The currency of community

Those attending the Service of Thanksgiving at St Bride’s church before the Harvest Lunch, listened to some timely and thought-provoking words from the Very Reverend Dr Mark Oakley, Dean of Southwark.

As journalists, our work often involves shining a light on government incompetence and mismanagement. Inevitably, this often includes highlighting the numerous grievances of our readers.

But the dean, who was brought up in rural Shropshire and has strong links to the farming community, reminded us of the value of the “currency of community”. Some of his words are below and are, I think, worth reflecting on whenever our mood becomes too dark or negative in these tricky times.

“This is the language that assures the members of the community that they are engaged in the same common enterprise and is composed of common stories and behaviours – things that you can expect other members of the community to understand without explanation – ways and styles of doing and saying things.

“Think of the body’s circulatory system to further explore this idea of the currency of a community. As the blood in the body circulates, it carries with it whatever is added into circulation. Unless it is purged from circulation, whatever is put into circulation will come back again. In the body, what you give is what you will receive. If you put in grievance, you will get back grievance. But on the other hand, if you place into circulation gratitude, the body recovers.

“Peace-making in a community, then, comes from the determination to place into circulation something other than grudges and grievances and anger and resentment. Peacemakers in a community consciously place into circulation such positive values as gratitude, generosity, acceptance, hospitality, respect, and celebration.

“Grudges, grievances, passive anger, resentment, and despair are toxic and pollute the circulation, making the body sick. But gratitude, generosity, acceptance, fairness, love of justice, hospitality, respect, and celebration overcome the toxicity of the other elements and work to make the body of the community well again.”

Rev Mark Oakley’s full speech:

Before becoming Dean at Southwark, London’s rather more understated Cathedral, I was Dean and Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge, and so able to dine at College high table. When I turned up of an evening, of course, the conversation of the dons would often turn to religion. Once, the topic of purgatory came up. One grumpy and irascible old don was confused. ‘Purgatory? Purgatory? Well, will I go to Purgatory?’, he asked. ‘Oh John’, said the don next to him, ‘It just wouldn’t be purgatory without you’.

Well, I’m rather in purgatory now knowing that sadly, due to a funeral I must take, I shall miss out on your lunch and being a foodie and supporter of British produce. I’m so sorry not to be able to join you, but now that I’ve reached the age when my broad mind and narrow waist have now swopped places, it might do me some good I suppose. But I have to admit that I was rather fond of that grumpy old don because we had something in common – as well as being grumpy and old that is. We were both from Shropshire, that beautiful country on the edges of north Wales than no one in London ever seems to have heard of. ‘Shropshire born, Shropshire bred. Strong in the body, thick in the head’. Ah, the poetry of the hills was sublime. And one of the most surprising facts about me is that one year I was the President of the Shropshire Horticultural Society, and I was very proud to be so. I love Shropshire and my memories of my childhood in the countryside there, and my continual visits over the years to visit my grandmother who brought me up, have only made my love stronger. But one of the memories I have as a child there is not good. We were right in the middle of the farming community and one day we heard the tragic news that our neighbour, a young farmer struggling to keep the family farm together as a working business, took his own life. Ever since that day I have been more than aware of the pressures laid on our farmers, and there are so many of them at the moment – not least rising costs (from fertilisers and feed to technology), extreme weather events meaning low yields and reduced production, complicated trade barriers, SFI anger and cash flow anxieties, labour shortages, livestock disease concerns, and a seeming inability in some places of influence to take food security seriously. It is not surprising that the recent study by the Farm Safety Foundation revealed that 91% of British farmers rank poor mental health as the “biggest hidden problem” currently facing the sector. That is why I couldn’t be happier to be here alongside agricultural journalists who are committed to waking people up to the realities of rural life, both the outer landscapes and the inner landscapes.

And we celebrate your work of truth telling and story shaping, at this Harvest Festival, a day when we bring out our thanks for the goodness of the earth, the produce that sustains us, and the communities and families who grow, transport and market that produce. And why is a day of thanks like this a bit more important than we problem first realise?

Because, it’s about what we might call the currency of a community, a community like ours here now. The currency of a community – the means of exchange between members of it – is the language that assures the members of the community that they are engaged in the same common enterprise. This currency of a community is composed of common stories and behaviours – things that you can expect other members of the community to understand without explanation – ways and styles of doing and saying things.

For example, you might visit a university and be curious about the currency of that particular community. What was the common practice that everyone there could identify with? Well, you might observe that whenever any group of people at the university gathered, they complained. The currency of that place was grievance.

Think of the body’s circulatory system to further explore this idea of the currency of a community. As the blood in the body circulates, it carries with it whatever is added into circulation. Unless it is purged from circulation, whatever is put into circulation will come back again. In the body, what you give is what you will receive. If you put in grievance, you will get back grievance. But on the other hand, if you place into circulation gratitude, the body recovers.

Peacemaking in a community, then, comes from the determination to place into circulation something other than grudges and grievances and anger and resentment. Peacemakers in a community consciously place into circulation such positive values as gratitude, generosity, acceptance, hospitality, respect, and celebration. Grudges, grievances, passive anger, resentment, and despair are toxic and pollute the circulation, making the body sick. But gratitude, generosity, acceptance, fairness, love of justice, hospitality, respect, and celebration overcome the toxicity of the other elements and work to make the body of the community well again.

What is the currency of exchange here in our community? What is the currency of exchange in our homes? In our workplace? In the classroom? And what do you place into circulation?

What Harvest tells us is that Gratitude is a good start. Let us try it. Let us try to recognize the currency of exchange currently in use in our various communities. I’d guess that the currency used around the places we hang out probably includes criticism, finger pointing, grievance, sarcasm, put-downs, and resentment – and that’s just the Church of England. So let us make conscious effort to place into circulation a positive currency. Gratitude. Respect. Generosity. Hope. If you don’t know how – just say thank you a bit more often. Jesus was clear on that mountain as to which values need circulating as he helped us see that the blessed are those with fragile spirits, those who live with loss, those whose ego doesn’t take over, and those with some mercy in them, those who believe that there is something called righteousness, who want justice, those who make peace, and those who get put down and injured because they believe all this to be true and the good news that this world so urgently needs to hear, a world where so many are trying to be examples of power when actually we are crying out for the power of example.

Getting old is like climbing a mountain, said Ingrid Bergman, you get a little out of breath but the view is much better. Our western world is focused on what we might call the CV virtues, achieving, competing, scoring, winning recognition, awards, maybe victories. We live to make the CV longer and more dazzling. And we like to see how our achievements outrank others, so in the church we make this very visible – the more important you are the nearer the back of the procession you are. The Church is the only place where saying ‘after you’ is an insult.

But there is also in us another person who is centred more on what we might call eulogy virtues, those things we’d like people to say about us at our funeral – these are about your character, your values, how you relate, love, show kindness, befriend, look beyond yourself, maybe had faith, someone who didn’t think less of themselves but thought of themselves a bit less, who didn’t take people for granted, who gave people dignity and attention, and a helping hand, not a fist. Of course, the world will always need CVs, but our communities and our churches must also keep in circulation those eulogy virtues to keep the heart of our cities and countryside and nation healthy.

A day of gratitude to God and one another for creation and life itself helps us see how much we need each other much more than we often like to admit. It helps us see that we need good and strong values of the common good in circulation. And it shows us we need to attend to these things urgently at a time when there is far too much high self-esteem coupled with low safe awareness, too many screens distracting us into the search for an enviable life rather than a good one, and too much bumper sticker politics that prefer dishonest simplicity to honest complexity – and that, as history shows, can lead us to very shadowed and dangerous places. Keep gratitude in circulation, make it your life’s not just a harvest, festival. It is urgent. Because as Evelyn Waugh once said, the saddest words in the whole English language are ‘too late’.