Fellowship springs from a shared mission. Genuine community needs a ‘why?’ – a reason for coming together beyond the community itself. Communities that have a common dream, or a collective hope, are then bonded together in the pursuit of that goal. Some communities might journey together for a short time, some communities have to travel as pilgrims and sojourners for many years. The journey that I have just embarked on is the latter and it is my suspicion that although the actual ‘planned’ journey for The Journey of Hope programme is only 6 months, it will be our life’s work to walk the challenging terrain together.
The Journey of Hope is a programme from St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace, based in Bishopsgate, east London. There has been a church based at St Ethelburga’s for at least 800 years. In 1993, an IRA bombing destroyed the majority of the church building leaving it in ruins. The then Bishop of London had a vision for the church to be rebuilt as a place for healing and peacemaking – and St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace was opened in 2002. St Ethelburga’s is ‘a maker of peace-makers’ and exists to inspire and train people to be peacemakers in their own communities. The Journey of Hope is one of the ways that they do this: over a 6 month period, a cohort of folk from across the United Kingdom will be ‘meeting’ virtually each month to learn together and to wrestle with the challenges to peace in our time. While the pandemic means that we cannot travel, we are being ‘hosted’ by different peace centres across the UK including the Corrymeela Community, Bridge Builders and Rose Castle Foundation. We are just setting off on our journey, so we are still getting to know each other, learning to trust and be vulnerable with one other, and creating a brave and resilient space together. Although many of us are much more comfortable on Zoom then we would have been a year ago, it can be tough having difficult conversations on screens. At the same time we are learning to show up as our full selves and seeking to be present to each other and the process that we have embarked on (even though we’re missing chatting over coffee and biscuits/ and late-night glasses of wine).
I wanted to be part of the Journey of Hope because I am concerned that apparently diverse communities across the UK are actually living siloed and parallel lives, which can lead to misunderstanding, fear, and prejudice. As I walk in my local park, I notice more often than not, that friendship groupings frequently fall along racial lines. There isn’t a lot of mixing. I grew up in a country where segregation was enshrined in law, yet I see that in my south London neighbourhood a kind of social segregation at work. I was listening to a podcast recently on which Brene Brown spoke about how she writes to save her own life and, if it helps anyone else, then that is a win. I’m on the Journey of Hope to save my own life – from the white privilege that I grew up with, from unconscious racism, from ignorance towards the earth and all its inhabitants, and from the many other blind spots and inconsistencies my behaviour displays.
The Journey of Hope is a shared mission – a common desire to press deeper into the work of peacemaking, of transforming conflict and of becoming ‘reconciling reconcilers’. It is a mission that will demand that we look into ourselves, at our own joys, pains, struggles, conflicts and celebrations. My hope is that the fruits of our collective labour will be the discovery of possibilities in our neighbourhoods: for peace, for collaboration, for justice, and for the flourishing of ‘unlikely’ friendships.
stumbling hopefully in the right direction 
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