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Spiritual reflection to start the day with Professor Alison Jack of Edinburgh University's School of Divinity.
Script: Good morning. It might be controversial, but I wonder if the greeting card is an under-rated art form. I sometimes find it hard to throw out birthday and Christmas cards that arrest me with their appealing colours and form. My son gave me a birthday card this year which I’ve kept and I’m looking at it now on the windowsill of my study. It has an image of a fox on it, sitting up and looking over its shoulder at a passing butterfly. The fox and its stylised background are constructed out of tiny pictures of flowers. The closer I looked at it, the more I loved it. I asked him if he’d chosen it because he’d remembered that ‘Reynard’, the fox, was my grandmother’s maiden name and it’s been kept as a middle name by others in the family. Or because of the story we’d told him about seeing a fox stop to stare at us as his dad and I walked into the hospital on the night he was born. No, he said, he just liked the card and thought I would like it too.

The card was lovely and satisfying whether it held an intended deeper meaning or not, and the stories I’d constructed about what lay behind its choice were simply and nicely serendipitous. Sometimes we worry about making a negative impression on others that we didn’t mean. And sometimes others take positive things from our words or actions about which we had no knowledge at the time. We can never be sure what others hear and understand in our interactions with them, although we can hope that as our relationships deepen over time there is more of a congruence between what we mean and what is understood. When the surplus meaning is both unintended and positive, perhaps that’s an occasion for both giver and the recipient to celebrate with a smile.

For the serendipitous in the words and actions of others, let us give thanks and praise to God. Amen.