Blogs • Revd Tim Hurd (Former Chaplain)

It’s been a number of weeks since I last made a contribution here, and it seems the world has become a much more turbulent place.

Not just because exams have started - and I’ve been thinking of you all who are studying for and sitting these - but the global financial situation has come to the fore in our news, the election campaign, and in the public consciousness.

The causes for the mess international banking is in - and all the knock-on effects - are numerous, but it seems fairly clear there’s a good ol’ fashioned dose of greed and simply trying-to-be-too-clever-for-our-own-good somewhere in the mix. Just the latest of a long line of such behaviour, to which any study of history - or indeed the Bible - will attest.

At a General Election we’re invited to exercise our right - and some might drift towards duty - to vote. Which should remind us we’re part of a bigger whole. Margaret Thatcher famously once said “there is no such thing as society”. Even in the most generous interpretation, I think that’s rubbish.

We are, to quote the song that accompanies TV ads for the Salvation Army appeals, “all in this together”. And that’s one of the insights and possibilities that a residential College offers students: not only a sense of belonging, but of community, inter-relation, and common purpose.

Most especially at exam time, residents know they can’t escape the impact of noise or nuisance on other Selwynites. We are all links in a chain of interdependency that, when working well, can offer strong support and useful boundaries. Something, in short, greater than the sum of its parts.

In such an environment, individuals rise and flourish, but hopefully not without a sense of the foundation on which they build, and a desire to contribute to the greater good, not just in the narrowness of self-interest, however supposedly “enlightened”.

Best wishes to all who are still in exam mode. May you do yourself, and those behind you, justice.