A Birthday Tribute to His Excellency, the Rt. Rev. Dr Selvister Ponnumuthan, Bishop of the Diocese of Punalur
By John Britto Kurusumuthu
Most mornings begin the same way. Before the newspaper, before the first cup of coffee, before the day has decided what it intends to do with me, a message arrives. It is short. It is almost always a single verse of Scripture. It comes from the Bishop of Punalur Diocese, and it has been coming, without interruption, for more than three years.
I have thought often about what that means. Today, on his birthday, it seems right to say it aloud.
The Arithmetic of Faithfulness
Three years is not an abstraction. It is more than a thousand mornings. It is a thousand occasions on which a man with a diocese to govern, clergy to guide, institutions to oversee and a calendar not remotely his own could reasonably have said: not today. Illness, travel, exhaustion, grief, the sheer accumulated weight of episcopal responsibility — each would have been an unimpeachable excuse. And yet the verse comes.
We tend to measure spiritual leadership by its visible peaks: the homily that moved a congregation, the decision that resolved a crisis, the initiative that bore public fruit. These are real. But they are not where fidelity actually lives. Fidelity lives in the unremarkable repetition that nobody applauds and nobody would notice until it stopped.
There is a reason Scripture speaks of manna rather than of a banquet. The gift that sustains is the one that arrives daily.
What a Single Verse Can Set in Motion
I should confess an interest. Every one of the Wake-Up Call reflections I have published on this platform began as one of those morning verses. The verse arrives; something in it catches; and by the time the day is properly underway, a reflection has taken shape around it. Over a thousand posts now stand on that foundation. Readers across several continents have written to say that a particular morning met them exactly where they were standing.
None of them know where it started. That is rather the point.
His Excellency does not send those verses to write simply. He sends them because a shepherd feeds his flock, and this is one of the ways a shepherd can now do it. What he cannot see — what none of us can fully see — is the distance a small faithful act travels once it leaves the hand. A verse sent to a modest list of recipients becomes a reflection; the reflection becomes a stranger’s consolation in a city he will never visit. The chain is invisible to the man who forged its first link.
I suspect most genuine influence works this way. We are permitted to see the seed and denied the harvest, which is perhaps the only arrangement under which sowing stays honest.
Constancy as a Form of Doctrine
There is a quiet theology embedded in the practice itself, quite apart from the verses chosen.
To send a verse every single morning is to make a statement about the nature of the Word: that it is not reserved for Sunday, not confined to the sanctuary, and not the property of the ordained. It is daily bread, and daily bread is handed out daily. It is also a statement about the nature of pastoral care in an age of distance — that a shepherd need not be physically present to be reliably present, and that reliability is itself a form of love.
And it is a statement about leadership. Anyone can be inspiring once. Being trustworthy a thousand times in succession is a different discipline altogether, and a far rarer one. Institutions — dioceses, colleges, associations, families — are held together far more by the second than by the first. Those of us who work within institutional structures know how much depends on the person who simply does the thing, every time, whether or not anyone is watching.
A Birthday Word
So this is a tribute written in gratitude rather than ceremony.
Your Excellency: you have begun my day for more than three years. You have handed me, morning after morning, the small seed from which everything I have written here has grown. You have taught, without ever setting out to teach it, that the ministry of small things is not a lesser ministry.
May the Lord grant you good health and abiding joy. May He give you many more years of fruitful ministry, and may He grant you, in this coming year, the consolation of glimpsing something of the harvest from seeds you sowed in silence.
And may tomorrow morning bring another verse.
Who began your day well, and never knew it? Perhaps today is the day to tell them.
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