Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Runcie

Calling a travel agent a saint is the kind of sly, Anglican provocation that works because it knows exactly how inflated it sounds. Robert Runcie, an archbishop with a public-facing feel for modern Britain, borrows the moral vocabulary of the church ("saints", "gave it to the people") to praise a profoundly worldly revolution: the packaging of leisure. The compliment lands as half-serious canonization, half wink at how contemporary societies relocate devotion from altar rails to airline queues.

The intent is democratic, but not naively so. Thomas Cook, pioneer of organized excursions and the voucher system, didn’t merely sell tickets; he industrialized access. Runcie frames that as a kind of redistribution: travel used to be the Grand Tour, a finishing-school rite for the wealthy. Cook turns it into something a clerk can afford and a factory worker can plan. That’s social mobility in timetable form.

The subtext is that modern “grace” often arrives through infrastructure, logistics, and consumer services rather than sermons. Cook becomes a secular saint because he expands the imagination of ordinary people: new geographies, new encounters, the sense that life can be larger than the parish boundary. There’s also a faint, self-aware tension: mass tourism is hardly pure. Yet Runcie’s line suggests that even compromised modern pleasures can carry moral weight when they widen the circle of who gets to see the world.