Article
Change
Mental Health
7 min read

Love is easy to say but hard to live

Love is not a one-time event. It is a practice.

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

A man stands and looks at a neon sign reading 'need love and... '
Chester Wade on Unsplash.

Over Easter, Christians contemplate the love that the cross represents. But what does love mean now, in the world as it is – and how do we live it?   

Love is one of those words that feels easy to say but hard to live. Like interdependence, like justice, like forgiveness. It is a word that can quickly get bent out of shape – mistaken for romance, twisted into desire, flattened into niceness, reduced to an emotion or a feeling. Still, we reach for it, or an approximation of it. We know we need it; we know it is a good and important thing. And yet for something so important we are never taught how to do it. Author and critic bell hooks (sic) said, “schools for love do not exist. Everyone assumes that we will know how to love instinctively.”  

The times we live in, though, are calling out for people who know how to love – for people who love well and who love much and who love like it has the power to heal and guide us – because the times we live in ask a lot. The forces and systems and ways of being that we’re so entangled with now are, I think, strengthened by lovelessness. Never-enough consumption, divisive politics, ruthless economics are all bolstered by lovelessness — by loneliness and othering and fear and greed. Still, like hooks, I think we “yearn to end the lovelessness that is so pervasive in our society.” She goes on: “To open our hearts more fully to love’s power and grace we must dare to acknowledge how little we know of love in both theory and practice…” 

Sometimes though, it seems Christians are as clueless about how to love as anyone. 

Christians should know something of love in theory and in practice. In the Bible, love is a command, love overcomes death, love serves, love lays down its life, love is God. Love is the cornerstone of all of it. Jesus calls another world into being when he tells his followers to not only love their neighbours, but to love their enemies too. He was consistently community-oriented in his teaching and living and loving, demonstrating love for his closest companions as well as for strangers and social outcasts. Love in the gospel is practical, unromantic, beautiful.  

Sometimes though, it seems Christians are as clueless about how to love as anyone. If non-believers see judgement, infighting, division, or other signs of lovelessness when they look at the church and its members — when we Christians feel these things ourselves — then we know there is work to do. There is of course always work to do, even when we love well, because love is not a one-time event; it must keep flowing, it is a way of being, it is a practice.  

A couple of the churches I went to early on in my Christian journey made me feel unwelcome. They were glossy, wealthy – not necessarily bad things in themselves, but here they felt like a silent sifter of belonging. Once, someone only half-jokingly corrected me for cutting the ‘nose’ off a wedge of cheese at a church event. I never felt relaxed, never myself. This was partly me, too – I realise lately that I have declined many invitations to belong. But the church we go to now is what I think perhaps an ideal church looks like. It’s an eclectic, scrappy group of people who tolerate some big differences in opinion and belief because they believe that love is bigger than those differences. There is no cancel culture, no shutting people out, though often it would be easier to do that than to stay, to keep coming back. A few weeks ago, I gave a sermon and in it, referenced the fact that over 30,000 people had been killed in Gaza, 70 per cent of whom were women and children. I said that if we were led by love – which is not selective, which is not reserved only for people we like the look of, which is never on the side of war and oppression – perhaps we might be doing what we could to make this dying stop: rage, protest, petition, pray. As I expected, the Minister had a complaint – that church shouldn’t be political, that I had been one sided, and so on. This is not an essay about that topic, but the reason I share this is because I knew some people would disagree with me, and I knew that would make me furious, and yet I also knew that our church holds the space for all this. I knew we would still all keep showing up, keep living alongside each other, keep encountering each other and being together in our unity, even when we infuriate each other. 

In the age of the individual, healing and development has become a personal mission, peddled as products by distant companies that do not really care about our hearts and souls and lives. 

There are other fault lines in our church – political, theological, economic, creative. But, just as fault lines on the Earth cause violent earthquakes yet still enable the plates to move and exist alongside each other, shaping and reshaping and evolving this one shared planet, so I think do the fault lines in church, in community, in the world. Perhaps they provide edges along which we can encounter each other, along which we can shape and reshape humanity. Fault lines can bring quakes and tremors, but they can also bring new shapes, new realities, if we’re willing to do the work. Rather than turn away, perhaps these fault lines offer the chance to choose to stay, to be curious, to encounter, to listen — to practice love.  

bell hooks again – she speaks so thoughtfully on the topic of love – said: “I am often struck by the dangerous narcissism fostered by spiritual rhetoric that pays so much attention to self-improvement and so little to the practice of love within the context of community.” I am struck by this too — in the age of the individual, healing and development has become a personal mission, peddled as products by distant companies that do not really care about our hearts and souls and lives. In our church though, and in the similarly infuriating and beautiful town it is in, I see – not always but often – how love blazes brightest in the context of relationships and community. It is a commitment, a deeply practical virtue that fosters togetherness, even along fault lines if we believe it can. Love lives in relationships that nurture us and challenge us, that shape us. And I think that is how the kingdom comes — not through grand gestures and money and tech, but person-by-person, through the everyday and lifetime work of love. 

Love asks – no, demands – that we root it in practice. It demands that we really see each other, that we encounter each other even along our messy and many fault lines. It demands that we listen, make space for dialogue and difference, seek to understand and be compassionate. This feels countercultural in a time when it can be easier to turn away than to stay. Love demands that we coexist together in our differences so that we are better able to see and unite against our real adversary — lovelessness, and all of its friends. This is holy work, I think, in the sense that it is about wholeness and that it really is work.  

At Easter, the cross we reflect on is a symbol of love, and it is also a critique of lovelessness, of empire, of religion that pretends to be about God and love. It is a looking glass, showing us who we are, and who we could yet be if we sought to embody the radical love that Jesus demonstrated even in his final moments, praying for his crucifiers “father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Love, I think, wants us to let it take more weight than we do – to trust it, to use it, to wield it like others wield weapons and hatred and judgement. This Easter and beyond, I am reflecting on what love really means in the world right now, and I am praying that we open ourselves more fully to its reality, its concreteness, its demands, its power, its practice. Finally, I am reading again the familiar but ever-challenging verses in St Paul's letter to a church in Corinth:  

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. 

Article
Change
Community
Hospitality
6 min read

In an age of disconnection, I want to belong

Old rituals offer reasons to stay linked together even when the world is trying to pull us apart

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Wassailers emerge from a shed beside a wood
Wassailing at Bourne Woods, Lincolnshire.
Bob Harvey, CCL, Geograph.

Once, I went to a ‘wassail’ on the edge of the city I lived in. A Wassail, from the Old English phrase meaning "be in good health", is a ceremony that involves toasting apple trees and scaring away evil spirits to ensure a good harvest, and it dates back to Anglo Saxon times. A man dressed in green and brown layers and leaves led the ceremony, passing around cups and cider for us to offer to the trees. We listened to stories, shared food. The event was ticketed. I was curious. But I felt out of place; a fraud stepping into this old ritual with no prior connection to these particular apple trees or this bit of land they were on, or to the people who surrounded them – trying to convince myself and others that I belonged. To what? To who? At the end, we all went back to our separate homes across the city, no more responsibility for those trees, nothing to link us to each other anymore.  

I’ve been advertised many events like this. Places to be celebrated through feasting, music and dance, entering into “ancient traditions connecting us to nature” – beating the bounds, toasting the land, enjoying seasonal feasts, listening to old stories. Photos advertising these events are like something styled for Country Living magazine, placing heritage rituals in high-end consumer settings; signalling intentionally or not that they are curated lifestyle experiences available to those who can afford them. They are part of the growing ‘return to the land’ movement that I often come across online, mediated through brands and influencers, curated retreats, Instagrammable countryside.  

I look outside the window towards our rural Devon village. It is grey and drizzly, and it will probably be grey and drizzly at harvest time. There will be no Instagrammable moments, but there will be deep roots that have grown slowly and are tended all year round.  

Perhaps these events signify an ache for a particular kind of rootedness. I have this ache. I am envious of friends who farm in landscapes their ancestors have inhabited for hundreds of years, of people who feel a clear sense of home and belonging. In the past, these feelings were often linked to community and to the faith and work traditions that bind community together: harvest home, Lammas, Rogation, saints’ days, midsummer. They weren’t boutique experiences open to anyone who could pay for them; they were communal and local, woven into survival, farming, faith, community. I am trying to carve out these feelings too. 

I have been wondering what we lose when old celebrations and rituals are curated, commodified, or disconnected from the deeper soil of faith and tradition that once sustained them. How do we celebrate the longing for rootedness without flattening it into a lifestyle accessory, stripping it of faith, memory, obligation, and mystery? How might old rituals help us to feel deeply hopeful and rooted in an environmentally and socially fragmented age?  

I think it can help to place these rituals in the context of place; of community; of faith. These contexts offer reasons to stay linked together even when the world is trying to pull us apart, even when I’d rather walk away. Without some kind of infrastructure of belonging, I think old rituals can become about consumption and lifestyle rather than connection to people and place. They become weekend events, or expressions of self, or a nice vibe – not a life’s ordering. Real ritual, I am coming to realise, requires weight; a tie to story, belief, and responsibility — not just aesthetic revival. A harvest festival in a rural, overlooked parish like mine may be small, strange and inefficient. It will not be photogenic, but it will connect me and others to a stream of 2,000 years of worship here, and before that to millennia of agricultural rhythm-marking. It introduces me to people and farms, to old stories that have lain dormant like relics in the soil, to possibilities for my own faith and belonging.  

I have been reading Paul Kingsnorth’s new book, Against the Machine. By ‘machine’ he means the nexus of power, wealth, ideology and technology that has emerged; a project of modernity “that is to replace nature with technology, and to rebuild the world in purely human shape, the better to fulfil the most ancient human dream: to become gods.” I suspect Kingsnorth would see the commercialisation of ancient rituals as a consequence of machine culture. Disconnecting the rituals from their origins and landscapes and relational ecosystems is to render them floating experiences, available to be purchased and claimed and bent to anyone’s will. A machine-friendly spirituality that strips mystery and, importantly, the cost of that spirituality – commitment, belonging, sacrifice, inconvenience.  

Kingsnorth shows that the razing of old stories, communities, and traditions created a blank canvas that allowed for the success of the industrial revolution, and so today’s materialistic and economically-driven culture. And so I see hope in the interest and resurgence of old traditions, in our hunger for roots, in the reclaiming of stories that were once trampled and forgotten. But I think it matters whether they are resurrected as machine-friendly buyable experiences, or as ways of being that seek continuity with something older and truer, something outside of today’s dominant paradigms.  

Anthropologist Victor Turner explored the ideas of liminality and communitas. Liminality refers to an ambiguous ‘between’ state where individuals are stripped of their usual social roles and statuses. Communitas is the unstructured social bond that emerges among people in this liminal state, creating a sense of equality, directness, and shared humanity that challenges formal social structures. Perhaps – in this time of climate change and AI and an increasingly unknowable future – we are all in a liminal space. Perhaps the revival of old rituals allows for direct human connection. Perhaps the wassail event, and others like it, encourages human connection in a fractured time. Perhaps they make the countryside into a sanctuary in unknowable times, and perhaps that is enough.  

The Christian story does these things too, but I think it goes deeper still – it sanctifies time itself, embedding the rituals and seasons in liturgy, creating a steady rhythm that can hold community together without being dependent on trends or tickets. It is a story grown from a sacred supper, shared feasts, prayer, fasting, seeds, and rituals of death and new life. It is a story that binds together its hearers into relation and rhythm-making.  

Christianity is not a neat ‘answer’ to the rootlessness and unbelonging of our time. But it offers old and tested examples of depth, continuity, and gratitude in ritual. It has of course long absorbed and re-shaped older rituals, born of older communities – like the Celts, who knew that place and time and land and people, animated by something beyond, could combine to create particular patterns and poetry which, when taken seriously, could deepen identity and togetherness with each other and the Earth. Christianity recognised this and built on it (and squashed it in places, but that is another story). I think that picking and choosing and bending old traditions, detaching them from time and place and cultural significance, even if just to remove religious baggage, reduces that old poetry to prose. It is no longer sustained by its original social and spiritual infrastructure.  

Such an infrastructure, built over generations, connects us to a through-line of celebration, gratitude, lament, and renewal. Following this through line – which whether I’ve liked it or not has linked me to new and old expressions of the Christian faith – is what is helping me to find belonging and participation. The wassail I joined signified to me that I’m still on the search for belonging. I want to go to a Wassail event again, but I want to do it outside of the ‘machine’, in a place I am putting roots into, with trees that I help tend, lifting bread around a harvest table with others I am working to know. I still feel a tug to these old rituals, as if assessing their ability to provide orienting infrastructure to my life and to the life of community. But in this age of disconnection – of industrial food, global supply chains, loneliness – what I want is less curated experience and more real belonging. I hope to find a bit more of that at harvest time.  

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