Thought for the Day - December 28th 2020

 This is the script for my Thought for the Day on BBC Radio Four, which went out on December 28th. 

My favourite book of all time is Charles Dickens’ timeless classic A Christmas Carol.  I love it so much that I read it every year and it’s become a key part of my Christmas tradition. The transformation of Scrooge from wicked old covetous sinner to one who is redeemed and reformed, is a story that is steeped in all the things I treasure most about Christianity. Salvation. Forgiveness. Second chances. Good triumphing over evil. The ultimate promise that we are worth so much more than our worst moments. 
 
The character who best illustrates all these things is not the haunted Ebenezer, but his indefatigably cheerful nephew Fred, who despite being faced with his uncle’s rudeness and cold indifference to his persistent overtures at friendship, keeps doggedly trying again. To keep our good humour when we’re confronted with indifference, despair, agony and sadness, has been one of the main challenges of the pandemic. 
 
Dickens writes that “There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good-humour.” My ministry is permeated in this assumption and it has been both my greatest gift to others and my best coping strategy for surviving this past year. The losses, both collectively and personally, have been profound. In the midst of unimaginable agony and desperate pain, I had to dig deep to rediscover the truth that where humour resides hope soon follows. 
 
I am a fond observer of the absurdities of life: A church service COVID-style, presided over by my Rector enthroned in clerical robes and an unwieldy plastic visor, which he forgets to raise before trying to drink from the chalice. A school bus, full of teenagers with their faces pressed up to the windows, making rude gestures at me as I walk my dogs, all wearing masks, like a scene from a B-List horror movie. The Zoom meetings, an endless source for comedy, featuring the inevitable WiFi glitches which momentarily transform participants into contestants in a gurning competition. The people chatting away in blithe ignorance of their muted microphones. The surprise video-bombs from unexpected pets and toddlers. We laughed. We had to. What else could we do? 
 
I am not an optimist by nature. To survive this cursed year of 2020 I’ve had to dredge up reserves of hope I didn’t know I had. I have hope that like Ebenezer Scrooge this past year will, somehow, be redeemed. I have hope that shared laughter – even through tears – has the power to save us in all sorts of unexpected ways. I have hope that we are all worth so much more than our worst moments. I have hope.