You don’t have to be good to do good

I am a regular listener to the Sunday morning service just after eight on BBC Radio 4. It’s a habit owed to my old bedside clock radio. Purchased in 1978, its controls have gone wonky and the radio takes ages to retune; so I just leave it on Radio 4 all the time. Every week, therefore, I awake on Sunday to the sound of hymns.

I like hymns. Their melodies and words are often trite, their message sanctimonious, but from a churchgoing boyhood I know them so well, and early on a Sunday morning there’s something comforting in the familiar. Besides I’m not a very fierce kind of atheist. Rationality gets wearisome, and I cannot but think it a good thing that humans should gather regularly in pursuit of larger truths and greater goods than engage us in our daily grind — even if they are under a misapprehension as to what these are and where to find them. Lying abed, half–listening, I feel vaguely uplifted though intellectually I haven’t agreed at all. I never end the interlude feeling a worse person.

So last Sunday slumber yielded pleasantly to the music and prayer from St Mary’s Church in Guildford. Two schoolchildren, Toby and Megan, recited their personal favourite among the six guiding principles of their school, Holy Trinity, Pewley Down. One of them chose ‘Embrace the future with hope and confidence’ while the other chose ‘Live in the moment’. It struck me these precepts are directly contradictory, but why carp, surrounded as we are by folk wisdom collected to cover every base: nothing ventured nothing gained, though of course better safe than sorry. It will be good practice for becoming grown-ups for Megan and Toby to learn to believe two contradictory precepts at once.