Accompaniment, Community and Nature: Overcoming isolation, marginalisation and alienation through meaningful connection, by Jonathan Herbert Photo: Book cover detail
Accompaniment, Community and Nature by Jonathan Herbert
Author: Jonathan Herbert. Review by Sharen Green
Jonathan Herbert started his journey as an accompanier at eight years old, sitting on the vicarage doorstep with rough sleepers. He has since practised accompaniment in urban Liverpool, rural Dorset, the Solomon Islands, Uganda and Palestine. Decades later he has formulated his ideas on the subject, which, he claims, is a powerful way of bringing about social and environmental justice.
Vivid anecdotes abound in the book. One tells of when, as a fairly new priest, Herbert was queuing with his inner city neighbours at the magistrates’ court. Like them, he hadn’t paid his poll tax. In a delicious scene his boss insists that it is his Christian duty to pay but ‘career’ is not a word the young cleric understands! Years later a trip to the family court ends in tragedy. The author accompanies a teenage Gypsy mum. Her baby remains in care because the system doesn’t understand Gypsy ways of child-rearing. The mother is rendered speechless by the court’s intimidating surroundings and Herbert is not allowed to speak.
The book’s rich hinterland features economists, academics and theologians. But it is far from cerebral. Manure, urine and the soil are important characters – Herbert is nothing if not down-to-earth. He now lives in Hilfield Friary, an Anglican community, and is the Salisbury Diocese’s chaplain to Gypsies and Travellers.
Living in community is something he learned the hard way. ‘I spent the first year [at the Pilsdon Community] worrying that I should be doing more to help people change… There was so much raw pain on display and bottled-up anger… I began to see my role as first being alongside individuals not as a social worker, support worker or a carer but simply as another human being who gives and receives support simply by being there and sharing a common life.’
Herbert later becomes a human rights monitor under the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel, run by Britain Yearly Meeting. Here he has to accompany himself following a searing episode witnessing the torture of an eight-year-old boy. Emir is walking down the street in Hebron when he is handcuffed, blindfolded and bundled into a van. Once released, the child is traumatised and almost mute.
Herbert recounts how he got through his own trauma, and even spares some compassion for the brutalised young soldiers. But back in London he finds himself filled with anger on seeing an Orthodox Jewish family on Waterloo Bridge. ‘I had never met the family but found myself having such profound feelings of revulsion for them that I crossed over the road as I couldn’t bear to be near them… I too, Jonathan Herbert, usually the “peacemaker” who always sees everyone’s point of view, had become polarised, projecting my anger at the injustice of the Israeli occupation on an innocent Jewish family.’ The prejudice took him completely by surprise and his determination to resist it by remembering the God-given humanity of the other is a lesson for us all.
