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Today’s guest editor is proud of her Yorkshire roots. She has spoken publicly about how Yorkshire’s beautiful scenery and dependable people helped to give her a great start in life. As a Yorkshireman myself, I am fortunate to share these blessings, and am especially grateful to be serving a region which includes the deeply rural dales where Lady Hale grew up and still lives, and the intensely urban cities and towns of West Yorkshire where she was born. This is a region that understands the call for a northern powerhouse and a national rural strategy. And it appreciates the need to strengthen the bonds that bind us together as community and society, transcending the divisions that might exist between urban and rural, north and south. The feast that the Church celebrates today provides some helpful wisdom. We remember St. John the Apostle. He is the one whom the gospels describe as Jesus’s ‘beloved disciple’. This is apt at a time of year when many of us, if we are fortunate, are spending time with our nearest and dearest. John was one of Jesus’s most faithful and dependable companions – they came from the same northern region. John travelled with Jesus as he taught and performed his miracles. He sat next to him at the Last Supper. He stood at the foot of the cross as Jesus was dying in agony. Jesus, looking down and seeing his mother, Mary, and John together, charged them to care for each other; ‘Here is your son… here is your mother’. We can see in this the creation of a new community with love and friendship at its heart; a community in which each person is valued and the weak and vulnerable are cared for. This is precisely what the Church at its best has tried to model. As any normal family over Christmas knows only too well, however, we don’t always live up to our ideals. There is the need to agree ground rules and to apply them in times of tension. Naturally, a healthy society needs politicians who can agree the ground rules, providing laws which seek the common good. And it needs judges who are at liberty to give rulings free of political bias. Following the general election, the Prime Minster called for healing within this nation. ‘Amen!’ The mutual commitment of the beloved disciple and Mary suggests that love and friendship are essential components of a firm foundation for a healthy society. Positive mutual regard and wishing the best for each other are crucial - for every family, community, and region.