Thought for the Day

Good morning.
I have spent about half my life in England and half in Australia. Watching the television news over the past few weeks has been somewhat confusing. I think of England as a place where nature is more or less under control, a ‘green and pleasant land’, mild in climate, with a landscape shaped by generations of human hands. Raging wildfires, the terrifying unpredictability of nature out of control, railway engineering disrupted by scorching heat, that seems part of a different place. That reminds me of my childhood, driving through areas destroyed by bushfire, areas in which, as the poet Judith Wright put it , “Charred death upon the rock leans his charred bone and stares at death from sockets black with flame.”
Reflecting on nature ‘under control’ as opposed to ‘out of control’, I wonder if this notion of ‘control’ isn’t exactly where the problem lies. At least since the industrial revolution, we have tended to see the natural world as brute matter for moulding to our will, as so much ‘stuff’ to be exploited, to be consumed. That approach has brought progress, but also the damage to our planet and the climate change from which we now suffer. Our thirst for ‘control’ has led us to a place where many young people, faced with an ecological crisis, feel more ‘out of control’ than ever before.
The bewitching vision of the writer of the book of Genesis is so very different. In the garden story, the relationship between the human and the natural world is not one of ‘control’ but of ‘authority’, of rule with a delegated responsibility for the natural world. Nature in this tradition is both an essentially good gift, and one damaged by rebellion against its giver, the Creator. It is therefore to be treasured, but not to be worshipped, nor even simply affirmed. So, we are right to be grateful for fire when it warms, and to be repelled by it when it kills. The human responsibility is not to ‘control’ nature but to tend it as one tends a garden, to work with it when we can, and to work for its healing when we can’t. In this vein, for example, science has recently affirmed the wisdom of ancient Aboriginal Australian practices of fire management, practices that by contained burning, by working with, rather than against ‘country’, limit the occurrence of more devastating fire.
Had we listened more carefully to the Genesis story over the last two hundred and fifty years, and less to the logic of consumption and control, we might now be in a better place ecologically. Reflecting on the story at this point, may just give our planet a chance.

17 AUG 26

TODAY, AUGUST 15, is traditionally the day that Catholics celebrate the feast of the Assumption, that marks Mary, mother of Jesus, being taken both body and soul into heaven. Countless Catholics even before the Church made it official dogma, believed it.
What intrigues me, though, is when the Church did make the Assumption dogma. It was confirmed by Pope Pius XII in 1950. So just five years after the end of the Second World War, when millions of Jewish people lost their lives in the Holocaust, the Catholic Church officially endorsed a Jewish woman as Queen of Heaven.
There’s still controversy about Pius XII, elected Pope in 1939. Some historians argue that he didn’t do enough for the Jewish people, while others say he worked behind the scenes to help save Jews from the Nazis. Before he became Pope, as Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the Vatican Secretary of State, he signed on behalf of his predecessor, Pius XI, the 1933 concordat that guaranteed the rights of the Catholic Church to operate in Germany.
What is less well-known is that four years later, horrified by what was happening in Germany – and monitored by Pacelli – the Vatican issued a papal teaching document or encyclical on the situation there. Called With Burning Anxiety, it was written in German, not the usual Latin, and read out in all Catholic Churches in Germany on Palm Sunday, 1937.
It endorsed the Jewish scriptures as worthy of respect and condemned the exaltation of race – in other words the Nazi obsession with the Aryan race. This so infuriated the Nazis they tried to confiscate copies of the encyclical.
While that document was published by Pius XI and probably authored by Pacelli, it was also probably influenced by the thinking of a Jewish woman, Edith Stein. Stein, a philosopher, converted to Catholicism and became a Carmelite nun. Stein was later arrested and died in Auschwitz in 1942. Her extensive body of writing, including the substantial letter she wrote to Pius XI, warning of the Nazis’ desire to destroy the Jews and their idolising of race and power, as well as her thinking on Mary, survives.
Stein saw Mary as the ideal woman, nurturing and sustaining others. A woman imitate Mary, not only in the home but in the workplace, Stein wrote, “conscious of where there is want and where help is needed, intervening and regulating as far as it is possible….Then will she, like a good spirit, spread blessing everywhere.”
A good spirit that spreads blessings everywhere – that is an aspiration inspired by one Jewish woman writing of another and one I cherish on the feast of the Assumption.

Good morning.
I’ve lived in Wales for the best part of two decades and slowly felt less of an outsider. But last week I found myself in deepest Cymru, at the Eisteddfod: the annual festival of Welsh language, music and literature, which this year took place near Cardigan framed by the Preseli hills.
The Eisteddfod is a cultural celebration but it draws on druidic ceremonies. My friend became a member of the Gorsedd: imagine a combination of getting an MBE and a druid initiation. She swore on a sword to uphold Welsh culture, and received a kind of blessing from the Archdruid, the First Minister looking on in his druid robes.
It was a moment of pride in Welsh identity but sometimes nationalist narratives make me uneasy. I can’t help but wonder who it excludes. My discomfort no doubt stems from being the son of a Jewish refugee from Nazism. The universality of Buddhist teachings was always part of its draw — but even that can be co-opted by nationalist politics.
And yet, as a Jewish Buddhist from Croydon, I respond to the powerful rootedness that’s so palpable at the Eisteddfod.
My friend runs a small meeting space in the festival, and I crowded in with a few dozen others for a performance featuring a storyteller and Catrin Finch, the harpist – a celebration of awen: of the land and its tales.
I don't speak Welsh, but I could roughly follow the stories, which came from the Mabinogion, the compendium of Welsh myths, many about this part of Wales. One featured Rhiannon, a queen wrongly accused of killing her child. As a penance she must sit at the castle gates, tell visitors her story and offer to carry them across the threshold.
In the performance, Rhiannon’s passionate cry declared the love and hope still burning within her. But she sets her fury aside, carries strangers on her back, and becomes larger than the pattern of blame and revenge. Buddhism calls this the deepest freedom — not escaping suffering but refusing to be imprisoned by it.
The awen I respond to transcends borders. The Preseli rocks were taken east to build Stonehenge — raised partly to track the sun’s movements. This week, as the sky darkened over the whole of Britain, it struck me that this magic was never only Wales's to possess. It belongs to anyone willing to receive it.

13 AUG 26