Good morning,
There’s much discussion over flags and marches and what it means to be British at the moment. This has meant the legitimate concerns of some have led to my own legitimate concerns for my family’s safety. As an immigrant and a visible ethnic minority in the town in which I live, I can feel a sense of dis-ease and fear about whether or not I’m welcome in the nation which I have called home my whole life.
It’s within this climate of hyper-vigilance that I boarded a local bus and braced myself for some racist words from one particular man – someone I had judged based on the colour of his skin. To me, he looked like the type of person who might not like me. I thought he might shout some abuse, or tell me to go back to where I came from.
Instead he showed me kindness. He held my son’s buggy for me as I struggled with mine and my kids’ belongings, giving up his seat so we could sit down. I could have wept at the simple humanity of it. And the shame of me pre-emptively judging another based on a perceived difference.
All around us we see evidence that our society is fractured and fragmented and polarised. The horror of the scenes in Northern Ireland, and the sadness as we remember MP Jo Cox’s murder 10 years ago this week.
We’re told time and again that we have more in common than what divides us. But I wonder whether this suggests we need to find our commonality before feeling a shared humanity. Maybe it’s recognising our difference and choosing decency, kindness, and even love despite those differences that we should value. The Christian tradition can help us here in the example of the early Church – people from many different backgrounds and cultural and religious traditions – came together, sharing everything they had, not because they were the same, but because of a commonality found outside their individual circumstances and characteristics. Their differences were the point.
This week, I attended the Sandford St Martin awards honouring the best in religious broadcasting, where a special award went to the BBC’s Pilgrimage. The show takes well-known figures in British life with different beliefs – the devoutly religious, the agnostic, and the vehemently atheist – on a journey towards sacred sites including Santiago de Compostela, Holy Island and the Vatican. Perhaps the show’s beauty lies not in the pilgrims’ sameness, but in their difference. The commonality is not in their beliefs, but in their shared purpose, getting through a gruelling journey; spiritual and personal transformation taking place along the way.
I find this a beautiful metaphor for this moment in which we find ourselves - One which might help us to meet the challenges ahead of us, where we might see our differences, and choose kindness and togetherness, anyway.
México