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Good Morning. This week Tom Hanks received an Oscar nomination for his role in ‘A Beautiful Day In The Neighbourhood’, a film which is about to open in the UK. Hanks plays TV presenter Fred Rogers, the host of ‘Mr Rogers Neighbourhood’, a show which enthralled millions of American pre-school children for thirty years. In the US Rogers is a household name, a throwback to a forgotten, friendlier age, but the film is about his relationship with a journalist who profiled him in Esquire Magazine, in 1998, three years before his death. The writer, Lloyd Vogel, is jaded and cynical and convinced that Rogers is too good to be true. He wants to find him out. He is also furious. A fury rooted in a broken relationship with his father who abandoned Vogels mother, as she lay dying. But in their meetings, Rogers turns the tables on Vogel - seeing him as a hurting human being, before he sees him as a journalist. He wants to know why he’s so angry - which makes Vogel even angrier. Before the pair eat in a restaurant Rogers, strangely, suggests they sit for a minute in silence to remember all the people, as he puts it, who loved Vogel into being. The silence of this contemplation in a public space is deafening to all the other diners. And a little surreal for the viewer. Before going to bed one night Rogers slowly incants the names of people on his mind, including this journalist and his family. He lets their names hang there in the quiet. If it’s a film about kindness and empathy, with a remarkable twist – no spoilers – it’s also a portrait of prayer as something as essential to life as breathing or food or friendship. Something natural, with its own rare beauty. Not a technique of the religious professional but a life-giving everyday practice. It liberates prayer from the preserve of the devout. The moment of quiet, the paying attention, the decision to listen to someone… the longing that things will not always be this way. Once a week some friends of ours light a candle before eating a meal and recite the names of people they care for. A simple sign of solidarity and connection. Prayer can be an everyday alchemy. Transforming how we see things. Enlarging the heart. It calls for a certain patience and in the richest religious traditions is often associated with waiting. But it’s not about cause and effect – unless the effect is simply about how our understanding may be changed. As I sat recently at the bedside of someone in her last days, the rhyme and rhythm of slowly saying a prayer was a balm in the face of the unknown. An alternative language. Prayer may become a poem that offers us another way of seeing.