Article
Community
Culture
7 min read

Think little: what villages teach about coming together

Elizabeth Wainwright explores the frustrations and encouragements of village life, real and virtual, and finds a need for communion.

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

A miniature tableau depicts a band performing at a concert as people dance and others watch from a marque.
A miniature village fete, Élancourt, France.
Frédéric Bisson, via Wikimedia Commons.

Since the birth of our daughter in May, I’ve been thinking about the village that it will supposedly take to raise her. I’m curious about where - or what - that village is today.  

A meme I saw on social media depicted Tom Hanks in his role in the film Castaway, edited so that instead of being alone on a desert island, he was walking through an empty city shouting:  

“IS ANYONE OUT THERE?”.  

The creator, a mother, had added a caption:  

“Me trying to find the village that was supposed to help me raise my children”.  

I clicked on the comments - there were hundreds of responses of all kinds:  

“Hyper independence is a narrative that is pushed on mothers” / “the world our grandparents and parents grew up in no longer exists” / “our lives are too busy” / “there is no village” / “the village is there but it takes work / “I struggle with ‘it takes a village, because for those of us who don’t have one, it highlights feelings of isolation” / “loneliness and isolation are a reality of our modern way of living, mothers especially feel this”. 

It seemed that other mothers were thinking about their village – or lack of it - too.  

My husband and daughter and I live in an actual village in rural Devon. In the summer, we went out into the garden, and - hearing a noise from the back of the house - turned to see one of our neighbours at the top of a ladder fixing a broken roof tile. Another neighbour was standing at the bottom of the ladder holding it in place. We hadn’t asked them to fix it - we’d only mentioned needing a new roof tile in passing. My heart swelled. Though not directly caring for our young daughter, they were easing the load by caring in the way they knew how. 

Online community is vital for me, and it is also lacking. Physical local community is vital for me, and it is also lacking. 

That act of neighbourliness made me wonder whether the village that will help raise our daughter is the literal village we live in. Here, there are people who care for this place and the people in it. Here, there is soil into which I can plunge my hands, anchoring me in this time, this place, amongst these people, all of it working to create a web of interdependence and care which I hope will steady us all in the face of a burning and unknowable future. But we’ve only been here a couple of years, and our stories don’t yet intertwine with the roots of the place. That takes time, and interdependence takes my little family being the village for others as well as benefitting from it. And there are days when I feel I have little capacity to reach out to others.  

Living in a small rural village can also be hard. A welcome is not guaranteed, relationships often have to bridge real difference. And whilst historically the village was a physical place with clear edges, family roots, and familiar neighbours, that’s now not most people’s reality. My husband and I have lived in various places over the years, our scattered friends part of our journey still, even at a geographic distance. Whether or not a scattered village is possible, it knows me in a way that our local village does not and perhaps cannot. It is part of a social fabric that will weave around our daughter, despite not being immediately accessible day to day.  

Or perhaps the village is increasingly virtual, made up of likeminded connections we draw near to online. Here I find not hands-on help, but understanding, ideas, encouragement, and a sense of possibility, even amongst people that don’t know me especially well. I find sustenance here, but I also know I close off real life encounters - and a more nuanced and unfiltered understanding of the world, of difference, of community - by investing in self-selecting online communities. And I want my daughter to encounter difference, to know that people can love and be loved even when they are nothing like her.  

Online community is vital for me, and it is also lacking. Physical local community is vital for me, and it is also lacking.  

They invite me to wonder but also to ‘think little’ as farmer and author Wendell Berry advocates, at the scale of this person, this relationship, this place.

And so I wonder what the village is, what it is becoming, and how we find it. Because whilst we’re told it takes a village to raise a child, in practice we often move to follow jobs, we live in isolated units and hear messaging that praises individualism and self-sufficiency and being able to do and have it all. And it can be as hard to call on the village as to find it in the first place - it can even be hard to accept the help of the village when it’s right there offering itself to us, so strong is the pull to look like we’re holding it all together, or to not burden others (I say this from experience). So we carry on trying to do it all ourselves.  

I find myself turning to ancient things for guidance. The Christian idea of communion – a table, bread, and wine shared in community – is beautiful to me, both in how it is practiced and what it represents. Bread and wine grow and are consumed in a particular place, at a particular time. The community that shares it is knowable, together at this particular time in the world. That this entrance into faith depends so much on place and time feels significant. Communion could easily be a mystical, cerebral, hard-to-grasp idea. But crucially it’s also personal, accessible, locatable. And church - not the idea or the institution but the local gathering place - can be a place where we find this access too, as can gardens and fields and food; tethers that remind us of this created earthy peopled world. To me, these things call me back to living here and now. They invite me to wonder but also to ‘think little’ as farmer and author Wendell Berry advocates, at the scale of this person, this relationship, this place. There is a tendency to think big when it comes to solutions to world crises when perhaps thinking little - at the scale of the ‘village’ - is more actionable, more sustainable, more appropriate – a solution that works here might not work there, and that’s ok. Berry says in multiple thoughtful ways that ‘what we stand on is what we stand for’. His is a call to know place, to invest in place, to be in place, despite (and perhaps because of) the challenges that come with doing so.  

I think the local is going to become more important - calling us to find our way back to community in a time of division and overwhelming global challenges. 

‘Thinking little’ might happen in a street, a church, a garden, a neighbourhood. A place where we can root into literal or metaphorical soil, where isolation can turn to relation, where interdependence becomes easier to live out. It need not be an either/or between this and geographically distant or online communities though - I think online spaces offer their own care in the world as it is. But the communion table shows me hospitality as well as mystery, and Jesus – whose body communion draws us closer to – shows us a truth built locally, relationship-by-relationship. It calls us to the challenge and beauty of caring and being cared for in our own here and now. 

Perhaps the early Christians had it right by being deeply invested in place, and in something beyond place too. They lived locally whilst acting globally and spiritually, ready to leave if the call should come. They were ready to build the church, person by person into something whole. God, after all, calls us to be a collective, to love our neighbours and in return, to feel love. I think the local is going to become more important - calling us to find our way back to community in a time of division and overwhelming global challenges, when faceless corporations would rather we relied on them than each other. As part of that, I think it’ll become important to engage with local civic bodies too, to all feel able to take part in placemaking and decision-making, especially when national government seems increasingly out of touch (my time as a District Councillor has given me a whole new lens on what living locally means). 

Working out what the village might mean – as a mother, a citizen, a neighbour – as our daughter grows is an ongoing journey and it’s a theme I’ll return to here. But what I know is this: that I want us to be part of an ecology of care. I want us to offer and more graciously receive that care. I want us to be like the trees outside my window: linked together, rooted in place whilst reaching upwards and outwards to the light that is sometimes hard to see, but is always there.   

Article
Belief
Culture
Music
5 min read

How Mumford and friends explore life's instability

Communing on fallibility, fear, grace, and love.

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A bassist hauls a double bass of its base as he plays it.
Daniel Boud/x.com/mumfordandsons.

“Serve God, love me, and mend” must rank as one of the more unexpected openings to a hugely popular album in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. A quote from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, it introduces us to the potent mix of Shakespearean and Biblical allusion and imagery to be found on Mumford and Sons debut album Sign No More.  

Sigh No More, both as song and album, begins with confident assertions of faith then moves into acknowledgement of human fallibility and prevarication summed up in the Shakespearean phrase that “Man is a giddy thing” before asserting that love does not enslave but is freeing, enabling those who know it to become the people they were meant to be. The song ends with a prayer to see the beauty which will come when the protagonist’s heart is truly aligned with love. Throughout the album, the overriding concern is that personal fallibilities and fears – the darkness within – will prevent grace from having its full effect and the beauty of alignment with love from being fully realised. 

In many Mumford and Sons songs such personal instability is the problem to be resolved; “Man is a giddy thing”, “Why do I keep falling?”. Their search is often for the relationship or place that will provide stability:  

I can't say, "I'm sorry," if I'm always on the run 

From the anchor (‘Anchor’) 

‘Roll Away Your Stone’ describes the darkness within as a God-shaped hole filled with false gods: 

See you told me that I would find a hole 

Within the fragile substance of my soul 

And I have filled this void with things unreal 

And all the while my character it steals 

but this is not how life has to be: 

It seems that all my bridges have been burned 

But, you say that's exactly how this grace thing works 

It's not the long walk home 

That will change this heart 

But the welcome I receive with the restart 

Lead singer and songwriter Marcus Mumford knows how this grace thing works because, on the one hand, his parents founded the Vineyard Church UK and Ireland meaning he grew up in the context of grace and, on the other, he seems to have experienced grace personally in relation to the sexual abuse he suffered as a child (which was not experienced in his family or his church). In ‘Grace’ from his self-titled solo album he contrasts grace, flowing like a river, with the experience of acknowledging the abuse he endured and the healing for which he prays. 

Such biblical allusions and references abound in the songs of Mumford and Sons, as is also the case with some of those with whom they performed, supported or inspired. The Nu-folk movement of which the Mumford’s were part, began at a club called Bosun’s Locker in Fulham. There, with the likes of Laura Marling, Noah and the Whale, and others, their musical journey commenced. Noah and the Whale’s first album Peaceful, the World Lays Me Down featured philosophical rumination on a par with that of Sigh No More including lines such as: 

Oh, there is no endless devotion 

That is free from the force of erosion 

Oh, if you don't believe in God 

How can you believe in love?          

Following the closure of Bosun’s Locker, Ben Lovett from Mumford and Sons, with others, set up Communion Records, a network of musicians, songwriters, industry and music fans who all share a common philosophy and set of ideals. Among the artists supported by Communion have been Bear’s Den and Michael Kiwanuka. 

Bear’s Den is one of several bands, which also included Dry the River, that have used religious and spiritual symbols in their songs. Andrew Davie from Bear’s Den has said: “I wouldn't say I'm particularly religious, but I was brought up going to church every Sunday, I studied a bit of religion in school and just from going to Sunday school, it's almost that I know the stories so well, that I find it a cool way of telling more modern and more nuanced stories about my own life. As a backdrop to that I find it just constantly helpful and it's quite a powerful way to talk about things. It adds weight to me.” Similarly, Matthew Taylor of Dry the River said of the theological imagery in lead singer Peter Liddle’s songs: “It’s always been a tool for Peter I think, to use the imagery you’re talking about, to add weight to what he’s writing about. It’s rich imagery, and the ideas are ones that people can relate to easily, if there’s that familiarity there.” Both recognise, as do Mumford and Sons, the continuing power of Christian ideas and imagery and their resonance for young people. 

Michael Kiwanuka was surprised that his early song about faith ‘I’m Getting Ready’ was enthusiastically released first as the title song of an EP from Communion Records and then by Polydor as a single from his debut album Home Again. Kiwanuka, who is married to Christian singer Charlotte, has consistently expressed aspects of his faith through songs like ‘Love and Hate’, ‘One More Night’, ‘Solid Ground’, and ‘Floating Parade’. Alexis Petridis has noted that Kiwanuka sees more people searching for a belief system: “Having a faith in things now is, I think, a lot more acceptable, whatever faith it is. There’s no dogma, necessarily. We’re connected by the struggles we have and I think that’s what I’m singing about – being a human being and trying to overcome, which is what we’re all doing in a way.” 

Whether opening up space for bands to utilise the power of Christian imagery in their songs or enabling singers with a Christian faith to be heard on mainstream labels, Mumford and Sons, by example and support, have created opportunities for faith to be explored and appreciated. The response to their music, its themes, and those of artists with whom they connect, seems to reflect a growing openness to spirituality and faith. As they sang, together with Pharrell Williams, on ‘Good People’, “Welcome to the revelation”. 

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