Thought for the Day

17 AUG 26

TODAY, AUGUST 15, is traditionally the day that Catholics celebrate the feast of the Assumption, that marks Mary, mother of Jesus, being taken both body and soul into heaven. Countless Catholics even before the Church made it official dogma, believed it.
What intrigues me, though, is when the Church did make the Assumption dogma. It was confirmed by Pope Pius XII in 1950. So just five years after the end of the Second World War, when millions of Jewish people lost their lives in the Holocaust, the Catholic Church officially endorsed a Jewish woman as Queen of Heaven.
There’s still controversy about Pius XII, elected Pope in 1939. Some historians argue that he didn’t do enough for the Jewish people, while others say he worked behind the scenes to help save Jews from the Nazis. Before he became Pope, as Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, the Vatican Secretary of State, he signed on behalf of his predecessor, Pius XI, the 1933 concordat that guaranteed the rights of the Catholic Church to operate in Germany.
What is less well-known is that four years later, horrified by what was happening in Germany – and monitored by Pacelli – the Vatican issued a papal teaching document or encyclical on the situation there. Called With Burning Anxiety, it was written in German, not the usual Latin, and read out in all Catholic Churches in Germany on Palm Sunday, 1937.
It endorsed the Jewish scriptures as worthy of respect and condemned the exaltation of race – in other words the Nazi obsession with the Aryan race. This so infuriated the Nazis they tried to confiscate copies of the encyclical.
While that document was published by Pius XI and probably authored by Pacelli, it was also probably influenced by the thinking of a Jewish woman, Edith Stein. Stein, a philosopher, converted to Catholicism and became a Carmelite nun. Stein was later arrested and died in Auschwitz in 1942. Her extensive body of writing, including the substantial letter she wrote to Pius XI, warning of the Nazis’ desire to destroy the Jews and their idolising of race and power, as well as her thinking on Mary, survives.
Stein saw Mary as the ideal woman, nurturing and sustaining others. A woman imitate Mary, not only in the home but in the workplace, Stein wrote, “conscious of where there is want and where help is needed, intervening and regulating as far as it is possible….Then will she, like a good spirit, spread blessing everywhere.”
A good spirit that spreads blessings everywhere – that is an aspiration inspired by one Jewish woman writing of another and one I cherish on the feast of the Assumption.

Good morning.
I’ve lived in Wales for the best part of two decades and slowly felt less of an outsider. But last week I found myself in deepest Cymru, at the Eisteddfod: the annual festival of Welsh language, music and literature, which this year took place near Cardigan framed by the Preseli hills.
The Eisteddfod is a cultural celebration but it draws on druidic ceremonies. My friend became a member of the Gorsedd: imagine a combination of getting an MBE and a druid initiation. She swore on a sword to uphold Welsh culture, and received a kind of blessing from the Archdruid, the First Minister looking on in his druid robes.
It was a moment of pride in Welsh identity but sometimes nationalist narratives make me uneasy. I can’t help but wonder who it excludes. My discomfort no doubt stems from being the son of a Jewish refugee from Nazism. The universality of Buddhist teachings was always part of its draw — but even that can be co-opted by nationalist politics.
And yet, as a Jewish Buddhist from Croydon, I respond to the powerful rootedness that’s so palpable at the Eisteddfod.
My friend runs a small meeting space in the festival, and I crowded in with a few dozen others for a performance featuring a storyteller and Catrin Finch, the harpist – a celebration of awen: of the land and its tales.
I don't speak Welsh, but I could roughly follow the stories, which came from the Mabinogion, the compendium of Welsh myths, many about this part of Wales. One featured Rhiannon, a queen wrongly accused of killing her child. As a penance she must sit at the castle gates, tell visitors her story and offer to carry them across the threshold.
In the performance, Rhiannon’s passionate cry declared the love and hope still burning within her. But she sets her fury aside, carries strangers on her back, and becomes larger than the pattern of blame and revenge. Buddhism calls this the deepest freedom — not escaping suffering but refusing to be imprisoned by it.
The awen I respond to transcends borders. The Preseli rocks were taken east to build Stonehenge — raised partly to track the sun’s movements. This week, as the sky darkened over the whole of Britain, it struck me that this magic was never only Wales's to possess. It belongs to anyone willing to receive it.

13 AUG 26

Good morning. In a twist I had not anticipated, it would appear that for some young people at least, digital cameras and wired earphones are back. The technology of my youth — iPods and Walkmans — is being embraced by Gen Z. Indeed, social media is full of people talking about why they're going back to basics, using devices that many of us consigned to the bin years ago.
As someone who loves shiny new tech I’ve been left wondering what is going on. Well, while some have said that older tech is higher quality, others have expressed a strong sense of nostalgia for reminders of simpler times.
Nostalgia is an idea with a rich and complex history. The historian Agnes Arnold-Forster has written brilliantly about how modern ideas of nostalgia emerged in seventeenth-century Switzerland where it was held to be a disease of home sickness which could quite literally kill you. These days nostalgia is just as likely to be co-opted by advertising agencies to sell us stuff or by politicians to pitch their latest policies.
The Bible treats nostalgia with suspicion. In the book of Ecclesiastes it says, ‘Do not say, ‘Why were the former days better than these?’ For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.’ Its writer challenges the rose-tinted glow we can feel when looking back on the past. This view chimes with the famous story of the Israelites who, lost in the desert on the way to the promised land, look back fondly on their days of bondage in Egypt. Their leader Moses shakes them out of their reverie and gets them to start looking forward again.
Certainly, nostalgia can be understood as sentimental and regressive. The poet Billy Collins captures this brilliantly in his satirical poem ‘Nostalgia’ in which the speaker is so enamoured with the past that he ends up believing that even a few hours ago is better than now.
However, I don’t think looking back fondly is necessarily retrograde or bad. Agnes Arnold-Forster also says, ‘Nostalgia can help us re-enchant the past’. On Sunday I worshipped at a Book of Common Prayer service. I felt a wave of nostalgia for its exquisite seventeenth-century language, but I also felt profoundly connected to God in the present. The old language quieted me. I was freed from the frenetic and distracting shape of my ordinary life. The past came alive but so did my present.
In their own way, perhaps those young people using older tech might also feel freed from the frenetic modern world. Certainly, I am reminded that while I find the challenge of the new compelling, there are riches to be found in how the present is illuminated by looking back to the past.