‘If we are to
plan sustainable communities, then, we have to have a good nose for what
depletes human capital. And I want to suggest that one major threat to human
capital is the sense of living without landmarks in time or space…Human beings
from their earliest days work out their identity by learning to cope with a
specific set of triggers and stimuli, the geography of a room, the rhythms of
feeding and sleeping, a face that becomes familiar. As their awareness expands,
they still work out and define who they are in relation to patterns of activity
in time and to a differentiated space; their mental world is in pat a set of
routes between familiar points. We inhabit a map. It is most dramatically
expressed in the Australian aboriginal idea of the ‘song lines’ that give
structure to the world: the aborigine knows the landscape as a series of songs
to be sung as you move from this point to that. Geography is a set of
instructions for responding with this or that song to the visual triggers you
encounter.
‘Now of course
any landscape, any physical environment, has such triggers. But it seems fairly
clear that a physical environment that is repetitive, undifferentiated, can
fail to give adequate material for a person to develop. A varied environment
with marked features, that perhaps have narratives and memories attached to
them, offers multiple stimuli to respond to. There is a local geography that is
more than just an abstract plan of the ground: it invests places with shared
significance. A landscape which proclaims its sameness with countless others,
in its layout, building materials, retail outlets and so on, is a seedbed for
problems. If it’s true that I can’t answer the question ‘Who am I?’ without at
some level being able to answer the question ‘Where am I?’, the character of
built space becomes hugely important. There will always be small scale domestic
answers to ‘Where am I?’ because we all imprint distinctiveness on our homes
and are ‘imprinted’ by them; but when this is restricted to the domestic, we
should not be surprised if there is little sense of investment in the local
environment outside the home.’
…
‘And last,
planning should, then, look seriously at how the reality of faith becomes part
of the landscape – how religious buildings figure among the landmarks of a
community. But this is not only a question of attending to the pragmatic needs
of religious groups. Like it or not, there are unsought experiences that
communities share, trauma and celebration which call out for the kind of space
that carries no political or sectional agenda, that is not for anything but the
expression of certain serious and complex emotions…And whether we are thinking
about personal trauma or collective…it is emphatically true that a very large number
of people, far larger than the statistics of regular worshippers, urgently need
a place for certain things to be voiced. What is offered by a space dedicated
to worship is essential – somewhere where events may occur that belong to a
whole locality, where solidarities of a mysterious but very important kind can
be reinforced.’
Rowan
Williams, essay on ‘Sustainable communities’ in Faith in the Public Square.
Last
weekend saw the second ‘Sanctuary’ event – a three-day festival showcasing
local bands, ale, and street food, organised by local business-men and -women
and held at Sunderland Minster - and I am struck afresh by the thoughts offered
by Rowan Williams above. I’m struck by the response, over and over again, of
people coming into this space for the first time, and finding somewhere to
which they are drawn back. I’m struck by the requests to host conversations
between different groups – the recognition that this is a safe space in which
difficult but greatly-needed communication can take place. I’m struck by the
gift that we have been given, by those who have gone before us and by God, for
the people of Sunderland; and by the great honour it is to be here.
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