Broadcast Scripts

Here are the scripts of my most recent radio broadcasts.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY  - BBC Radio 4  

26 August 2002  -  Lavinia Byrne

 Good morning.

 We are the faithful remnant, the happy few who have not left the country in search of the sun and whose Bank Holiday seems to be blessed as so far this weekend – for many of us - our weather has been better than in Majorca.  Down here in Wells in Somerset, that means only one thing: the annual boat race on the moat at the Bishop’s Palace this afternoon will be a riot.  The boats in question are hand-made rafts whose design secrets have been under wraps, only hinted at in the local paper.  Yet scraps of info dribble through.  So we have a boat called God’s Eye from St Cuthbert’s, whose crew have cast faith to the winds as we read that they have ‘ordered in extra supplies of polythene bags and gaffer tape’.

I ask you, did Jonah buy in gaffer tape to insulate the whale’s belly?  Not a bit of it.  He launched out into the face of the deep without so much as water wings and met God there. 

For the writers of our sacred scriptures, water is more than a simple element.  So the psalmist can talk about the people who, ‘went down to the sea in ships, doing business on the mighty waters’, and claim that they ‘saw the deeds of the Lord, his wondrous works in the deep’.  It is as though this medium is both murky and transparent and that somehow we see the gift of God most clearly this way.  For there is mystery here and mystery does us good. 

The beauty of water is that it invites us to play to find the mystery.  It invites us to dance and to swim and yet to be dreamy and reflective.  It doesn’t ask us to become solemn or to put on special faces.  It calls us to joy.  Is that why a former medieval Bishop of Bath and Wells arranged for conduits to take the water that sprung up in his Palace moat out to the citizens as a free gift?  After all, the water came to him as just that because of the natural lie of the land at the foot of the Mendip Hills.  It sprung up just outside his back door, so he did well to hand it on. 

And all because of this mystery business.  With the gift of water comes the gift of life.  With the gift of water comes more than that – a vocabulary that goes beyond words, beyond many of the funny things we try to give each other, a medium that restores us to delight and to play with God.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY  BBC Radio 4

7 June 2002 – Lavinia Byrne

Good morning.

So working from home now attracts over two million people or seven per cent of the work force. And that’s not counting those on a sicky to watch the football.  Some have a day a week away from the open-plan office and, as we learnt yesterday, view this as space to think and write.  Others work full-time at home.  All you need is a computer and a telephone and you’re in business.  All right, some of us develop strategies to make it feel like work: by walking out of the back door and coming in the front to begin a working day, for instance; by striving to be at our desks when the pips announce the nine o’clock news – that’s my one; by wearing certain shoes or developing little rituals of rewards - cups of tea and coffee, the liturgy of the radio on over lunch and the bliss of a newspaper break every so often. 

To anyone setting off to a hectic day of meetings or the barrage of a noisy office, this must sound like heaven – and it is.   The  Christian tradition knows all about the reality of giving people space to think and be themselves.  In the earliest centuries, it was known as the fuga mundi, the flight from the world which made some people saints.  How did it do this?  By enabling them to say that it is all right to withdraw from the hurly burly of everyday life and find something important in solitude.  Though the desert monks and nuns were not to sit there doing nothing.  To keep temptation at bay, they would weave mats of palm tree leaves.  In a word, they would work.

Then they could begin the real task that this flight from the world was all about.  Put briefly, and it was by one of their great leaders, a Desert Father: ‘Remain in your cell; it will teach you everything’.  It’s hard to get the real meaning of that word ‘remain’, because it carries the echoes of the gospel word ‘dwell’ – as in ‘the Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us’.  Meaning that being in your cell or your home is a spiritual activity in its own right and you will learn things about yourself and about God as you do so.  There is great grace to be gained from the work we do at home because in our own homes we learn about interior space, the hunger we have to be true to ourselves and our own vision.  That is the lesson that is being taught to us there.  That’s why it’s worth remaining in your cell and welcoming the space it offers.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY  BBC Radio 4

24 May 2002 – Lavinia Byrne

Good morning.

‘Let us be frank about it: most of our people have never had it so good.’  As a child I knew what that bold claim of Harold Macmillan’s looked like.  I had a visual representation of the fact that the war was over, that we were about to become ‘Young Elizabethans’ and that the future was bright.  For if I behaved, my sister would allow me to inspect her album of chocolate wrappers.  On page one was the front of her Ration Book and then, as you turned over the other pages, a dazzling array of newly-acquired sweetie papers.  It all looked benign.

I contrast that with the world of today, a world into which the four horses of the Apocalypse seem to have been released.  They come from the first four seals of The Book of Revelation:  the white horse, the red horse, the black horse and the pale horse.  Supposedly, they represent war, famine, pestilence and death and we see their hoof prints everywhere in our world. War looming in Kashmir, famine in Malawi, AIDS all over the African continent and elsewhere and daily death in Israel.  The benign view of human nature I learnt as a child has been undermined.

So who rides these horses?  I don’t ask this question to be moralistic; I ask it in an attempt to understand.  Who rides the four horses of the Apocalypse?  In a culture of blame, it looks all too easy to name the culprits:  politicians, the media, disaffected youth, drug addicts, the promiscuous, foreigners.  Sex, drugs and rock and roll, as it were, with the population of Sangatte refugee centre thrown in for good measure.  Oh and – maybe - the Godless, or the Godly.  Put simply, that means other people – and never ourselves.

That’s not good enough.  If we remain in the guilt and blame matrix, we do something humanly and spiritually unwise.  It seems to me important to raise our eyes to the mountains and work out what we actually believe in.  What inspires us?  What would give us the energy to unsaddle the riders of the four horses?  My generation were offered Macmillan’s formula:  that after the dreadful suffering of the War, somehow we had the right to have it so good.  Meaning that to have is good; to have more is better; to have most is best. 

Fifty years on, let’s re-examine that.  I believe the four horses of the Apocalypse have but a single rider and that that rider is poverty.  Could it be that this poverty is fuelled by our desire to have more?

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY BBC Radio 4

28 February 2002 – Lavinia Byrne

Good morning.

‘BT moves to boost broadband demand’ my newspaper told me yesterday morning.  I’m afraid that if my broadband demand gets further boosted, I shall burst.  I put myself down in a queue for ADSL in June 2000 and have yet to have so much as a squeak of interest shown in my request. 

If the words ‘broadband’ and ADSL sound like so much gibberish to you, then please realise that to some of us they are a lifeline, for they represent speeded up access to the internet.  Unsuitable concerns for a religious person?  I don’t think so.  I take huge interest in all things techie.  Why so?   Well, identify with this interest through the medium you know and love:  the radio.  Can you imagine a world without it?  Hilda Matheson, who invented the Shipping Forecast, wrote in 1933 that, ‘ Broadcasting is a harnessing of elemental forces, a capturing of sounds and voices all over the world to which we have hitherto been deaf.’  She suggested that ‘broadcasting, and its allies, telegraphy and telephony, are only stages in the long process that … may end in some form of thought transference of which we now have no conception.’  Close quotes.

Enter the internet, stage right.  Another harnessing of elemental forces, another means of enlarging human consciousness.  A form of thought transference which thrills me.   Why so?  Because of the Great Commission in Matthew’s gospel, about telling the whole world the Good News of the Christian Gospel.  Well partly, but actually for a more powerful reason than that. 

For my faith tells me that communication is part of the very nature of God.  Indeed that this is why we humans, made in the divine image and likeness, are driven by a desire to talk to each other, to tell each other we love each other, to struggle for truth, for the honest word that illuminates and enlightens.

These moral imperatives drive the best of journalism; they can drive us too as we use the internet and its potentially toxic offspring, the email.  In themselves both are morally neutral.  In the hands of the wrong person they wreak havoc, as we are presently learning to our cost; when well used they rustle with angels’ wings helping human consciousness to mirror the mind of God.   

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY - BBC RADIO 4

21 February 2002  -  Lavinia Byrne

 Which is worse: neglect of the living or neglect of the dead?  That’s a question I never thought I’d have to ask.  But the frankly ghastly story from the ill-named town of Noble in Georgia has put a chill into my bones.  It’s not simply that the local people were cheated in a commercial transaction when the Tri-State Crematory failed to cremate their loved ones.  Something far more ignoble was done when the bodies of the deceased were stashed up like so much dross.  Something outrageous when the mourners were issued with little pots of earth and fobbed of with the information that these contained cremated mortal remains.

Compare that with the respect and reverence we expect and receive from genuine funeral directors and you get some idea of the scale of the problem.  When I made my will I was invited to add a side letter which would specify certain details about my funeral.  I have yet to write it, but it is rapidly taking shape in my head.  Apart from your wedding or your landmark birthday celebrations, it’s rare to have the opportunity , as Princess Margaret did, to work out the choreography of a truly important occasion for yourself.  By choosing the readings and the hymns, by thinking about the party after the event, you put yourself in the shoes of those who will mourn you.  You put a personal stamp on the occasion, so that it reflects you and your beliefs; what you treasure and hold dear.  But you also seek to comfort and console.

Those of us who are left behind though, are also left with a responsibility.  Not simply to celebrate the memory of our loved ones, but to ensure that everything is done properly and well.  Why?  Because death has to be treated with the gravitas it deserves.  Because the process of mourning is interrupted when this work is not done.  Because our care of the living is mirrored in our care of the dead.

If you want to know what the due solemnity of death sounds like, then play Edward Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius to yourself.  It depicts the passage from life to death; from mortality to immortality; to that encounter with God we both crave and dread.  Today is the anniversary of the birth of  John Henry, Cardinal Newman, who wrote the words Elgar set to music.  ‘Go forth upon thy journey’, the great angel sings as Gerontius dies.  In the one performance in which I’ve sung this work, in York Minster, someone in the front did just that.  Not a death anyone could have planned, but what a spectacular way to go.  He didn’t choose the music, but the music certainly chose him. 

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY BBC Radio 4

14 February 2002  Lavinia Byrne

Good morning

Those who sit in judgement over Slobodon Milosevic in the Hague today face an enormous task. On the one hand, they have a figure before them who is already judged by many to be guilty of war crimes and genocide on an historical scale.  The relatives of his former victims cry out to heaven for justice.  On the other, the judges believe in the due process of law, and claim to be offering a fair trial - insofar as this is possible - and they are setting aside around two years of their lives to ensure that this will happen. 

So it is not simply the defendant who is on trial.  If you like, it is the very idea of law itself.  With crimes on such a scale as this, and such a wealth of evidence to sift through, can the legal system deliver?  We must hope and pray that it will, for without the work of an international court of justice, there is no ultimate tribunal, no buffer against lawlessness.

Whether we like it or not, we are all implicated in this trial at the Hague, because it affects us all.  Then there's the further question: here's a man who is accused of acting inhumanely, of losing his humanity.  Now how do you assess that? I think that the chief prosecutor put her finger on it when she said that the prisoner appeared to have 'no regrets, no shame'.  

I'm glad she used these words while we still remember what they mean.  After all, they are deeply unfashionable.  People find it hard to say sorry and to express the sense that they have done wrong.  So once again the Milosevic story is about all of us, not simply about something that is happening in the Hague.

How do you do recall a man to regret and to shame?  How do you ensure that these human qualities do not get rubbished in our litigious and querulous age?  The Christian season of Lent which began with Ash Wednesday yesterday is intended to do just that, to remind us that it all right to say that we have done wrong, indeed that it is important to do so.

Without a healthy shot of repentance and contrition in our lives, we too are less than human.   This is not moralistic nonsense.  It's a pathway, a doorway into a dispensation of grace where saying sorry enables us to hear that we are forgiven.  I tremble for anyone who, by refusing to say sorry for what they've done, refuses any offer of clemency and with it the dynamic described in the Lord's prayer: 'forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us'.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY – BBC Radio 4

24 November 2001  -  Lavinia Byrne

Good morning.  

In the blue corner, St Cecilia whose feast day we celebrated this week; in the red, St Clare whose feast day, inconveniently, falls in August.  Why do I line them up like this?  St Cecilia, patron saint of music, reminds us of the beauty and intimacy of sound.  For those of us who are impassioned radio listeners, she validates our commitment to music, speech, the works.

But in the red corner we still have St Clare, patron saint of TV because the word play on her name gives us clarity and a celebration of light and the offspring of light: telly and films. 

Those of us who have already been to see the Harry Potter movie, those of us who were dismayed yesterday to learn that Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings has received a PG - Parental Guidance - certificate have to face facts.  To borrow a quote, there is something of the night about this most luminous of media.  For the intimacy of radio, with films we have the immediacy of images, their power to short-circuit their way into our memories and dreams and nightmares.  For the beauty of wireless, with its ability to trigger our imaginations – you know what they say, ‘the pictures are better on radio’ – we have the wizardry of the special effects boffins and all their works and pomps.  Visual fireworks. 

Harry Potter was fine.  I went with a little boy and his grandmother and friend.  Of course he got scared, but they were there to comfort him and we had an interval and leg stretch, which diffused the tension.  But tension there was because the visual medium is so powerful; its impact quite different from the book or even the radio reading.  So you could be left thinking that radio and T.V. war on each other.

But Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings adds another perspective.  For Tolkein, explicitly, was a Christian and was captivated with ideas about good and evil, right and wrong – not simply for their dramatic potential – but because they were the very fabric of the human condition.  To be human was to grapple with them and to approach God.  Of course this is grown-up stuff.

So who wins, St Cecilia, with beauty and intimacy on her side?   Or St Clare, surrounded by the clear light of Umbria, Giotto’s paintings of St Francis already taking shape in the artist’s imagination, poised on the cusp of a flowering of the visual?  Both, of course, for they took the dilemma of being human seriously – which is what Tolkein knew all about.  Grown-up stuff indeed.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY – BBC RADIO 4

17 November 2001 – Lavinia Byrne  

Good morning.

Until I saw the TV programme, I hadn’t realised that subliminally, I have been riveted by the story of the Walton sextuplets and their amazing parents.  They rampaged their way onto our screens to celebrate their eighteenth birthdays this week.  As icons of the IVF generation.  At one point in the programme, whilst performing to a Women’s Institute, their father joked that occasionally he felt like ‘storming out’ but that his wife would call him to order by whispering three little words to him.  His listeners’ faces softened.  He brought us all down to earth with his quick quip:  ‘Child Support Agency’.

Is it anxiety about emotional support that accounts for the reluctance experienced by some as the High Court begins to debate the rights of children conceived by donor insemination to trace their biological fathers?  From the perspective of the donors, the question is a simple one.  Once upon a time – and probably for financial reasons – for some young men, this was an easy way to make a contribution to someone in need and to earn a quick bob.  From the perspective of the donor offspring of this clinical union, life has proved as rich and interesting as for the rest of us, with the same ups and downs and so on.  Only it hasn’t.  If we are to believe the evidence, like many adopted children, they are claiming the right to know who their fathers are.

It appears that to know who we are, we need to know where we come from.  That is the way the logic goes.  Is this simply because of the importance of medical history in determining our own medical profile?  Or is it because of something more complicated, with our very humanity even.  You would have thought that in our mobile, sophisticated, high-speed world, the influence of one’s parents’ religion or hobbies or skills would be relatively unimportant.  Only for the donor offspring who are mounting the campaign to know who their fathers are, this is clearly not the case. 

From the security of my own family background – where all is known and pursued with rigorous fascination by the family history buffs – I cannot comment.  But I do know this:  there is great joy in knowing that you are wanted and loved, but you have to believe it for it to be real.  In all family relationships there has to be faith, as well as love - whatever your gene pool.  Certainty is not what is offered by human relationships; faith, hope - as well as charity - are what count.  There is risk in all human living, thank God.  And now even the Walton girls are poised to discover that.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY -  10 November 2001

BBC Radio Four  Lavinia Byrne 

Good morning.

I’ve been to the railway carriage in the forest of Compiegne in France where the armistice was signed in 1918.  I was with my mother and, unusually for her, she talked about the War.  The First World War, of course because that was where it formally ended.  But her war too, the Second World War in which both her brothers were killed.

She said something which, at the time, I found irreverent but now realise was hugely brave.  The blitz on Birmingham where she lived was dreadful.  But, she said, from the moment she was able to take her Lizzie Arden makeup down into the air-raid shelter every night – so that she could emerge in the morning with her ‘face’ on - everything got better.  Memory is so well carried in the detail rather that in the global overview.

Is that why we have an annual opportunity to remember the fallen?  Not so that we can pontificate about the rights and wrongs of the politicians and generals and world leaders.  But so that we can recall the true heroism of individuals, named people and unknown warriors and value the detail that carries the meaning of the whole. 

This year’s adverts for poppy day carry the slogan, ‘Greater love hath no man’.  They flash past you as you go up and down escalators in the tube.  Or fly past on buses.  Oddly they are not attributed.  Is this because we all know that they are words of Jesus, and so central to the message of the Christian Gospel that true heroism can cost you your life, as it cost him his?  Or is it because we are embarrassed by religion at present?  Had one of the Beatles sung them, along with the comforting but vapid ‘All you need is love’ or the curiously innocent ‘Imagine’, I guess the attribution would be up there in bold print. 

But put a religious tag on anything just now, and are you fomenting trouble?  Political – and, let it be said – Church leaders bend over backwards to say that our present-day conflict is not between Islam and Christianity, as though religion is a purely private affair.  I wonder.  My fear would be that in a war against terrorism, value for religious belief will be the first casualty and secularism the ultimate winner.

On a happier note, many of us are overjoyed this week because valuable archive material from Workers’ Playtime and Tony Hancock has been discovered and handed over to the BBC.  The power of memory lies in the detail.  Anything that makes us laugh and be slightly irreverent is especially to be treasured this Armistice day.  For there is joy in memory too, just as there is in religious faith.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY – BBC Radio 4

9 August 2001 – Lavinia Byrne

Good morning.

This weekend we keep the anniversary of the destruction of the Russian submarine, the Kursk, in the Barents Sea.  It seems that its entire arsenal of torpedo warheads blew up this supposedly impregnable battle vessel – twice the length of a jumbo jet – and that it exploded with a seismic blast registering four points on the Richter scale. 

A year ago we looked on helplessly as the rescue services tried to move in, in the vain hope that there would be survivors.   For the crew of 118 officers and men all perished.  Their bodies have yet to be brought to the surface and buried.  They remain trapped in their watery time capsule, tossed about on the ocean floor.

There was something about the horror of this particular accident that struck a powerful chord in our imaginations.  Forget the torpedoes, these men were somehow our friends, and we identified with them as they went to hell and back through a journey we all fear.  After all, our earliest memories are associated with the breaking of waters.  In the symbolic ordering of things, we know we have to pass through water in order to reach out to life – and that this is terrifying.

The greatest of scriptural metaphors are about salvation from a flood in an ark; about the parting of the seas as the people of Israel walk dry-shod to freedom; about Jonah who lived for three days in the belly of the whale and then was spewed up on the shore.  No wonder the great hymns such as ‘Almighty Father, strong to save’, with its evocative prayer for ‘Those in peril on the sea’ lie well beyond the clutches of the most iconoclastic of ‘hymn-banners’.

No wonder the most basic of all the Christian sacraments has babies, children, people re-live the birth experience by plunging them into the waters of a baptismal font.  For in baptism, the promise is of re-birth, not as some tokenistic gesture, but as a true pledge.  Death by water is especially frightening and rightly so, as the anniversary of the tragic loss of the Kursk reminds us.  Life by a passage through water into something new and helpful – as every birth, every baptism should remind us – holds out not the threat of annihilation, but a promise.  For the font too is a Moses basket, a miniature ark of salvation.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY – BBC Radio 4

3 August 2001  -  Lavinia Byrne 

The letters pages of The Times are alive with the sound of religious conflict.  Eminent churchmen are fighting over the status of the Bible.  Is it the word of God?  Is Jesus the word of God?  How do you speak and hear the word of God in today’s world? 

This could sound like an idiosyncratic and slightly batty in-house argument between competing wings of the Christian Church.  In the blue corner, conservative evangelicals clutching the Bible in self-defence.  In the red corner, liberals who talk openly about the fact that the Bible is the word of God in human words, that it’s a cultural artefact written over a period of time in diverse historical contexts.  And let’s face it, that there is conflict in its own internal evidence.  It has at least two versions of the creation story, two versions of the Lord’s Prayer, more than one set of Beatitudes; so not exactly dictated from on high.  Conclusion: biblical scholarship needs to be reverent but not naïve. 

As I say, this could sound like someone else’s problem, were it not for the fact that the status of sacred texts is of huge significance for us all as we struggle with moral problems and try to develop an ethic for our age.  After all, you can’t look up words like cannabis or genetic modification in any biblical concordance.  You can’t get a straight fit between the text or word of God and modern problems that we face.

So what do you do?  Ditch it.  Resist people who fling biblical texts at you.  I don’t think so.  You can’t get rid of your wisdom literature.  Especially when its core message that God is love and that we are to love one another opens doors, rather than slamming them in each other’s face.  Surely it helps to think more about other people than about ourselves; to live in ways that give God and transcendence some space. 

A story: in the village of Sherston in Wiltshire there was a battle ten years before the Norman conquest.  A local hero, named Rattlebone, is remembered as he was wounded early in the conflict, yet fought on till sunset with a Bible pressed against his side.  This is the religious version of the story, which identifies him as a Bishop, and it’s commemorated in a statue on the outside of the parish church.  A secular version has him staunch his blood with a chunk of local stone.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

BBC Radio 4 - 27 July 2001 

Good morning.

How do you measure time? We’re given days and months and years: seasons marked out for us by the sun and the earth’s relationship with it.  But landmark events aren’t really that neat and tidy.  They cut across the logic of our ordered lives and give us pause, spilling across time and making it fly or crawl past us.  That’s what makes history so fascinating; that’s what gives our own personal story its cut and thrust, its ebb and flow. 

So what has been this week’s landmark event?  A lost test match, more talk of global warming and star wars, political protest in the shires?  Or the death of  Britain’s oldest man?  My money is on him: Bertie Felstead, whose life spanned three centuries as he died aged one hundred and six and he was born in 1895.  A veteran of the First World War, a private in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, Felstead was the final British survivor of that famous football match when British and German soldiers laid down their weapons on Christmas Day in 1915 and played together in no man’s land. 

Was it the sheer chivalry of that event that lodged it in the public imagination?  The thought of men defying orders by having half an hour’s amnesty and celebrating Christmas as they chose?  Did its zaniness strike a human chord that cuts right across the culture of violence generated by war?  After all it was not something dreamt up by the Blackadder team, though it could so easily have been.  Was it some kind of fluke?  Nice men, a crisp day with winter light in the sky, an unbidden desire for companionship, a random football. 

Probably all three, plus the formulaic day, Christmas itself, the birthday of a man who would say, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ and ‘those who live by the sword will perish by the sword’.  Not comfortable words, as most of us are far more belligerent than we care to admit.  Yet a comforting message.  Which, I assume, is why the death of Bertie Felstead isn’t simply about his family’s private grief.  It’s a news story, and needs to be, because we should remember an era when no man’s land could be a place of encounter and human warmth, as well as the scene of atrocities.  A time when peacemaking took the form of a football, a simple game became a legend.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY – BBC RADIO 4

20 July 2001 – Lavinia Byrne

‘In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.’  The version of history on which I was raised could reduce it to simple uncomplicated jingles.   The discovery of America on the back of a postcard, as it were.  Now wouldn’t Christopher Columbus, Genoa’s most prominent son, be amazed to see his home town this morning, surrounded by a steel fence, the washing which ordinarily flutters from rooftops and windows discretely consigned to inner rooms so that nothing should spoil the view of the delegates at the G8 summit.  Protestors, for instance, as well as socks and vests and pants.  

This invisibility is a pity – for people who can’t see each other can’t hear each other either, and so the myths develop: that all multi-nationals are corrupt institutions; that globalisation is a universal evil; that moral superiority is the possession of one side over and against another. 

What would Columbus have thought?  And what would his generation have made of it all?  After all, just as he took to the high seas in a spirit of adventure, so too Copernicus and Galileo took to the stars and the firmament, bent on discovery and development. It was only later that the judgements kicked in: that Columbus was accused of colonisation; that the religious groups who followed in his wake brought what is now considered to be a triumphalist faith that destroyed indigenous values and practices; that Galileo was condemned as a heretic and so on.  

They lived out a dilemma, one which faces our world today as governments and multi-nationals struggle with AIDS and debt relief and world economics and as protest groups use the most globalised of all technologies, the internet, to bring their members to Genoa. 

Is big always bad?  I don’t think so.  Because Christianity is such a globalising animal, with its central plank that Jesus’s followers were to go out and teach all nations, it would be hypocritical for it to condemn expansionism in others.  But there is a separate strand, the command to love your enemies, to gather together and make community, to be little as well as big, so that it should be able to offer a corrective too, whilst owning up to its own colonising sins.

The secret lies in holding the tension, in the kind of slogan that appeals to the aid and development agencies: ‘think globally, act locally’.  Don’t be afraid of the dirty linen aired out in public; it may turn out to be quite clean after all.  And that goes for the protestors too.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY 

3 April 2001 - BBC Radio Four 

Good morning.

So the crisis deepens, with what some commentators have described as the suspension of the democratic process, namely the proposed delay to local government elections.  For the commentators, this has provided a field day, with opinions polarised over what this delay means.  For the rest of us, faced with a ten-week wait, there is a further problem, because we don’t want to be beaten over the head by covert election campaigns dressed up as concern for the country or the countryside.  Whatever our political affiliation, we tend to prefer truth to lies.   

Where does clarity lie?  In recognising the temptations that go with the moment.  Take depression.  If you feel you are gazing down a dark tunnel and that your life is being destroyed along with your livelihood or your nest egg, the temptation to despair becomes overwhelming.  It is fiendishly difficult to beat off, however kind and supportive your friends and neighbours and however powerful the antidepressants you find yourself taking along with your morning cup of tea. 

The Christian tradition recognises an even more complicated set of feelings though and identifies a temptation which leads to one of the seven deadly sins, namely sloth.  This is the attitude of mind which the early Church Fathers called ‘accidie’ or dryness, a sense that nothing can change anything anyway.   The Greek word itself means ‘negligence’ or indifference.  Nowadays, we call it apathy and don’t really think of it as a sin.  We prefer the other ones, pride, covertousness, lust, greed, envy, anger.  The ones that make you seem like a bit of a lad because committing them can feel quite like good fun. 

But we need to reclaim the knowledge that apathy is like a virus, sneaking its way into our emotional life, seeking out whom it may destroy, as destroy it will.   Apathy is an enemy not because it may or may not make people stay away from the polling booths – whenever they become open – but because it saps our ability to care.  And care is in short supply at the moment.  Care for each other, of course; care for the beasts who are daily being slaughtered, their carcasses destroyed before our very eyes; care for truth; care for virtue; care for emotional and spiritual integrity.  Without which we perish.

Today is the birthday of George Herbert, the seventeenth-century poet and divine who renounced politics and the king’s court for life in a country parsonage.  Not from apathy, but because he cared - and wanted all the world, in every corner, to sing. 

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY 

 BBC Radio Four  27 March 2001 

Good morning.

I met a woman on Friday who runs her own business, hiring out posh frocks and hats to men and women who want to look good at parties.  Peering into the future, she said that, if Royal Ascot gets cancelled, she’d be in real shtook, but to console herself she was going to enjoy the Oscars ceremony, as that is where she gets some of her most creative ideas.  I thought of her when the upbeat report duly came through on the programme yesterday and hoped that she had had a good evening watching the parade of the successful, the annual pageant of the glittery life of the stars as they approached the venue called the ‘Shrine’ where the event is held.  A temple to the triumph of celluloid. 

That is said without irony because I don’t resent others their success and anyway the Oscars is a bit of a lottery as far as I can make out.  After all, more people lose than win.    But the instinct to win is there in all of us and we want to do well and have our children do well.  Is that why there are all those hits on the Today programme’s website where we all seem to be sneaking off to work out what class we are?  An actor comes out at socio-economic class 2, by the way, so there goes your snobbery along with your coveted prize.

Yet how do we square this desire to do well with the old-fashioned virtues of modesty and humility, and with the spiritual insight that we are all equal in the eyes of God?  Not an easy task when the new class structure gives a category called Churchman (sic) including rabbi/vicar/ mullah a posh score, namely 1.2 so you are already deemed to be part of an elite, and getting preachy about class would seem to be a bit rich. 

There’s a further problem too, because religion is really rather keen on rewards.  After all, it holds up the ultimate prize, eternal life, to its adherents and nothing beats that.  Certainly not the mobile phones and computers with which children are presently rewarded both in and out of adventurous schools or homes where this kind of awards system is up and running.  

The difference, I suppose, is that eternal life or heaven is on offer to all and that the idea that that is your destiny is intended to help you walk tall, whatever your circumstances or your socio-economic class.  According to this understanding, all our names are written in the stars. 

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY 

 BBC Radio Four  - 20 March 2001 

Good morning. 

Why do I meet such nice teachers?  Smart, bright people - if overburdened - who want the very best for the children in their classes and seem able to achieve it.  

You could make assumptions and presume that I'm spoilt and that I only meet teachers from pukka independent schools.  But that wouldn't be true.  You could assume that I meet teachers from Church schools who have a sense of vocation and who wing their way to school and back on a bright cloud, supported by the love of God.  Wrong again, though getting warmer.  You might even think that contented teachers are well-managed teachers, people who belong to teams where everyone has a place and all can flourish.  Or brilliantly-resourced teachers with the very best of modern kit and so on.  Moderately warm.

So what about hot?  What does bring contentment to members of this beleaguered profession?  What could prevent the strike action which threatens to disrupt our schools and to bring the profession into disrepute, because we'll all get cross and think they are letting the children down, when actually it is we who have let them down by neither valuing nor rewarding them adequately?  How do you restore a sense of purpose to a profession that is utterly demoralised.  Betrayed even.  I got half an answer at an art gallery on Sunday.  One of the painters told me about his former headmaster, a man who claimed - as he herded small boys into chapel -  'Religion should be enjoyed and not endured'.  If only we could make that true of education too.  'Education should be enjoyed and not endured'. What happens in our schools should not be penitential; learning should be huge fun for all concerned. 

I once preached at Founders Day for St Alban's High School for Girls.  Imagine an abbey full of eight to eighteen-year olds.   As a prop I had a toy kangaroo, about a foot tall.  In her pouch, she had a little roo, three inches tall but easily visible from the front rows where the smallest children were sitting.  A good school, I suggested, was like a kangaroo's pouch, somewhere where you felt immensely safe and could have fun; somewhere where you would be taken care of and fed.  And ultimately somewhere you would have to leave - so why not enjoy it while you are in there?  And the rest of us too could try to make the vocation of teaching a joy and not a grind. 

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY -  BBC Radio Four 

 13 March 2001  Lavinia Byrne

Good morning.

The weather forecast is being feted today, with the issue of special stamps by the Post Office.  Michael Fish told us all about it before the eight o’clock news yesterday.  So it’s official, scientific weather prediction exists and is there to be celebrated.  I’m a real fan, despite the fact that it is the hardest bit of radio to listen to.  My mind goes out of focus and needs to be hauled back to consciousness by local references.  I mean, I feel sorry for the people who are facing yet more snow, but down here in Somerset, it’s the winds we watch out for.  Funnily enough though, if I’m honest, I think I use my hair as a weather indicator, rather than the weather maps.  Dreadfully lo-tech, I know, but because it’s curly, it’s like seaweed and tells me if we’re in for rain or sunshine.  I run a hand through it and know.

Does that make me superstitious?   Am I buying into something the Bible rails against when it is outspoken in its condemnation of soothsayers and charms and all that kit?  Or am I being a religious and scientific person?  Now there’s a thought.  Since Stephen Jay Gould, not a fan of religion, let it be said, has written imaginatively about the relationship between the two, a new door has been opened.  For science and religion can talk to each other creatively once both disciplines recognise that they are dealing with similar questions.  You can list these: who are we? Where do we come from?  Why?  How?  All the questions that children are brilliant at, because they are still inquisitive.

If there’s an enemy, it’s not science for religion, or religion for science, because at their best, both hate superstition.  The true enemy is indifference, the apathy that takes the buzz out of our inquiring minds and reduces everything to a post-modern monochrome canvas where nothing really matters anyway and you become a prey to fads.  

So thank God for the weather forecast.  Because weather does matter.  It affects us profoundly and keeps us rooted in human reality.  Our weather bulletins, whether delivered on telly or the wireless, are scientific sound bites, precision bullets from the hand of Fish and co., constant reminders that we are people in an ecosystem – and here goes for the religious sting – where rain falls on the just and the unjust alike.

Now T.S.Eliot’s life was measured out in coffee spoons.  I’d rather find mine punctuated by the weather forecast because then I’m reminded, on the hour, that the heavens are telling the glory of an un-judgemental God.  You don’t merit the weather you get or get the weather you deserve.  You just get weather. 

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY – BBC Radio Four

20 December 2000 - Lavinia Byrne

Good morning.

Will Richard Branson be the only loser in the latest lottery bid?  Or will the idea of ‘good works’ go down the tubes as well?  Disinterested giving.  Pure charity.  Yesterday on this programme, we were told that 65% of the adult population play the lottery and that their intention is simple: they want to win.

I wonder if Andrew Motion, the poet laureate, wrote his recent poem for them.  It was published in last week’s War Cry, the newspaper of the Salvation Army, after Motion visited one of their hostels.  It makes me ask what the status of ‘good works’ is in the public imagination?  How do we react to the needs of those who have stumbled on to a lottery wheel of bad fortune not of their own choosing?

The lead character in his poem is like us, not unlike us.  A forty-three year old barrister whose car comes off the road, killing his passengers, his wife and child, after which -  quote, ‘he had no discipline/ to settle him, no stable law for life/just randomness.’ 

You can imagine the consequences, the downward trail that leads to homelessness and hopelessness and, what feels worse, a sense of namelessness.  The poet isn’t sentimental about this.  He doesn’t meet out judgement or offer sympathy.  He invites us to look in a mirror and to visualise ourselves there.  So to the final stanza, a celebration of altruism, of the work of the Salvation Army obviously, but also of the Christian gospel which gives its officers ‘a stable law for life’, a motive for practising good works, a sense of what Christmas is all about, I quote:

 ‘Take Will again, his swarming poacher’s coat

with long, stuffed pockets, belt of plastic string

and gust of moonlight cold.  He’s standing there

inside the mantle of the hostel light

strained forward while the nightmen ask him in

but can’t be sure.  What is this love built up

from faith and charity? Not known to him.

They ask again.  He stalls and stamps his boots

So hard star-splinters frazzle the cement –

We only want to know your name, that’s all –

And squares himself, hands pushed down deep

To grip those pocket-secrets, then leans close

Enough to smell the food and warmth. My name?

He lifts his head.  My name is William Legge.’

 So an idea to reflect on, I think:  ‘What is this love built up from faith and charity?’  Not from chance, notice; not from random numbers, tumbling in a drum.  But from something utterly dependable, a faith-filled heart.  

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY – BBC Radio 4

14 December 2000  Lavinia Byrne

  Good morning.

So the vast machinery of the American elections has finally ground to a halt.  Thank God, as I think that we were all worn out by it and beginning to suffer from jetlag by proxy as James Naughety winged his way to and fro across the Atlantic before our very ears.   So all we’re left with now are the post mortems and we are bound to have those as there is a sense that there has been a casualty, a fatality even.  And I’m not thinking of the losers.

So what has died? Our sense of fairness?  Our faith in the due processes of law?  Or is the casualty the very idea of democracy itself?  I think that is what we fear, because we value the idea that if you ask enough people to make a choice; if you educate them so that they understand the causes that are at issue;  you will discover the right thing to do.  You enfranchise people, because you involve them in the process of selecting their leaders, for example.  You place your trust in the goodness of the informed and enlightened consciousness and conscience of other people. 

 If you like, you accept the fact that the will of God is located outside of yourself.  You testify to the belief that this will of God can be discovered and learnt by following a process of consultation.  You don’t simply play mind games, with the idea that democracy is worth supporting as some kind of concept; you plug into the idealism that sent the first Puritan pilgrims across the Atlantic in search of freedom and truth.

 I’d go further than that, actually.  I’d say you accept the wisdom of one of the most ancient and important of all Christian texts: The Rule of St Benedict. 

It begins with a simple word: ‘Listen’, it says and then sets out the description of a way of life which produces a benign, even a warm, community.  This makes it as significant a text for Western Christendom as the Declaration of Independence is for the citizens of the USA. 

But who are we to listen to? The Father Abbot?  The big boys in the monastery, like the Prior and the Cellarer?  Of course, on one level.  But Benedict also wanted the older monks, the heavyweights, to listen to the younger ones as well.  And all the monks were to listen to God.

And that’s the point.  That’s the vision of democracy we lose at our peril.  Let’s hope that it’s not the casualty or fatality we fear. 

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY – BBC RADIO FOUR

7 December 2000  Lavinia Byrne 

Good morning. 

When I was little I thought it was called ‘nice’, like the biscuits.  A bit sad really, as my French grandmother lived in Nice so I should have known better.   I think I was six when I first went there and trotted alongside her on the Promenade des Anglais.  The Brits have always loved the South of France, so no surprise that we got our own street names.  A detail, though.  And I’m sorry about this, but Grand’mere’s home, which she bought in 1946, was a former brothel.  German army officers had visited there during the war.  A thoroughly pukka character, my grandmother, a Norman.  Someone who met and fell in love with and married an Irishman and who lost both her English sons in the War.  One a Battle of Britain pilot, one a doctor on the convoys when the theatre of war transferred to the Atlantic the following year, as well as her husband. To be honest, she was a real xenophobe and hated the Bosche.  So, was she a foreigner, or one of us? 

Stories such as this are part of the legacy all of us bring to gathering like the EC meeting today in Nice.  A legacy that is about hatred and genuine, well-grounded suspicion.  A legacy which cannot be dispelled by platitudes. 

So I’m left with a question:  how do you deal with people you really can’t be doing with?  People you hate.   How do you make community in today’s world?  How do you embrace a vision of human living which is about more than individual or even national self-survival?  Huge questions really and tantalising because they are timeless.  The Bible – along with the sacred texts of all the major living faiths – has been grappling with them since forever.  So what’s the wisdom?  What’s the gossip on the spiritual block? 

‘Love your enemies; do good to those who hate you’, Jesus says.  It’s not an easy message; it’s not ‘love your friends and only associate with people with the same social, political and fiscal views as yourself’.  It doesn’t even contain a get-out clause.  It doesn’t say, ‘ Say you love these people and secretly convert them to your view, so that they become like you, somehow homogenized/Europeanised/sanitized.’  It places before us a simple requirement: that we should allow people to be different from us, because only then will the love we claim to have for them carry any weight; only then will our idealistic communities of nowadays be able to bear the crippling legacy of all our yesterdays.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY – BBC RADIO FOUR

27 November 2000  Lavinia Byrne

Good morning.

So, another rainy Monday morning for most of us, after a weekend of wind and downpours.  As the wettest autumn on record turns into a winter which risks being as dire, we thrash around looking for someone or something to blame.  And now, with the collapse of international talks which were supposed to sort out our climate by applying commonly-held rules of good practice globally, we’re left with a series of accusations, and a sense of powerlessness.

The accusations are deafening, with words like hubris and nemesis and winners and losers being bandied about.  The deeper charge is more worrying than any of those.  For if ever proof were needed that we are living dangerously, it is surely in our reaction to the accidents of human living.  We risk becoming a blame culture.  And that is one short step away from becoming a litigation culture, where you identify your enemies, heap blame on them, and them sue them till they drop.   

Is there a middle way?  The failure of the World Climate Change Conference in Holland at the weekend does raise serious issues, of course.  It puts responsibility back onto the rest of us.  As individuals, do we believe that our behaviour and the weather are linked and, if so, what can we do about it in our homes?  As a nation too, we have to take stock.  For this is about public as well as personal behaviour.

But what about the underlying ideology which drives us?  Are we led by a sense of stewardship?  Are we ‘Genesis-chapter-one-people’, believing that God placed us over creation, as the pinnacle of all the divine works, with responsibilities for nurturing life and especially the life of the planet?  Or are we ‘prophet-Job-people’; with his altogether darker and, as I see it, more powerful message.  For Job speaks out against any kind of blame-culture.  When he loses his family and property, he will not accept that these ills are his own fault, despite the smooth talking of his supposed comforters.  Then God intervenes and shows him Behemoth, a hippopotamus and Leviathan, a crocodile.  ‘Where were you when I made the world?’ God asks, claiming ultimate power over creation and reminding us that we are part of a world of infinite beauty and complexity, which – ironically - could actually dispense with us.

The Bible does not resolve the conundrum.  It simply lays it out.  Are we above nature?  Or are we part of nature? Either way, the thrust of the Book of Job is to drive out blame and to free us from guilt.  No-one can save the planet.  Only God – its creator - is able to do that.   

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY – BBC Radio Four

21 July 2000  - Lavinia Byrne

Good morning.

 So celibacy is in the doghouse, again.  The spotlight has been on a sex scandal this week as it has emerged that yet another Catholic priest is serving time as a paedophile and that his Bishop, presently the Archbishop of Westminster, may have acted in good faith, but possibly less than wisely in believing that the man’s problem was safely contained when he emerged from therapeutic treatment some fifteen years ago.

 I’m not interested in the merits or demerits of this particular case.  After all, I don’t know enough about it.  But I do know something about celibacy and I hate seeing it being knocked when, for a good number of people, it is a totally valid way of living a life of great human integrity.  Let’s face it: for many people it is not an option.  Mr or Mrs Right have not come along in their direction and actually they rather like the freedom that goes with being a single person.

It’s hard to say this nowadays as ours is such a highly sexualised society that we can’t remember that there are valid alternatives.  And that celibacy is one of them.  After all, for some people, it is a deliberate choice and the Church has recognised this by giving it a context, namely the vowed or religious life.  Which is an odd phenomenon really because the tradition is not peculiar to Christianity.  There are monks and nuns in Buddhism too, or people from a variety of faith traditions who voluntarily embrace a celibate life knowing full well that it is counter-cultural.   

 Yet I think we’d be mistaken if we say these choices are about a life which is strictly for odd balls.  As I see it, there are lots of different ways of being happy as a human being and we miss out on many of them if we associate them all with sex.  Indeed you could argue that one tragic consequence of aggressive over-sexualization is that children are not spared from its orbit.  This week we’ve stood by hopelessly as evidence of yet another child abduction and murder has come through on our radios and TV screen.  Terrible stuff for any parent to have to watch, let alone Sarah Payne’s.  Horrendous too, for our children. 

 Where does hope lie?  What about a happiness campaign where play, ice creams, reading, bopping at a one hundredth birthday party, or sitting in the sun get re-instated and the sexual heat is taken off us all?  God knows, I think we’re all ready for a break.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY – BBC Radio Four

14 July 2000 – Lavinia Byrne 

Good morning.

Well, I think we are all going to miss her.  As Madam Speaker, Betty Boothroyd has been my role model for the past eight years.  When I eventually saw her in action, for real – rather than on telly - I was riveted.  The lobby of the House of Commons fell silent as we stood waiting for her procession.  Then I heard the clickrety, clickerty, lickerty, spit of her heels as she made her way to the debating chamber, preceded by men in tights, meaning her entourage in ceremonial garb.  She looked radiant. 

I went up to the public gallery and heard her bark out her famous commands.  I watched her and marvelled, for there is a strange irony about being called a Speaker, yet being changed to be a Silencer, someone who has to call the unruly to order and to remind grown men not to behave like boys. 

 There is a discipline around words.  They have such power and authority.  Yet they can run away with us.  They require, as it were, the authority of older disciplines, to hold them in check.  Silence, for instance.  Or moderation.  It’s a bit like the old joke about ‘never trust a man in a bow tie, unless he is a gynaecologist’.   The flamboyant per se, will always be suspect.  Silence is the deepest discipline of all.   

The Advent antiphon, not seasonal just now, but so what – says, ‘When all things were in quiet silence, and the night was in the midst of her course, thy almighty Word leapt down from heaven’.   The truest of our words require silence if they are to be born.  The Incarnate Word is best born in silence.  So the ministry of a silencer, ironically called a Speaker, is a tantalizing one, for it is a reminder of these older disciplines and calls us all to order, talkers and hearers alike – for we are all invited to listen as well as to speak.

 One final word.  King David, remember, drew down scandal upon himself because he insisted on dancing before the Tabernacle of the Lord when it was brought into the Holy City of Jerusalem.  Tablets of the Law with the Commandments of the Lord engraved upon them.  Immobile words, cast in stone, which his dance brought to life.  So can dance, lickerty, lickerty, spickerty, hop teach us something?  Yes, absolutely and utterly.  In your retirement, Madam Speaker, dance on. 

 30 June 2000   Lavinia Byrne

 1 June 2000  Lavinia Byrne

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY BBC Radio 4

25 May 2000 – Lavinia Byrne

Good morning.

So Dame Barbara Cartland has been buried in her cardboard coffin, doubtless in a pink dress and with her makeup in place.  At least that is what I hope because I would want her to meet her maker looking as instantly recognisable as she was when she lived. Ditto Sir John Gielgud.  For in the column inches of ink that have been used to write their obituaries, since they died earlier this week, I find evidence of something larger than the life either of them lived.

 One was an actor, well both were really, but Gielgud gave something immeasurable to the human spirit.  He brought language to life and gave expression to our deepest feelings thereby.  As one obituary suggested,  ‘the commonwealth of classical drama had its soldier in Laurence Olivier, its common man in Sir Ralph Richardson and in Gielgud, it had its priest’.  Now that’s a powerful claim.  For a priest stands at an interface, turning now towards us and now towards  God.  A priest is a mediator, communicating the divine to us, reconciling us with God and each other.

 That is why religion uses liturgy, to enact the drama of our relationships with each other and with God, and it’s also why liturgy is unashamedly theatrical, as it were, assaulting our senses with colour and song and incense, taking us away from the realm of human discourse and the tedium of words to a place of transformation where all is grace and we sense that we will live for ever.

 That is why theatre is so powerful too and why it needs its priests and why we mourn the death of a Gielgud and the end of the era he represents.  What about Barbara Cartland then?  Is it irreverent to mention her in the same breath.  After all, hers was a simple art form, based on romance and fantasy and we need those too.  So the obituaries have been generous and she will be missed by the millions the world over who read her seven hundred and twenty three books.  ‘A formidable fairy queen’ they called her, who saw her task as to ‘give beauty and love to the world’.  A nice touch that she had Perry Como’s ‘I believe’ at her funeral yesterday, spinning the myth of her own story to the end.

 With their deaths we lose a window onto the world of the imagination through a special kind of theatre and a window onto fantasy through a distinctive kind of fiction. So yes, we need our priests and probably our fairy queens too - and we are right to note their passing. 

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY  BBC RADIO FOUR  

  13 May 2000  Lavinia Byrne

Good morning.

 I rarely turn the radio off, but I did the other day when the RSPCA report on children and cruelty to animals came through.  I literally could not bear to listen but my memory kicked into gear.  Mrs Clark and a cup of tea, Street, Somerset, circa 1955.  As she poured it for me I watched in fascination for great globules of earth fell from her hands into my cup.  ‘It’s only garden dirt’, she said, noticing my funny look, and so I drank it down obediently and appreciatively.  Somehow that made it OK.

 So I went home and fed Chloe, my cow, and put the chickens to bed.  I checked out Pansy, my cat and settled down to do my accounts.  I am aged eight, remember, but the next day is pay-day when a huge van from the Milk Marketing Board will swing round the lane and pick up my Maran hens’ eggs, leaving me with a cheque for two and four pence.  Another profitable week for a young agricultural person.  

What privilege, I now realise.  I thought I was blessed to live in the countryside.  I knew I was blessed because I was trusted to look after animals.  I now realise I was blessed because this exposure had its costly side as well as its fun side.  My mother made me kill the hens when their moment came.  I had to feather and gut them too.  They were not toys.  I was not a little Marie Antoinette, playing at being a farmer.  I was the real thing and so I had to honour what she considered to be the God-given relationship I had with them.

 That is the balance I would wish for for every modern child.  A living relationship with a real live animal, so that you are neither sentimental about nature, nor vituperative towards it.  So that you are exposed to nature’s own cruelty, to the dirty side of husbandry, and do not create or impose your own.  If we were made to have stewardship over the animals as the Bible insists, then it is supposed to be the dominion which St Paul tries to describe when he talks about marriage.  This is about service and care and devotion. You have to be faithful to your commitments.  You are not to torment each other.   It is also about realism, so that dirt and pain are part of the package – and, as the Quaker, Mrs Clark knew - they have a healthy message for us too.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY  BBC Radio Four 

 11 May 2000   Lavinia Byrne

As the news from Sierra Leone becomes increasingly complicated I find myself turning back to Graham Greene.  His novel The Heart of the Matter is set in some unnamed west African state and it’s about  what all Greene’s novels are about: the human condition.  That is the material or ‘matter’ which his hero, Major Scobie, has to come to the heart of.

 This is highly re-assuring at a time when Africa is once again making headline news.  We have seen the overthrow of apartheid in South Africa, the emergence of Desmond Tutu’s ‘rainbow people’ with all the hope they carry for the whole continent; yet we’ve seen genocide on a frightening scale in Rwunda, starvation in Somalia, and flooding in Mozambique.  And more recently, we’ve seen violence in Zimbabwe and now a return of anarchy in Sierra Leone.  This amounts to a horrendous list of disasters.  So that it would be easy for the rest of the world to stand aside and to despair.  Or simply to restrict our reactions to a kind of inventory, asking how much aid can or should we give; how much military intervention can or should we make; how much compassion should or could we offer.

Graham Greene’s insight is more interesting than that.  His books are set in every continent.  The Latin American ‘whisky’ priest shares the same problems as Major Scobie; the British lover whose affair is ended is matched by the odious ‘Pinkey’ whose domain is the seaside at Brighton.  Greene does not locate sin and greed and corruption in one place over and against another.  Human nature, as he saw it, is essentially flawed and that goes for you wherever you live.  So Greene does not let us demonise people or continents or nations.  As though half the world does things right and Africa is doomed to get it wrong.  His understanding is both more bleak and more cheerful than that.

 Bleak because it requires us to accept that we are all sinful.  Yet cheerful because the good news is that his novels do not end there, and neither does human life and energy nor human aspirations.  Greene believes in redemption, in a doctrine of grace which means that all will be well and that all manner of things will be well.  The knack lies in acknowledging your need for God, for a redeemer who can bring us back from the moral abyss of the messes we all make for ourselves.  As he saw it, that’s true in Africa, and equally here as well.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY   BBC Radio 4 

 7 March 2000  Lavinia Byrne

Good morning.

 I don’t know which I like best.  Old books about broadcasting – because I collect them.  Old wirelesses and 78 records – for exactly the same reason.  Or listening to old transmissions.  I’m a radio  junkie.   My first radio experience was hearing the announcement that the King had died.  I sat on the floor aged four with my head pressed to the set.  I knew that it was a momentous moment because the wireless told me so.  I believed the word in its radio incarnation.

 In 1952 Maurice Goreham of the BBC wrote that, ‘The history of broadcasting is short but tremendous.  At the end of the First World War broadcasting did not even exist; by the beginning of the second it had covered the world. A new medium, a new habit, a new profession, and a new industry had all sprung up. All based on the new power to transmit sounds of every kind over distances to people in their own homes.’

 I find that an incredible prophetic piece of writing, because of course it is still true nowadays.  Only now it applies to a brand new medium, one which Goreham could not have dreamt about in his wildest dreams: the Internet.

 With the announcement that the American company, Alta Vista, is to offer virtually free Internet access to our homes by the summer comes not just a ‘new medium’.  Along comes  ‘a new habit, a new profession, and a new industry’ as well.  All our lives will be affected.  Nothing so ‘big’ has happened to public communications since the Protestant Reformation and the issues are just as dramatic.

 They are about how we use information; about who owns truth; who writes the Bibles of our age.  They are about our time and how we use it; about commerce and money to be made on an unimaginable scale.  Scary stuff.  Until we take stock and realize that we have been here before – and survived.

 So how are we to respond?  By getting panicky and saying that orthodoxy will die?  By getting greedy and saying that all we want is more information, faster.  Or by getting rational and remembering that we are made, as St Augustine said, ‘for God’ and that we will always ‘remain restless until our hearts are set on him’.  I’d go for the latter.  This is not some pious platitude.  It’s a reminder that at the deepest level, as the first protestors knew, we have the capacity to discern what is good for us, to work out what is right for society and to find God in the oddest places. 

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY   BBC RADIO 4

 29 February 2000   Lavinia Byrne

So Frodo Baggins was the first to jump ship.  Just after midnight, one Frodo Baggins, hound of this parish, became the first British dog to be accepted back into this country without  benefit of six month’s stay in quarantine.  Instead he had a micro-chip inserted under his pelt and a hero’s welcome.  For dogs who come in from the European community, quarantine is over, and dog and pet hampster and parrot and monkey owners everywhere are cheering.  It’s like the Ark story in reverse, only now the animals are coming off onto dry land.

  The Ark story is a fascinating one because it provides us with an image of safety and salvation.  Here was Noah, threatened with a flood that would drown the whole known world.  Here was God, displeased with the way in which people were living their lives.  Only water would wash away the sins he saw.  So God opened the heavens and let all the sluice gates they contained go rip.   Just beforehand though, he had taken Noah on one side and advised him to build an ark, a boat in which he and his wife and their sons and daughters-in-law could take refuge. 

 More than that, animals were to be invited on board.  So two-by-two, in they trouped: giraffes gently bending their necks; fleas, trying to avoid being trampled on; giant pandas, wondering if there would be enough privacy for them to breed; worms, anxious about feeling sea-sick.  The whole of creation, summonsed by our narrative into a ramshackle boat, which came with a promise from God.  They would be saved.  This is one of the oldest stories in the Bible and one of the most primitive.  It speaks to a raw place in the human psyche. A place where we want to be safely at one with nature, and not alienated from it. 

 Noah’s boat has another name too; it is called the Ark of the Covenant.  God did not promise that nature would be nice; that the raw in tooth and claw bits would evaporate; that floods would go away.  What he was concerned to show us is that the whole of creation sinks or swims together.  We are in the ark of salvation along with everyone else: people in Mozambique who desperately need boats to get away from present-day flood damage; people in Chechnia who are being violated, as we speak.  And of course animals too. 

 When Mr and Mrs Noah and the No-lets eventually got to shore, God gave them a sign of redemption.  He set a bow in the clouds, a rainbow which would be an everlasting reminder that he intended salvation for everyone and for all.   

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY   BBC Radio 4 

 22 February 2000   Lavinia Byrne

I liked the birdsong story, yesterday’s news from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, about Mozart and the requiem he wrote for his dead starling, better known to us as his Divertimento K522 or ‘A Musical Joke’.