I’m so sorry not to be there with you in the studio this morning. It sounds fun. Having said that, though, perhaps it’s for the best because I have a suspicion I might be just a touch intimidated because my word you’re a disciplined bunch. And, to be frank, I am not.
But you, Tom, you’ve disciplined your body to do things a body simply shouldn’t. Richard, Miles, gentlemen of Reef – you know the emotional and mental discipline that goes into a performance with any soul. Kirsty – you know that running a career and a home requires practical discipline, managing time, space, people. Superhuman discipline.
And yet, not one of those things – body, soul, mind, home, work – is enough on its own to make us human. And as well as superhuman, you’re all just ordinarily human.
As you’ve gathered, the reason I’m not there is that I am instead in leafy Northamptonshire at the 45th Greenbelt Festival.
Greenbelt was started on a farm in the 70s by some Christian hippies and since then it’s grown, moved, shrunk, moved again and grown again. But the one thing it has not done is remain just a music festival.
Because a great festival isn’t just about the music. So at Greenbelt you’ll hear other things too, about politics, about faith, about love. You’ll hear argument and debate, comedy and commentary. It’s complicated. It’s beautiful. It’s human.
Jesus knew about the complications of being human, how the personal, political, emotional and physical are all untidily knotted together. And he knew what was important.
I believe Jesus didn’t care about who you kissed, but how much you cared. He didn’t worry about what you owned, but what you did with it. He wasn’t fussed about how you how you organised yourselves, as long as you organised yourselves to look after the vulnerable and stand up for the oppressed.
So this weekend, I hope I’ll have the discipline, in this beautiful place, with these amazing people, to sort out what matters from what doesn’t: to listen generously, to watch attentively and to speak kindly and that maybe I’ll learn to be a little more joyful, a little more loving, a little more aware, a little more human.
That would be a good Greenbelt. That would be a good weekend any weekend.
This was the first Pause for Thought delivered live from Greenbelt Festival. It was a little fraught. The studio guests were Tom Daley, Reef and Kirsty Allsop.
The image is of Pussy Riot onstage at Greenbelt that weekend.