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A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with Zahid Hussain

Good Morning

Within a few short days of the Lockdown, I noticed something where I live, perhaps you noticed it too: I could hear birds singing in the daytime. I live in a city and I do hear birdsong, but it’s usually before dawn, before the world pushes me out of bed, before I hear the steady rumble of cars trundling along the road.

It was one of those joyous moments when you stop to collect yourself and you gaze around in wonder trying to pin down what exactly it is that’s different and there it was…the carefree lilting song of birds calling their companions.

Even now, if I push open the window, I can hear it, the tweet of birds all day long, the delighted chirping of starlings, sparrows and robins. When I first noticed the mid-day twittering in the trees, I realised something… that for so long, birds and animals have had to listen to us, to our mechanical beasts and we didn’t have a care in the world. But now, the urban hum of humans has been pushed back but it hasn’t been replaced with silence, no, in the space we occupied the sounds of nature have seeped slowly back in.

We now have the chance to do something we should have done a long time ago: to listen to the world.

Let us pray. Lord, you are the All-Hearing. Allow us to hear the stirring of our conscience, to hear the consequences of the things we’ve done, to allows us to hear the unwinding of our hearts and to hear the good that’s all around us that we’ve ignored and to find sanctuary in the sacred sounds of your world.

Amen.