Address given at the Memorial Service for the Rev Dr John Hughes

Address given at the Memorial Service for the Rev Dr John Hughes

               Professor Janet Soskice, President of Jesus College
                   and Chair of the Faculty Board of Divinity

                          Saturday, 11th October 2014
                   at the University Church of Great St Mary's

We have come here today to honour and remember John Hughes, beloved Dean
and Chaplain of Jesus College. Yet our very presence in Great St. Mary’s attests
to how many beyond the walls of Jesus College, John’s life touched. For it was
evident from the outset, when planning this Memorial Service, that Jesus
College Chapel, much as it was loved by John, would be too small to
accommodate the many who would wish to honour him today.

So I would like to begin by thanking Canon John Binns and his team at Great St
Mary’s for generously hosting what is in many ways a College Memorial service
in the University Church, and by welcoming all of you here today, and most
especially Janet and Hywel Hughes, John’s parents. If I speak today, for the
most part of John as Dean and Chaplain of Jesus, I do so fully minded of those
who worked with and loved him as family and as friends in Exeter as a curate,
in Westcott House, Emmanuel and Merton College, Oxford, in Little St. Mary’s,
the Faculty of the Divinity, the Diocese of Ely and more specifically his fellow
young priests. All these were dear to him and by all his loss is felt, but I hope
by speaking of John at Jesus College to find a prism through which we may all
see John and celebrate his life.

For many of us here today John’s death is both still recent and raw, and I think
especially of Jesus undergraduates who had gone down just before the car
accident which took his life on 29th June. Some of you younger ones may never
have attended a memorial service before. This University Church has hosted
many, with recollections of long, illustrious careers, early triumphs on the
river, government committees chaired, University departments founded and
even Nobel prizes won. But today we are remembering someone who died at
just 35 years of age with, what it is only natural to feel, humanly speaking, so
much of his life in front of him. It is a loss of one so young, so gifted and we
must also say so ‘good’ that it can’t but be felt as a blow.

In the week immediately following John’s death, Jesus College had a
perceptible, sad stillness - like some great creature that had been punched in
the stomach and stood bent over itself in a silent pain. And yet, as the College

nurse reminded me, there was beneath this grief a feeling of great unity. As
though when we suffered this loss we realized, vividly, that ‘we’ were a ‘we’.

A college is a complex thing – its students and fellows, but also its chefs and
catering team, its porters, secretarial and finance division, its gardeners,
boatman, conference office and IT services, its choirs and choristers,
librarians, archivist and housekeepers, the admissions, tutorial and human
resources personnel, its development office, maintenance and bursarial staff.
It was evident in those first weeks that John’s death touched us all. Along with
the Master, John Hughes as Dean was the one Fellow known to almost all who
studied, taught at or worked for Jesus College and the shock was not just at
the sudden death of one so young, but at the loss of one who was, for many, a
real friend.

Few members of any college community know what a good Dean or Chaplain
does. In fact it might be more accurate to say that, apart from themselves, no
one does, since a good Dean or Chaplain is quietly and continuously working
both publically and confidentially across all sectors college life. The ‘job’, if
we can call it that, goes far beyond any written description, and that is why,
for someone ideally suited to it as was John Hughes, it is not a job but a
vocation. A good Dean is simply ‘around’ (which is not such a simple thing to
be) acting not only publically in the worshipping life of the Chapel, on a score
of its committees, at graduate hall or in the raucous congeniality of the
student bar of an evening, but privately and confidentially where someone has
a crisis of work or confidence or love life, or a child is ill, or a member of
college, of whatever age, branch or division, faces loss or death. A good Dean
or Chaplain - and John Hughes held both offices in turn- does this with
apparent joy and effortlessness, moving from complex planning for Choir tours
to careful encouragement of an anxious graduate.

At the tea in the Lady Chapel of Ely Cathedral after John’s funeral, one of the
members of the choir who had known John for some time said, apropos the
sermon which we’d just heard, that they did not realize John was a highly
regarded philosopher of religion and leading voice in Christian social thought.
For them (the choir), she said, he was ‘just John’. Tributes written in the book
of remembrance testified to the fact that for choir parents and choristers, John
also ‘just John’ - not that they were unaware of his other gifts, but to them he
was a dear and trusted friend. And this story could be repeated across all the
college’s branches and divisions.

I’m told that shortly after becoming Dean, John sent a note round to all the
college Heads of Departments (Bursary, Maintenance and so on) with an
invitation to all members of staff for ‘a short historical tour of our beautiful
chapel’, with tea and cakes in John’s room to follow. About 20 took up the
offer and, cramming into John’s study at the end, were astonished to find John
busy boiling four kettles and providing all the cakes himself. We were all in
receipt of countless little emails and invitations, every week or more, to some
special service, an outing, cocoa after Compline. I don’t think John expected

us all to go, but it had the effect that we all knew that the Chapel, and more
specifically John, was there for us. Just the week before his death John laid on
and conducted a special guided tour of the Chapel for the Finance Department
and was planning to do the same soon for Housekeeping.

John was born in 1978 in Exeter, the only child of Hywel and Janet Hughes. He
came to Jesus from Dawlish Community College in 1997 to read Theology and
Religious Studies. I was his Director of Studies.

John’s powerful intelligence was immediately evident, though concealed
somewhat by his modest matter. Weekly essays written for me in his second
year (which I recall stretching to 8 or 10 tightly spaced, typed pages) were
almost publishable as they stood – in fact his first publication for an
international journal, an essay on King Lear and forgiveness, was written while
still an undergraduate.

John seemed able to read and understand dense primary texts by the likes of
Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth with the ease with which others might read the
sports pages, and have plenty of time left for astute appraisal of voluminous
(and optional) secondary reading. (A bit daunting for a supervisor.) Another
tutor, to whom I’d farmed John out for the notoriously difficult philosopher,
Plotinus, said it was clear from the outset John, at the age of 19 knew, more
about Plotinus than he himself did. John’s First Class degree seemed inevitable
when it came.

Even at this young age John appeared to be entirely himself – quizzical, kindly
and quietly humorous, with hair that never quite sat down and gave him a
boyish look well into his thirties. He seemed to have no need for the varying
experiments in self-presentation that most of us go in for in our late teens and
early 20s. Part of his self-knowledge was his certainty early on that, if found
acceptable, he would be a priest in the Church of England. After a Masters at
Merton College, Oxford, he returned to Westcott House for ordination training
and a PhD under Catherine Pickstock subsequently published as The End of
Work, a distinguished re-animation of Anglican debates on labour, leisure and
capitalism which has been hailed as ‘the finest theological treatment of the
topic of work’ for many years. Following a curacy in Exeter he returned to
Jesus as Chaplain in 2009 and then as Dean in 2011.

John loved the Church of England, its language, prayer books and liturgies,
but above all he loved the living church itself. Theologically and liturgically
Anglo-Catholic, the services he organised and sermons he preached were never
exclusive or cultish, and always deeply informed by his study of Scripture. He
inherited from Tim Jenkins and Jonathan Collis, previous Dean and Chaplain, a
lively and well-integrated chapel. With Mark Williams, the Director of Music, he
oversaw a golden age of Jesus Chapel worship, not just for the beauty of its
music and liturgy but also, as a Benedictine monk of Glenstall Abbey who made
Jesus his preferred place of worship in Cambridge during his sabbatical here
said to me, for its atmosphere of prayer.

Student chapel stewards were more or less openly bribed into office by the
promise of Chapel trips. The big ones were in the Easter Vacation and in
alternate years open to non-student, as well as student-members of college.
On one trip that John took to St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai, with
myself as Sinaitic side kick, the Jesus college party made an un-unusual
addition to the complement of guests at the run down, Red Sea hotel which
was our base, otherwise frequented by Russians on package holidays. The Jesus
College contingent, quickly up on the dance floor after dinner to ‘una paloma
blanca’ and ‘Rock around the clock’ as sung by an Egyptian crooner, ranged in
age from 10 (a Fellow’s daughter) to 70 (the widow of a Fellow) and included
the French Lector, the college’s Financial Controller, ordinands, undergrads,
graduate students and assorted academics. Although daily prayer and eucharist
were on offer for those who wished (on the beach for we were not allowed to
hold religious celebrations in the hotel) not being a chapel-goer or religious
person was no bar to participation in these delightful expeditions…another
spring expedition involved walking part of the Way of Compostela. No other
events in my experience at Jesus College have so formed friendships across the
various sectors of college life as these trips, which John took endless pains in
organising and in luring people to sign up for, finding money where needed to
help students who might otherwise be unable to take part.

John emanated unruffled energy. He never appeared to be rushed even while,
along with all his chapel and college duties, I knew he was researching,
lecturing, publishing and supervising and examining both undergraduate and
graduate students. In the Faculty of Divinity he was a highly regarded colleague
in theology, philosophy of religion and ethics. Amongst his contemporaries he
was widely regarded as the most gifted Anglican theologian of his generation.

One of John’s his important College responsibilities was that of being ‘lead’ for
our team of Tutorial Advisors, and famously relied up by the others (so they
have told me) for the really difficult cases. This might mean an awkward
conversation, or a call at any time of day or night for an acute need. Nothing
seemed to be too much for John – cocoa (and port) in his rooms after Compline,
Morning Prayer on the roof of N Staircase for Ascension Day, looking across roof
leads, turrets and trees. As another member of the college staff (the college
nurse) put it, ‘he just made everyone feel special. It didn’t matter’, she said,
‘who you were, he always had time for you. Nothing was too much trouble and
he always seemed really interested.’

I think John seemed really interested because he was really interested, and this
went right to the heart of his guiding theology and of how he understood the
office of a priest in the college community. He would never have conceived this
as a matter ‘bringing the Gospel’ to dark corners, as though the Gospel were a
large lardy cake to be deposited on the desks of unwitting and unwilling
recipients. John did not need to bring God to people because according to his
Anglican Thomism God was already there. His job was to make us glad and help
us rejoice as we worked, whether as students, Fellows, or in one of the

colleges many other departments for, as he wrote in The End of Work, ‘labour
whose only end is efficiency and functionality, labour free of responsibility,
intellect and delight’, is not worthy of human beings.

We were all his people. Our Financial Controller told me that because of the
many needs of the Chapel and Choir, he had tried to persuade John to set up a
direct debit account for these purposes, but that John initially refused the
offer because it would mean he would not need to come into the Finance
Office as often to chat to staff. This is typical of John. When made more
aware of the work this would save the team, John completed the form but
found other ways to visit the Office on a regular basis.

John's Anglo-Catholicism by no means that he spent his hours lurking about the
vestry of the college’s medieval chapel and musing on Cranmer’s prayer book
(which he loved). Anyone who knew of his affection for Thomas Aquinas would
recover from the mistake of thinking him a fusty medievalist by a glance at his
first book. There they would find not Aquinas (at least not overtly) but Hegel,
Marx, Weber, Adorno and Hannah Arendt under discussion. For John was
profoundly interested in social justice, and embedded in that tradition of
Anglican social thought which, from the 19th century, responded to what they
perceived as an idolatry of utility - the growing demands of a world where only
the markets matter and people are reduced to consumers, and, especially for
the global poor, as commodities to be bought and sold themselves.

This book was entitled The End of Work and by this John did not mean romantic
aspirations towards the abolition of work but that we consider, deeply and with
urgency in our time, the end, or purpose of work. What is our work ordered to?
Which means asking ‘what are our lives ordered to?’ Faced with the
overwhelming tyranny of utility, John cites Hegel with approbation ‘there is
not only use, there is also blessing.’ Yet it was not to Hegel or Marx but to
English social teaching that John looked for critiques of an all consuming
mentality of utility – to John Ruskin, F.D. Maurice, Gandhi (a disciple of
Ruskin), to William Morris and his recovery of work as craft. Not just to
political theorists, then, but to artists, guilds and artisans. He thought this line
of thought most adequately captured by 20th century's artists who tried to
marry English social criticism with Catholic metaphysics, especially Eric Gill and
the Welsh poet and artist, David Jones, in his remarkable essays on work and
sacrament.

I think we can see why John felt himself to be completely at home in Jesus
College Chapel, rebuilt and recovered as it was in the 19th century by just those
energetic artists and social reformers who understood themselves to be trying
to change the world of work – not just by romantic recovery of a Gothic past
but by framing a habitable future for all. John, surrounded by the Pugin glass
and candlesticks, and the Morris company windows and draperies, was in the
cock pit of his campaign to make us all - Christians first but then society more
generally - think seriously about the ends of work, meaningful and rewarding
daily lives, for as he said, citing William Morris, ‘Happiness without happy daily

work is impossible’. In John’s Anglo-Catholicism, this recovery of work had to
go hand in hand with love of beauty and life ordered to the Good, that is, to
God… Human beings, as Aquinas marvellously said, are naturally oriented to the
Good, and because of this, even in our work, naturally at home in the world.
And this is why they are also attuned to Beauty, since the human mind is not
‘going against the grain of the Universe but in harmony with it’. And this is
because, in John’s Christian understanding, this world is creation, rather than
chaos – a loving gift.

John in his duties, meeting us on committees or in social gatherings, finding us
in our places of work, whether that was student room or study, library or
kitchen, or leaning up against a keg of beer and chatting to the Head Chef at
the Staff and Fellows’ lunch, was supporting us in our worlds of work and at the
same time doing his own. And this was underscored by his ‘work’ as a priest in
the daily liturgy of the Chapel, for that rather churchy word – ‘liturgy’ –
derives from the Greek for ‘the work of the people’. This was, for John, a work
of praise and thanksgiving and John was only perfectly at home in the Chapel
because he was perfectly home everywhere else in the college.

Near the end of The End of Work, John wrote that it is not enough to just talk
about things, and most of all not enough to just talk about God as the supposed
end of all our work, ‘indeed, he writes ‘the most holy work will be directed
towards the Highest End entirely unconsciously and without show, like the best
artists’. I’m sure John would squirm if we identified his day to day being
amongst us as ‘holy work’, but yet many of us have found ourselves saying
since his death - he was always there, he always seemed to have time to talk to
me, he never seemed rushed, he always was so interested. In attending to us
he was waiting on God.

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