and being. It means letting go of our anxieties, stresses and ambitions in order to live creatively and meaningfully in the here and now.
Jesus invites his followers to ‘consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They toil not, neither do they spin, yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.’ Each one of us is a work of God, a work of infinite beauty and worth, before and beyond whatever work we do.
In the words of the psalmist, ‘I praise you God, because I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Your works are wonderful. I know that full well. Amen.’
Tuesday, June 7th
Good morning. Today is the feast day of St. Robert of Newminster, a twelfth century English Cistercian monk and one of the founders of Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire. Robert’s biographers describe him as a kind and gentle man, merciful to others but strict in his personal regime of poverty.
Cistercian spirituality is based on the Rule of St. Benedict. It’s a weaving together of prayer, manual labour, and a life of austerity. The Cistercians made a significant contribution to agriculture and technology in medieval Europe, and they were known for the architectural beauty of their abbeys such as Tintern, Hailes and Fountains.
Today, these ruined buildings lend a haunting beauty to our countryside. They’re tranquil places to visit, their contours softened by time, with few reminders of the violence which destroyed them in the religious and political upheavals of the sixteenth century.
Our quest for God expresses itself in sublimely creative ways, but it sometimes drives us to terrible acts of destruction. Religion encompasses both these aspects of the human spirit. The lives of saints such as Robert reflect the virtues of holiness, simplicity and creativity which all great religions seek to cultivate among their followers. But today also reminds us of the darker side of religion, because it marks the anniversary of the beginning of the siege of Jerusalem during the first crusade in 1099.
Never before has it been so urgent for us to go beyond the violence and conflict of religious differences, to discover a shared vision of peace. With its rich diversity of peoples and faiths, society today offers us unique opportunities for dialogue and understanding. We ask Robert of Newminster and all the saints to pray with us, as we seek a more simple, peaceful and creative way of being together in the world. Amen.
Wednesday, June 8th
Good morning. Today is World Oceans Day, when we’re invited to reflect on the oceans on which life depends. Over-fishing and pollution are threatening the world’s water resources, and some say that population growth is bringing us to the brink of a catastrophic water shortage.
These are challenging realities, but the oceans are more than a resource for human exploitation. Beyond any usefulness to us, they have intrinsic meaning and value. We experience that deeper reality when we take time to be at rest within nature, when we stand on the beach or walk along a cliff top and marvel at the beauty of creation.
But the oceans also have the power to overwhelm us. In the Japanese tsunami, we were reminded of how small and vulnerable we are in relation to the majesty of the cosmos. In the nuclear crisis which followed, we discovered yet again how destructive our modern technology can be, unless knowledge and power are tempered by wisdom and love. Too often we confuse knowledge about the world with power over the world. Wisdom is that form of knowledge which teaches us to love the world and to live creatively within it. To quote scientist and theologian Guy Consolmagno, ‘Science gives us answers about how the universe works; it doesn’t explain why we are so delighted to find those answers. God doesn’t make the tides. God makes them awesome. We learn that from prayer; and from any surfer.’
Only when we rediscover a sense of awe and wonder in relation to nature, might we learn how to flourish in harmony with the seasons, tides and species of the natural world. Then we might rediscover what it means to say with the psalmist, ‘Praise the Lord from the earth, you great sea creatures, and all the ocean depths.’ Amen.
Thursday, June 9th
Good morning. At the dawn of history, when something in the evolutionary process jumped the tracks of consciousness, the human emerged as a dreaming ape. Deep in the caves of the world, creatures began to paint. A species had evolved that could imagine the world other than it is, and from that imaginative leap came the very essence of what it means to be human. Werner Herzog’s latest film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, takes us inside those caves and enables us to gaze on wondrous images through thirty thousand years of our time on earth, bringing us face to face with the most mysterious and haunting questions about the origins and meaning of human life. Some say those were the earliest expressions of religious art.
In the Middle Ages, the Gothic cathedrals of Europe were home to some of the world’s greatest art. On the 9th of June, 1311, Duccio’s altarpiece, the Maesta, was installed in Siena Cathedral amidst great ceremony. An eyewitness account tells of how the whole city came together for the procession, and the poor received many alms. The centre panel of the altarpiece shows the Virgin enthroned in majesty, holding the infant Christ, surrounded by angels and saints. It’s an image of astonishing serenity, gazing out at us across the centuries with an infinite peace.
Art is powerless to change the world, but great art changes us. It sets us free, and that enables us to imagine a better world. That’s why tyrants and dictators always wage war on the freedom of art. It remains the most primal and creative expression of human freedom. Without it, we’re less than human. Today, we pray for the gift to see the mystery of God in the beauty of creation, and to reflect that beauty and mystery in all our artistic endeavours. Amen.
Friday, June 10th
Good morning. What kind of structure do you like best? I love bridges. Unlike many other large engineering projects, bridges add beauty and interest to a landscape or a city. It’s hard to imagine San Francisco without the Golden Gate Bridge, Sydney without the Harbour Bridge, or Edinburgh without the Forth Bridge. In Bristol where I live, Brunel’s bridge spans the Avon Gorge as a marvel of Victorian engineering.
The Millennium Bridge in London opened on the 10th of June, 2000. It’s sometimes known as the wobbly bridge, because it began to sway as crowds of people crossed it. They all unconsciously adjusted their movements to fit with one another and with the bridge, so that the swaying increased. In engineering terms that was a significant problem, but it shows how powerful we humans can be when, consciously or unconsciously, we walk in harmony with one another.
No wonder that we so often use the language of bridges as a metaphor. Bridges unite communities, they allow communication instead of separation, and for people living in remote regions they can make the difference between poverty and prosperity, isolation and integration. When we speak of building, crossing and burning bridges, we use those physical structures to create imagined worlds of meaning.
Christians sometimes speak of Christ as a bridge between the human and God. A bridge is not a resting place, but a space of movement, connection and purpose. That’s why the life of faith is so often described as a journey. In the words of St. Augustine, ‘You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.’ Amen.
