Thought for the Day

Good morning. “Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out.” I was reminded of that quip from G. K. Chesterton last week, when I visited The Old Ferryboat Inn in Cambridgeshire, which not only claims to be the oldest pub in England (serving ale since 560AD, apparently), but also to have a resident ghost.
A young woman took her life for love almost a thousand years ago and local legend has it she’s haunted the place ever since, appearing each year on the anniversary of her death: the 17th March. That date also happens to be St Patrick’s Day, which is perhaps not the ideal occasion for sober eyewitness testimony. But it’s easy to be sceptical….
According to a recent National Folklore Survey, more than a third of people in England believe in ghosts, and many like the idea of them too. “A haunted house at the top of your street is fantastic,” said Caroline Gibson from Pontefract in Yorkshire, speaking to the BBC about a poltergeist who is currently trending on social media, after featuring on the paranormal podcast, Uncanny.
The occult does not sit easily with mainstream Christianity. The Church warns against séances, spirit-hunting and attempts to conjure the dead. Yet in an age inclined to explain everything materially, Christianity insists that the world does indeed have a spiritual dimension.
A problem remains, however, of how to discern between spiritual reality versus superstition — or for that matter, between good versus evil spiritual forces.
“Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out” doesn’t really help us with that discernment, but Chesterton, himself a Christian, followed up with another one-liner that might be more useful. “The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”
That gets us closer. Open the mind, just not endlessly, to no purpose: open it up to close it again.
The risk of being open-minded is that you may sometimes look foolish or naïve. But there is risk too in being so determined never to be gulled, or seemingly unscientific, that you refuse in advance the richness that comes with leading a spiritual life.
Ghost stories challenge us to believe that there’s more to the world than what we can understand in purely physical terms. Christianity goes further still, teaching that we ourselves are more than merely physical beings.
If a haunted house in your street can be called fantastic, then why shouldn’t a church be called the same – in both meanings of the word? Fantastic in the modern sense of being great, but also in the older sense of being extra-ordinary. A place for open minds to shut down on something solid.

Good morning.
As the sun finally begins to coax flowers into bloom, the Chelsea Flower Show will open its gates today. The Royal Horticultural Society’s annual event sees organisations create beautiful planted spaces, which inspire and educate visitors. With our news headlines full of unremitting contempt and calamity, millions of us will tune into coverage of Chelsea this week for relief. I’d like to think this is more than just a comforting distraction.
Christian writer CS Lewis wrote about his vision of hell in the novella ‘the great divorce’. Hell was a place of continual twilight where people moved further and further apart into infinite space, driven by mutual suspicion and a sense of time ticking down. Paradise, by contrast was a place of colour, fruitfulness, and sunshine – open to anyone bold enough to stay. In paradise, people were unafraid of each other or the future. They sought out newcomers, working to convince them to remain.
The show gardens at Chelsea may be sanctuaries of beauty, but they are also about shared spaces and living well together. Many, like the Trussell ‘together’ garden, are inspired specifically by the way communities deal with hardship – the Trussel Trust’s foodbanks tackle food poverty. Like Lewis’ paradise, communal gardens like this one combat the notion that safety and solace can only be had by building walls and retreating from the world.
John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, wrote a collection of health remedies based on what people could grow or source themselves. Titled ‘Primitive Physick’ and published in 1747 it would run to 23 editions during his life. Although his remedies were of their day, his commitment to people’s access to healthcare and use of what was readily available still bears weight. Today, the rooftop garden of the national Methodist offices in London is planted with herbs and flowers used in Primitive Physick, recognising the importance of gardens to our collective mental and physical well-being.
A reality of life in Britain today is that access to outdoor space is not equal: many do not have gardens. A Christian vision for good community still resists the notion that beautiful outdoor spaces are only the preserve of private wealth.
After the show, all of the Chelsea gardens will find their way out into communities around the country – plants will go to balconies, windowsills and neglected urban spaces, gardens to hospices, schools, and the verges of motorways. They will join many other community gardens schemes, allowing even those of us who live surrounded by pavement, to put our hands in soil and see something grow. These gardens are places of retreat, yes: but also places of truth telling about the quiet work of living peacefully together.

18 MAY 26

Good morning. Reed Hoffman, one of the founders of Linked In, tells us that typing is over and voicepilling is here.
This is the word he has coined to capture the way, he says, we are set to bypass keyboards.
After the quill the pen, then the typewriter, the text, the voice note… but in voicepilling entire articles, essays or books - everything actually - is spoken directly to the machine for production. Hands-free.
Is voicepilling a word that will stick? Sounds unlikely but who knows? New words seem to be invented more rapidly than ever but then language is always being born again.
At an open mic event I was at this week one poet used the beautiful expression ‘sonder’ - the kind of neglected word from Chaucer or Shakespeare which etymologists and crossword compilers love to rediscover.
Sonder is defined as one’s realization that each person you pass by ‘is the main character in their own story, in which you are just an extra.’
The definition comes from John Koenig in his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a collection of words he created to capture emotions that he says, ‘we feel but don’t have the words too express’.
Some words or phrases disappear, some morph into new meaning… while others stick around for ever.
Few writers have had more stickability than William Tyndale. The 500th anniversary of his English New Testament is currently being celebrated in an exhibition at the British Library and, from next month, at St Paul’s Cathedral.
Tyndale believed it shouldn’t only be priests who could access the Bible, but that everyone should hear it in everyday English.
His translation, published in 1526, was so popular that when King James commissioned his 'Authorized Version’, nearly a century later, the royal translation team ripped ninety percent of their text straight out of Tyndale.
His phrases continue to haunt the language: 'from strength to strength’; ‘for better or worse’; ‘lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil’; ‘salt of the earth’ and ‘fight the good fight’.
Tyndale was after a poetic language understood by ordinary people and was so successful that, as someone said, ‘No Tyndale, No Shakespeare’.
Or as playwright David Edgar put it: ‘No Tyndale, No Kindle’.
But in democratizing religion, in translating the divine into the human, he was branded the ‘most dangerous man in England’ and burned at the stake.
The political powers could see, to use another of his phrases, ‘the writing on the wall’.
Words are dangerous.
Once you can speak the divine in your own tongue then you can bring god down from heaven onto earth and decide for yourself what your religion means for your life.
You can, as Tyndale wrote, ‘let there be light'

Sometimes, digging into the origins of a word can help with real insights into a contemporary issue.

Take the meaning of the word person. The ancient Greeks used the word for face – prosopon – to mean a person, while in Latin, the word persona, from which we get the English person, owes its origins to sonare, which means to sound. So ideas about a person in these ancient languages focused on what can be seen and heard – the face and the voice. They’re integral to how people connect with one another.

This importance of the person came to mind when I read reports this week that the revamped NHS app, sold to the public as providing patients with a doctor in their pocket by digitising services, has had a distressing unforeseen drawback. Some patients, according to these reports, discovered test results for serious illnesses, such as cancer, by them being uploaded on the app. The NHS has said it has reissued guidance to stop this happening, confirming the importance of the soothing voice of a doctor breaking bad news. As one patient who says this happened to them, put it: “Seeing someone face to face is so important”.

Technology can speed life up and be super-efficient, but there are clearly alienating, impersonal drawbacks too. When Pope Leo was elected a year ago, he said he was going to make artificial intelligence a key priority of his work. He’s about to release his first encyclical, or teaching document on AI, focusing on the importance of human dignity as the world undergoes such profound technological change. He’s also released a message on AI for the Catholic Church’s annual World Communications Day, being marked this Sunday. It warns AI can erode people’s ability to think analytically and creatively.

Not that Pope Leo is a Luddite opposed to change. He’s comfortable with technology. One of his brothers told a reporter that when he got locked out of his computer recently, he phoned the Pope who quickly told him what to do to get back in.

But Leo’s concern is that if AI takes over areas of life where human interaction used to be essential, it damages the deepest levels of human communication.

People of faith, like Pope Leo, believe that faces and voices are sacred because God created humanity in his image and likeness. Back in the fourth century, St Gregory of Nyssa said that preserving human faces and voices means preserving an indelible reflection of divine love. It’s as true today as it was then. For a patient facing bad news, a gentle voice and a consoling look can mean the difference between what you can bear and what you cannot.