³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ

Art Historian, Dr Jim Harris

A big football tournament is a great time for thinking deep thoughts.Ìý Who are we? What does it mean today to be English? Am I also British?Ìý European?Ìý I’m pretty sure I’m not Welsh and I’m faintly sad that Gareth Bale is. We all want to know where our identity lies and so we like to categorise each other.Ìý It makes us feel secure.Ìý If I can say something definite about you, it helps me to work out who and what I am.Ìý Sometimes, that’s easy.Ìý Or at least we think it is: Chris Evans, DJ. Toby Jones, Actor. Nadiya Hussein, baker (and idol to my daughter Miriam who says hi, by the way)

Ìý

But when we come to look at ourselves the picture gets muddier, because we think, ‘well, my life is richer and more complex than a single label can ever indicate or suggest’. I’m a Teaching Curator, but does that make me a teacher or a curator?Ìý Or a university lecturer?Ìý Or am I mostly a Dad?Ìý Or a Christian? Or a Dulwich Hamlet fan? And once we start to see how complicated we are, everyone else looks less straightforward too: Tom Odell, singer, songwriter, son, brother, Renaissance Man? Who knows?

Ìý

But a big football tournament is also a great time for simplifying things.Ìý We are English or Welsh, Irish or Northern Irish, German, Italian or Albanian. That’s it. And whatever we are, we paint our faces, wave a flag, wear a shirt. This can be good.Ìý National identities bind us, reflecting our communities and our histories.Ìý Alternatively, having a profession or a faith can locate us safely in a shifting world.

But I reckon that it spells trouble when we invest too heavily in those things and somehow imagine that they represent everything we are or, worse, everything someone else is.

Ìý

Jo Cox’s life was invested in the opposite.Ìý At Save the Children, at Oxfam and as an MP, she worked believing in the complexity and infinite potential of every individual and in our collective responsibility to enable them to achieve it. St Paul wrote that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female.Ìý In other words, God doesn’t care about our nationality or religious affiliation, our economic, or political status.Ìý He doesn’t care about our gender or orientation.Ìý He cares about us, whatever and whoever we are.Ìý He loves us in all our rich, complicated, indecipherable individuality. So I believe that when we feel the urge to box someone in to a particular identity, it’s worth remembering that none of it matters. Nation, class, party, religion, sexuality. None of it. What matters is that we are who we are. But I still wish Gareth Bale was English.