Homily given by Bishop Nicholas Hudson on Sunday 17 November at the patronal Mass of St Hugh of Lincoln, Letchworth
God has given you a wonderful patron! John Ruskin described St Hugh as ‘the most beautiful sacerdotal figure known to me in history.’ You are right to celebrate him with full solemnity! He was not the last monk in England to be made a bishop. One thinks of monks like Cardinal Hume, Bishop Butler, Bishop Jabale. But Hugh was the last monk-bishop of this land to be declared a saint. He was canonised just twenty years after his death. He died in the year 1200.
Hugh was a Frenchman. He was born in Avalon, near Grenoble, around 1135. He was only 25 when he decided to enter the monastery of La Grande Chartreuse. La Grande Chartreuse was the mother-house of the Carthusians. The name Carthusian and Charterhouse comes from Chartreuse. The Carthusians lived a heroically simple life. Hugh was made the Procurator: today we’d say ‘bursar’. He took to heart St Paul’s example, as we hear expressed in his 2nd Letter to the Corinthians; and embraced this role of administration as a grace, a gift – ‘an act of mercy’ indeed.
Because Hugh was so good at running this monastery, King Henry II wished him to move to England to be Prior of Witham, in Somerset. Henry had founded Witham in reparation for his having St Thomas Becket put to death. Hugh flourished in this new role. So, Henry decided Hugh should be Bishop of Lincoln. Hugh demurred. He felt his calling was to be a monk, living the simple life of a monastery. It was only when the Prior of the Grande Chartreuse leant on him that Hugh relented.
The words we hear today on the lips of Jesus must have spoken deeply to Hugh at that moment – when he heard the Lord say, ‘You did not choose me; no, I chose you.’ Hugh knew what his choice would be, but then he yielded to the Lord’s choice rather than his own. The words of this psalm which we have also just heard must have found an even deeper resonance within him. The psalmist is speaking here about David, King David. He speaks words which Hugh must have known could be applied to him as well – when the Lord says, ‘I have found David, my servant, and with my holy oil anointed him.’
For Hugh then found himself being anointed Bishop of Lincoln. In Lincoln he lived an exemplary pastoral ministry. We are told he loved to get out and about – to consecrate churches, confirm children, bury the dead. He was a highly respected judge. He would tend lepers.
He risked his life in riots to save some Jews from death. He took at his word the Lord’s command to love one another as he has loved us.
Still he would retreat to his beloved Witham whenever he could. He preferred to sleep in his old monastic cell rather than in the bishop’s rooms. He would take his turn as priest of the week, organising rotas and leading liturgies. He had a particular love for the laity. He insisted that women should be made to feel particularly welcome in the monastery. He used to say that no man has ever had the honour to be called a parent of God: only a woman has had that honour. And he would encourage lay Christians in their vocation by telling them that, if lay people practise charity in their hearts, are truthful with their lips, and chaste with their bodies, then they will be rewarded in heaven as fully as celibate monks and nuns.
Such was his strength of personality that he could be a critical friend to not one but three successive kings of England.
He overcame Henry II’s anger by teasing him.
He calmed Richard I by shaking him.
He had no fear telling King John that he disapproved of him.
Hugh followed St Paul’s injunction to speak the truth openly.
King John showed his respect for Hugh by carrying his coffin at Hugh’s funeral.
Hugh had fallen ill while visiting the London Charterhouse; and died there. When he was close to death, they brought him the Sacred Host in his cell. Hugh summoned up the energy to rise from his bed, dressed as he was in his hair-shirt, habit and cowl but with bare feet, and kneeling, he prayed; and adored the Lord for a long time, we are told. After he had received the sacraments, he turned to those around him, and said, ‘Now my doctors and my diseases may fight it out as they will, I shall have little care for either. I have given myself to God; I have received him, I will hold him and rest fast in him; it is good to abide fast in him, it is a blessed thing to hold him; he who receives him and gives himself to him is safe and sound.’
Confident in God’s loving mercy, he yielded up his spirit. His funeral was one of the greatest Lincoln ever saw. In attendance there were not only King John but also three archbishops, fourteen bishops, one hundred abbots, the Prince of South Wales, the whole Jewish community from the Lincoln ghetto, and King William of Scotland. The year was 1200.
Three hundred and thirty-five years later, in 1535, close to the place where Hugh had died, another saint was looking out of a window from his cell in the Tower of London. His name was Thomas More. He was watching three monks of that same London Charterhouse where blessed Hugh had given up his spirit being taken to their death. More’s daughter was visiting him. He turned to her and said, ‘Lo, dost thou not see, Meg, that these blessed Fathers be now as cheerfully going to their deaths as bridegrooms to their marriage?’ Weeks later, More himself would be led out of that cell for execution.
‘The life and death of each of us has its influence on others,’ St Paul had written some fifteen centuries earlier. St Paul had been writing to the Romans. I had the privilege recently to visit More’s cell; and to see for myself the view he had of those brave monks who went ahead of him to their death. It occurred to me that More must have derived great strength from their courageous witness. And the memory of St Paul’s words rose up in my heart – that the life and death of each of us indeed has its influence on others.
We study the saints and their lives not just out of curiosity – but in order that they might influence us. ‘The greatest tragedy in life,’ says Pope Francis, ‘is not to be a saint!’ ‘I want to be saint,’ Therese, the Little Flower, would cry. In St Hugh, you have a wonderful patron saint of your parish. But I urge you not to leave him just as your parish patron but to make him your own; make him your personal patron saint too. Ask him daily to intercede for you.
Pray him to help you be a saint yourself – or, if you can’t quite manage that, at least to grow in holiness; grow daily to be more the person Jesus is calling you to be. And ask him that, when you reach life’s end, you be given the grace to yearn for your last sacraments with as much faith and devotion as did St Hugh. Ask him that, when you pass onto the other side of death, he be there to recognise you as one his Letchworth flock, a parishioner of St Hugh’s, to beg God’s mercy upon you so that you too might be admitted to join him and all the saints in the wonderful and everlasting joy of heaven!
