Here’s the text for the 10 June 2024 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Zoe Ball on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

On a walk last summer, our four-year-old godson, Brecon, was excited to tell me about his recent discovery. He wanted to show me ­– as he put it – “where the snails live”. We weren’t in a garden or a farmer’s field but on the pavements of northwest-London. Brecon took my hand, and led me to a wall. “Look!” he said. He pointed to a crack in the bricks. I leaned over and saw the spiral-shells clustered there, and Brecon yelled out: “Wow!”

To be honest, I wasn’t feeling well at the time ­– I was in a cloud of depression that stuck around the whole summer. But Brecon’s glee in snail-spotting lifted my spirit. We got lost in laughter and a growing chorus of “Wows!”. And even though we fully expected to find more snails in each new crevice, we were somehow still surprised when we found them.

Brecon reminded me of Charles Darwin, famous for his 19^th-century theory of evolution. Darwin kept a journal during his scientific expeditions, and in it he wrote: “I expected to discover a great deal”. But even he wasn’t prepared for what he described as the “hurricane of delight and astonishment” that swirled through him with each new discovery.

For example, he saw an unusually-shaped butterfly and, using the creature’s Latin name, he scribbled: “Tresses like hair – beautiful lepidoptera – Silence – Hosanna!”

I love that. First, Darwin is struck silent by the beauty. Then he cries out “Hosanna!”­– an ancient religious word that basically means “Wow!”

Hosannas are strewn-through Darwin’s journals ­– a growing chorus of “Wows” that for me as a Christian, points to the harmony between spirituality and nature, between true science and true religion.

Theologian Rowan Williams says: the harmony and “immensity of the universe” inspire us to wonder “what kind of concentrated, unlimited energy is holding everything together in being?”

We don’t have to be religious to ponder that. We might not call that unlimited energy “God”. We might be agnostic or atheist. But when we’re gobsmacked by the glory of the Northern Lights, or bats-like-holy-angels on summer-nights, or when we kneel down to save a snail from commuters racing by – maybe we get freed-up a little. Unstuck a bit from ourselves, perhaps, when we’re struck by that beauty­­ – that energy – that universal love we’re not even sure we believe in.

So, thank you, Charles Darwin and, personally speaking, thank you, Jesus, for getting me unstuck, for declaring that every inch of the universe is holy ground. And thanks especially to my godson Brecon: for teaching me to cry out: Wow!