Thought for the Day

21 AUG 26

20 AUG 26

What does it mean to erase a woman? You don't have to kill her. You can simply make her invisible. Tell her she can’t get a higher education, she can’t work freely, tell her where she can go, who she can speak to, and how loudly she can speak. Eventually, you don't need to silence her because her absence has been made normal.
Five years after the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan, women and girls have told the BBC their lives are unrecognisable under the rule of the regime. The Taliban's foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, was asked by the BBC about education for girls in Afghanistan, to which he replied that "it is not correct to say everything is banned for women", "Women are not totally restricted on all walks of life... Only one small part (of their affairs) is restricted until further notice."
And while there is some disagreement within the Taliban as well as condemnation from many Muslim voices and organisations, those who rule say they are doing this in the name of Islam. But a government that needs to control the movement, clothing, education and voice of women in the name of morality, a morality that requires women to disappear isn’t showing strength; it’s showing fear dressed as piety. Because often across all faiths, religious authority which says `We know what God wants’ always conveniently discovers that what God wants looks remarkably like what we want. And that’s why gradually the word woman is ignored from the Qur’anic verses which speak of the moral agency of “the believing men and believing women, the devout men and devout women, the truthful men and truthful women.”
Today the women of Afghanistan have become a political and theological test. But perhaps the most dangerous thing is the possibility that the world will eventually become accustomed to it. Because oppression has a final victory. Not when people are silenced, but when their silence no longer disturbs us.
And yet despite all of this, many women tell the BBC, `One day, everything will change... but we must continue with patience, and we will not lose hope." A government can close a school, it can close a university, it can close a woman's workplace but it can’t destroy the future she imagines.’ In the words of the Afghan poet, Nadia Anjuman, who wrote in her poem `My Garden’: `I will trust the meaning of hope, I will shut the door on grief and find another path.’

Good morning.
I have spent about half my life in England and half in Australia. Watching the television news over the past few weeks has been somewhat confusing. I think of England as a place where nature is more or less under control, a ‘green and pleasant land’, mild in climate, with a landscape shaped by generations of human hands. Raging wildfires, the terrifying unpredictability of nature out of control, railway engineering disrupted by scorching heat, that seems part of a different place. That reminds me of my childhood, driving through areas destroyed by bushfire, areas in which, as the poet Judith Wright put it , “Charred death upon the rock leans his charred bone and stares at death from sockets black with flame.”
Reflecting on nature ‘under control’ as opposed to ‘out of control’, I wonder if this notion of ‘control’ isn’t exactly where the problem lies. At least since the industrial revolution, we have tended to see the natural world as brute matter for moulding to our will, as so much ‘stuff’ to be exploited, to be consumed. That approach has brought progress, but also the damage to our planet and the climate change from which we now suffer. Our thirst for ‘control’ has led us to a place where many young people, faced with an ecological crisis, feel more ‘out of control’ than ever before.
The bewitching vision of the writer of the book of Genesis is so very different. In the garden story, the relationship between the human and the natural world is not one of ‘control’ but of ‘authority’, of rule with a delegated responsibility for the natural world. Nature in this tradition is both an essentially good gift, and one damaged by rebellion against its giver, the Creator. It is therefore to be treasured, but not to be worshipped, nor even simply affirmed. So, we are right to be grateful for fire when it warms, and to be repelled by it when it kills. The human responsibility is not to ‘control’ nature but to tend it as one tends a garden, to work with it when we can, and to work for its healing when we can’t. In this vein, for example, science has recently affirmed the wisdom of ancient Aboriginal Australian practices of fire management, practices that by contained burning, by working with, rather than against ‘country’, limit the occurrence of more devastating fire.
Had we listened more carefully to the Genesis story over the last two hundred and fifty years, and less to the logic of consumption and control, we might now be in a better place ecologically. Reflecting on the story at this point, may just give our planet a chance.

17 AUG 26