Thursday's Thought

“2B? NT2B?=???” is a text version of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy. Dot Mobile, a company offering mobile phones to students, has hired Professor John Sutherland, professor emeritus of English Literature at University College London, to offer subscribers text message summaries of literary classics and quotations from them. The climax of Romeo and Juliet is that "bothLuvrs kill Emselves," while Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice concludes when "Evry1GtsMaryd."

Such summaries may well convey factual information about what happens in these well-known works of literature. But they don’t capture their full emotional force. For this you need words.

When the fourth gospel describes Jesus as the Word, its writer was perhaps recognizing a similar truth. The Hebrew experience of God had been varied, often very personal and almost always powerful. Yet those who had experienced Jesus in the flesh felt that everything that had preceded him was a pale reflection of God compared with the impact made by him. Even words failed fully to capture the force of his presence - he was best described simply as the Word.

Let’s appreciate today writers and journalists who use words well to convey and evoke feelings and imagination as well as to give factual information. And let’s be grateful for the Word which was made flesh.

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Wednesday's Thought

After Babs the gorilla died at age 30, keepers at Brookfield Zoo decided to allow surviving gorillas to mourn her. Babs' 9-year-old daughter, Bana, was the first to approach the body. She sat down, held Babs' hand and stroked her mother's stomach. Then she laid her head on Babs' arm. Other gorillas approached Babs and gently sniffed the body. Koola brought her infant daughter and held her close to Babs, as she had frequently done when Babs was alive. "I had a headache for the rest of the day after all the tears I cried watching them," said their keeper, Betty Green.

Touching was central to the way these gorillas expressed their grief. There are many other emotions touching can convey. Comfort, affection, reassurance, sympathy as well as greeting and farewell can all be physically expressed.

One of the messages of Christmas is that God wanted to be able to express feelings in physical ways. By being born in the flesh, God made bodily contact with the world. Jesus nearly always touched those he was healing.

Perhaps today as we use our hands and bodies to communicate with those we care for, let’s be grateful for touch, for the extra emphasis it gives to the way we convey our feelings and for its ability to say what words sometimes can’t.

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Tuesday's Thought

The National Toy Hall of Fame at the Strong Museum in Oregon has a new exhibit – a cardboard box. “Low-tech and unpretentious it may be, but the cardboard box has fostered learning and creativity for multiple generations and in many cultures,” said Christopher Bensch, chief curator. "I think every adult has had that disillusioning experience of picking what they think is a wonderful toy for a child and then finding the kid playing with the box. It's that empty box full of possibilities that the kids can sense and the adults don't always see."

There are enormous possibilities for fun in the simplest and most unlikely things. It often takes a childlike attitude to see them but it’s an attitude people of any age can develop. The same is true of the ability to become aware of God. There are places and times where we expect to be conscious of God because of their religious connotations but it’s often on less predictable occasions that we get a sense that God is there and such moments are all the more exciting because of their unexpectedness.

Of course, a child is fascinated by a box because he or she is able to imagine what isn’t there. It becomes a spaceship, castle or a haven to daydream in. When God becomes real, for example in what we are looking at, in a conversation or in a moment of quiet reflection, what is revealed to us is what is there all the time – we’re just not normally aware of it.

Developing the capacity to have fun will enrich our lives. So too will becoming more open to letting God come to us in the simple, ordinary aspects of our lives.

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Monday's Thought

The new ReadyWhenURKettle is operated by text message. It contains a radio receiver and levers to turn on the kettle when an SMS message is picked up. Tea company PG Tips, who have worked with Orange to produce the kettle, are hoping for success when it hits shops in January. Spokesman Pete Harbour said: 'It's a great gadget that will give people longer to see their favourite TV shows.'

Modern technology is making it easier to do all sorts of things from a distance. We can shop without going to shops, we can confer with colleagues all over the world without leaving the office, we can see our photographs without taking them to be developed. It is becoming distinctly unfashionable to have to make the effort to go anywhere.

God’s choice to come into our world indicates God’s reluctance to do things from a distance. In Jesus, God “makes the effort” to come and share human experience. What Jesus discovers is not a world where people sit in their armchairs enjoying every modern convenience but a world, like the one experienced by most people these days too, full of struggle and challenge.

There is lots to be grateful for in contemporary labour-saving devices. But God’s loving when Jesus came was not labour-saving. Let’s check today that we’re not seduced by modern expectations into thinking our loving can be without effort.

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Week Two - Judging

Friday's Thought

In Cornwall, parking wardens recently clamped a van belonging to a dead man and then refused to waive the £350 release fee. In Kristiansand, on Norway's southern tip, a motorist unable to move because of rush hour traffic got a parking ticket. The officials involved would clearly have benefited from the new BTEC qualification for ‘immobilisation operatives’. Described as a course to assist clampers and parking wardens with communication skills and conflict resolution, let’s hope it also equips them to make less stupid decisions!

It’s not only parking wardens who do stupid things; and a thirty-hour training course would make little impact on the capacity of nearly all of us to make silly mistakes or behave foolishly. Careless speech or clumsy behaviour can leave us feeling very red in the face, even when only we know about it.

Occasionally embarrassment is the only appropriate response. But often, there is a reason why we have done or said something stupid. It may be a sign that we are over-tired, or that we are feeling threatened, or that something not yet identified is making us uncomfortable. It’s sensible in such circumstances not to berate ourselves but to make careful judgements about why we might have behaved like that. We can make something creative out of a faux pas if we pause to reflect on why this normally sensible person suddenly does something silly; and then take appropriate action.

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