Sunny Banana
I am a school chaplain and the content is intended to encourage curiosity about Faith and it's impact on day to day life
The Sunny Banana, is a play upon the Zulu greeting, Sanibonani, meaning I see you.
As tech wrenches us from real life, we are not seeing each other. The Greek word 'idea' means to see. It is as if we have lost the idea of what it means to be human; social, communal, relational. The same word, to see, in Old English is 'seon' which has connotations of understanding.
Let's start seeing each other again, listening, respecting, and understanding each other and ourselves. After all, we are people through other people.
Sunny Banana
Peter Owen Jones | Embracing the Unseen in Chaotic Times
Is faith just a relic of the past, or does it hold the key to navigating today's mechanistic world? Join our fascinating discussion with Father Peter Owen Jones, renowned for his spiritual adventures in the BBC series "Extreme Pilgrim." Peter shares his profound interactions with Kung Fu monks, Indian mystics, and Christian hermits, inviting us to reconsider the non-logical essence of spirituality. We delve into the challenges younger generations face in harmonising faith with reason and reflect on keeping religion and normality intriguingly "weird" in our ever-changing world.
so today we have father peter owen jones, who would rather be called peter, and I'm going to call you peter from now on, but it's wonderful to have you with us today, peter, and we we're talking about faith, spirituality and religion today and its role in society today. And, yeah, we're just going to pick your brains today and hopefully learn from your wisdom and experience. So, welcome to Beads, if you like. Thank you for having me. Yeah, it's great.
Speaker 1:So, way of introduction, really, um, the way I came across you was, um, I first saw you on the extreme pilgrim on the bbc. Um, as an anglican myself, and I thought, wow, what's this anglican up to? Um, so I watched a bit of that. Um, and then one christmas, uh, I came to a charity event for Anthem House and you were the emcee there and I looked at you and I said I've seen this guy before somewhere, and then the penny dropped and that's when I met you that night and you were very gracious in saying you know, whenever you want, I must ask you and you can come and meet our pupils at beads or come speak in chapel. So it was great to meet you. So it's great to have this opportunity to speak to you about faith, religion and spirituality.
Speaker 1:So let's get straight into it. The Extreme Pilgrim I think on bbc and people can watch it, but you went to see kung fu monks in central china, uh, wandering indian mystics and the christian hermits of the egyptian desert, um. So for our listeners out there, can you tell us a little bit about that? So just the motivation behind it, why you went out and did this, and if you can briefly just explain that experience.
Speaker 2:Well, I think you described it very well. Essentially, we started off at the Shaolin Temple, which is essentially a martial arts, a combination of martial arts and Buddhism, and then from there we traveled to India to meet the holy men and women known as sadhus, and I lived with them for a month. I visited the Kumbh Mela, which is the biggest festival on the planet, and then from there I ended up in a cave in the desert with a wonderful Christian Orthodox hermit called Father Lazarus, and we just there was really no time to think, we just kind of got on with it and took each day as it arrived, and it was impossible to plan anything, not really. We just had to just dive in and that's, that's what we all did yeah, that is uh interesting.
Speaker 1:You say that, so no time to think, and also, you just need to take each day at a time and I think, um, we'll get into this later, but there's one. There's one thing with youngsters today that I find as being a chaplain to them is they struggle with the rationality of it. They struggle to see religion and faith as something logical. So I think, in the wake of the new atheist movement, that sort of came out and said you know, religion is for dumb people, if I may say so crudely as that, crudely as that. But could you, you know, because you experience these rituals and these experiences, and could you talk into that about what religion may help a person today who may think? Well, it's not for me, because I just cannot logically or rationally engage. It's just not something that they can see that way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, of course.
Speaker 1:Why on?
Speaker 2:earth would religion be logical? You know, we've ended up in a binary world where there is coding, where there is coding, where we can just flick a binary switch and watch a binary program, where we can eat binary food and have a binary relationship organized for us on a binary platform called a dating app. So we are essentially, as a society, becoming almost overwhelmed by the mechanistic, by the machine, by the binary. What was so extraordinary about all three of those experiences was that they were not going to drop the knee to the binary. They were going to say. They were saying to all do not get subsumed, do not let your imagination be dulled and neutered by the mechanistic, by the binary function, by the mechanistic, by the binary function.
Speaker 2:If you want to engage with the great mystery of divine love, then you're not going to get any logical answers. You're going to have your logic challenged. And in that sense I am with the Indian mystics, I am with Father Lazarus, I am with the monks in the Shaolin Temple. I do not want to live a binary life, hemmed into a binary house, in a binary village, in a binary world. I want to go into the mystery of existence. I want to travel into the mystery of divine love. And yes, the atheists can yell as much as they like, that it's not logical. No, it's not logical, thank god it's not logical.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you. When you're talking there, it reminds me of the historian Tom Holland. Yes, I think he's a historian, a social commentator and wrote the book Dominion, but he's sort of an atheist, but he's sort of tipping, dipping his feet into Christianity and the one thing he says is let's keep religion. Weird.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I would. I'm not sure I can. I think normality is pretty weird. Should we keep normality weird?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, yeah, it's perspective. Yeah, let's keep greed weird. Let's is pretty weird. Should we keep normality weird? Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, yeah, specifically.
Speaker 2:Let's keep greed weird. Let's keep war weird. Yeah, let's keep all of these normal things apparently normal things weird. And therefore I'm not in favor of him saying, you know, this is coming from a purely binary standpoint, a logical standpoint. Oh whoa, religion's weird yeah. No more weird than the normality we have to find ourselves with.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but I guess it's something you said in your BBC documentary is that you wanted to go to these places to find that enlightenment and the spirituality that you think Britain had once and has lost. Do you think it is? Those things have become weird to us modern Brits Sorry, I'm South African, but to modern-day Britain it has become weird because something has flipped and we see things the machine is eating us up and we see things like they talk about angels and saints and sin and prostration and candles and incense and singing. It becomes weird. So how do we? I guess there we go, how do we? This is the big question. How do we go back to that default being of stepping into the mystery and those rituals and, um, yeah, I don't think we can go back to it.
Speaker 2:I think I think history is a great seduction. You turn on the television now and you know literally 40, 50 percent of it is history. You know, yeah, this is all about Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. This is all about the Neolithic, the Neolithic Chimilai on top of the South Dance. I'm bored out of my brain really. You know, we're drowning in history.
Speaker 2:The invitation to each human being, to you and I, is to step into the mystery. We don't have to go back. It's a step forward. It's just to open ourselves up and say, okay, I'm going to engage, I'm going to take this risk, I'm going to engage in loving my neighbor as myself. I'm going to engage in loving my enemy, I'm going to engage in the holy, sacred state of prayer and I'm not going to be bumped off that track by the machine. I have a human right to be able to follow this path, and Christ described this. He was always talking about the way and the path. I have a right, as a human being, to choose this path to reflect my experience of being humanity, and that's my choice. And if people want to think I'm a lunatic, I don't mind they can think what they like.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you said prayer there. One of my challenges as a chaplain today is, I guess, explaining and teaching prayer to a modern audience. What is prayer to you, and how do people engage in it or can engage in it, especially our teenagers?
Speaker 2:prayer is connection with love. Prayer is an opening of oneself up to the divine presence of love. This divine presence is in everything. It is in everything. It is in every river, it is in every leaf, it is in every star, it is in every sparrow, it is in everything and it is all present and everywhere. And prayer is simply an opening up of oneself to stand, sit, to be helped in that divine reality. And that's not so crazy. That's really where we are and how it is yeah, thank you.
Speaker 1:so my discussion with rabbi julie jacobs in miami. We had a lovely chat and right at the end there was a question that came from the pupils why do people close their, uh cover their eyes when they say the shema prayer? And she said attention, you need to distract, you need to distract, you need to take all distractions away when you say that prayer, that the Lord God is one and you should love the Lord God with all your might and all your soul. And I find prayer to be a mode of attention. So when you sit, it's not necessarily talking and maybe you can talk about your experience in the desert about this, but it's not necessarily talking.
Speaker 1:No, and maybe you can talk about your experience in the desert about this, but it's about a listening. Prayer is more about a listening to that divine voice and being present to that divine presence. Um, and I mean silence in today's age is also quite a challenge to for people, where it's information, noise and sound from all sorts of sources, street knowledge is like, oh yeah, prayer is about asking for what I want instead of it being filled up or actually paying attention, and then your life can become a prayer. You know you can pray walking around and looking people in the eye. And, my goodness, do we need to look people in the eye? Because lots of us are looking down at our phones, or they have earphones on or we have our earphones on.
Speaker 2:Um, yeah, you know. What you're saying is we're all being pulled into the machine, into the mechanistic. Prayer is about taking care of other people. It is actually essentially you begin with loving your neighbor, so you begin with expressing love and gratitude. Gratitude is incredibly important for those who love you and for those who challenge you, and gratitude for those who you do not like. So you begin with the other and only right at the end, if there is something pressing, do you ask for yourself. There is really no need ever to ask for ourselves, other than perhaps the reassurance of verbalizing it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But by the act of offering up love for those you like and those you dislike, you are then taking part in prayer. That is prayer in many ways. Yes, if you can do 10 minutes in complete silence, try it. It's not easy. 20 minutes not easy, um, but that is the challenge of our society. Uh, it's not just the challenge of each individual, um. It's the challenge of a society that has grown terrified of silence, terrified of what it perceives to be apparently nothing. There is a beautiful divine presence within that silence. It's just a question of, as the man said, knocking on the door.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's like depends on the degree of attention you are giving it or open to it. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's a scary place. I'm going to let go of all my desires. I'm going to let go of my resentments, my frustrations, my angers that I hold on to to give me a sense of myself and entitlement to be that individual. I'm going to let go of all of that and sit in the silence of what I find. That's not an easy thing to do and because we don't have to press a button and get a result. It's not like that, it's not on that tramway. This is something completely different to that. And if religion has failed in the West and it is failing different to that and if religion has failed in the west and it is failing, it's failing to to really express that reality, divine reality, in an imaginative and compelling way yeah, I like to see prayer as a sort of radical acceptance of what is and also sometimes, as you say, terrifying, because we are God and you only, and the truths are there.
Speaker 1:So you're confronted actually with yourself, the overwhelming, terrifying self of yourself, and then, slowly but surely, the more you do that, the more acceptance of yourself you get, so that you can give of yourself and understand yourself. Yeah, that's what I found in my silent practice.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I think that's beautiful. I mean, you know, we all remember love thy neighbour, but do we remember as thyself?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's often harder to love oneself because I know, I know what a waster I am, I know what a liar I am, I know you know these dark corners in myself. Whether I choose to reveal them or not is another matter. So loving me, loving me isn't so easy. This isn't about some moral line. This is about my capacity for love and for loving. Yeah, In prayer, that's always going to come up.
Speaker 1:Let's see. Thank you, Thank you. So I guess a lot of words that are thrown around these days is spiritual spirituality, and I've come across a lot of people who tell me they are spiritual but not religious. Can the two live alone and separate, or are they inseparable, religion and spirituality? What would you say to that?
Speaker 2:I would say and that's a fine question. I would say they are two sides of the same coin. You know, whenever the two or three are gathered together in my name, I will be with them. But whenever two or three are gathered together in my name, they've got to actually organize the time to get together. So you know, and where are they going to meet? Are they going to meet in the middle of a wood? Are they going to meet in your house? Are they going to meet in a church?
Speaker 2:The moment you get all of this human, organizational stuff coming in and then you know we have to have a shared belief system, otherwise, you know, what are we actually doing? Then I think, you get religion, and that's just kind of, that's just human kind of stuff, that's part of it. And then you get resentments, then you get ambition, then you get the corruption of power and you get as has been demonstrated rather recently tragically and horribly you get abuse. Spirituality is about the leaning into divine love and accepting or embracing the possibility that it is in fact divine love that holds all being in being. But if we're going to work together here, if I as a Christian am going to sit down with a Buddhist or a follower of the Jain religion. Then we've got kind of stuff to organize, we've got mental constructs, you know hundreds of years of theology and all of that to wade through. That's religion and it's interesting. Theology and all of that to wade through, that's religion and it's interesting. Yeah, but it's not. It's not particularly it's not going to set the world on fire.
Speaker 2:Um, and that's kind of that's how I see it perhaps two sides of the same coin yeah but um, I think they they do live together. They just don't like each other some of the time.
Speaker 1:Yes, thank you. Yeah, I like to think of it as sort of a river. So spirituality is like the river. It's a powerful force to get involved in, but if it doesn't have strong banks, yeah, it doesn't go anywhere. It sort of like goes all over the place. And what is that to my neighbor? Uh, if I just stay at home and do my spirituality, religion is those banks that get us out of ourselves, out of our houses, and together, um, and two or three gathered is powerful. I sometimes joke with people who ask me if I'm religious or not and I say, well, I brush my teeth every morning and I shake people's hands when I meet them. So what I'm trying to say is that we are religious, we're all religious in a way, um, and we perform rituals every day.
Speaker 1:So my next question is what is the importance of ritual um and the significance behind rituals, even on that as simple as shaking hands?
Speaker 2:I think, rituals you know we have some great rituals and we have some not so good rituals. Ritual is about, you know there are personal rituals, but the way in which ritual is generally expressed is that this is a shared experience. Ritual is generally expressed is that this is a shared experience. The ritual is there to provide the vessel, or to shape the vessel, for the shared experience to take place. And, um, that would be how I define it. Um, you know, you go into some christian churches and the manner in which the ritual of the service is expressed is going to bore you senseless. And in other Christian services, you know, you might get quite engaged, but that's just the vessel. It's just the vessel.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so would you say. Rituals build community then, sir, because it's a shared experience.
Speaker 2:I would absolutely say that rituals build community. Then, sir, because it's a shared experience, I would absolutely say that rituals build community. I think if you look at any indigenous tribal communities, which is something that we have all come from, they are very much fostered and nurtured by the experience of shared ritual and nurtured by the experience of shared ritual. And you know, as long as human beings get together you know Christmas Day is a shared ritual Going to a football match is very ritualistic. You know we love ritual.
Speaker 1:Human beings love ritual. So we've spoken about religion, we've spoken about spirituality, but I'd like to touch on faith Now. Faith particularly for the health of a person. Now I wanted to talk about the efficacy of faith for the healing of a person or the health of a person. I wondered if you have any thoughts on that sort of how faith can make us actually healthy. We've got a lot of self-help books, a lot of advice out there, but they shy away from the faith. They talk about mindfulness and they talk about taking some time alone and walking in nature, but you never see, I'm coming back.
Speaker 2:the doorbell's just gone, not a problem. Parish priest stuff, hang on. Yes, yes, come in. I'm just being interviewed online. Oh okay, I'm just being interviewed online.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Hi, there I'm back.
Speaker 1:Brilliant, brilliant. Yeah, so we're talking about the popular culture, popular advice out there to self-help, because we know we've got depression stats that are quite depressing. Obviously, anxiety is quite high, but we go for a walk in the woods and so on. I guess I know what. The other problem is, not saying pray or have faith, but could you talk into that and say how faith could be an option for youngsters? Then, and say how faith could could be an option for youngsters? Um, you know, if they never ever have experience of faith or religion or spirituality, how could you, could you speak into that about faith being something that could lead them to wholism and and health? Uh, it's been mental health and being well.
Speaker 2:That's a very good question, thank you. First of all, I'd like to say that one of the biggest issues with religion is belief, that all we have to do is believe. Yeah, that's all we have to do is believe. Yeah, that's all we have to do. And I think belief and faith get very confused. And, um, it depends what you believe in, um, but unless you have experience of it, belief isn't really experiential. It's pretty binary I either do believe or I don't. Unless you have experience of what it is you apparently believe in and lots of people don't, then you're just going to end up as almost an empty vessel. Faith is about experiencing. It's experiential it's.
Speaker 2:I will take this path because I feel, intuitively Now we're on very risky ground and I hope you're listening, 17 year olds because I feel this, this is the right thing to do. I'm going to trust the feelings I have here in relation to who I am as a person, what I'm doing on this planet, why I'm here right now and the context with which I am, in which I feel I don't believe. I feel is one of divine love. If I can go with that, then I'm beginning to encounter what faith means. Yeah, you can believe whatever you want. You can believe that Christ was crucified, that he died Three days later he rose again, that there was a virgin birth, that you know you changed water into wine. It's meaningless unless you experience, unless you experience the presence of the divine and it is acting on that experience which is faith. And, yes, I'm asking all of you to do a crazy thing and, yeah, I'm going to keep asking until you try.
Speaker 1:Yeah, goes back to what you were saying in the beginning, how it's a risk, a beautiful risk.
Speaker 2:Have you got the bottle? Have you got the bottle? All of you sitting in the audience now have you got the bottle? Yeah, have you? Don't have a go at me, because I'm some lunatic that believes in divine love. Have you got the bottle to test it for yourself, have you?
Speaker 1:it's um it's. It's being open to being wounded, which the word vulnerable means, isn't it?
Speaker 2:Absolutely, of course, of course, and that's what the cross is all about. Yeah, that's what the cross is about. You know, you can protect yourself, you can be in your bubble of belief, you can do what you want, but you open. You open to this possibility, you open to being derided for the place you happen to take up. Are you open to ridicule? Are you open to having your heart broken? Are you open to love, to loving? That requires vulnerability and that requires courage.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, I think faith and trust are sort of quite close to each other, interchangeable, or epistate. To know you know, to have confidence that you will be caught. I spoke about this in chapel last night. Our theme was trust, you know. Trapeze artists um, the one in the air that's flinged in the air. If they start reaching out and grabbing and trying to control the situation, they will miss, they will, they will, they will miss. Who's supposed to catch them? Yeah, person. They just have to put their arm out in trust, their hands out in trust to be caught. The other one who's attached to something solid, right? So I guess you and I will agree that the solid foundation of that is God and we know that we step out every morning to take the risk of loving. We know we'll be caught and held by the grace and mercy and compassion of God. So we're talking to an audience that probably don't have that experience or understanding.
Speaker 2:I don't think I had that experience when I was 14 or 15. I was much more interested in the person sitting next to me, in what Led Zeppelin were doing in, you know, smoking my first cigarette, drinking you know too much beer or whatever, and therefore I can only say look, I'm with you on this journey because at that age it's quite a ride. This is quite a ride now, but you will come back. I will see you when you come back from all of that chaos. I will be here and I will be saying the same stuff. I have you and I will be here. If you want to knock on my door when your boyfriend's left you, I will be saying the same stuff. I have you and I will be here. If you want to knock on my door when your boyfriend's left you, I will be here.
Speaker 1:Because I love you. And I suppose this sounds very much like the prodigal son. Yeah, prodigal son, and for reference for our audience out there if they can read the prodigal son, and for reference for our audience out there if they can read the prodigal son. Do you know, I'm not Protestant enough to know exactly the….
Speaker 2:I'm not sure I am either.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's in the Bible and it's, I think, luke. And it's this experience of we take control of our lives and we say we've got it all sorted and we're going to do what we want, and then we find ourselves at a moment of utter desolation. We remember what we left behind and we return. And Christianity because this is what the talk's about really, because we're coming from a Christian perspective. Christianity, because this is what the talk's about really, because we're coming from a Christian perspective you as a vicar is the understanding that God is not this being who is standing there with a whip because you've done something wrong.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:He punished you, but he's there arms wide open like the prodigal son, explains. The son returns back home and is embraced in a celebration second to none. It's quite beautiful. I just want to go back because we kind of normalize the weird. The cross is a central part of Christianity. The cross is a central part of Christianity and I think a lot of people on the street might think of that and say, well, the cross is done. So now suffering is over and sacrifice is actually saying what is required of us. The cross is actually saying, in order to have eternal life, and and and, and, that pure joy takes sacrifice and takes. That sacrifice is very risky. The sacrifice of our own intellectual faculty may be putting that down at the cross. We're getting into some deep Christian theology here, but I'm just saying how the cross teaches us that we are called to make some sacrifices in our life, quite risky ones. And yeah, I wonder if you could comment on that.
Speaker 2:I think the cross is saying if you love, you're going to get hurt.
Speaker 2:If you are brave enough to love with all of your heart, with all of your mind and with all of your mind and with all of your soul, then at some point you will suffer. That love and suffering are sisters, they are entwined, and I would like to celebrate that reality because in my very limited experience I've seen it to be true. You know, if you've been married for 50 years, one of you is going to die before the other and the one that's left will suffer. If anyone has ever had a boyfriend or girlfriend and they've left them or they've been betrayed, then you will suffer. If you dare to love with all of your heart, with all of your soul and all of your mind, then you will suffer.
Speaker 2:And I think the cross to me demonstrates the divine capacity for love and the potential that lies within every human image for love. And it remains as a huge challenge to every single human being to love more deeply, to more boldly and more bravely. And I'm still and will continue to struggle with that part of history for the rest of my life. But it is an invitation, ultimately, to love. I'm not sure I can go along with the fact that you know God has sacrificed his son and we've all been forgiven. I didn't ask for that. You know, if he wants to do that, fine, but please don't involve me in this. Yeah, but in terms of a lesson in what it means to love, I go along with that 100%.
Speaker 1:Thank you. I've got two more things I'd like to talk about and go back to intention again and social media. Yeah, the can you speak into. We talk about so there's like social platforms and there's about being an individual and being self-made and everything, and it's just, isn't that so tiring, I think, you know, trying to reinvent yourself and you're on this platform and you're trying to put a face and a front out there, yeah, and I think no wonder we tired and anxious and depressed if we on this platform all the time and it distracts us. That's why I come back to attention. Sorry, detention, I've been in detention. Attention comes back to attention because we're so distracted by this, especially those youngsters today, and a lot of who we care for have been born with the screen. You know the screen is there and it's this almost other reality, but it's like a platform, as I say, tiring. How do we snap out of it?
Speaker 2:Well, I don't know. I think you know, um. It's exciting, you know I can. I am told um that you know, if you're on a dating app and you, someone and you filled in your profile and then someone sends you a, an emoji of a smiling face or whatever it is, then you get a little hit.
Speaker 2:You get a little hit, and so I can understand that it's exciting, but I would kind of really counsel very strongly against the addictive nature of it. There's a wonderful word in the English language called glamour, and at the moment we're all being groomed to be glamorous. You know, to be the most glamorous person in the room, to be the most interesting, to be the most intelligent, and all you have to do is kind of, you know, present this face to the world and you might get 500 hits. This is all about narcissism and vanity. This is all about me. It's just about me, nothing else. And the machine is licking its lips, smiling. I've got you, I've got you. I've got you. Now You're walking around with me in your hand, with me in your pocket. I am providing you with information to behave in a certain way, to do certain things, to be seen with certain people. Yeah, I've got you. Now I've got you.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And the sadness is that so many people just end up lost their soul, my soul, your soul, are lost in this glamour, we're lost in this glamour. And, yeah, you go online, you speak to your friends on Facebook, on Snapchat, on all of this. Yeah, just be careful you don't get lost, that you don't get lost and your soul doesn't become diminished and downhearted. And I would just say to you, if you burn your mobile phone, you're still the same person without it. Maybe it's time to get to know who they are.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Yeah, so we've been talking about holding.
Speaker 1:I'm just trying to put my my feet in the shoes of our pupils yeah and they could equally turn around because they are very intelligent, yeah, and say, listen, the god you speak of and all the stuff is also like I've got you, I hold you, you know. But I guess what we as religious people or faith, faith practicing, will say well, I know who. I would like to be held by. Rather, you know someone who loves me. I would like to be held by, rather, you know someone who loves me, who's got the best intentions, or a machine that wants to not give anything back but take everything, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, you know I'm a Christian priest, but I can walk out of this any time I want. I can just kind of put the screen down and walk out and I'm gone, but I know I'm still held. The question is can you put the mobile phone down? Can you put the tablet down? Can you put the internet down? I'm not saying these are bad, inherently bad things. I'm just saying how much of you is wrapped up in this stuff? How much of your time is it taking? Is it demanding? Because really it's feeding, it's feeding on you and, um, you know, I have a mobile phone, I have, I have all all of this stuff, but I'm kind of wary. I can going. Okay, you know, this isn't the way that human connection is fostered. This is just a mirror. That's's all it is, and I need to be aware of that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you. Last question and topic we have something here called the Philosophy Society and we get together and we'll throw a topic out, from politics, to religion, to ethics and so on and so forth. The pupils have asked for it to be Christianity and its role in schools, so obviously very relevant to them, and I wondered if you could say comment on that, comment on what you think if Christianity has a role in schools first of all, and what is?
Speaker 2:that role. Okay, thank you for that. Thank you for that. I think Christians, those who have chosen to follow the Christian path, have a role in schools. Christianity as the ritualistic vessel which we've talked about and discussed for a shared experience and a shared coming together. Um, a share, a shared being together, as, at best, a set of moral principles. But I am uncomfortable with that. Um, yes, I, I genuinely can't think of anything better. When I look at all the religions and I've seen, I've been privileged enough to encounter many of them I would say that Christianity is the religion of love. And if I had a choice about, if I had to say that there needs to be a religion in a school, I would put my hand up and say well, I think Christianity would be a good place to start and that's where I am with that Christianity isn't meant to make things better.
Speaker 2:it's meant to challenge the excesses of power and meant to challenge those in power or who have apparent power when they step over the line. That's fair enough. I think it needs to be doing more of that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, beautiful. Well, as you've called me before, and, if I may, brother, brother, I do love brother Brother, I do love that Brother. Thank you so much for today. I pray that our pupils gather as much as I did from this discussion with you so much knowledge, so much wisdom.
Speaker 2:Thank you, go well, my brother, go well, cheers.