Love Your Neighbour
THE UNITED KINGDOM is a multicultural nation and Reading and Caversham reflect that. The number of international restaurants in Caversham alone is testament to the mix of ethnicities we can boast locally. Official census data (2021–2022), recognises six major faiths in the UK among a large nonreligious population, with many denominations and belief systems nationwide. Approximately 27.5 million people (46.5% of the population) in the UK identified as Christian. There are also many different cultural groups and mostly people tend to stick with their own ‘kind’. Many nationalities have been in the UK for years; some are new immigrants hoping to find a life better than the one they may have been forced to leave behind. I was a stranger in Caversham when I arrived 47 years ago.
Two important words in this context are tolerance and communication. We may not understand other people’s customs, but we can be tolerant. But is tolerance enough? Do we observe from afar or do we try to learn about our neighbours? Do we communicate with them or share their joys or sadness? Do we need to get to know our neighbours before we can learn to love them as ourselves? Do we need to make ourselves known? I write from a white British Christian perspective, but I have lived for almost a decade in the Middle East and have the experience of being ‘foreign’. Getting to know people on an individual basis, communicating with them, sharing things about each other’s lives, is so important in a population sometimes disparate and distrustful of those not the same as ourselves.
When I was a child communication was on a very different scale from what it is today. There was no internet, no mobile phones. There were no WhatsApp conversations across the globe. We used to write letters to one another. And our communications were generally more local within our own communities. These days there is a surfeit of communication from every corner of the world. We are bombarded by it all and it may exacerbate our wariness of the stranger. It can be a challenge to love people from different backgrounds and not treat them with suspicion.
So let us get to know our neighbours, communicate with them and befriend them. Let us talk to the stranger. God is our guide, the pinnacle of tolerance and compassion who always holds us with love and an understanding which we should emulate in our communities. Hebrews 13:2 tells us, ‘Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers for, by doing that, some have entertained angels without knowing it’. Who knows who you might get to know?
by Revd Dr Catherine Radcliffe
Assistant Curate St Peter’s Caversham
Be the first to comment