Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Adam McCoy, OHC
The Solemnity of James Otis Sargent Huntington, OHC – Thursday 25 November 2010
Father Huntington has so many identities: social reformer, union organizer, political radical; preacher, spiritual director, confessor, priest; initiator of Church organizations; author; and to us in particular, founder and legislator and monk. Every one of these is worth our attention, but if we even skimmed each of them today, we’d be here far into the afternoon and the turkey would get cold. So I want to do something different. Instead of delving into his biography, I want to hazard some thoughts about his basic ideas, his core concepts, what made him tick.
When I first started paying attention to Father Huntington the thing that struck me was his confidence. That confidence was not so much in his own actions, though he was never afraid to say or do things he thought were right and constructive, regardless of their approval or not by others. But his confidence, it seems to me, was in something much greater. I think he believed something like this: Something important is waiting to be born into the world. Everything is interconnected, and so every action is significant, and is multiplied by association. Holiness is a particularly potent agent by which God is bringing about this something important.
The late Victorian era was very different from ours in many ways, and not least in its sense of almost infinite optimism. Great things were happening and about to happen. Knowledge was expanding daily. Transportation systems were spanning oceans and continents. New industries flourished everywhere. People were drawn in masses to North America by the promise of its amazing economic expansion. Educational, cultural, social and health care institutions were founded and quickly expanded. The rich were unimaginably rich, as they are today, but were still formally committed to the religious and moral systems of the general community. Social awareness was being developed as never before. It was a heady time for a young and privileged man like Huntington. His family background and Harvard, with the excellent social connections that flowed from them, gave him a platform. An awakened consciousness married to his native self-confidence gave him eyes to see and ears to hear.
And Anglo-Catholic religion gave him a voice to speak. It is difficult to recapture the excitement of the Anglo-Catholic movement of those days today. Its realization of the deepest meaning of the Incarnation gave to that movement the insight that the whole world was waiting to be shown its true identity: Not only is every individual human being made in the sight of God, but the entire human social enterprise is of the deepest interest to God. Every act of prayer cooperates with the divine energy. Every celebration of the Eucharist opens the saving heart of Jesus to the world. To join in the Anglo-Catholic project was to sign on for the transformation of the world. To pray was to engage in one’s own life the very powers of God for good, to unite the one who prays with God’s compassionate yearning for every straining, struggling life. It was to let loose the Holy Spirit and cooperate in the co-creation of the New Jerusalem.
Spurred on by his Anglo-Catholic convictions, by theologians like Frederick Denison Maurice and by social thinkers of the secular world, Father Huntington believed in interconnection, of God with the world and of people with each other. For him that connectedness was a gift of the Holy Spirit, whether consciously realized or not. He thought that when a person acted, it had far more effect than that person could know, but that people acting in groups were far more significant than individuals acting in isolation ever could be. It is why he believed in labor unions, why he founded organizations and worked with committees and believed in structural transformation as well as individual salvation. It is why he believed in Henry George and the Single Tax, which tied all value to the ownership of land. This might justifiably be regarded, in the inimitable words of President Bush the Elder, as voodoo economics, but I think it appealed to Father Huntington because in the Single Tax he saw economics as a universal connectedness. It is why he made Fr. Allen Superior of the Order on the day Fr. Allen, the second member of the Order was life professed. The group was more important than any single individual. He believed that nothing happens in isolation, and that when the weakest is made strong, all are made better. He believed that people in association, in mutual involvement, are different, and if acting for good, are better than when they act alone. I would not be at all surprised to find that in his meditations, Father Huntington would have come to believe that the God who is One in Three, the Savior who is both Human and Divine, are themselves models of the communal life God wishes for us.
The human community Father Huntington envisioned would never leave the weak, the poor, the exploited, the sick, the unfortunate, behind. Such a community would actively seek the well-being of all. The love of God requires the restoration of the weakest so that God may be all in all. For Father Huntington, the Gospel is in fact the key to human social relations, and when one joins this Gospel action, one is joining in the great mediatorial work of Christ.
For Father Huntington it was as important to put this work of Christ into practice in one’s personal life as in one’s public and social life. Holiness can be found anywhere, but a monastic community is its traditional workshop. For Father Huntington and the early members of the Order it was hard to know where external observance left off and internal growth began, and in this they were one with the great sweep of monastic life, from Anthony and Pachomius through Benedict and on, to Merton and others in our own day. Early Holy Cross men were renowned for a prayer and working life which left hardly a minute unscheduled. They were renowned for their austerity, and they were criticized for it, and some of them did not bear it well. But the best of them, the great ones of our past, found in the practice of strict self-giving the great liberation which ascetic practice can bring to a heart yearning for the ever clearer, fuller presence of God. Such a life opens the heart to God and through God’s presence the heart opens to the love of others. In the holiness of good monastic practice love for God grows as the self is sanctified, and at the same time so does love for the brethren. And that love inevitably and rightly overflows from the community to the world, seeking others with whom to share.
These themes come together to form a world-view, one which I think is basic to Father Huntington’s understanding. I can find no better expression of them in his writings than in a passage which is tucked away in the chapter in his Rule devoted to “The Devout Study of Ascetic Writers”. It is perhaps his best statement of the sacred inner meaning of the monastic life.
Let us listen and see if we can hear these themes. Let us listen to them with the ears of our hearts, as a loving father, our own loving father, speaks to us:
The Kingdom, for the coming of which we pray, advances not only by the conversion of sinners, but by the raising of some souls to great holiness of life. Holiness is the brightness of divine love, and love is never idle; it must accomplish great things. Love must act as light must shine and fire must burn.
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