What is meaningful connection? This is a question we’re likely to be asking ourselves with more urgency during a time of Coronavirus lockdown and deliberate social isolation. In this honest, yet tremendously hopeful book, Jonathan Hebert presents a series of episodes from his life as a priest, and his experiences of living in various intentional communities around the world, particularly the Pilsdon Community and Hilfield Friary, both in rural Dorset in South West England. He sets out the idea of accompaniment as a sense of working, walking, and waiting alongside another person. Accompaniment, he suggests, is ‘less than friendship and also much more.’ It’s about living well with people who are different from us and building interdependence. Perhaps above all, accompaniment simply involves spending time with people, and being together. For all its apparent simplicity, in a world of constant busyness, where ‘time is money’ and even our leisure activities are measured by how much we’re doing, the idea of accompaniment is deeply counter-cultural and not at all easy.
Meaningful connection can happen in surprising ways. I ‘met’ Jonathan Herbert during a zoom call when a retreat we were planning from Bristol to Hilfield Friary was cancelled as a result of the Coronavirus crisis. In just a few minutes of conversation he spoke passionately about life at Hilfield Friary and his experiences of community, and he gave us encouragement to keep moving forward with our plans for a City Farm Church in Bristol. He mentioned his recently published book, and I was immediately inspired to read it. Even from within the four walls of my social isolation, the book gave me a deep sense of connection with Herbert and the communities he has lived in.
The book is beautifully written. Rather than presenting the experiences from his life in chronological order, Herbert adopts a thematic approach, picking appropriate episodes to illustrate his points. In the first chapter, he sets out alienation and loneliness among the central crises of our age:
My journey through this book is about first seeing the danger and threats we face, the crisis of loneliness and alienation we are living in, acknowledging the damage that has been done by the destructive forces of individualistic thinking, and then journeying towards a more holistic understanding of what it means to live well together (Kindle loc 154).
Chapters on community, accompaniment, sharing labour, crossing divides, making peace, living sustainably, and knowing ourselves, offer powerful ways to confront alienation and loneliness. Not all of the stories are uplifting. Herbert writes compassionately about destructive addictions, violent confrontations, institutionalised racism, and child kidnappings. But the picture that emerges, over and over again throughout the book, is that a different, less individualised way of living is possible. This possibility brings hope even to the darkest places. I was particularly drawn to stories of getting to know people by walking and working together: fixing a roof with a convicted criminal, being together as horses were put down, walking together in pilgrimage.
I’m a little wary of the concept of ‘nature deficit disorder’, which Herbert turns to occasionally to explain the value of spending time at a place like the Pilsdon Community of the Hilfield Friary. It’s not that I disagree with the healing and restorative powers of being outside surrounded by what we would traditionally recognize as ‘nature’ – fields, trees, wildlife, farm animals. On plenty of occasions I’ve felt a strong need to get out of a seemingly oppressive city and into the spacious liberation of the countryside. But this urge has worked the other way as well with the craving for the bright lights of a city. I worry slightly that ‘nature deficit disorder’ perpetuates a binary of the natural and the unnatural, and risks imposing one particular set of cultural values onto people from other cultural contexts. A deficit model, by its nature, views something – and perhaps by extension, someone – as lacking. In my view, Herbert’s central theme of meaningful connection with difference can explain the value of living in an intentional rural community in a much more positive way. As demonstrated throughout the book, we can all benefit from connecting with different people and unfamiliar, and from the self-reflection that these encounters can bring.
The book finishes with two short appendices on ‘hints for accompaniment’ and ‘essential ingredients for living in community.’ Vision, for example, is all-important for successful community life, since without it, things will break down as soon as difficulties start. Accompaniment, Community and Nature is a ‘how to’ book in the very best sense. There is plenty of idealism, but this is accompanied by constructive and practical action. The action promoted by Herbert is the exact opposite of the constant, unreflective activity that pervades our individualistic world. Doing less can very often be the key to doing more. The book will be of interest to anyone who has lived in community, or anyone who is contemplating living in community. But more broadly than that, this is truly inspirational book that should be read by anyone looking for practical ways to bring meaningful change to a broken world.
Religion, Environment, History 