One of the profound joys of these last weeks has been the experience of saints past through the places they inhabited. There is a holiness to these encounters. Deep calls out to deep as we walk the cobblestone paths they walked and kneel in the wooden pews where they prayed. Here, the secular becomes sacred and an old sandstone church becomes the site for the mysterious communion of saints.
Saint is a loaded term. Usually when we hear saint we think of those who have died and then been canonized as one truly a saint now in heaven. And I definitely do not mean anything less than that. But the word saint most originally included all those in the faith together -- living and dead. The communion of saints is the fellowship we share together which has the power to transcend both space and time. Here is what Celtic spirituality calls "thin places" -- the sacred site where heaven draws near to earth.
Christ Church, Oxford is a thin place for me -- a place of encounter with the great cloud of witnesses. Here I walk the same stone path John Wesley and William Penn walked as students. I see the after-effects of their weight and the weight of a whole host of others bearing down in certain places, their footsteps quite literally imprinting themselves, sinking even, into worn and weathered stone. It is a metaphor for what they have all together done to lay their collective mark on the future.
But it is another former student of Christ Church that I have felt most deeply connected to here, one of my great heroes of the faith from the last century -- Trevor Huddleston.
The son of a diplomat, Huddleston was a student here in the 1930s when he watched a mass of marchers -- mostly miners, and dock workers, and other poor, working class people -- make their way through Oxford on the way from South Wales to Westminster. It was definitive moment for Huddleston, marking a movement away from a world of diplomacy and ivory towers and toward the poor of the earth. Moved by what he saw, the young Huddleston decided to devote his life to making a difference in the conditions of the world -- which he indeed did.
Upon graduation from Christ Church, Huddleston began the path toward ordination in the Anglican Church and then became a monk within a special order called the Community of the Resurrection. In 1946 the community sent him to Sophiatown, one of the poor, black slums of South Africa, and the place where he would leave his own most indelible footprint.
The poverty and prejudice Huddleston saw in South Africa were at once sobering and also galvanizing. Soon he took up the cause as one of just a few white allies of the black community, speaking out against the rising Apartheid regime and helping to organize against it. The level of Huddleston's political activism was unusual for an Anglican monk and subversive to the powers that were. After 13 years in South Africa the Community of the Resurrection decided Huddleston had gone far enough, and called him back to England for fear he was causing too much trouble.
But Huddleston's political impact on South Africa had just begun. After his return to England, he published a book on the injustices he witnessed in South Africa titled Naught for Your Comfort, which landed him on the cover of Life magazine and brought awareness of the problem of Apartheid to millions. Even as he rose to the rank of bishop and then ultimately Archbishop in the church, Huddleston continued as the most public face of the anti-Aparthied movement in Britain and a persistent gadfly to worldwide leaders and businesses who wished to turn a blind eye to what was happening in South Africa.
To get a sense of just how great Huddleston's contribution Was to the anti-Apartheid movement one only has to read what Nelson Mandela said about him upon Huddleston's death: "No white person has done more for South Africa than Trevor Huddleston."
Knowing that here in Oxford is where Huddleston first received his call makes it a place not only of study but also of pilgrimage for me. Huddleston is one of the saints I have set before me as a paradigm of ministry. He was both a pastor and a social reformer, priestly and prophetic -- someone who made a difference in both the lives of individuals and also society as a whole.
There is an image of Huddleston's ministry that speaks profoundly of the kind of priest he was. It comes from a black South African who was in Huddleston's parish as a child. He said any day Huddleston might be playing in the streets with a gaggle of poor children from the village in the morning, and then in the afternoon receive a visit from a most important dignitary or government official. This is, to me, a picture of ministry in the first order.
That same man who was in Huddleston's pariah also speaks of two other things about His former priest. The first is his remembrance of Huddleston coming a great distance to make weekly hospital visits when the boy was sick with tuberculosis for a year. The other is his memory from only the age of 7 or 8 when he was walking down the street with his mother, a domestic worker, and the two saw Huddleston and Huddleston took off his hat to in respect to the mother.
The man later described that moment with as the most defining moment of his life.
"I didn't know then that it would have affected me so much, but it was something that was really -- it blew your mind that a white man would doff his hat," he said.
"And subsequently I discovered, of course, that this was quite consistent with [Huddleston's] theology that every person is of significance, of infinite value, because they are created in the image of God.
"And the passion with which he opposed apartheid and any other injustice is something that I sought then to emulate."
That man who would indeed go on to emulate Huddleston's passion, the little boy in the story, is Desmond Tutu.
I am standing here beneath the Tom Gate where Huddleston first entered the walls of Christ Church. I hear the same carillon of bells he would have heard the day he received his call. I walk the same cobblestone road outside the gate into the world. It is the communion of saints -- a reminder to me that I am not alone on this path, but rather surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. Others have gone before; and others will come after. And right here and now, this distance is very thin.
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