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This week, like many before, will be a decisive one in the political life of the country. We have a stalemate in our democracy, and the way forward remains unclear. Difficult choices are ahead, and regardless of the final decision, one group is likely to feel delighted, the other dejected.
I am amazed at how quickly we have all adopted fixed badges of identity, which until recently hardly appeared in our society. Now, whether you are a remainer or a breixteer matters to many people. It has even affected many of our institutions, which are founded and known for their independence and impartiality, such as the Civil Service, the Â鶹Éç or the Judiciary. They have not escaped being placed in one camp or the other.

Regardless of the eventual outcome, many in our society will feel alienated. In such circumstances, it will be very difficult to re-build cohesion. And yet that is what we must do if society is to heal. The choice, the zero-sum of it, and the increasingly emotive language and volume, reminds me somewhat of the Northern Ireland of my youth. A place where compromise had become a dirty word, and where within groups and against groups, part of the normal vocabulary included charges of treachery, surrender, uncivilised, ignorant, and much worse. If your vocabulary demonises your opponent, then it could be only a matter of time before your actions or those of someone else follows suit.

We do not have to descend to a depth as a society only to find that there are no answers there. We can learn from other societies, like Northern Ireland, and its somewhat imperfect peace process, that deeply held and different views, can be accommodated, respected, and not used to overwhelm the other. But that will require talking, not trading insults.

Even the early Christian Church had tensions that seemed insurmountable at the time. So much so that St. Paul, in his letters to the Romans, asked his followers – who came from many different ethnic and national backgrounds - to find ways to accept and accommodate the differences for the sake of keeping the Early Church together. St. Paul cautioned against passing judgement on someone else’s heart, a heart they could not know.

Like many other societies before us, we find ourselves at a crossroads. If we want to stay together, we will need to prize unity over division. We can’t do that through force, coercion or imposition. We can do it through reason, acceptance, and tolerance of difference. It won’t be easy, but it has been done before, both here and elsewhere.

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