Martin Wroe

Good morning.Ocean transport has rarely left our news headlines over these last few weeks. The ongoing efforts of the USA and Iran to block or open up the Strait of Hormuz now being joined by the plight of passengers on a virus struck cruise ship, finally docked in Tenerife.It’s tempting then, to think of the world’s oceans primarily as means of transporting travellers and goods. Yet, as ocean naturalists, from Rachel Carson to David Attenborough, have repeatedly reminded us, the seas are home to a vast array of amazing species. The wonders of our oceans are however, now at significant risk from two direct consequences of human activity, climate change and pollution. Indeed, it’s widely argued by scientists that, for the seas to recover, a minimum of 30% of the world’s oceans will need to be protected by 2030.The challenge, as so often with regard to environmental damage, is our human reluctance to take short term sacrifices for longer term gain. Or else we so frame the actions required by way of sacrifice that they fall disproportionately on the poorest among our communities and nations. It is here that two core aspects of my own faith come together.First, as Psalm 95 in the Hebrew Scriptures asserts, “The sea is his, and he made it”. That tells me, our human accountability to God extends to our treatment of the oceans just as much as it does the dry land.Second, those of us with greater wealth or assets are expected to shoulder the heavier burden. As Jesus says in Luke 12: 48, “From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded.”Governments have a vital part to play. The High Seas Treaty, which came into force earlier this year, and the UK Parliament has now legislated to ratify, affords opportunity for safeguarding large swathes of the oceans. The Sargasso Sea, surrounding the Island of Bermuda, and home to a rich and diverse range of species, is a prime candidate for environmental protection measures that avoid destroying the livelihoods of local fishing communitiesI’m grateful too for the work of campaigning organisations, such as Greenpeace, whose ship Witness, I was privileged to visit, with other parliamentarians, recently. Along with sister vessels, it monitors biodiversity and plastic pollution in sensitive areas, exposing behaviours that jeopardise the seas and challenging us all to do better. Together, treaties and campaigners offer me hope that we can yet treasure the world’s oceans for their true value, a value far far beyond their immediate usefulness as means to transport the world’s supplies of oil. But, as Jesus stated so bluntly, our own individual practices matter too.

Good morning. After another tense night watching football in the pub, my friend reminded me of how different the experience is to when we were younger. How do you mean I asked. Well, we don’t reek of smoke, he said. And I remembered what it used to be like. How after going to a gig, or a bar, everyone stank of someone else’s smoke afterwards. And now we never do.It was twenty years ago this year that the Health Act passed, banning smoking in enclosed spaces… and today we take it for granted.Last month, almost under the radar, another law passed so that anyone born since January 2009 will never legally be able to buy tobacco products. Smoking will become rarer and rarer…but so gradually that we won’t realise.We don’t notice change as it’s happening, it’s absorbed into the new normal.If the morning news is immediate and dramatic, history is often incremental and invisible. It happens on the quiet.Until you stop to notice that it’s hiding in plain sight. Or you measure it against a greater span than a news cycle. A life span, for example, a centurion like David Attenborough.Penicillin, discovered when Attenborough was two, has a reasonable claim to being the best invention since sliced bread… except that sliced bread was also invented in 1928.My uncle Dave, who died the other day, was the last of my mothers eleven siblings. One didn’t survive into adulthood due to polio, a disease almost eradicated today. People no longer have 12 children like my grandparents, - the NHS, born when Attenborough was 22, introduced the contraceptive pill and family sizes fell.Then there’s electrification or the mobile phone - when Attenborough was 50 … as well as, on the down side, the atom bomb and global warming.Just as we might wonder how our ancestors tolerated slavery or hanging maybe our descendants will wonder how we tolerated the industrial production of animals for food or tearing down rainforests. The American essayist Rebecca Solnit, who calls herself, in a winning phrase, an ‘ambient Buddhist,’ says that it’s not heroic leaders who change history but the seeds planted quietly by communities acting together… who may not live to see those seeds flower. Seeds of equality or justice or peace which, once planted, may seem to disappear. In her new book, The Beginning Comes After The End, Solnit calls these seeds ‘imaginal cells’ which hold ‘the instructions for transformation’. Or as Jesus of Nazareth told his friends, ‘unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.’

Good morning. If you live to be one hundred, will you still be the same person inside who you’ve always been? Will the same things still make you laugh? Will you remember the best moments of your life…and the worst? Will you still care about the world and will it still care about you, if you live to be one hundred? Let’s ask Sir David Attenborough, who today reaches one hundred. He’s helped create some of the most beloved and respected nature programmes ever made. But he’s a mere whippersnapper in comparison with some of the antediluvian patriarchs from the book of Genesis. There is Methuselah, of course, who is listed as living 969 years. He appears in the genealogy from Adam to Noah, who only lived for 950 years. After the flood, the patriarchs got younger. Moses, for example, only lived for a mere 120 years. There are symbolic and literary interpretations for why these men were described as being extraordinarily long-lived. These stories tell us that ageing should not be feared but revered. That the older a person was, the more respected they were, the more important they were, and crucially, the closer they were to God. Today, ageing is more feared than ever before. We have an obsession with artificially preserving youth to an unnatural degree, as if ageing were a shameful secret. The middle-aged are spoken of with a hint of derision. Our parents dismissed as privileged, clueless boomers. And the generation before them? Silent. Of course, old age doesn’t always lead to wisdom, but anti-ageing rhetoric, however subtle, does lead to a disquieting erosion of worth. To see the elderly as God sees them would be to regard ageing as a privilege, and to see those older than us as repositories of wisdom and experience, instead of a burden on public resources. It is the elderly who engage most in public service, making up an army of volunteers who do everything from maintaining communal outdoor space, helping run various social groups, and caring for grandchildren. They are the custodians of the Christian faith, valued elders who play a vital role in the life of the church. Psalm 92 speaks of cedars planted in the house of the Lord, how in old age they’re still green and produce fruit. In every community there are to be found inspiring archetypes of ageing. We place all our hopes in the young, for they represent the future, but our elders don’t just belong to the past, they are the present too. They still have the ability to take the world by surprise. Happy 100th birthday Sir David. If I live to be one hundred, may I too be green and full of fruit.

07 MAY 26

Early one morning last week, I was taking a walk from the church to the park in central London where I live. I walked down Waterloo Place, named after the battle more than 200 years ago when on a June Sunday, 60,000 casualties and thousands of horses were killed on a muddy field in present day Belgium. Past the memorial to the war in Crimea fought three decades later when hundreds of thousands of men died, many from infected wounds. Historic acknowledgement of terrible bloodshed collided with the present day as I noticed a new statue, as yet without too many crowds to see it, had appeared overnight. We now know it was put there by Banksy. Up on a plinth is a well fed man, dressed in a western style business suit. In his right hand, he holds high a huge flag. His other hand is in a fist. He is marching forward. But the flag he’s carrying has blown into his face and he can’t see where he’s going. As the viewer, we witness his next step taking him off the plinth, marching into thin air. One more step and he will fall. The man’s distinctive posture lionises individual autonomy, allied with what seems to be a determination to dominate in the name of whatever’s on the flag he’s holding. But the flag, presumably the reason he’s marching in the first place, is itself the very reason he can’t see the way ahead. I found myself addressing the man as he towered over me…. Sir – you’re holding your flag up proudly but you can’t see where you’re going. I don’t know what made you think you should be up there, but you don’t have to stay. Now, the only way is down. But when you’re scrambling to get up - in the mud of the wars similar to the ones that are commemorated all around you – there’s a chance you could recover yourself, and turn your flag, no doubt colourful and vibrant, into a symbol of a different kind of unity. You could use it to bind the wounds of war, to wipe the face of Christ on his way to be crucified. You could use it to make shade in the heat, bring warmth in the cold. In addressing the man in my mind, I thought of the prodigal son in Jesus’s parable, leaving his community to seek autonomy, marching off his own particular plinth, finding to his surprise, off his pedestal, that his father still welcomed him home. I found myself feeling compassion for hubristic and lonely humanity, as we consistently choose domination over cooperation, clenched fists not open hands. And for evoking these reflections, I thanked God for the inventiveness of artists, who in these bellicose and dysregulated times, powerfully and provocatively show us another way.

05 MAY 26

05 MAY 26

I don’t know about you, but May is my favourite month: spring in its pomp and the blessing of light, warm days to come! And with ‘international dawn-chorus day’ tomorrow, too, it’s an invitation to hear nature’s songs of praise sung from the treetops afresh.If you struggle to rise early, you could follow the advice of journalist Henry Porter and drink a lot of water before you go to bed.Though some may not have been to bed at all! — a report out this week says that birdwatching is now the second most popular hobby among “Gen Z”. Almost three quarters of a million 16-29 year-olds bird-watch regularly, which has to be good news. A young woman called Jess Painter, of the RSPB youth council, said that by pausing “to be curious, to watch, listen and learn, you open yourself up to endless small moments of wonder.”With so much strife in the world, it’s surely one profound way of clearing our heads.Yet as Jess hints, getting out to watch the birds, or to listen to the dawn chorus, is not merely escape from what’s wrong, but embrace of what’s right: nature calls to our own better nature, too — to give the gift of our attention, so desperately fought over by the tech giants, to what’s natural, beautiful. And as a Christian I’d say to sense the Creator’s presence, too, within the awe-inspiring symphony of Creation.Such awe is so good for us — our ego knows it can’t possibly compete with a choir of blackbirds, robins, warblers, even a nightingale if we’re very lucky — so it quietens, and lets the soul stir to become part of ‘the family of things’ again, as the poet Mary Oliver puts it.And in such moments, shift happens. Recently, I interviewed the eminent ecologist Tom Crowther, who says that nature is filled with feedback loops — some of which are destructive, when the balance of an ecosystem has been upset (so often by humans); while other loops are restorative, regenerative — and we can be part of them.As a scientist, he said that it’s crucial his discipline learns spiritual practices of contemplation, meditation, prayer, as ways to help break the circuit, to step out of our personal feedback loops of despair, into ones of hopeful uplift instead.Take joy in nature, as we rediscover our own nature singing its song, too. Watch the birds of the air, as Jesus said for good reason.It may start simply with setting an alarm for tomorrow — or by drinking that large glass of water tonight. Whatever helps us best to catch this polyphonic wake up for the soul.

Good morning. 75 years ago this weekend saw the Festival of Britain open to much fanfare. In 1951, cities were being rebuilt from the rubble of war, there were food shortages and rationing, and there was uncertainty in everyday life. But instead of retreating into itself and just focusing on the practicalities of post-war life, Britain decided to do something remarkable and celebrate itself. The Festival saw the SouthBank of the Thames in Central London transformed into a cultural and entertainment hub, much as it had been centuries earlier, and it left a lasting imprint, shaping modern British design, architecture, and public art for decades to come. But perhaps its most powerful legacy was in creating a shared collective national experience, a moment in time where people felt like belonged to something far greater than themselves. We’ve had glimpses of that more recently, and the London 2012 Olympics carried a similar energy. I vividly remember how, for those few weeks, there was a real sense of shared joy and excitement across the country, no matter who we were. The opening ceremony showed a Britain that reflected its modern identity, whimsical, eccentric, confident and diverse, with a keen sense of our history and an eye for what the future may hold. Collective moments like this matter, because they bring the nation together and remind us of who we are and who we can be. Sadly, that sense of togetherness is perhaps more fragile today. Differences feel more pronounced, more obvious than ever. Some seem more inclined to destroy rather than build bridges, and we have seen the horrible consequences of that this week in Golders Green. In the Sikh scriptures, one of the revered saints of the faith, Bhagat Kabir, says “When the difference between myself and others is removed, then wherever I look, I see only You, the Divine”. At a time of polarised communities both here and abroad, some minorities feel under threat, particularly when it’s easier to withdraw into our own perspectives than it is to convene with those who may see the world differently. But if we look beyond those differences, I believe we are far stronger as a country than some – both inside and outside the UK - might give us credit for. 75 years ago, the Festival of Britain was special because of its spirit of hope and togetherness. Likewise with London 2012. They weren’t times of perfect agreement, in fact far from it, but they remained moments of shared experience nonetheless because they celebrated us – every single one of us – in our United Kingdom.

30 APRIL 26