The Guild Thought for the Day January 2008 Tuesday 29 January Long ago, with a great deal of sweat and tears, I just managed to get my Physics O level. My daughter is a physicist working on an international research project to discover more about the origins of the universe, so you can see how far out of my league she is. Indeed, she’s so far out of my league, that if my league were to explode, she wouldn’t hear the sound it made for three days. Who says scientists have no sense of humour? So, for her sake at least, I was concerned to read about the shortfall in funding which means that British scientists are losing access to two of the world’s most powerful telescopes. Alternative funds will be found elsewhere, I’ve no doubt, and the search will go on. Mankind has always pushed at the boundaries and sought to “boldly go” where no-one has gone before – and not just in terms of space exploration. Since the start of the year there’s been a flood of scientific news and the inevitable controversy about where it’s all leading. We’ve had a beating heart grown from cells in a lab, the debate about presumed consent in organ donation, the importance of providing genetic history in the case of people born as a result of donated eggs or sperm, and now, this weekend, scientists claim to have created the DNA of bacteria in a test tube. There’s great potential for good here, but how are we to cope with the human and societal consequences of this kind of power? I guess that question must have been posed with every scientific advance since the discovery of fire and it’s clear that the pursuit for knowledge still goes on. We hope for so much from our scientists and it’s their job to take things as far as they can - in theory and in the lab. What happens next depends on a whole other kind of expertise and involves all of us. Questions of individual identity, of protection for the vulnerable, and of common responsibility for the greater good can’t be ducked. We can’t accuse scientists of playing God and at the same time excuse ourselves from grappling with the question of what it means to be human. Tuesday 15 January Hillary Clinton’s a woman; Barack Obama is black; John McCain is over seventy. So who do you vote for if you’re a seventy five year-old black woman in America? If you’re thinking that’s a stupid question, you’re absolutely right. But in some places that’s exactly how the complex, important process of the American primaries is being described. Call me old-fashioned, but I’d like to think that votes in any election are cast on the basis of a candidate’s political philosophy and carefully examined record. Age, race and gender shouldn’t define a person any more than a carefully rehearsed soundbite or focus group-tested slogan should masquerade as genuine policy. Just like the other man’s grass, the other nation’s election is always more exciting. And it’s been fun to see the pollsters and opinion formers in the media come a cropper as things consistently fail to conform to their predictions. As the rollercoaster moves on today to Michigan, where the republicans take centre stage, the pundits are, thankfully, being rather more cautious in their predictions of momentum and meltdown. Will the Christians come out for the preacher or will they stop to read the small print of his views on gun control? Will the war hero lose some of the patriotic core vote because he’s seen as soft on immigration? All will be revealed. This election has a way to go yet. It will be long and complicated , which is what the electorate requires and deserves. This isn’t a single issue contest and these aren’t one-dimensional candidates. The grandeur of human character can’t be reduced to a single defining condition or quality. It’s too vital and vibrant to submit to the kind of product branding that labels one experienced and another untested, one dull and another charismatic. That’s why moments of unscripted spontaneity are so welcome : humour, anger, passion, mistakes, tears are all part of who we are. In relationships, human or divine, it’s when we lose the packaging and risk being truly known, that we discover we’re truly loved. Tuesday 22 January I’m glad Gordon Brown found time during his trip to India to visit a women’s empowerment project. I’ve no doubt that the women he met would grab with both hands the chance to tell him about the massive problems they’re tackling, and I’m glad he was inspired by that side of India as well as by its amazing progress as a dynamic economic power. On a visit to India last year with the Church of Scotland’s Moderator, I found every day brought new and conflicting impressions of the country. Driving out to a state of the art conference centre on the outskirts of Delhi, the road was one long development of luxury hotels and glitzy corporate headquarters, but on that same highway I saw ramshackle bullock carts - and my first elephant - lumbering along in the slow lane, with produce to sell in the city. Our visit focussed on Church projects and we’d little time to be tourists, but two diversions from our itinerary stick in my mind as moments of revelation. A dramatic presentation, in Delhi’s spectacular Red Fort, reminded me just how recent and how brief in the long history of India the period of British rule was. And a tour of the Golden Temple at Amritsar, the holy place for Sikhs, brought home to me the role of India’s great faiths in its political conflict and cultural development. Struggling with this complexity of history, traditions, religions and languages I asked a Christian Bishop what bound India together as a nation. He said that, apart from cricket, it was thousands of years of culture and some key values shared across all the faiths. I thought of this again on Sunday at the beginning of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Good things happen when we recognise what hopes and beliefs we share and how together our different gifts can make these values count in the world. Ecumenical and interfaith relations don’t work well when differences are fudged, but they can be wonderfully creative when diversity is acknowledged and celebrated.