Episode details

Available for over a year
Good morning. Amidst all the bad news there is one easily overlooked, but still remarkable, fact - human beings continue to care for one another. Well over 100,000 Ukrainian refugees have been welcomed to the country. Volunteers help to resource and run some 2,500 food banks. I deeply regret the fact that war and poverty make these necessary, but I am glad there is something in the human spirit which makes us want to respond to human need. This something is partly a natural concern for others, but there is more to it than this. Most parents love their children and most parents at times find them totally impossible. But whatever they are feeling they know that the baby still has to be fed and the child taken to school. There are certain things that just have to be done whether you feel like it or not. You have a role, as a parent, and parents have responsibilities. You have an obligation, a duty. As someone who lived through the 1960’s I think it was in that decade that the word duty stopped being part of our national vocabulary. But the abiding validity of what it stood for was revealed recently in the deeply felt sense of loss when the late Queen died. She inherited a strong sense of duty from her father King George VIth and the nation recognised and admired the way she had lived it out to the end of her life. For believers in God that capacity to discern our responsibilities and obligations is ultimately rooted in the being and will of our creator. But that capacity belongs to our humanity as such. The great 19th century novelist George Eliot, an agnostic, was once reported as saying Three words have often been used as the trumpet-call of men - the words God, Immortality, Duty - pronounced with terrible earnestness. How inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable was the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third. Today is the 11th day of the 11th month and on the 11th hour of this day in 1918 hostilities ceased, and the red poppies this week remind us of those service men and women then and later who lost their lives. They believed they were doing their duty as citizens. That language is not quite as natural to us as it was to them, but what it stands for remains as valid as ever.
Programme Website