成人快手

A spiritual comment and prayer to start the day with writer and broadcaster Mark Dowd

Good Morning

Some years ago I was asked to present a TV documentary on religious fundamentalism. One of our interviewees was the former Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks who had just published a compelling book entitled: The Dignity of Difference. His words from our encounter in his north London home have stayed with me for more than a decade:

鈥淔undamentalism is the attempt to impose a single truth on a plural world. And what really lies behind it is fear. That makes you feel when you meet someone who鈥檚 not like you or who doesn鈥檛 agree with you, that that challenges your very being. Aggression is always a sign of insecurity.鈥�

Now this mindset isn鈥檛 the exclusive preserve of the religious outlook. Many鈥檚 the time in these heady, octane-fuelled weeks of political dispute, that Lord Sack鈥檚 words have hovered in my mind. He wasn鈥檛 by any means the first to warn about fractious division and reducing your opponents to two dimensional cardboard cutouts. St Paul in his letter to the Galatians, warned against this tendency to demonise and dehumanize. 鈥淚f you bite and devour each other,鈥� he said, 鈥渨atch out, or you will be destroyed by each other.鈥�

Any person who does not stop to ponder how the world must look from the vantage point of another lacks empathy. And he or she who lacks empathy is, as the saying goes, 鈥渁 self-made creature who worships his creator.鈥� A binary world in which I have all truth and you have none is a world reduced to my vain and self-serving outlook. It is a world, as the poet W.B Yeats said, in which the best can lack all conviction and the worst of us can have 鈥渁ll passionate intensity.鈥�

Creator God, give us tongues that practice the discourse of love and respect; and that, when needed, choose the precious gift of silence that listens.

Amen