麻豆约拍

A spiritual comment and prayer to start the day with Dr Marika Rose.

Good morning. I鈥檒l be spending today travelling back from Greenbelt, one of the UK鈥檚 largest faith-based festivals, where I鈥檝e spent the bank holiday weekend catching up with friends, encountering new ideas, and not getting nearly enough sleep. Perhaps you鈥檙e also on your way back from a festival, a holiday, or a trip to visit friends or family. Travel is interesting because being shaken out of our usual routines can help us experience different ways of being. How does it affect us to have to change our breakfast routine, to navigate around unfamiliar neighbourhoods, to experience different cultures, to speak different languages, to make do without a shower, or to cope with all the discomforts of camping in a grubby muddy field somewhere?

There鈥檚 nothing wrong with routine, but sometimes we can get so absorbed in the habits and busyness of day to day life that we forget that how we live isn鈥檛 the only way to live; that how we inhabit our bodies, our homes, and our relationships, is always partly the result of choices that we鈥檝e made. We can come to think that our way of living is the only way of living, both for us and for other people, and there鈥檚 a danger that we can lose sight of the many possibilities of human life, and the richness of human difference.

God we thank you that you are no less present with us and in us when we travel than when we stay at home. Help us to learn from our experiences of travelling, what it might mean to live a life that is kinder and freer than the one we currently inhabit. Help us to develop compassion for others whose ways of being in the world are different from our own. Amen.