Author: David Herbert

My name is David Herbert. I started growing up in Leicester. I’m currently growing up in Ellesmere Port. I am a priest in the Church of England. I was ordained in Sheffield in 1974. I have been privileged to serve in communities in Sheffield (Manor and Gleadless Valley) and communities near to Chester (Ellesmere Port and Tarvin). I am a keeper of learning spaces and support continuing ministerial/professional development in the Diocese of Chester.

Leadership lessons

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Photo by LHG Creative

For Dave Soleil, in this blogpost, leadership is a community action rather than a person. Soleil, like so many others, is critical of the traditional model of leadership which consists of a single heroic person that large groups of people follow.  Soleil describes this as the “find a parade and walk in front of it” model of leadership.

If leadership is identified with a particular person we are often left in a position of waiting on that leader (who we can also conveniently scapegoat). Soleil suggests that “if we see the visionary … as one of many pieces of a community-based leadership movement, we empower everyone in the community to contribute their gifts as a critical piece of the collective effort we call leadership.” Those gifts will include vision, co-ordination (of the collective effort), encouragement etc etc.

Leadership models forged in the heat of battle and industrial process have looked for control, but Meg Wheatley asks:

What if we stopped looking for control, and began, in earnest, to look for order? Order we will find in places we never thought to look before – all around us in nature’s living, dynamic systems. In fact, once we begin to look into nature with new eyes, the teachers are everywhere. (Leadership and the New Science, 1999, p25).

The flight of geese is one of nature’s stock supply teachers when it comes to leadership programmes. I have never heard the translation of Goosehonk, but my guess is that the question they are asking is not “who is the leader?” but “who is leading next?”.  Leadership is not something they leave to the next bird. There isn’t a goose who ducks the responsibility it shares with its whole community. Leadership is a community inter-action.

Merton on sanity

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We can no longer assume that because a man is “sane” he is therefore in his “right mind.” The whole concept of sanity in a society where spiritual values have lost their meaning is itself meaningless…

And so I ask myself: what is the meaning of a concept of sanity that excludes love, considers it irrelevant, and destroys our capacity to love other human beings, to respond to their needs and their sufferings, to recognize them also as persons, to apprehend their pain as one’s own? Evidently this is not necessary for “sanity” at all.

The worst error is to imagine that a Christian must try to be “sane” like everybody else, that we belong in our kind of society.

A Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolf Eichmann by Thomas Merton in Raids on the Unspeakable.

Goblin Market

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Goblin Market, Goblin Market.

Goblin Market is a remarkable poem by Christina Rossetti. I love this video version because of its pace, images and soundtrack. The words are here. Christina Rossetti was a volunteer worker for over ten years at a refuge for former prostitutes (St Mary Magdalene “house of charity” in Highgate, London), and this experience pulses through the poem.

Rossetti is also well known for writing the words of the Christmas carol, In the bleak Midwinter, (here sung by Alison Crowe). The carol ends with the question “what can I give him, poor as I am?” This is a profound and everyday question. What can we give when we think we have nothing to give? Gift shops have ideas with price tags for those not so poor. Their buyers may wonder what they can get away with. The receivers of such gifts may pass them on to others as something unwanted. What they wanted was something of themselves.  Something that comes from the heart: something that is wholehearted.

What can I give him, poor as I am? If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb; If I were a wise man, I would play my part; Yet what I can, I give him: give my heart.

For posing the question and for her wholehearted responses  – we give thanks today, a feast day for Christina Rossetti.

The image is Come Buy, a wood engraving by Laurence Housman (1892) scanned by George Landow.

So, what about truth?

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I share Simon Marsh’s reservations about those who insist on the authority of truth. I am not sure that the question of “what is truth?” is on many people’s minds (contrary to what some think). Pontius Pilate is an exception: he couldn’t see truth when he was staring him in the face (John 18:38). We are all too preoccupied for such philosophical discussion that the question of truth is left as a luxury for a small elite. The rest of us know when our interactions ring true.

I have been playing round with my new ArtSet app. Collapsing truth, as some people suggest is happening, I came up with a very different picture of truth. It is a picture which asks the question of whether my truth hurts – funny how we have that expression “truth hurts”. It’s a picture which raises the question about the quality of shelter, about whether there is hospitable space and about whether u r cared for.

It’s a picture which presents us with Ruth as well as truth. The book of Ruth is a story of loving-kindness. Ruth shows herself to be full of loving kindness to Naomi, her grief-stricken mother in law, and Ruth receives the loving kindness of Boaz who becomes her kinsman-redeemer. Ruth means compassion and pity. (Ruthlessness describes the absence of those qualities.) Boaz and Ruth are counted as sowing the seed of Jesus. Even though she was a Moabitess, and therefore foreigner, she is Jesus’ great (times many) grandmother – according to Matthew. It’s Ruth’s story which is often chosen by couples getting married. Ruth “plights her troth” to her mother in law:

Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die …

Truth is questionable. Just like Saint Paul, “we now see, only dimly in a mirror. As yet, we only partially know.” (1 Corinthians 13:12). We have only one pair of eyes and limited perspective. That is something that is factually true. But the truth that ignores the perspective of others, that hurts, that welcomes no stranger, that cares for no-one, is blatantly false. Truth is measured by what we do.

Signed: Yours truly

St George’s international holiday

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Palestinians, Moscovites, Ljubljanans, Beirutians, Genovians, citizens of Maltese cities Qormi and Victoria, and people of Bosnia-Herzegovena, Bulgaria, Canada, Catalonia, Croatia, Cyprus, Georgia, Greece, Macedonia, Portugal, Romania & Serbia enjoy celebrating the life of Saint George, along with the English – some of whom violently fly the flag of St George in the face of the dragon of multiculturalism. Long live the dragon and thank God for Wikipedia.
Photo by Guy Evans at Birmingham Culture

Overcommitment

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To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralises his work for peace. It destroys his own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.

Thomas Merton in Confessions of a Guilty Bystander

Crossing a path on Palm Sunday

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MA062S01 World Bank
It’s only a donkey! There was no horsepower to Jesus’ entry to Jerusalem.
Photo from the World Bank Photo Collection

In his excellent book Barefoot Disciple, Stephen Cherry reminds us that we have misunderstood Jesus’ “triumphal” entry into Jerusalem and suggests that we should not be celebrating a triumphal entry on Palm Sunday but a “humble entry”. That is what Matthew makes of it. Matthew cuts the “triumphant and victorious” reference of Zechariah’s prophecy and simply says, “Look your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey.” (21:5). The crowd wanted a triumphal entry of a Saviour to please them. Jesus’ humble entry led to a humble end. He refused to play to the crowd (his last temptation?) who expected him to turn the tables on their occupiers, and then they turned the tables on him.

Like many Christians I joined the Palm Sunday procession yesterday. I was at Chester Cathedral. We went into the city. I have seen many processions, including many I dare not and could not cross. They were triumphal processions. They were pompous processions. Yesterday several people crossed our path.  This was an unpretentious procession. This was a procession you could touch (and the children loved petting the donkey!) I appreciated the soft edge of our procession and the hospitality of the ground that was given to all who passed by. If that’s the way of the cross, that’s the way to go.

How Jesus entered Jerusalem challenges our rather grand entrances. Don’t we like to wade in? Don’t we like to look big? Don’t we try to impress? I followed the humble procession yesterday. I’m not so sure how much I fit with my other interventions, my entries into conversations, rooms and situations. There’s a way to go: a way that is far more compassionate.

Stephen Cherry blogs at Another Angle

The Bigger Picture

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Photo of Kilham “tunnel” with permission. http://www.yocc.co.uk
David Hockney certainly provides the Bigger Picture at the Royal Academy of Arts. Increasingly he has rejected the viewfinder of the camera. The viewfinder of his most recent work is his own eyes and the imagination of his mind’s eye.

What Hockney sees is amazing the rest of us who haven’t practiced the art of seeing. The colours he sees in a field, a tree trunk or a forest floor are not far-fetched but are already hinted at in the subject. Many of the subjects are from his own homeland of East Yorkshire, including “the tunnel” near Kilham. The tunnel is an ordinary farm track with trees, hedgerow and tractor track, with the tunnel being formed by the trees that overarch the track.

It is a track which most of would take for granted, which we would pass by without noticing it. But Hockney treats us to his own views which he lays out on canvases that fill the room. Each view is different. He steps to one side and then another to give himself yet another point of view. He steps forward and he steps backwards. He sees it in the morning light and the evening light, when wet and when dry, in spring through to winter. He sees it in relaxed mood and when stressed and tired. There is the one scene, but so many views. There is one pair of eyes, but so many perspectives.  There is the partiality of personal insight but still such wonder. Even Hockney “only sees dimly”, because that is the human condition (1 Cor 13).

There is only so much that can go into one exhibition room. The exhibition is a sell out, even though it is open till midnight on some evenings. The rooms are crowded with people who have come to see. We are given a bigger picture which we see with our own eyes. Excitedly, many take the time to try to share what they see but it is each to their own. There is the one scene, and through one pair of eyes so many views. There is one room and so many pairs of eyes, each drawing their own conclusions.

Realising the many perspectives gives us the bigger picture. Is this the prescription that helps us see better? It is, so long as we can reconcile our views. In any room full of people there is a whole variety of views. But no bigger picture emerges if those views can’t be reconciled to each other. If our views are diametrically opposed to each other we become uncomfortable and we don’t know where to look.