Solemnity of James Otis Sargent Huntington

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Brother Adam McCoy, OHC
Solemnity of James Otis Sargent Huntington, OHC - November 27, 2012 
(transferred from Nov 25)

James Otis Sargent Huntington, Founder of OHC

    Today we are gathered in celebration of the man we count as our Founder, though he never considered himself so, James Otis Sargent Huntington.  Many are the glories, many are the triumphs of his life: pioneer of the monastic life for men in our Church; tireless worker for the rights of working people and for social justice; founder and promoter of work for the poor and neglected; spiritual advisor to hundreds, perhaps thousands of people during his long ministry; a man of deep and transcendent prayer whose mere presence radiated goodness.  

    Two weeks ago or so Br. Robert circulated to the community a report of a meeting of Buddhist and Roman Catholic monks.  The monks spoke of mid-life crisis and senior burnout, disappointment and disillusion.  At the end of the discussion, the participants in that discussion realized that “To be disillusioned is to recognize the truth that I stand on no ground, to discover how dependent I have been on everything around me, to realize that everything I was looking for, had I found it, would have been a substitute.”  The reporter quoted the very wise words of Michael Casey: 

    "Monastic life is not really about self-realization, in the immediate sense of these words:  it is far more about self-transcendence. These are noble words, but the reality they describe is a lifetime of feeling out of one’s depth: confused, bewildered, and not a little affronted by the mysterious ways of God. This is why those who persevere and are buried in a monastic cemetery can rarely be described as perfectly integrated human beings.”

    Using this as a lens, I would like to look not at the glories but at some of the struggles Fr. Huntington faced, to see if we might profit by his example in facing them, as we profit by imitating him in his bright and public successes.  In this I am also thinking about that avatar of monastic life, Anthony of Egypt.  There are plenty of mighty works recorded in St. Athanasius’ biography of St. Anthony, but what we remember best, I think, are his struggles.  He and the whole desert tradition made it their primary business to discover, confront, name, struggle against, and in some measure, with God’s help, reach a point where the reappearance of their particular demons could be put in their proper perspective, and the life of the monk could be directed more and more powerfully to God.  This was Anthony’s heroism, it was the heroism of the desert, and, I would suggest, it was Fr. Huntington’s, and perhaps ours, as well.  I want to suggest five crises in his life which Fr. Huntington met and struggled with and turned to good.

    Fr. Huntington did not “found” the Order of the Holy Cross.  It arose from a conversation he had with Fr. Robert Stockton Dod, whose excitement seems to have been the greater of the two.  They were joined by Fr. James Cameron.  When the three of them began the Order’s life in the autumn of 1881, it was Fr. Dod who led the way in the formation of community life.  It was Dod who consulted the experts in England, who wrote the first Rule, and who led them in the early days.  What must Fr. Huntington’s feelings have been when, just a year later,  Fr. Dod entered into a cycle of chronic illness that turned out to be both emotional and physical.  For the next year and a half, his illness was the constant backdrop to their community life, and Fr. Cameron left a year later, in October, 1883.  By March, 1884, Fr. Dod had left as well, leaving Fr. Huntington alone of the first three.  Fr. Huntington was young - he was only 29 when Fr. Dod left - and he was strong, but what a blow.  In his later life he was occasionally troubled by the small numbers of people coming forth to join the Order and persevering, but he never let that get in the way of new exploits.

    In the summer of 1902 the Church of the Advent in Boston invited Fr. Huntington to become its Rector.  For a Boston-born-and-bred Anglo-Catholic like Fr. Huntington, could there be a more attractive prospect?  It is instructive to understand the context of that offer.  The Order had acquired the West Park property in the fall of 1899.  The hard work of planning and fund raising occupied almost three years, during which time the community prevailed on Fr. Huntington to write a new Rule.  He was reluctant to do so, but did, and it was adopted in October, 1901.  Construction began with the laying of the cornerstone in June, 1902.  Bishop Potter of New York, who had warmly encouraged Fr. Huntington in the early stages of his vocation, refused an invitation to attend, writing in utter disdain, “Once you were the head of a Brotherhood engaged in the service of the poor.  Now, I believe yours is a “contemplative” brotherhood, and you a roaming preacher.  I must own that neither your aims nor life interest us.”  During all this time Fr. Huntington had been Superior, and had borne the brunt of these great activities.  How interesting that the writing of the Rule Fr. Huntington was not at all eager to put down on paper, and that the preparation for construction of the monastery come at the same time.  And that Bishop Potter’s renunciation of Fr. Huntington is almost simultaneous with The Advent’s invitation to priestly glory.  Fr. Huntington did not answer that call for at least two months.  We can perhaps imagine the struggle in his soul, stinging from Bishop Potter’s utter disdain, uncertain of his worthiness to write a Rule, tired from the efforts to undertake construction.  In the end, he decided to stay.

    Fr. Huntington was devoted to his family.  He was in constant contact by letter and visited them often.  He was especially close to his father and mother.  His father, Bishop Frederic Dan Huntington, was in many ways the inspiration for Fr. Huntington’s vocation as an evangelist, and Fr. Huntington cannot be understood either as a person or as a religious figure without reference to Bishop Huntington.  His father died in July, 1904, followed soon after by the death of his brother, George Huntington.  Fr. Huntington seems to have borne up for two years, but in September, 1906, tendered his resignation as Superior.  The Chapter re-elected him nonetheless, 
and he consented, but soon afterward embarked on a long trip to Europe, which lasted into the summer of 1907.  When he returned, he again tendered his resignation, and this time the Chapter accepted it.  His mother, Hannah Dane Sargent Huntington, died in 1910.  Soon after that, Fr. Huntington spent a considerable time with his three sisters in Syracuse, who ministered to him.  The next winter, that of 1911-12, he went to Florida with Fr. Lorey, who seems to have been similarly afflicted, to convalesce.   These events were clearly something close to nervous breakdowns, and they coincided with the difficulties of Fr. Henry Rufus Sargent, the third member of the Order and a titanic personality.  During exactly these same years Sargent underwent a long and fairly public crisis of conscience, which culminated in his conversion to the Roman church and subsequent expulsion from the Order, the month before Fr. Huntington’s mother’s death.  Heavy times, but Fr. Huntington, wounded though he was, sought help and soldiered on.

    Just before going with Fr. Lorey to Florida for convalescence, Fr. Huntington wrote and published a series of articles on the failure of the ideal of the religious life as he had understood it.  They are depressing reading.  The background to them is what was perceived by many Anglo-Catholics of the social justice persuasion as the failure of their movement, crystallized when in 1907 the General Convention passed a canonical change allowing preaching at Sunday services by clergy who were not ordained in the Episcopal Church.  This Open Pulpit movement gnawed at Anglo-Catholics for years afterward, and was the straw that broke Fr. Sargent’s back.  It obviously laid heavy upon Fr. Huntington as well.  He lays what he sees as the failure of missionary monasticism, which, building on his father’s teaching, was his own vision, to a lack of nerve in a church now driven by a kind of  congregational life which looks to its own well-being and not to the conversion of the nation and the world.  It seemed to him the death of an ideal, and one can wonder whether so much recent death in his own life is not the emotional background to his analysis.   But he did not let the death of what he hoped for discourage him.  He writes, in peroration:

    "The virtues of the monastic state are, indeed, the virtues which characterize the Christian life everywhere, – humility, otherworldliness, obedience, self-sacrifice, purity, love.  But that which distinguishes the monastic ideal is that, according to it, these virtues are no longer practiced by each individual, living his own life, doing his own work, but they are practiced by a number of individuals who have abandoned themselves to live and act in common, as a single unified body, moved by one impulse, guided by one will."

    The fifth struggle of Fr. Huntington which I would like to point out happened at the Chapter of 1930, when Fr. Hughson and the adherents of his more “advanced”, ritualist, historicist and conservative brand of Anglo-Catholicism carried the day.   The Chapter elected Fr. Hughson Superior, and officially titled Fr. Huntington as “Father Founder”.  It was a title Fr. Huntington never wanted, knowing it to be factually untrue.  If anyone was the founder of the Order, it was Fr. Dod.  Fr. Huntington felt elevated to irrelevance, put out to pasture, made redundant.  But despite his protestations, even as the Chapter of the Order – we in the corporate sense – were sidelining him, enacting our own particular patricidal drama, the greater truth did not escape the community.  Fr. Huntington had persevered.  In face of so many struggles, many more than those we have examined this morning, Fr. Huntington had remained steadfast.  The demons of abandonment, of exhaustion, of grief, of the loss of his original vision, had been met and struggled with and recognized and named and had lost some of their power.  He was, in the late autumn of his life, not unlike St. Anthony, who emerged from the fortress of his struggle an almost-new Adam: “The state of his soul was one of purity, for it was not one constricted by grief or relaxed by pleasure, nor affected by either laughter or dejection.”  He had seemed to have lost in the struggle between his vision and Fr. Hughson’s, and so he turned that loss to good.  His last five years are a marvel of public speaking, spiritual counsel and private encouragement to multitudes of individuals who sought him out.  The fiftieth anniversary of his life profession in November of 1934 was greeted with a vast outpouring of love and praise from every part of the Church and beyond.  After his funeral in 1935, which Fr. Hughson did not attend because he was in Liberia, the Presiding Bishop called him “the best loved priest in the Episcopal Church.”

    So, what is struggle and what is glory?  Is there something problematic with a person who has great times of struggle?  Should we view such a person as a detriment to monastic life because it does not, at the moment, seem productive?  Is monastic life to be measured by our successes according to the standards of our culture?  Sometimes I wonder if the glory we gain in the ordinary understanding of glory – institutions founded, buildings built, people attracted to vocation and membership, financial and other kinds of stability – sometimes I wonder if all these are not like the simple service of a meal.  The food must be cooked, the table must be set, the dishes must be served, the mess must be cleaned up.  But the important thing is not the cook, the servers, the cleaners, but the food and the fellowship of the meal, what the food can build in the body and what the spirit can gain from friendship and conviviality.  All of what the world sees as our great work is in service of the actual lives of the monks, messy and incomplete and fraught as they are.  All in service of providing an arena for their battles, small and great, a safe place for them to meet the demons, to engage the struggle.  That is why we do all this.  

    We are always talking of being counter-cultural.  Perhaps Fr. Huntington’s life can point us the way.  Which is greater – the founding, the preaching, the writing, the counseling, the great works, or the acceptance of the struggles that his life brought him, losing companions, facing exhaustion and the temptation to escape, owing up to his own weakness in the face of grief at the death of loved ones and the loss of friends, the realization that his ideal had not triumphed, the indignity of an honor which placed him on the shelf?  I would suggest that his greatness has its roots in his struggles, that without the struggles the greatness would not have emerged, and that the greatest struggles are those he feared the most because they penetrated to the heart of his life.      The monastic life gives to monks the time and the space and the opportunity to encounter our demons and to engage in the struggles they bring.  Fr. Huntington was not diminished by engaging his struggles but rather those struggles created in him capacities for growth and for a deepened character of sympathy with others.  Could he have accomplished his great works if he had been spared his griefs?  Perhaps some of them, but perhaps only in the vigor of his youth.  Would he have been the man from whose life flowed such grace and goodness?  I doubt it.   

    I think God loves us because of our struggles.  What kind of monastic life does not have its demons?  Is a monastic life without struggle worth the effort?  In the Kingdom of Heaven, who will be marked out as the greatest among us?  Perhaps it will be those who do great things that the world can see and touch and measure and remark and praise.  But I think, in fact, the greatest among us in the Kingdom of Heaven will be those who courageously faced their demons and engaged in the struggles their life brought them.  And of those demons, those struggles, only God knows the true story.  Perhaps the greatest in God’s eyes are not the strongest but the weakest among us, as the world would account them, who only with God’s help can meet and name their demons, and who even with God’s help win perhaps only small victories.  Perhaps we should revise our estimates of each other and ask, Who among us faces their demons, who among us struggles perhaps without our even knowing?  Perhaps the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven are quite unknown to us now, but so greatly loved by God because he knows and sees them in their fullness.  

    Maybe being perfectly integrated is not the goal for monks.  Maybe the monastic goal is to put our imperfection into the heart of Christ.