Getting Together

There’s a new cherry tree in the church garden, with a new brass plaque next to it, provided by one of our local firms of undertakers. In years to come, I wonder whether people will think that Jo Cox, who the plaque mentions, was our MP. Will anyone long remember what happened to her in the summer of 2016, in the hot days before the UK voted to leave the European Union?

The series of events in commemoration of Ms Cox went under the title of the Great Get Together and the branding was a work of genius. The Gill Sans lettering subconsciously recalls Keep Calm and Carry On and any number of wartime propaganda posters, and is laid out against a red-and-white chequer tablecloth. You can find endless photographs online from the weekend of communities up and down the land taking part in the event, usually with a lady or two in a hijab to make the point that this includes everyone: the whole of England, united by what else but tea and cake, that alchemical universal solvent that takes different races, cultures and background and makes a nation of them. I strike a slightly ironic tone, but don’t mean to inject any note of cynicism: I know it’s about aspiration, about saying (as Jo Cox did, blandly but unchallengeably) ‘Far more unites us than divides us’; even when what divides us is actually very important indeed.

We are not quite so multicultural in Swanvale Halt. The event here was driven by a couple of members of the congregation with a long involvement in local politics from the liberal-leftward direction, so I didn’t have much to do with its planning. We had tea, dedicated the tree (for which I had to devise a tiny liturgy as there doesn’t seem to be anything available even in the Rituale Romanum), and went into the church for some apposite readings and hymns. The local choral society sang Fauré’s ‘Cantique de Jean Racine’. A church member in his early 90s talked about why he’d chosen ‘Father I give into your hands’ as his hymn: ‘I thought, We all have to rely on someone else, and this hymn is about that, in a way’.

It is of course true, all the community-togetherness stuff, and true too that ‘more unites us than divides us’. But I thought about the business round the corner, run by a young mum whose children go to the infants school, that recently had to close down after getting going with such aspiration and optimism, because the landlord lost patience with not receiving the full rent – and had a better offer for the site from a property developer. The landlord also lives in the area, is part of exactly the same ‘community’ as the people involved in the business. Sometimes what unites us only goes so far when you’re up against the facts of economics and of power.

It’s not that such conflicts of interest illegitimate events like the Great Get Together: they are liturgies of what we want to be. It’s just that it isn’t that simple: community needs hard work, if only the hard work of mutual interaction and listening; it needs people, structures, and sometimes sacrifice. It needs the diligent, careful cultivation of hope and trust. We all have to look after the cherry trees.