There are many synonyms: friendliness, geniality, affability, amiability, congeniality, good humour, cordiality, warmth, warm-heartedness, good nature, sociability, gregariousness, clubbability, companionability, cheerfulness, cheeriness, good cheer, joviality, jollity, gaiety, liveliness, festivity, bonhomie. And one rather sad antonym: unfriendliness.
In interdiac the definition of conviviality has three elements drawn from an understanding of the social and community aspects of life in the Iberian Peninsula where Moslems were able to live freely and openly with their Jewish and Christian neighbours.
The conviviality of life in 19th Century Paris with its free and unconstrained conversation.
The work and writings of Ivan Illich in which he described the transformation of relationships between people and their environment and technology.
In Manchester in the early 1970’s I worked in an inner-city environment which was scheduled for demolition to make way for an urban motorway.
In my time in this community I undertook a variety of activities working with unemployed and homeless young people. I established a workplace environment teaching young people skills, Workpiece, together with a hostel offering accommodation, Nightcap.
The essence of the work was established on the basis of neighbourliness, responding to Jesus’ radical question to the lawyer, who is neighbour to him? To which the answer is clearly your neighbour is anyone whose need lays a claim on your love.
It was also based on an understanding of justice and human rights. These young people were rejected not only by society, having left school at 16 without qualifications or jobs to go to, their families unable to feed, or clothe or house them they drifted, surfed friends sofas, or as one young man explained when my brother is inside then I get the sofa and if both my brothers are in prison I get the bed, otherwise I’m out. Drugs, thieving, violence were part and parcel of their lives.
Our main definition of what we were about in this work especially in the establishment of Nightcap the hostel, came from Bob Dylan’s Balled of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest:
‘What kind of house is this,” he said
‘Where I have come to roam?”
‘It’s not a house,’ said Judas Priest
“it’s not a house, it’s a home”
So how does this work in the broader context of interdiac and the definition of Conviviality.
My reflection at the time and now is that these young people were a ‘litmus’ test of the fairness and simple lack of justice that lay at the heart of society. They were invisible, as I realised when talking to Church Groups who had no sense of what lay beneath the surface of their comfortable community life.
As Tony Addy writes: there were new insights, sparkling moments, change happened. But there were empty moments too when nothing could be said.
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