Retracing our steps to our first vocation

David HerbertLeave a comment

Lent 2a

Draft sermon for March 5th 2023

Readings: Genesis 12:1-4a and John 3:1-17

I begin with a blessing written by Jan Richardson. Jan has written a blessing for every Sunday based on the readings. You can find them on her website called The Painted Prayerbook.

This one is called “Beginning with Beloved – a blessing”

Before reading it I have to say that I never know how to pronounce “beloved”. How do you say it?
Is our confusion because we don’t use the word enough?
Is it one word or two? Beloved or be loved?

Here is the blessing:

Is there any other words
needs saying,
any other blessing
could compare
with this name,
this knowing?

Beloved

Comes like a mercy
to the ear that has never
heard it.
Comes like a river
to the body that has never
seen such grace.

Beloved

Comes holy
to the heart
aching to be new.
Comes healing
to the soul
wanting to begin again.

Beloved

Keep saying it
and though it may 

sound strange at first
watch how it becomes
part of you,
how it becomes you,
as if you never
could have known yourself
anything else,
as if you could ever
have been other
than this.

Beloved.

Today is the 2nd Sunday of Lent.

Lent gets its name from the Old English and refers to the lengthening of the days during the spring following our wintering, as in “our days are lentening”.

Ancient wisdom has carved out these gifts of time for us. 

It is journeying time,

time for following the Way of Jesus,
for journeying through our difficult and dark age to the day of resurrection and a day without darkness when every tear will be wiped from our eyes, when death will be no more and when mourning and crying and pain will be no more. (Revelation 21 and 22).

Our readings feature Abram and Nicodemus. They are both setting out on journeys of faith.

God told Abram to leave his country, his kindred, his home.
He was 75 years old when he left everything behind for the sake of “becoming a great nation” and to be the blessing for all the families of the earth. 

(As an aside, it is interesting to note that in our moment of history when there is unprecedented migration that those who count themselves as “children of Abraham” – Muslims, Jews and Christians – owe their identity to Abram who made his name Abraham by leaving his country, kindred and home and became a migrant.)

Abram left his old life behind. He left his old age. He left his identity and he even left his name to become Abraham.

The meaning of the name Abraham is “Father of a crowd” or “Father of multitudes”.

God is the making of him and he becomes his name.

Nicodemus’s journey is very different. Nicodemus is mentioned three times in John’s gospel. This is the first – here he comes to Jesus by night. He may be a teacher of Israel but he doesn’t understand what Jesus is really talking about. He is in the dark.

How can anyone be born again? How can someone who has lived so much life be born again? How can anyone who has travelled so far get back to the beginning?
These are the questions that spring to his mind when Jesus tells him that those who want to see the kingdom of God need to be born again.

In the second passage (John 7:45-51) he is part of the ruling council which wants to condemn Jesus – but Nicodemus emerges from their shadow to stand out against them to defend Jesus.

The third passage (John 19:38-42) shows Nicodemus taking responsibility with Joseph of Arimathea for laying Jesus in the garden tomb after his crucifixion.
He is the last person to touch Jesus’ body before his resurrection – and as such he is celebrated as one of the Myrrhbearers by Orthodox Christians on the 3rd Sunday of Easter.


Like Abraham, Nicodemus is on a journey of faith. But Nicodemus’s journey is measured in light. Here we see him coming to Jesus in the dark. By the end of the gospel we see him in the light of Jesus’ death and resurrection. His movement is from the darkness of not-knowing into the light of knowing. That is how he is born again.

What is true for Nicodemus must be true for us as well. Jesus said, noone can see the kingdom of God without being born from above. We have to be born again to see the kingdom of God. But how? 

How are we born again, and how do we help others to be born from above?

I don’t know about you but I never made anything of the anniversary of my baptism – then I went to the trouble of finding the date and now have that in my diary. This week on March 11th I will have been baptised 72 years. I am sorry for what I have missed by not remembering it. 

Baptism marks the beginning of a journey with God when the church welcomes the new Christian, promising support and prayer for the future. It’s a new life, walking in the light of Christ for the rest of our lives. It’s a new life born by water and Spirit. That’s the theory.

Maybe Lent is an opportunity to retrace our steps to that beginning,
retracing our steps to that time the church started lovingly calling us by name,
when we became precious sister or brother to all the other people of God,
when we were commissioned alongside them,
committing ourselves with all Abraham’s children to grow in friendship with God,
in love for his people,
listening to the word of God and receiving the gifts of God.

If Lent is a journey, maybe it’s time to go backwards in order to move forwards.

Maybe Lent is the time to recall the voice that set us on the path of a new life. 
Maybe Lent is the time to retrace our steps to that beginning when we heard our name called in such a way as to save us, not condemn us – when we heard our name called in such a way as to save us from the old age.

Maybe Lent is the time of recalling ourselves in Christ who was sent into the world only ever to save the world, and never to condemn the world.

Maybe Lent is the time to listen to our name being called without a hint of a curse or judgement.
Henri Nouwen wrote in his book, The Life of the Beloved, “We are beloved. We are intimately loved long before our parents, teachers, spouses, children and friends loved or wounded us….”

Maybe Lent is the time to search for our blessing.

Maybe Lent is the time to listen for the same voice that Jesus heard at his baptism, the voice from heaven which said: “You are my son, whom I love. With you I am well pleased.”
“You are the one whom I love. With you I am well pleased.”

Maybe Lent is the time for us as church to be born again. It is hard for God’s word to be heard when the church is too guarded in blessing and too quick in judgements. 

In Lent we return to the beginning, to what we have forgotten about the making of us. We begin with the inscription of dust on our foreheads to remind ourselves that God makes life out of dust.
We retrace our often mis-taken steps so that we can begin again the journey of our life time.
We read our scriptures to retrace our blessing.

We turn to Abram (who is the beginning of our faith journey) and Nicodemus
We return to the beginning to see ourselves and others as God intends – as “beloved”.

We are never too old for this journey back to the beginning and then onwards with Jesus.
Part of the blessing is never being written off as too old.

Remember, Abram was 75 when he was told to leave everything, when he said good bye to his old age with its curses and judgements.

It’s always time to start again.

And it’s always time to be there for others who want to start again, 

to remind them by word and deed that Jesus’ mission is to save the world, not condemn it,
to reassure them that it is never too late for a fresh start
to bless them by re-calling them      “beloved”.

Tempters and resistance

David HerbertLeave a comment

A sermon draft for Lent 1a – February 26th 2023 at St Mark’s Leamington

Readings: Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7 and Matthew 4:1-11

Today is the first Sunday of Lent, one of the seasons of the church’s year. These seasons are gifts of time in which we can grow as disciples. There are 40 days in Lent as there are 40 days in the Easter season, from Easter to Ascension, as there are in the season between Christmas and Candlemas, and as many think that there should be during Advent. 

40 is just how long it takes to wait. In the Bible it is always 40 – years or days. 40 is the measure of waiting and testing. For example,

  • God flooded the earth for 40 days
  • The Israelites wandered in the desert for 40 years before entering the Promised Land after being freed from Egypt
  • Goliath mocked and taunted Israel for 40 days
  • Moses and Jesus fasted 40 days

Lent gets its name from Old English and refers to the lengthening of the days during the spring following our wintering – as in lentening days.

Ancient wisdom has carved out these gifts of time for us. What shall we do with this gift of time? 

Our two readings are both dramatisations
– the dramatisation of what it means to be human and loved by God. 
And Lent is a time for staging the drama. 

There is a beginning which is dramatised in the reading we heard from Genesis, which is reenacted on the first day of Lent, Ash Wednesday, when the dust from which we are made is inscribed on our forehead.
And there is an end in sight, the day of resurrection, and a day without darkness when every tear will be wiped from our eyes, when death will be no more and when mourning and crying and pain will be no more. (Revelation 21 and 22)

Lent holds the drama of the time between, the drama of the everyday and the here and now which, for us today is dramatised in the reading we have just heard about the temptations faced by Jesus.

The time between the beginning and the end is here and now, in the mean time when time can be very mean. 

These are the days of war, hunger, suffering, poverty, corruption, injustice. This is the mean time, a difficult age, a dangerous age when we get anxious about so much and when there is so much temptation. 

It is in this mean time  and in this difficult age that God shows his love for us.

There is no other time for God to show his love for the world.

The gift of Lent is the opportunity to look our time in the eye and face up to the challenge of how we are going to live in this mean time. 

What are our disciplines going to be as we live with temptation in the wilderness and wildness of our lives?
What is our resistance to evil going to look like? 
How shall we build resilience? 
What are the virtues we are trying to inhabit?

There is so much wrong and there is so much broken in our society.

That is what makes this mean-time and a difficult age.

There is temptation everywhere we look.

I know someone who hears the sound of children in the story we know as the story of Adam and Eve. He sees this as a story about growing up, of growing up from an age of innocence and discovering what it is like to be grown up.

We have a new granddaughter. She is two weeks old and she has a sister who is two and a half. The baby is totally innocent. She sleeps mostly. But we know she will soon grow into a toddler who tests boundaries and begins to know right from wrong (and we look forward to her living that life).
The terrible twos will turn into the terrible threes, into the terrible teens, and then terrible old age, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

There isn’t any age of our lives, which isn’t a difficult age.

Temptation takes different forms as we go through all our difficult ages. Temptation in old age is different to temptation for those who are younger.
Temptation when we are tired, run down or ill (which can lead to despair) is different to when we are feeling fresh and on top of things (which can lead to arrogance).
The temptation of those who are poor may be different to the temptation of the wealthy.
The temptation of those living desperately, with disaster, in, for example Ukraine, Northern Syria and SE Turkey is different to when their lives were more comfortable.

Temptation is contextual. We are all tempted differently.

One of our temptations is to trivialise temptation.
Another temptation we fall prey to is the temptation to individualise temptation – temptation isolates us, then shames us. We hide in our shame and focus on our self as the victim of temptation and as the one to resist temptation.

What is wrong is not individualistic but is societal, systemic and thoroughgoing and is of unimaginable scale.
But the tempters who prey on us are socially networked. 
They are in all our systems,

They are inside us – the voices we hear demeaning us and hardening our hearts. 
They are all around us.
They don’t have horns and a pitchfork. They are well groomed to groom us for their own selfish ends.

They come to us as wolves in sheep’s clothing. Tempters look just like us.

The powers in our lives aren’t always kindly intentioned. 
Think of those who try to scam us,
and the bots used to manipulate our thinking and undermine our democracy,
and the empire builders who groom us and use us to profit their purposes. 

They all come with their tempting offers. 

Even those who are kindly intentioned make unreasonable demands which often show that they don’t really understand us.
Work harder, look better, grow faster, spend more.
They’re all orders that disorder us – these are the temptations of our day and age.

These are temptations in our difficult age in which God, even now, shows his love for us.

I have painted a dark picture of our times – and I have done this deliberately because there are so many whose own interest is to persuade us that now is ok – that “we’ve never had it so good”. That is a temptation. The tempters would love us to believe that everything is hunky dory. That way they can get away with anything.

It is tempting to make light of our darkness.

The tempters would love us to believe that giving up chocolate for Lent is enough resistance to temptation. Hopefully we realise that such gestures are only token gestures and that they need to be first steps on the path to building resistance and resilience. 

But many of these gestures are things we take on on our own. And it is not good for us to be on our own in times like these, in mean times and our very difficult age.

If God created our relationships from the beginning to the end of our difficult age, then it is only through those relationships that we can resist. 

It is by being together as a church and as a family that we can resist. 

It is not good for any of us to be alone in our difficult age. 

It is often by talking things through with those who love us in our homes or church – with those who love us with a love that is divine – that we can make sense of things and find the heart to resist.

All of us are living through that “very difficult age”. It’s not good for any of us to be on our own at this time. 

God recognised that from the beginning and created relationships.

Together we can remind ourselves that the only effective resistance to temptation and tempters is through God, that it is only God who can deliver us from evil.
And so we pray, just as Jesus taught us – Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.

This is our greatest act of resistance – to pray together. This is our greatest resistance to the tempters, the powers that be and the wrongs of the difficult age we find ourselves in, however old we are. 

And it is through this particular resistance that we find that God answers our prayer to be led from temptation and to be delivered from evil. That is how we come to know that God loves us – however difficult our age, however mean our times.

This is a reworking of Psalm 139 by Cara Heafey. She had LGBT Christians who may have been wounded by the church in mind when she wrote it. For me, it shows just an example of the importance of our scriptures as texts of resistance. It shows God’s love for us in our mean-time and these words spite the temptation to think that we are not good enough for God’s love.

I made you myself, carefully and lovingly.
I gathered your molecules together,
Scooping them out of the dust, warming them into clay.
I formed you, deftly
With the skill and vision of an artist
Into a unique creation.
A tiny masterpiece.
Your contours bear the imprint of my fingers.
Your imperfections and irregularities are a part of my design;
They are what make you beautiful.
I breathed life into you with my own breath.
To behold what I have brought into being in you
fills me with pleasure and pride.
As I cradle you in cupped hands, how could I feel anything but love?
It is my love for you that brought you into existence.
I know you more intimately than you could ever know yourself.
I know your thoughts before you think them, your words before you speak them,
The pattern and purpose of your days before you live them.
There is no point in hiding or pretending; don’t even try.Who told you that I did not love you?
Who taught you to be ashamed?
Listen to me. Hear the very words that I whispered into you
At the moment of your beginning:
“You are my beloved child, with you I am well pleased.
You are my beloved child, I will never let you go.
You are my beloved child; do not be afraid.”

God is our resistance.

When the Dust Settles – a review

David Herbert3 Comments

A review of When the Dust Settles by Lucy Easthope, published in 2022 by Hodder and Stoughton.

Lucy Easthope is the UK’s leading authority on recovering from disaster and has been an advisor on nearly every major disaster of the past two decades. She is a Professor in Practice of Risk and Hazard at the University of Durham and Fellow in Mass Fatalities and Pandemics at the Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath. She advises government and disaster planners. She is part of a profession that provides a Cinderella service dedicated to cleaning up after the worst has happened. As she says, it is a hidden profession and the book is her attempt to bring this painstaking work into the light. There are stories here of love, loss and hope from someone committed to every detail of loss and all the remains of disaster. The stories are infused with a competence and compassion to inspire trust in the powers of endurance and recovery.

When the Dust Settles helps us to appreciate the inevitability of disaster and the care of responders to every single victim. It is noticeable how Lucy’s professional disaster awareness and experience is entwined with a far more personal account of crises and disasters in her own life (and her living through them). She is disarmingly honest about the difficulties, disappointments and disasters that she has faced and this gives an air of authenticity and integrity to her writing. She understands the risks of disasters and the ripple effects of disasters. Disasters don’t occur in isolation. “They domino into other disasters, and as they unfurl they become entangled with the other challenges in our lives that would have occurred regardless”. (p264)

“Disasters are about total loss. Tangible losses: of a person, a house, a place. And intangible losses: of a feeling of safety, trust in authority.” She makes use of the Welsh word hiraeth (for which there is no English equivalent) to describe the terrible mourning for the “life before”. “Hiraeth is a longing for a place to which there is no return, an echo of something that can never be found, a heartsickness for something that no longer exists and a time that can never be gone back to.”

Lucy writes: “Life after disaster is perpetual, chronic, with a pain that ebbs and flows like tides…. In the floodwaters of Doncaster and the rubble of Christchurch, I discovered a new, long, chronic loss brought about by the loss of everything. The ‘furniture of self’ laid to waste. The never ending ache of hiraeth. But these places also taught me something else. The value of a horizon to swim towards. The importance of trying to build something afterwards. But to stay living, breathing, there had to be a purpose, a future, a bluer sky.” (p124)

A lot of Lucy’s work is providing training and helping people to learn lessons from disasters. I was at the point of asking myself how clergy are prepared to minister and preach through disaster when I read about the clergy training Lucy provided at a special training day on June 13th 2017. That training was around a scenario which Lucy describes as “the sum of all my fears”, involving homes, the destruction of “furniture of self”, a tower block, fire, loss of life and concerns about the actions of local authorities and building enforcement agencies. The following day, June 14th, 129 homes in Grenfell Tower in London were destroyed by fire. At least 72 people were killed. (A few days later I was at a local high school overlooked by the flats for an exhibition of A-level student work organised by my son who was Head of Art there.)

The media often turn to local clergy for a comment when disaster strikes a community. I wonder how prepared I ever was to respond to such a disaster or to endure the long term consequences. I am now more conscious than ever that our scriptures were borne out of disasters by those who suffered them. Those scriptures contain texts that have forged resilience in their readers. Jesus’ teaching and the sorrowful discipleship path he leads his followers on were designed to help us endure disaster. For example, Jesus tells his disciples what to expect in Mark 13. There will be earthquakes, wars, injustice, betrayal, murder and hatred. These things may feel like the end and to some may signal the end, but they never are. They have been with us from the beginning, and from the beginning the people of God have repeatedly helped people live and work through the dreadful consequences.

It is striking just how many disasters Lucy refers to. So many are carefully dated, even to the minute and the moment. This reinforces the sense that life changes in an instant for those who are victims of disaster.

Lucy rather overstates the case that we are all disaster survivors now following the Covid-19 pandemic. A lot of people were relatively untouched by the pandemic, some of them making the most of the opportunity to profit from it, or using it as an opportunity to relocate or learn a new language. What is striking in the last chapter with its focus on the pandemic is the foresight of those who knew we were overdue a pandemic and how, as one, she actively mobilised proactive responses in her local community.

Her final sentence: “All the planners can do now is be the light-bearers, illuminating the traps and helping as many as they can to navigate the next steps.” (p271). When the dust settles we have a lot to be thankful for – not least those, like the funeral directors who are prepared to deal with bodies contaminated by chemicals, and others Lucy highlights as such valuable colleagues. I’m letting the dust settle after reading this book. I learned a lot, I’ve thought again and I hope I am now less inclined to bury my head in the sand of my own preoccupations as disaster strikes again (and again).

Christmas and the cost of living

David Herbert2 Comments

This poem was inspired by a small and mighty Christmas cards designed by a friend.

Christmas and the cost of living

Why do we make
Christmas so big
when joy’s so short,
innocence lost,
when baby’s squeezed
in a one star place?

Why do we make
Christmas so big
when the word,
from the beginning
was just a whisper
kissed of God?

Why do we make
Christmas so big
when we hang the tree,
lynch the light and
tinsel tight tie
the hostage angel?

Do we there nail
our hope that in
Advent edgeway
such baby-talk
may faithful grow
mercy, love, peace?

©David Herbert

Go Back to Your Own Country

David Herbert1 Comment

Go Back to Your Own Country

Let me tell you about countries: nobody has their own
and where we come from moves. Our mothers’ wombs
aren’t where we left them. Continents calve. Jerusalem
holds a tray full of glasses which a scrum of men take
and put back, take and put back, unworried for the weight
she must shift. Let me tell you: some of the countries
aren’t where we left them. Someone pulls a string and six
tumble from Yugoslavia’s pocket. Someone halves
Sudan like a branch over their knee. Someone crumbles
a bailey between Berlin and Germany is one place
again. Only Adam had his own country, and he could not
go back. A country is land that’s learned to disown.

Jane Zwart

This poem has been reproduced with the poet’s permission. It first appeared in Contemporary Verse 2.

If a poem has love I will call it lovely. If a poem rings powerfully true I will call it stunning. This is a lovely, stunning poem which begins so well with a request to come alongside and explain. “Let me tell you” – that is such a good way to begin a poem, and such a good way to start to complicate a racist and nationalistic mindset with the thought that wombs and countries are never where we left them.

Jane Zwart teaches literature and writing at Calvin University and co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing.

Some thoughts on Exile and the Dislocated Bones of Ezekiel’s Imagination

David HerbertLeave a comment

Ezekiel is ecstatic in his prophecy. His visions are psychadelic. I wonder if it is this that brings his prophecy home to his fellow exiles – themselves ecstatic in the sense that they are far from home, removed from their stasis. His colourful language in response to God’s call and the suffering of their exile even resonates with us. For example, Ezekiel gives us the image of wheels within wheels which is the phrase often used to describe the powers that be. And, of course, it is Ezekiel who has given us the singalong Dry Bones as he explored the exile experience of dislocation and displacement and their eventual revival and replacement through the image of those dry bones.

(Here’s the Delta Rhythm Boys singing Dry Bones.)

Ezekiel sees the hand of God in exile. According to Ezekiel, it is God who drove Ezekiel and his fellow exiles out, for the sake of their safety. He sees the glory of God moving with them, abandoning the old place and travelling with them to their many places. Far and wide they are scattered and dispersed, becoming a diaspora. God is the scatterer rather than the perpetrators of violence and occupation and he scatters them to save them from the violence and occupation.

Ezekiel’s message would have created a very different horizon for the exiles. Maybe they thought that they were exiled because of their enemies or because of their shame and guilt. But here, Ezekiel is reframing their experience. For those who would listen there is the message of hope – that love is the reason for their exile, a concern for their safety, that God’s glory remains with them, and that that glory will give them fresh heart which will lead to their return.

“Those [the exiles] of whom the inhabitants of Jerusalem have said ‘They have gone far from the Lord; to us this land is given for a possession.’ Say to them: Thus says the Lord God: Though I removed them [the exiles] far away mong the nations, ad though I scattered them among the countries, yet I have been a sanctuary to them for a little while in the countries where they have gone. Therefore say [to the exiles]: Thus says the Lord God: I will gather you from the peoples and assemble you out of the countries where you have been scattered … I will give them one heart, and put a new spirit within them.”

Ezekiel 11

I wonder how many exiles see God as the cause of their exile, and how many see the glory of God travelling with them. Certainly xenophobic communities don’t see exiled refugees in that light as they tighten their borders against them. But let’s imagine what happens when, in the words of Warsan Shire’s poem Home, “home is the mouth of a shark”, when home is a place that is too dangerous, too dangerous to be called home, when home is no place for our gods, when they become god forsaken. The God of Exodus never settles – always ready to move in with us and move out with us. Have we got the theological imagination of Ezekiel to imagine God leading the abused, the tortured from one place of extreme danger to places of sanctuary? Have we got the imagination to see the light of God’s love in our coastal waters guiding exiles to safe havens?

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well
Warsan Shire

According to Ezekiel’s ecstatic imagination the diaspora is God’s doing. It is his dislocation and dispersal. This dispersal is reenacted in our liturgy. At God’s word we go, “in peace to love and serve the world”. We are scattered far and wide like seed. We are made exiles because, in other imaginations of scripture, we are in the world but not of the world (John 17:6), sheep amongst wolves (Matthew 10:16), living in cities while calling another city home (Hebrews 11:10), praying for a kingdom like nothing on earth (Matthew 6:9-13).

Here’s Jamila Lyiscott reading Warsan Shire’s Home.

I’m inviting prayer for those in their teens – particularly these days

David HerbertLeave a comment

I’ve invited prayer in the Chester Diocesan Cycle of Prayer with a bit of science.

It is hard to be honoured by people who have seen us grow up. Jesus recognized that. “Prophets are not without honour, except in their home town, and among their own kin.” (Mark 6:4). Is that partly because they have seen the difficulties we have had growing up?

So let’s pray for those in their teenage years.

There’s a lot happening in the teenage brain with the unused connections in the thinking and processing part of the brain being pruned away while other connections are being strengthened. The prefrontal cortex is still developing leaving teenagers to rely on the part of brain called the amygdala for their decision making.

The amygdala is all emotion, impulse, aggression and instinctive behaviour. This makes growing up through the teenage years very difficult and leads many to be ashamed and to self-harm. One way of reading Genesis 3 is to see Adam and Eve as teenagers, making impulsive decisions and growing in shame.

Growing up is difficult. Please pray for those living through their teenage years, including

  • those who are vulnerable, anxious or ashamed,
  • those who have made mistakes or are troubled or troubling,
  • those who have suffered mental health issues through the pandemic,
  • parents
  • and those in our communities who support and champion teenagers

Something surely to be recalled

David HerbertLeave a comment

I was baptised
seventy years ago today,
a lifespan away,
another drop in the ocean.

In troubled water
the Spirit dives deepest.
with arms banned
she calls in a wave

or a bubbled “beloved”
leaving that pocket of sound
echoing deep as the pulse
in the beating of my heart.

©David Herbert

Note: This poem was written in response to an invitation to write something on echoes.

For One Day Only – particularly the 11th

David HerbertLeave a comment
The Pioneers by Stephen Broadbent in Ellesmere Port, just off J9 of the M53.

For one day only

I thought I’d have some fun with numbers
today, (or is it 2day?), 11.ii.21, one month,
ten years after 11.1.11 when we launched
Headway with an image of one by one
forward-peering, prowed-standing pioneers
coupled for growing enterprise like two sides
of a coin, one complementing the other,
one complimenting the other, tied and tethered
in affection and imagination. One by one,
the perfect team, the first eleven,
the prime number no one can divide.

So it is, the perfect eleven, the perfect spell,
vowel, consonant, vowel, consonant bound
in rhythm marching time, beating heart time,
one two, one two, two one, one by one partners
like Noah’s passenger list and those first gardeners.
There is a second eleven, the mourning break,
the eleventh of the eleventh, when we remember
the one who stood with one and fell, along with
all the fallen ones, tragically flat lining
when one stood against one as betrayer,
the twelfth man making even eleven odd.

©David Herbert, 11/2/21

Headway is the title of a leadership programme I have been involved with.

A Dutiful Boy by Mohsin Zaidi

David Herbert3 Comments

A Dutiful Boy is an important book for me – it’s importance measured by the fact that one of my beautiful, dutiful sons singled this book out as my Christmas present. The book charts the pain of a gay Pakistani Muslim’s journey to acceptance, love and flourishing.

The book’s inner sleeve explains that Mohsin Zaidi grew up in a poor pocket of east London in a devout Shia Muslim community. His family were close knit and conservative. He became the first person from his school to attend Oxford University, and it was there that he found the space to become the man he was born to be.

Zaidi talks frankly about his own self-hatred and his prayers to be “different” and “cured”. The tensions and the love of Pakistani family life are well told. Throughout Zaidi is committed to his parents, brothers and his extended family of aunts and uncles and this is one of the most moving aspects of this story. The book is as much a memoir of their journey to acceptance as it is of Mohsin’s.

Counselling helped. I will treasure the exchange with his counsellor, Maureen Zaidi reports. Responding to Maureen’s questions Zaidi admits that he had thought of suicide. Maureen asked: “do you think your parents would rather a gay son or a dead son?” Zaidi didn’t know the answer. “ A dead son they could explain. It would be a moment in time and then they might move forward. They’d live with the shame of a gay son for as long as I was alive.” Then Maureen invites Zaidi to imagine a future in which he has a son.

“Now imagine your son in exactly the situation you are in now – the same history, the same conflicts, the same desires and the same fears. What do you do?”

Zaidi replied: “I grab him. I hold him tightly and tell him that he’s OK. That he is loved and that I don’t give a fuck about religion. That any God who loves me must love him as much.”

Then Maureen asks: “Now think about his sadness, what does that make you feel?”

“It makes me angry … really, really angry.”

“Digging deep into this pit of anger, I felt something shift inside me. My sense of justice kicked in. The anger felt good, powerful. Like rocket fuel. I wouldn’t be stalled by the obstacles put in my path. I would knock them down. I was surer than ever before that I would not marry a woman. I would live my life as a gay man, and, one way or another, there would come a time when I would face my family and force them to face the truth.”

Throughout this journey Mohsin remains the “dutiful boy”. There is secrecy about his gay life and there are enormous tensions along the way but there is integrity in the way Mohsin and his family will not let go of one another in spite of the pain and shame they all suffer and in spite of the distance they put between themselves.

This is a story in which all find their cure and it is a delight to read how Mohsin finds love and the freedom in which he can grow his work. Other people aren’t so fortunate and continue to struggle in cultures which hate homosexuality and seek to change, cure and deny those who are gay. Mohsin and his parents set up a support group for the families of LGBT Muslims.

In the first session his Mum said to the group: “My brother was sick and it … he has taught me a lot. We have so little time with our loved ones. Why waste it? God created my son this way and it is me who had the problem, not him.” His Dad joined in: “Children are not ours to disown, my son is not hurting anyone. He is a good person. I don’t care what anybody says. I know that Allah loves him like I do.”

A Dutiful Boy by Mohsin Zaidi was published by Square Peg on August 20th 2020