Windows on the world (84)

Ilford, 2010

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Wovenhand - As I Went Out One Morning.

Post-Christendom Church

Visitors from the East came looking for Jesus in a palace but found him in a manger. They looked for him at the heart of privileges won through personal power but found him in a place of poverty and dispossession. The visitors from the East looked for a King according to their understanding of kingship but only found Jesus when they left that understanding of political power and rule behind to encounter a King whose every breath is service of his subjects.

The slogan of the Early Church was that Christ is Lord. This was a direct political challenge to the Roman Emperor, to the Caesars who were worshipped as gods and whose personal and political power extended across the known world. However, by saying that Christ was Lord, the Early Church was not seeking to set up Christ as an alternative Emperor instead they were seeking to say that there is a different conception of power, of kingship and of rule, exemplified in the loving service and sacrifice of Christ and standing in stark contrast to the selfish exercise of personal power exemplified in human rulers and empires. By living out the statement that Christ is Lord they were living in the truth of Jesus’ words when he stood in front of Pilate and said that his kingdom is not the kingdom of top-down power and control that Pilate exemplified.

Tom Wright, the Bishop of Durham, puts it like this:

“… the whole point of the Gospels is that the coming of God's kingdom on earth as in heaven is precisely not the imposition of an alien and dehumanizing tyranny, but rather the confrontation of alien and dehumanizing tyrannies with the news of a God — the God recognized in Jesus — who is radically different from them all, and whose inbreaking justice aims at rescuing and restoring genuine humanness.”

This is an understanding of politics, power and kingship that was lost, in part, for a large period of the history of the Church beginning with the adoption, by the Emperor Constantine, of Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire. There were long periods of the history of the Church where Patriarchs and Popes held political power over large parts of the then known world and periods where alliances between Church and State gave Christianity huge power and influence within society. These periods of Church history are known as Christendom and we now live in a period after Christendom while often still remembering the final days of Christendom through which many of us have lived. Days when legislation was generally rooted in the Christian scriptures, the Church was the dominant and determining voice within our society, the nation was generally considered a “Christian” country, and levels of churchgoing were higher than now.

These changes have had increasingly significant implications for churches in this Deanery and more widely as we struggle with changing patterns of churchgoing, multi-faith parishes, less people with free time for volunteering, and the financial demands of maintaining large, old building through the generous giving of local congregations. These are all issues that we have grappled with at St John’s Seven Kings over the past few years; with the past year seeing us making significant changes to the way that we respond to these challenges.

Initially these changes were driven by a secular agenda which sought to drive Christianity to the margins of public life by arguing that religion was entirely a matter of private faith, but that drive has been counter-balanced by recognition of the diversity of faiths that now exist within the UK. We still see the secularising agenda in the militant atheism of people like Richard Dawkins and Polly Toynbee but what has been enshrined in law is an equality of religions and beliefs, not the eradication of religion for which the militant atheists have argued. So, in the Post-Christendom world, Christianity is losing most of the privileges that it previously possessed in order that it receives equal treatment from the State to that of other religions and beliefs.

Many still yearn for the Christendom period to return but the reality of today is that we are in a Post-Christendom period and we have to deal with the reality of where we are, not yearn for the supposed ‘Golden Age’ of the past. The reality of being in a Post-Christendom period also means that we are actually much closer to the situation of the Early Church than was the case when the Church had political power and influence.

Our text for 2010 - “Be alert, stand firm in the faith, be brave, be strong. Do all your work in love” is taken from 1 Corinthians 16. 13 & 14 and is how St Paul ends his first letter to the church in Corinth. Our pew bibles tell us that, “Corinth was a great cosmopolitan Greek city, the capital of the Roman province of Achaia. It was noted for its thriving commerce, proud culture, widespread immorality, and variety of religions.” Not so different from our own culture and city then!

Being church in that kind of city and culture was no easy task and so Paul’s letter shows how the Good News speaks to the questions and issues faced by that church. By doing so, Paul was declaring the lordship of Christ over those issues and the culture and city in which the Corinthians lived. Once he had addressed those issues that were contemporary for the Corinthian church, he ended with the exhortation which is our text for 2010, “Be alert, stand firm in the faith, be brave, be strong. Do all your work in love.”

This is why, I believe, these verses to be a relevant message for us at St John’s, and also for Christians more widely, in 2010. At our Annual Parochial Church Meeting in 2009 we spoke about the challenges of the changing culture around us and over the course of 2009 we have faced up to financial pressures, made key changes to our use of the Parish Centre, and have discussed ways of dealing with disagreements. Not only that but we have increased our involvement in our local community – something which has always been strong at St John’s through our involvements in Redbridge Voluntary Care and the Redbridge Night Shelter, among others – through involvement in community campaigns to improve facilities in the area.

Tom Wright writes of the Church “doing to the rulers of the world what Jesus did to Pilate ... confronting him with the news of the kingdom and of truth, deeply unwelcome and indeed incomprehensible though both of them were.” Part of the way, he writes, “in which the church will do this is by getting on with, and setting forward, those works of justice and mercy, of beauty and relationship, that the rulers know ought to be flourishing but which they seem powerless to bring about.”

When we argue publicly for improved community facilities in the parish and provide through our Parish Centre a place within which our local community can come together then, we are doing what Jesus did when he stood before Pilate demonstrating a different kind of kingship and what the Early Church did when they declared Jesus Christ to be Lord rather than Caesar. By “doing God in public” we declare the Lordship of Christ over our community and create signs of the kingdom of Christ that we know in part but which is still to come in full.

Again, Tom Wright puts it well when he writes:

“… it is vital that the church learn to critique the present workings of democracy itself … we should take seriously the fact that our present glorification of democracy emerged precisely from Enlightenment dualism — the banishing of God from the public square and the elevation of vox populi [‘voice of the people’] to fill the vacuum, which we have seen to be profoundly inadequate when faced with the publicness of the kingdom of God.”

None of this is easy but these verses from 1 Corinthians exhort us to stand firm. Dealing with the challenges faced by the 21st Century Church in a Post-Christendom period requires the alertness, bravery and strength about which Paul writes. As we take forward in 2010 the decisions and changes we have made in 2009, we will need the same alertness, bravery and strength.

Alertness involves being aware of the real issues that we face, bravery is needed to face them fully, and strength is needed to persevere with the direction we have taken.

We can be encouraged with new members, increased giving, increased hall income, an increased community profile, new stewardship responses, and funding for our community garden project. These, and other aspects of St John’s, are positive signs which indicate that, although we haven’t resolved all of the issues we face, we are on the right lines and need to take St Paul’s words to heart in 2010.

Most of all, we need to continue living out St Paul’s final exhortation to do all our work in love. It is love that needs to underpin all we do and which will continue to hold us together. Love for each other needs to characterise every action, interaction and decision. Love needs to be at the forefront of our vision, our relationships and our mission. Love is how we stand firm in our faith. Paul writes in his letter to the Corinthians that love is the best of God’s gifts to his people. God is love and when we live in love we live in God.

So, as we move forward in 2010, let us be alert, stand firm in the faith, be brave, be strong, and do all our work in love.

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M. Ward - Vincent O'Brien.

Valentines Mansion

Finally got around to visiting Valentines Mansion this afternoon. Located in the beautiful setting of Valentines Park, near Gants Hill, the Mansion was completely restored between July 2007 and November 2008. The London Borough of Redbridge and the Heritage Lottery Fund financed this work.

Valentines Mansion was built in about 1696. It is considered by English Heritage to be "of outstanding architectural or historic interest or of great importance to the nation's built heritage" and is Grade II listed. Not a grand building, but a family home for a gentleman of high status. The listing is because it is one of very few surviving rural homes of London businessmen of the 18th century and makes it one of the top 8% of listed buildings in England.

In parallel with the restoration work on the Mansion, the surrounding parkland and gardens have been extensively restored. The results of this park and garden restoration are absolutely stunning and complement the work on the Mansion. There are walled gardens, ponds and lakes, rococo grottos, a dovecote and a well, a rose garden and walks.

The Mansion features period rooms, an exhibition gallery and displays on the history of the Mansion and its estate. School children can role-play life 'upstairs & downstairs', using the reconstructed Victorian kitchen and dairy as part of an exciting new education programme. There is a well-equipped family room devoted to activities for younger children. Artists and craftspeople now occupy studios on the top floor, and showcase their work.

The current exhibition, in the Bird Room and Gallery, features works by the nine local artists and craftspeople who lease the studios on the top floor of the mansion. The six contemporary studios, created following the mansion’s refurbishment, are used to produce a variety of arts and crafts, including paintings, stained glass, pottery, ceramics, sculpture and new media.

Featured artists include Anne Eggebert who specialises in site-specific works and has made a new work 'At a Distance; dawn chorus'. This piece is inspired by the Mansion's Bird Room and an ongoing collaboration with Canadian artist Fae Logie.

Trudy Staines, a ceramic artist, has also used the mansion as inspiration in her new work, 'Stag Beetle Lacanus Cervus', which pulls ideas from her own garden, the mansion garden and technology bringing together mechanical components, ceramics and natural forms to create a piece that will interest visitors of all ages.

Sarah Partridge’s work features an estimated 5000 individually cut pieces to form an interpretation of micro mosaic, using iridised glass and porcelain, capturing the flight and spirit of dragonflies.

Jason Rose’s piece, ‘The Gift’ has the theme of growing up and things left behind from childhood. Jason said, “Working at my studio has been very inspirational due to many things: the gorgeous view out of the window; my gifted and inspiring fellow artists; the evocative feeling of history that the entire building is imbued with; the helpful and friendly mansion staff; the chocolate chip cookies from the mansion cafe, and many more things. I'm very grateful for the opportunity to exhibit my piece alongside the others artists at the mansion.”

Other pieces include a stained glass light box and a gigantic mixed media Green Man. The exhibition follows successful open studio days which have seen many visitors taking the opportunity to browse the workshops and meet the artists. The exhibition will run until Sunday 14 February 2010.

Valentines Mansion is open to the public on Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 10am to 5pm and Sundays from 11am to 4pm throughout the year. Entry to the mansion is free.

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Michael McDermott - Great American Novel.

Airbrushed from Art History (14)

Expressionism has continued to be understood and used by artists from a variety of differing cultures as a medium and movement which is particularly appropriate to the exploration of spiritual and Biblical themes. This can be clearly seen by describing significant aspects of the work of four unrelated artists: Graham Sutherland, F. N. Souza, Arthur Boyd and Peter Howson.

Sutherland was already a significant neo-romantic British artist working in a landscape-based tradition when he was approached by Revd. Walter Hussey, Vicar of St Matthews Northampton , regarding a commission for a painting which would face the Madonna and Child already commissioned from Henry Moore. In view of Sutherland’s landscape-based work Hussey suggested The Agony in the Garden as the subject of the work but Sutherland requested that instead he paint a crucifixion.

While this suggests a need on Sutherland’s part to move beyond the restrictions of his landscape-based reputation, it was nevertheless in landscape that he initially found inspiration for the form of his Crucifixion. Sutherland wrote, in an article for The Listener:

“I started to notice thorn bushes, and the structure of thorns as they pierced the air. I made some drawings, and as I made them, a curious change developed. As the thorns rearranged themselves, they became whilst still retaining their own pricking space encompassing life, something else – a kind of stand-in for a Crucifixion and a crucified head.”

Sutherland combined this exploration with images of tortured bodies photographed in Nazi concentration camps which “looked like figures deposed from crosses” and with the crucifixions painted by Matthais Grünewald.

Revd. Tom Devonshire Jones has described well the resulting work in Images of Christ:

“All the elements worked out in the studies are present: the freely interpreted crown of thorns and the debilitated legs from the Concentration Camp photographs. But the real suffering is in the arms and hands. The fingers curl up in agony. The taut arms pull the ribcage away from the rest of the body, as if a dead stag was being torn apart. In this painting Christ is still in the process of dying. Herein lies its original and frightening power.”

For Sutherland, with his focus on the agonized death inherent in crucifixion, expressionist forms and colours were essential to the depiction of such agony and to its representation as an icon of all who suffer through the inhumanity of human beings one to another.

F. N. Souza was another for whom expressionist form and colour were essential means in depicting the agony of crucifixion. George Melly has described well in Religion and Erotica the savage cross-hatching and cubist fragmentation of forms which mean “that there is no overt sentimentality in the artist’s religious iconography”, indeed, Melly suggests, “he expresses no obvious belief in redemption, only in suffering” as he “seems to attack his evocations of the sacred with angry cross-hatching to the point of near obliteration.”

Melly writes:

“Every artist to be reckoned with tends to invent their own trademarks. In Souza’s case, the religious work especially it is the very small forehead ... a portrait of Christ, his neck and torso pierced by two symbolic arrows, there is hardly room to jam on the crown of thorns. The eyes too are unnaturally high in the head and in this case, as in many others blacked-out. In this drawing, for example, Jesus weeps rods rather than tears, framed by ... fish skeletons ... This comparatively common device, is used not only to represent tears, but beards and hair are quite often treated in this way. The arrows also appear elsewhere, surely a symbol of suffering, borrowed from that pincushion, St Sebastian.”

In this Souza was influenced firstly by the Roman Catholicism of his youth, he was born in the Catholic province of Goa in India, and has written of seeing “the enormous crucifix with the impaled image of a Man supposed to be the son of God, scourged and dripping, with matted hair tangled in plaited thorns.” Secondly, he was influenced by the modernist movement and the work of Picasso in particular. Roger Wollen, in writing of The Crucifixion from 1962 now in the Methodist Church Collection of Modern Art, describes this work as “overtly expressionist in style and the figure on Jesus’ left ... is conveyed in a cubist style, with four superimposed eyes, two looking at Jesus and two looking out of the painting at the viewer.” The result, in the words of Nevile Wallis, are great crucifixions; “barbaric in colour” with “scrawny jagged forms, and thorny shapes” burning in their “terrible conviction.”

As Edwin Mullins says in F. N. Souza:

“Souza’s treatment of the figurative image is richly varied. Besides the violence, the eroticism and the satire, there is a religious quality about his work which is medieval in its simplicity and in its unsophisticated sense of wonder. Some of the most moving of Souza’s paintings are those which convey a spirit of awe in the presence of divine power ... in his religious work there is a quality of fearfulness and terrible grandeur which even Rouault and Graham Sutherland have not equalled in this century.”

Melly writes that Souza became a committed modernist in 1947 when he and his friends “had to rely, in the Bombay of that time, on books and magazines” for images of modernist works. “This was not unique to India,” Melly says, as “Australia, too, was full of converts and suffered, as they later admitted, from what they called ‘the cultural cringe’.” It is to Australia that we turn next to find the expressionist element in the biblically inspired work by Arthur Boyd.

Boyd’s early imagery changed dramatically through the onset of the Second World War. Robert Hughes proposed in a 1964 article on Boyd and Sidney Nolan for the Nation, that “the war convulsed Boyd’s arcadian plein-airism into ... wider expressionist images.” Barry Pearce has written, in Arthur Boyd, of Boyd projecting his personal sense of pessimism “against the world at large through a powerful series of biblical paintings” (which include The Mockers and The Mourners of 1945) and cites Franz Philipp as saying in 1947:

“Boyd is not just telling a story. He is saying ... how he feels about his time, about the state of the world ... Why the Crucifixion and not the Concentration Camp? Mine (and perhaps the artist’s reply) would be that the factual statement is apt to remain merely documentary, whilst the symbol of the Crucifixion enables the artist to stress the universal – one might almost say – the metaphysical aspect of the event ... the subject of ‘The Mockers’ is orgiastic hatred, the St Vitus dance of a possessed humanity.”

This use of biblical narrative was to be repeated later in Boyd’s career with the Nebuchadnezzar series of paintings. Pearce notes Ursula Hoff’s suggestion that:

“... it was not insignificant that the Nebuchadnezzar works were made at the height of the Vietnam war. As the 1960s moved towards the end of the decade, nations became divided by images of horror that confronted them in the mass media: villages incinerated, men and women tortured and killed, children screaming from the pain of napalm. Self-immolation in protest actually took place on Hampstead Heath near Boyd’s house, and once more a biblical subject by him was seen to be an allegory of the descent of humanity in a conflicted world; except this time instead of grotesque masses sliding into a hell of their own making, the focus was on the crisis of an individual.”

The major war reflected in the work and life of Peter Howson was the Bosnian conflict which he observed as an official War Artist but conflict and suffering have featured in his work from its earliest appearance, again with biblical references. Robert Heller writes in Peter Howson that “many of Howson’s mature works are deeply influenced by apocalyptic thoughts and biblical references.”

Heller writes that:

“Howson is hard to place in the current British art scene, where his taste for the heroic, the poignant and the violent is not widely shared. Taking the longer view, he still remains a difficult fit. Sources and masters can easily be found for the apocalyptic paintings, the series, the caricatures, the narratives, and so on. But nobody covers the same great range – though Goya, the past master, who makes the most intriguing comparison, with his phenomenal output, passion for drawing and genius at caricature, comes very close. The two artists, two centuries apart, have even tackled the same subject – Blind leading the Blind.

The Biblical passage concerned has inspired other artists, including Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Breughal (Howson’s inspiration for this motif) and Cornelis Massys, whose 1540 etching is very Howsonian in composition and style. Howson’s work, though, is not a single picture, but a series of ten powerful paintings, each depicting different forms of morally bankrupt humanity, and culminating in a frenzied crowd scene whose brilliant composition focuses on a sexually threatening girl in a skimpy dress.

The series makes two important statements about this painter: first, it establishes his artistic lineage, that of a young master who stands on the shoulders of giants; second, it sets out his ethical standpoint, that of a moralist who is uncompromising in his depiction of human failure and folly, but who paints them with a deep underlying respect for life itself. To these two statements, the rehabilitated Howson has added a third dimension: that of a power greater by far than man, but freely available as the sole source of man’s redemption.

The series which was heading for completion as I wrote these words was a commission from an inspired collector – inspired because The Stations of the Cross coincided so deeply with Howson’s own spiritual needs and preoccupations at this time. In the related and very powerful series of drawings, The Man of Sorrows, Christ is reminiscent of the tortured down-and-outs who figure so powerfully in Howson’s portrait gallery; but the drawings also contain passages which recall some of the self-portraits that run like a sub-theme through the painter’s oeuvre. The idea of suffering humanity being redeemed through the suffering of the Son of God at once subjects the individual to God and releases the individual into a saved life.

The crucifixion is the ultimate symbol of this theology ... The saved drawings on which the painted Stations are based have both delicacy and power, ranging from brilliantly composed crowd scenes to to a Christ attended only by two grieving women; from savage brutality to keening tenderness; from the dramatic (a massively strong man lifting the Cross beneath whose weight Jesus has fallen) to the matter-of-fact (two non-threatening workmen hammering in the nails – ‘just doing me job, mate’). At every station, the viewer is haunted by the infinitely sad face of the condemned Christ.”

Heller concludes that:“Howson is a thinker, and his thoughts illumine his work. Yet the seemingly raw emotion in his paintings is what, above all, has constituted his image and aura. The emotions, like the characters who project them, are generally ugly ... A certain fascination with violence has informed a considerable amount of Howson’s art ... Howson paints life through painting people, sometimes as straight portraits, but mostly as imaginary members of the vast population which inhabits his teeming canvases. He can be justifiably excused for the violence in these faces and figures, because violence lurks somewhere in everybody – as it does in Howson himself.”

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David Rawlings Machine - I Hear Them All.

Science Fiction reviews

I've been enjoying some Science Fiction post-Christmas in reading Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow and watching James Cameron's Avatar.

The Sparrow is an unusual Science Fiction novel in that its theme is of a crisis of conscience for Emilio Sanchez, its Jesuit central character. It's a well written story, once it gets going, with an engaging central character who is honest about the deficiencies and the inspirations of his faith. The split narrative works well before meshing at the conclusion to bring together the events of the central crisis and the response to it. This central crisis is genuinely shocking although its resolution is probably a little too easy and dealt with too briefly but the novel, as a whole, provides an engaging and challenging exploration of God's presence and guidance in human exploration and suffering.

Avatar has been criticised as a simplistic eco-fable with good indigenous characters lined up against the evil exploitative humans but this is to ignore the conversion of Jake Sully, its central character. This conversion, supported by the other members of his immediate team, is that which is needed by the human race if climate change and peak oil are to be countered and a narrative and world in which we can be immersed, as is possible in watching Avatar, can have an effect in changing consciousness of the issues. For that to be the case, both the narrative and the world created and imagined have to be of sufficient depth for the viewer to become immersed and this seemed to me to be the case with Avatar.

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Woven Hand - The Beautiful Axe.

Community Garden project

The interview which I gave at the Faith and Climate Change Conference for the OU/BBC's Creative Climate project is now on their website.

In part of the interview I talk about the community garden project at St John's Seven Kings, for which we have recently gained funding through London over the Border and the Area 5 & 7 Committees.

The project aims to redevelop the garden around the east end of the church as a community garden in order to encourage local people to use the garden for rest and reflection by introducing: additional seating areas; areas of sensory and remembrance planting; artworks, and community information.

Our more detailed plans are:

1. Additional seating areas - locate benches at the north and south ends of the East Wall and a companion seat at the church end of the remembrance area.

2. Areas of sensory and remembrance planting – create sensory borders around each of the East Wall benches by: use trellis behind the benches to grow climbers such as honeysuckle and winter jasmine; and borders of low growing, scented plants (such as lavender and rosemary) alongside the benches; and create a remembrance area at the far north end of the garden (in front of the Fellowship Room) using slate chips to cover the ground, a low chain link fence to delineate the area, and planting miniature roses and French lavender (in memory of loved ones) within the area.

3. Artworks – introduce a community mosaic or mural along the middle of the East Wall. An artist would be commissioned to design and make the mosaic/mural through community art workshops involving local people (i.e. school, community groups etc.); commission a sculpture for the centre of the remembrance area; and display art posters and/or paintings on the reverse of the noticeboards.

4. Community information – replace the existing noticeboards with new noticeboards in the same or similar locations, one of which would be for community information.

5. Additional plans – remove the border along the Aldborough Road South wall and replace with grass; create a circular border around the holly tree, add a bird bath and feeders, and plant with grasses; plant choisya, hebes, dogwood, ceanothus, spirea, and osteopermum in the East Wall border below the mosaic/mural; narrow and thin the border along the St John’s Road wall and plant a Judas Tree at the corner of St John’s Road and Aldborough Road South; locate an outside tap close to the Fellowship Room porch.

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Creed - Rain.

Faith-based leadership models (5)

Shared leadership

A key aspect of shared leadership is dialogue. Good conversation involves us in cooperating, thinking of each other’s feelings and experiences, and giving each room to talk.

This is an area where faith communities hold considerable resources.

The Inter Faith Network for the UK, for example, has published a Code of Conduct for interfaith dialogue that contains useful lessons for all leaders. Their Code suggests that when “we talk about matters of faith with one another, we need to do so with sensitivity, honesty and straightforwardness. This means:

• recognising that listening as well as speaking is necessary for a genuine conversation;
• being honest about our beliefs and religious allegiances;
• not misrepresenting or disparaging other people's beliefs and practices;
• correcting misunderstanding or misrepresentations not only of our own but also of other faiths whenever we come across them;
• being straightforward about our intentions; and
• accepting that in formal inter faith meetings there is a particular responsibility to ensure that the religious commitment of all those who are present will be respected.”

Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, has written of the way in which the “wisest is not one who knows himself wiser than others: he is one who knows all men have some share of wisdom and is willing to learn from them, for none of us knows all the truth and each of us knows some of it.”

Sacks has written about argument, debate and conversation as being a fundamental aspect of Judaism. He argues that this is because Judaism is “an attempt to do justice to the fact that there is more than one point of view; more than one truth.” He says that we must learn the art of conversation as it is only as we allow our world to be enlarged by others who think and act in radically different ways from us that truth emerges.

The Hindu understanding of pluralism holds similar potential for peaceful coexistence between those holding differing views. Because each of us are different we all approach reality in different ways. Therefore none of us can claim to know absolute truth. On this basis we can simply say, “your ideas and belief suit you and are best for you, mine are fine for my purposes so why threaten or feel threatened by each other?” True leadership therefore involves the humble recognition of the necessary limitations of what we perceive as absolute.

Soul

Deepak Chopra has become recognised as one of the top motivational speakers internationally by seeking to bridge the “technological miracles of the west with the wisdom of the east", principally Hinduism. Chopra argues that leaders are the symbolic soul of an organisation or group. At different times, groups need a parent, protector, ruler, muse or visionary. Successful leaders embody the values for which their group or organisation hungers. Leaders are born as they sense the felt need of the group or organisation.

Great leaders understand lower needs, like the need to feel safe, and meet these but also respond from the higher levels of spirit by understanding that their followers yearn for freedom, love, and spiritual worth. Great leaders, Chopra argues, are in touch with every level of human experience.

Alan Briskin has argued, in The Stirring of Soul in the Workplace, that the soul is a place of union among opposites and, in a world where there is information overload, represents our ability to hold onto the whole and create coherence through relationships with others. Soul “resides in the tension between apparent opposites” and it is in grappling with contradictions that soul is stirred into being. He quotes an ancient Sufi teaching: “You think because you understand one you must understand two, because one and one make two. But you must also understand and.” Briskin points out that the and is the point of overlap that unites in relationship. Caring for the soul, he suggests, involves an appreciation for and.

Doing so involves both dialogue and respect for uncertainty and is the source of creativity within workplaces. Dialogue is important because when we dialogue “we meet at the crossing between the forms of each other’s thought.” Respect for uncertainty is significant because by looking for patterns and attempting to find opportunities in the new patterns that emerge we can recalibrate our own intentions and forge relationships that incorporate randomness rather than condemning it. This does not mean the abandonment of planning and accountability but does involve operating in a richer perspective that tolerates “both a causal connection between events and an appreciation for the dice being thrown.”

Similarly, Danah Zohar, in SQ: The Ultimate Intelligence, has argued that Spiritual Intelligence (SQ) is our access to and use of meaning, vision and value in the way that we think and the decisions that we make. As such, it is the intelligence that makes us whole and that gives us integrity. SQ is about integrating, understanding and always adapting to new perspectives, Zohar suggests that the following generate a high SQ:

• being flexible – the world is a place of multiple realities, so live in it;
• being self-aware – look inward and don’t be afraid of what you’ll find;
• have a vision and be led by your values;
• use adversity – learn from death, failure and the things you fear;
• be holistic – see the big picture;
• be open to diversity – enjoy difference, like flexibility;
• be your own person – find true faith in your own convictions;
• ask “Why?” – it works for kids!
• reframe – step back and find the broader context;
• practice servant leadership; and
• create conditions for change.

Zohar argues that it is when we are a little uncomfortable that learning and innovation is most likely to occur.

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Henryk Gorecki - Miserere.