Hay Festival 500 Words with Alex Jones and David Walliams

Pause For Thought

With Barry Morgan, Archbishop of Wales.

I hadn’t realised until recently that Wales had quite so many festivals – at least 150 a year, celebrating various aspects of life. There is the Carmarthen Bay Film Festival, the Llandovery Sheep Festival, the Wrexham Beer Festival, the Green Man music Festival, the Brecon Jazz Festival, and the Porthcawl Elvis Festival to name but a few. Then there are our well known national ones – the Llangollen International Music Festival, the Eisteddfod celebrating Welsh culture and life and the Royal Welsh celebrating all aspects of rural life. And of course, there is this Hay Literary Festival, in its 25th year, which attracts authors and thinkers from all over the world.

This year’s theme is “Imagine the World” – a challenge to all of us to think about our lives and our world, not as it is but as it might be. And that, of course, is what writers and poets do. They touch our imaginations, our hearts and minds if you like, and enable us to look at things in ways we might not have thought before.

When I think about it, that’s what Jesus did in His ministry. He was a great story teller who spoke about ordinary things, such as a man who had two sons, one of whom went off the rails but whom his father welcomed home, even though he had wasted all his money. Jesus leaves His hearers to work out for themselves that it was a story about a God who loves all His children, whatever they do.

Or in the story of the man left half dead by the roadside, he is helped, not by a priest, or by a fellow Jew, but by a stranger and foreigner so that His hearers will hopefully realise that their definition of who their neighbour might be, is enlarged.

That’s what good story tellers and writers do. They re-shape the landscape of our minds and by so doing can transform the way we live our lives as well.