I have been a regular contributor to  Thought For The Day on Radio 4’s Today programme since 2000. In the last 20 years I have written and broadcast over 250 of them. A selection is published in the book Godbothering. In 2015 I did a Thought on National Poetry Day, trying to capture what I think Thought For The Day is and should be. Here:

Thought Poem

(On National Poetry Day)

It’s time for Thought

And there’s two minutes forty

To put some glory

In the morning’s story,

To make something meaningful

Of what is topical.

To see the spiritual

In all this material.

Time to get the words right

To set the world straight

To give a different take

And shed a different light

To kick against the pricks

Of the daily grind.

To grab a truth worth hearing

To have a quiet word

Amidst the cut and thrust

Of opinion and cross-question. 

To offer reflections

From Faith’s deep wisdoms

To speak for and against the absurd

To admit the world-sorrow

And not let it have the final word.

It’s slipped between

What The Papers Say

And that taped section which

(On any given day)

Reports a sparrow’s falling

A kingdom dividing;

And the weather

(Bad and changing).

This daily anomaly

Can’t be sermon

And not quite homily,

Preach and be damned

But sound right about what’s wrong

Mine for the good

In the ore of the bad

For a single pearl make a dive

Say there’s a God:

Or hint that there might be

Keep the rumour alive.

But don’t get ethereal

Keep things reasonable

Don’t peddle consolation

Or the best available illusion

Tell a truth, but tell it slant

If not truth then something equal to it.

Make sense of the din,

The savagery, the wonder and triviality,

If you can.

Think of the listeners

Put yourself in their ears

The invisible throng,

Half listening, heckling,

Shaving, commuting.

You’re background noise, 

To all this thrum

A still, small voice vying

With all the striving.

Truth and platitude sound alike to someone not listening.

The world is dying

To hear something better,

But at this time of morning

It’s hard to catch

Other ways of seeing and being

Of doing and living

When you need

To get going,

And a bigger story’s breaking

And stocks are tumbling

Empires are crumbling

And they’re announcing

The fall

Of kings and companies

The start of wars

And the whole world’s ending.

The clock is ticking

Everything atrophies

And things fall apart.

Dare you say

There’s something lasting?

You have mere moments

To risk the invisible

Back the un-provable

Stake all on the intangible.

Be still, and know

There’s a place

A three-minute space

(The time it takes to boil an egg)

To hear a different voice, another noise

Clear your throat(Yes, it’s live)

Speak of more

Than what we simply see and hear,

The something, not the nothing.

No need to start a creed, or lay a law

Say what you think this life is for.

Give some grist,

Blow a breeze, throw a seed

From your studio chair,

From this Kingdom of the air. 

Announce good news is near

Before we’re off and on our way

And whatever you do, whatever you say

Make it a Thought

That lasts a day.

In 2006, whilst travelling in Africa, India and China with my wife and two children, I did a series of Thoughts For The Day describing our journey through places affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic. This Thought, about the preciousness of life and pricelessness of a glass of water, is my own favourite.  

 Good morning/afternoon,

 Physically I’m in India’s maximum city, Mumbai, but spiritually this thought comes to you from rural Kenya where we have been living for the last month.

 Although we are a well-travelled family, we have rarely been to places where people live on the dollar a day that (1/3rd) of the World’s population try to survive on. If we ever witnessed this poverty it was fleeting and at best made an edgy ‘authentic’ snap for our photo album. We didn’t dare to experience what it was like to live alongside serious deprivation. That was something for anthropologists and priests. We were busy pursuing culture and recreation. For isn’t this how we learn about the world?

 But living in a community, with a high prevalence of HIV/Aids, a water shortage, no electricity, unreliable food and exceptionally bad roads, has seriously challenged our understanding about the world. We can’t help feeling that if we’d done this earlier we might have learned things that years of pursuing culture and pleasure have failed to teach us.

 Not that when you come to Africa you expect to be taught something. If anything, you think, because you’ve read the economic arguments and know the history, and come from a part of the world which has surely worked out how life works, that you have something to teach it.

 But then you get to this massive, red-earthed continent and away from the tourist bubble and you realise that your horizons have been utterly limited until now, and that these people you characterised as poor and sick and somehow lacking in the basics are, despite all they face, talented, funny and generous; that they live with exceptional hope and resilience, and in communities so inter-dependent that is makes our individualistic, self-sufficient lives seem deleterious. For a while, your whole system for measuring ‘wealth’ gets turned upside down.

 But then you wake up the next day and circumstances douse your naïve enthusiasm: across the road a 35 year old man dies of AIDS leaving five more orphans for the community to feed; then you learn that the community has inadequate water for crops because there’s been a 2 year drought; then a tearful father asks you for funds to send a daughter to secondary school; and there is a scandal about the government spending millions on fleets of flashy four wheel drives, a government that is already spending more on repaying debt than it does on education - and you want to push your head into the red dust and scream.

 But the next day the sun comes up, and you see the people walking to market to sell mangoes and goats in exchange for exercise books and tools; and in church people pledge sacks of beans for the orphans; and the widows group are using the money from their maize to buy another cow; and maybe the government are going to bore for water after all, and there’s sense that, with a little support and some investment that this could all work …

 And you sit down exhausted from the rollercoaster of an African day, when your 70 year old neighbour comes to check that you are okay (as if you are the one who is deprived) and you offer her a glass of water and she pauses before drinking and you wonder if you’ve broken some social protocol and then you see that she is actually thanking God for the glass of the water and for the gift of life, and you realise that all your wealth, travel, education and privilege has never really taught you the true worth of a glass of water or been able to demonstrate how precious life is as simply and powerfully as this.