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Good morning. The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall are in Rwanda for the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting. The term Commonwealth didn’t begin in the 50s, as is often thought. In 1917 the South African Jan Smuts coined the term the ‘British Commonwealth of Nations’: by 1926 this had become the official name of the Empire. In her 1953 Christmas Day broadcast, the Queen celebrated the Commonwealth as ‘an entirely new conception – built on the highest qualities of the [human spirit]: friendship, loyalty, and the desire for freedom and peace.’ The term ‘commonwealth’ tells a positive story of how an empire often today synonymous with exploitation evolved into a community of nations of equal status – though in truth not all tell the story that way. The irony behind the close association of the Queen with the Commonwealth is that during the seventeenth-century English Civil War, when Parliament unseated and executed the king, Commonwealth was the name it adopted for its new notion of a state. In fact the term goes back to Augustine, and before him to Cicero. It’s rooted in the notion of the common weal – the well-being of every person in what today we’d call a state. Augustine’s description of a people as a body united by ‘common objects of love’ might be a fitting description of today’s Commonwealth. If we scrutinise the term ‘commonwealth’ a bit more, we can see it contains a philosophical claim: that our true wealth lies in the things we hold in common. It underlines the late MP Jo Cox’s words, ‘We have far more in common than that which divides us.’ Instead of perceiving wealth as an individual possession insulating us from society, the term suggests wealth lies in what we share. The American agrarian writer Wendell Berry makes a distinction between two scriptural words. He describes that in society which is short supply, which individuals cling to themselves. Employing a word Jesus used, he calls that ‘mammon.’ Mammon is the economy of scarcity, where there’s not enough to go round. Then Berry describes that in the world which never runs out, and belongs to everybody, which he calls ‘manna.’ Manna, originally the food God constantly gave to the children of Israel in the wilderness, gives what money can’t buy, and never expires. Manna is the economy of abundance. Here we arrive at a deeper meaning of commonwealth. It’s discovering the myriad of things available to us when we open our imaginations to what belongs to everybody. The secret of happiness is learning to love the things we’re given in plenty. The name for those things is manna. If the Commonwealth had a common currency, perhaps it might be called manna.