Rev Dr Sam Wells

Good Morning. Tonight is Seder night, the start of Passover, the Jewish Festival of Freedom, when we recall the Exodus from Egypt, our people’s journey from slavery to liberation. It’s a story which embraces all our stories. My mother, aged a hundred, tells how she escaped Nazi Europe. A woman whose husband is imprisoned in the Congo says, ‘May God who freed your people, free him.’ A Muslim guest who fled for his life stands up and exclaims: ‘Your story is my story too.’ For, far from free, so much of the world suffers beneath oppression and war. Maybe that’s why the Seder ends with a song, Chad Gadya, which means ‘one little goat’ in Aramaic. It’s a ditty in the style of The House That Jack Built: a cat eats the goat, dog bites cat, stick hits dog, fire burns stick, water quenches fire, cow drinks water, butcher kills cow, the angel of death despatches the butcher. But then comes God and slays the angel of death. I have a vivid memory of my grandfather, aged and weak, catching my eye and whispering at what he knew would be his final Seder, ‘after death comes God.’ That was his faith, his hope. But does God have the last word in our violent world? It hardly feels that way today. I phone family in Jerusalem: we’re in and out of bomb shelters. My heart goes out to them. I call an Iranian friend: ‘No word from my sisters in Tehran.’ ‘My hometown’s just been bombed,’ a Ukrainian acquaintance texts me. So that Chad Gadya song feels like a metaphor for history, only it’s not goats and cats, but humanity who’s the victim. In their heart-rending shared memorial service, bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families sing that song in Hebrew and Arabic together. Yet, I still see my grandfather’s face and hear his whisper: after the angel of death comes God; life is greater than death. But I hear those words as a question: What world is this? What do we want it to be? Of death, or life; oppression or freedom; cruelty or compassion? I pray this Passover will truly mark our journey towards freedom, so that we can celebrate God’s world together, knowing that the same sacred spirit flows through us all, whatever our faith or nationality, giving life to all that breathes. We’ve had too much of cat eating goat, human devouring human. May this Festival of Freedom mark our liberation from hatred, violence and fear, for my people, and every people.

31 MAR 26

30 MAR 26

28 MAR 26

Good morning. I recently came across a new term - ‘chronically terminal’. Janis Chen, has stage four lung cancer and writing in the Guardian, she describes how every day is a struggle to go on. She lives in what she calls ‘The long middle’, the period between first diagnosis and the time when she will finally pass from this life; a time that is ‘chronically terminal’. But still a time for living, of living as best she can. As 3.5 million people in the UK live with cancer and there are 420,000 new cases a year, many will resonate with her situation. In this beautifully written piece she describes the effect of illness on people’s religious belief or lack of belief. She said that she found herself back in church on Sundays. ‘Faith furnished me with a different architecture for endurance: it offered a vocabulary of hope’. But she also notes that a member of her support group who previously had a faith totally lost it as a result of the illness. They could not understand why it had happened to them. ‘To some, the diagnosis is a clarifying fire that burns away the trivial, leaving a refined spiritual core. To others, it is an acid dissolving everything they once held.’ What the illness has done for her more than anything else has sharpened her discernment. As she put it: It leaves only the essential, revealing that meaning resides entirely in the quality of our attention. To walk through a park, to watch the sunlight catch a river or to register the laughter of children against the thrum of a passing bus is to realise these are no longer background noise; they are the destination. Particularly at this time of year with trees budding and blossom coming out what she writes seems particularly pertinent and it brought to mind a famous interview between Melvyn Bragg and the playwright Dennis Potter as he was dying. Dennis Potter said that when he looked out of the window he did not just say ‘Oh that’s nice blossom’. I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it. the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous. It is this living in the moment that the discipline of mindfulness is trying to achieve, whatever stage of life we are at. Father Pierre de Caussade, in the first half of the 18th century, wrote about it and called it ‘the Sacrament of the present moment’. For him however it was not just about experiencing the present more intensely, but being open and receptive to what might be being asked of us in that moment-in every now there was, he taught, a providence to be discerned and responded to.

26 MAR 26

25 MAR 26

In an interview on this programme yesterday, the former national security adviser Peter Ricketts; was asked ‘what about that old thing…. Wisdom’? it was in the contemporary context of the war between the US, Israel and Iran. It’s a modern question that echoes the question in the Book of Proverbs: Where can wisdom be found? Good question. Difficult question. The search for wisdom today is in the context of the escalation of violence in the Middle East, and in the counting of over 60 active state-based conflicts and wars worldwide, the highest number since (records began in) 1946. And in the context of another escalation; the exponential growth in the capability and reach of artificial intelligence, which scientists are now calling the ‘Intelligence Explosion’ predicted back in the 1960s, when human beings cede control of the growth and development of AI. In both of these enormous endeavours, the speed and scale of revolutionary action is disorientating for many populations around the world. And in both the prosecution of global war, and the ceding of the growth of AI to AI itself, the illusion of human control over events is both inaccurate and has the potential to be ultimately destructive for, well, everyone. In short: it’s easier to light the spark of AI than to control the spread of its flames. And it’s easier to start a war than to end it. It is a question for our time – what is it in human beings that is served by our need for speed and escalation? As a species, we seem to give free reign to these instincts, sometimes useful of course, but also with the capacity to brutalise and crush us. These instincts leave little room for creativity, kindness and selflessness that take more time than we seem to think we have. But the search for wisdom in Scripture is characterised by the taking of time, by a commitment to restraint, self-discipline, and closely linked not so much to the acquisition of more knowledge but a desire to understand. Tomorrow, the first woman to be Archbishop of Canterbury will begin her public ministry with prayer, music, silence and the gathering of community in a house of prayer that has stood for 1400 years. In gathering to sing and pray, it might look as if the church is fiddling while Rome is burning. But the ancient liturgies and symbolic actions form a different sort of public statement: that wisdom matters. And that even in the perilous times that we are in, humility and grace point the way to another vision of what it is to be human before God.

23 MAR 26

Good morning, The words of Jessie Buckley dedicating her Oscar win to ‘the beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart’ have been echoing in my mind throughout this week. She picked up the Best Actress award for playing a grieving mother in Hamnet. The film reimagines the lives of William Shakespeare and his wife Anne Hathaway as they cope with the tragic death of their 11-year-old son. This idea of the beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart moves us beyond the saccharine pinks and yellow flowers of Mother’s Day to the reality that motherhood is wild and earth-shattering and terrifying. My goodness can it be joyous, too. But for many mothers, it is all those things – sometimes all at once. Sometimes the chaos of a mother’s heart has to deal with the worst things imaginable: the death of a child. On Thursday night, I hosted an event in conversation with Gee Walker at Chester Cathedral, exploring black motherhood and grief. Gee’s 18-year-old son Anthony was murdered in a racially aggravated attack while walking near his home in Merseyside 20 years ago. In the book by Maggie O’Farrell upon which the film Hamnet is based, are these words: “Never take for granted that your children’s hearts beat, that they sup milk, that they draw breath, that they walk and speak and smile and argue and play. Never forget that they may be gone, snatched from you, in the blink of an eye, borne away from you like thistledown.” I had planned to ask Gee Walker at the end of our event what gives her hope, but I couldn’t bring myself to. I resisted the urge to wrap her grief up in a tidy bow, to end on a glib message so we could all go away feeling better. This Easter, Christians will celebrate Jesus’s resurrection – the great story at the heart of my faith. But perhaps what many of us also take from Holy Week is that resurrection doesn’t erase the reality of the brutality of Christ’s crucifixion. His mother watching it all at the foot of the cross. Gee Walker told me she finds solidarity in “Mamma Mary”, as she describes Jesus’s mother”: a mother who – just like her – experienced the nightmare of watching her son die and not being able to do anything to help, not even be able to hold him. Gee described doing the little that she was able to –while Antony lay dying- holding tightly to his feet while police and paramedics intervened. In the months following Anthony’s death, Gee’s family started the Anthony Walker Foundation, raising aspirations of schoolchildren and providing comfort to other grieving families. For her, it’s through this work that Anthony lives on. So too did Mary mother a movement that took her son’s message to the ends of the earth. Perhaps the “beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart” is that even when it is broken, it can speak life.