Early morning photos from Foxhill Conference Centre near Frodsham.
What a wonderful picture of the morning here from friend Simon Marsh. Definitely a blog worth following.
Tiki Taka
One of the highlights of my week has been spending time with a group of clergy committed to developing more leaderful communities and congregations, but facing the problems of working with those who don’t see leadership as their responsibility. How do we bridge that gap?
Leadership models have focused on individuals and individualism. New models of leadership inspired by “new science” focus on process and what goes on between people (this has coincided with a renewed awareness of the interplay and community of the Trinity). Other facilitators, like Viv McWaters and Chris Corrigan talk about developing play. The result is that leadership develops as a community activity rather than a one man (often gender specific) band.
Tomorrow is Cup Final Day. Kenny Dalglish and Roberto di Matteo, managers of Liverpool and Chelsea respectively will be giving their team talks. The winning team will most likely be the team that plays better together, and that is less like a collection of interviews. As we play together, we grow together. As we play together, we take more risks together. Chris Corrigan picks up the theme of football teamwork when he refers to a style of play called Tiki Taka:
A style of play characterised by short passing and movement, working the ball through various channels, and maintaining possession.” With Tiki Taka the ball is continuously passed between team members in a way that the whole team operates as one intelligent field, rather than sum total of talented individuals.
Is that it? Do we need a rich passage of interplay to become a successful team? Is it the short passes, working the channels, the give and go which turns an unresponsive group of individuals into one intelligent field and a leaderful organisation.
If you liked this post, you may also like this recent post: https://davidherbert.me/2012/05/03/leadership-lessons/
Leadership lessons
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
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.
I have a bee in my bonnet about learning leadership from nature. Here is someone who says it so well …..
Goblin Market
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?
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
Overcommitment
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
Grits and Grains 
