In the five years since I came to these beautiful Wiltshire villages, I have been deeply struck by the friendliness and ‘good neighbourliness’ of our communities. It is very special the way people look out for their neighbours, helping and supporting each other. It’s a great gift we offer and something so many of our towns and cities now struggle to do, where anonymity and transience, and the hectic pace of modern life, have broken down some of those deeper bonds.
We should be proud of our strong communities, but also not complacent. It would be so easy to allow it to drift away. Even now, our connections will be immensely strong with those we consider friends and those with whom we socialise regularly, but are we sometimes tempted to feel; ‘I have my friends; I don’t have time or energy or attention, or any need, to widen this circle’?
I am well aware that, when under pressure, (for example, when trying to whip round Tesco’s, with my sons already irritated by how long I’ve kept them waiting), I can adopt a certain walk, a certain smile, that appears superficially warm, but simultaneously screams ‘I am too busy for you!’ Recognise that?
It’s a temptation I know we sometimes experience in our churches; we welcome people warmly, but then have to ensure that busyness, shyness, or complacency, don’t prevent us from offering anything more than a smile and a wave, or a few moments of small talk. Building and sustaining a community requires so much more.
It is, of course, one of the best known bible quotes, the commandment to ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’; but as the inspiring spiritual writer, Henri Nouwen, said: ‘We become neighbours when we are willing to cross the road for one another.’ If we want our villages to retain that precious sense of connectedness, we need to be alert to the people for whom we don’t yet ‘cross the road’; the newcomer; the shyer person who takes more perseverance to get to know; the people outside our usual ‘set’; the person struggling with ill-health or grief who, above all, would hate to be seen as a ‘burden’.
I can’t promise I won’t sometimes just smile and nod in Tesco’s, but I’ll try to ‘cross the road’ to you as often as I can. Perhaps we can meet each other in the middle!
Revd Kate McFarlane
