Rev Dr Giles Fraser

19 JUNE 26

Good morning, There’s much discussion over flags and marches and what it means to be British at the moment. This has meant the legitimate concerns of some have led to my own legitimate concerns for my family’s safety. As an immigrant and a visible ethnic minority in the town in which I live, I can feel a sense of dis-ease and fear about whether or not I’m welcome in the nation which I have called home my whole life. It’s within this climate of hyper-vigilance that I boarded a local bus and braced myself for some racist words from one particular man – someone I had judged based on the colour of his skin. To me, he looked like the type of person who might not like me. I thought he might shout some abuse, or tell me to go back to where I came from. Instead he showed me kindness. He held my son’s buggy for me as I struggled with mine and my kids’ belongings, giving up his seat so we could sit down. I could have wept at the simple humanity of it. And the shame of me pre-emptively judging another based on a perceived difference. All around us we see evidence that our society is fractured and fragmented and polarised. The horror of the scenes in Northern Ireland, and the sadness as we remember MP Jo Cox’s murder 10 years ago this week. We’re told time and again that we have more in common than what divides us. But I wonder whether this suggests we need to find our commonality before feeling a shared humanity. Maybe it’s recognising our difference and choosing decency, kindness, and even love despite those differences that we should value. The Christian tradition can help us here in the example of the early Church – people from many different backgrounds and cultural and religious traditions – came together, sharing everything they had, not because they were the same, but because of a commonality found outside their individual circumstances and characteristics. Their differences were the point. This week, I attended the Sandford St Martin awards honouring the best in religious broadcasting, where a special award went to the BBC’s Pilgrimage. The show takes well-known figures in British life with different beliefs – the devoutly religious, the agnostic, and the vehemently atheist – on a journey towards sacred sites including Santiago de Compostela, Holy Island and the Vatican. Perhaps the show’s beauty lies not in the pilgrims’ sameness, but in their difference. The commonality is not in their beliefs, but in their shared purpose, getting through a gruelling journey; spiritual and personal transformation taking place along the way. I find this a beautiful metaphor for this moment in which we find ourselves - One which might help us to meet the challenges ahead of us, where we might see our differences, and choose kindness and togetherness, anyway.

The headline simply says: ‘All I have left is a burnt bag.’ These are the words of a parent in a recent Sky News investigation. The report has identified the faces of most of the children and teachers who were killed in Iran when a US missile struck a primary school in Minab at the start of the US-Israel war in Iran. At the time, the world reacted with shock, leaders made statements, but then the cameras moved on, and another tragedy replaced the last. That these children never returned home was a reality lost in the politics of war. As we hopefully reach an agreement to end the conflict this week, the photos of these school children are a poignant reminder that while deaths are reported as numbers in the news headlines, behind every face is a name, behind every name is a family and behind every family is a world that changed forever when that child was killed. Whether it’s news of a school shooting in America, children killed in war and conflict or the thousands dying from the slow tragedy of famine, I sometimes wonder whether too often children’s deaths have become headlines we just ignore or scroll past – they are over there, far away, someone else’s problem. Because we live in a time where tragedy can appear on our screens, compete for attention, and disappear within hours. But I think that if religious faith means anything it demands that we ask ourselves what happens to our own humanity when another person’s suffering no longer moves us. Faith shouldn’t make us complacent; it should make us care. If as Islamic thought tells us children are an amanah, a trust from God, the moral weight of this trust is that it can be broken not only by violence but also by silence. As adults, we don’t own their future but we are responsible for protecting it. Seeing children as evidence of hope, the Indian poet and writer Rabindranath Tagore once said: ‘Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of humanity.’ Perhaps that’s the hope we can all hold onto, that however terrible war is, we don’t reduce or dismiss the deaths of children to collateral damage. Good journalism can’t explain everything but it can refuse to let everything be forgotten. And yes, at a time when so much of the news media is contested, this story shows us that the world depends on journalists to turn distance into attention and hopefully attention, at its best, into conscience.

16 JUNE 26

15 JUNE 26

13 JUNE 26

A friend relates the stresses of getting up in the morning. Her child has stubbed a toe but is it broken, poor kid? Simultaneously, the radio on, there is news of bombs again in the Middle East. And then, another worry: the erratic weather and what that might mean for a shifting climate. On top of that again, a background of disturbed domestic politics. Where is that leading? A hotch-potch of anxieties mount up. My friend and I talked about how to handle these confused concerns, some smaller, some massive; some nearer, some afar. They crash in on us. Little wonder that some people become politically frazzled or mentally fatigued – or over-stimulated or drop out altogether. The wisdom traditions offer advice on how to deal with such turbulence. A label often given to this advice is non-attachment. The idea is not to not care. But rather to learn a skilfulness in how you care. Jesus was one figure who taught as much, captured in sayings such as: “Give no thought for the morrow.” To be preoccupied with what might happen, or how things might go, is paralysing. And freezing in the present moment, or conversely over-reacting, is a disaster because the present moment is the only one to which you can respond well. The advice continues with caring for the soul, or how we are in the world, which effects how we act in the world. Or to put it another way: tend to the jostling facets of ourselves, what might be called our temperamental inner community. That internal unrest shapes our interactions with the wider community that exists around and about us. How we are inside will much effect how we are in the outside world. Cultivating a non-attached attention also opens up awareness of something spiritual. Staying with what is present is an admission that there are many things that we cannot control and, crucially, that we will let them be. This is not a failure but the gaining of a wider perspective. And then, it is possible to see that the modest good we can do is part of a wider good, which can be called God. There is a mental cost to feeling trapped in myriad troubles, but there is a spiritual liberty to find. Care with our attention brings that freedom – which is what I found with my friend. Her child with the stubbed toe was OK. The wider world certainly knows suffering, but there is also a goodness in the world that we can find and amplify.

Good morning. For followers of football, this is an important day. The FIFA men’s World Cup begins, and all around the world, fans are preparing themselves to cheer on their favourite team. Although the real stars of the competition are the talented players and their coaches, we should not underestimate the importance of supporters. Numerous pieces of research have shown that the presence of fans does have a positive impact on how well a team plays. So much so, in fact, that they’re often called the twelfth player. This became particularly clear during covid when football matches were played without anyone else present. When this happened, the home team advantage melted away. Without a crowd in the stands to cheer them on, the footballers struggled to play their best. The sudden lack of the presence of supporters at games highlighted that fans really do make a difference to how teams play. Today, churches around the world celebrate the feast of St Barnabas. Born in Cyprus, he was originally called Joseph but was renamed Barnabas by the earliest Christians, a name which means ‘son of encouragement’. Stories in the Acts of the Apostles show that Barnabas dedicated his life to encouraging others. He was generous and supportive, brave and compassionate, so much so, in fact, that he is the patron saint of encouragement. This doesn’t mean that Barnabas spent his life simply being nice to people. He was courageous. When the apostle Paul first converted, many other Christians were frightened of him and Barnabas stood up for him; but when Paul later fell out with John Mark, for abandoning his missionary journey and returning to Jerusalem, Barnabas supported John Mark against the more powerful Paul. An encourager stands up for you when you need it most. Everyone needs encouragement. We all need people on our side, cheering us on and giving us hope, confidence and the strength to continue. The people who have been most important my life are not the ones who have, entirely correctly, pointed out the many things I’ve done wrong, but the ones who have given me the vision of who I could be and the things I could do. We need people to believe in us; it is what enables us to do our best. Over the next five weeks, whether you are a football fan or not, perhaps you can take a moment to pause and give thanks for the people who have been your biggest fans in life, and to remember that no matter what form it takes, encouragement really does make a difference.

Good morning. What would you do if you came across a man in a park, sitting in front of a typewriter, offering to write a poem with you? I would avoid eye contact and walk away as quickly as possible. After all, the offer might just be a ruse to rob me, or worse. And even if its genuine, I suspect the outcome of our poetic collaboration would be cringingly bad. But there is such a man in the park, and I have, on reflection, come to think he’s doing a good thing. Patrick Kruse, a Master’s student in Belfast, has set himself up in the city’s botanic gardens, encouraging passersby to write poems – every day for the next year. Perfect strangers report being charmed and moved by the experience. AI offers something similar, of course. Feed it key words and it can spit out verses in any style you like. So, what’s the difference? Most discussions about AI focus on its supposed capabilities. But another approach would be to ask what it means for us humans when we give up certain of our own capabilities so that AI can perform them instead. Pope Leo XIV recently published an encyclical warning against creating a technological “Tower of Babel”. He emphasized that human dignity does not derive from productivity, that no machine can replace “the grandeur of humanity” revealed in the human heart. It’s very well said. Yet there is, it seems to me, much more that still needs to said; in particular, on how AI is changing the way human beings relate to language. One of the greatest minds and prose stylists of the 19th century, Cardinal (now Saint) John Henry Newman described writing as a “thinking out into language”. Writing is not, he believed, simply a matter of expressing thoughts that are already in our heads. The act of writing is itself a form of thinking. As humans, we don’t passively transcribe ideas into words on the page; we actively test, explore, refine, reimagine our ideas as we go. Writing is in that sense a unique and powerful tool not simply for communication, but for reasoning. Having machines write for us may be quicker, easier, slicker. But by outsourcing our struggles to find the right words, we also outsource the essential human struggle known as thinking. The new bard of Belfast’s botanic gardens may not be producing high poetry, but his eccentric efforts are surely welcome in an age obsessed with efficiency and outcomes. It’s good to be reminded that all of us have something worthwhile to say, including things we cannot fully know until we set our minds to dance with language.

09 JUNE 26