I met Eric in 1955. At the time I was an Exhibitioner at
an Oxford College, but having some real difficulty settling in. I was advised
by a friend, who was a student at King’s College, London, to go to
see the Dean of King’s, one Eric Abbott. I think it is nothing but
the truth to say that Eric ‘saved’ me. I went to see him in
some fear and trembling, but found myself spilling out all sorts of things
which I had never dreamt I would be able to discuss with anyone. At one
point Eric gently kicked the sole of my foot with his toe-cap, saying “Don’t
worry, boy, I’m not going to send you home in your underpants!”
As a result of that encounter, with some relief but also real regret, I
left Oxford and went to King’s. No sooner had I arrived than, such
are life’s ironies, Eric was appointed to be Warden of Keble College
at Oxford! So I had just one term with him at King’s, but it was enough
to establish a lifelong friendship.
People sometimes say to me, “How wonderful it must be to have spent
so much time with Eric Abbott – to have been able constantly to
discuss weighty matters of Spirituality and Theology.” Well, through
my association with Eric, I was present at three Royal Weddings and other
great occasions – mostly in Westminster Abbey; I was allowed to
‘act as butler’, so to speak, at private lunch or supper parties
for many prominent men and women; I had the heady delight of being first
taken to the Classical World by Eric, who knew and felt it all so deeply;
and I also had the privilege of perhaps educating him a little, in keeping
him up to date with many modernisms. It was a particular joy for me to
be able to take so many Christ’s Hospital boys and Wellingtonians
to meet him. These encounters were always moving, and marked particularly
by great interest and growing respect on both sides. I am sure they helped
to keep Eric young at heart and equally gave the boys a real experience
of vision and depth. But Eric and I never really discussed ‘Religion’
or ‘Theology’ except incidentally, and certainly not his work.
It was not like that. Over the past week I have been very conscious that
my bereavement – which is still real and painful – is very
much that of a son grieving for the most true, most viable father-figure
he has ever had. And I believe it to be the case that for Eric, I perhaps
became the nearest thing to being the son he never had – albeit
a problematic and difficult one! Certainly I was very close to him, and
particularly so after his premature departure through ill health from
the Abbey in 1974 to begin his long, painful exile of retirement.
I must mention Lincoln. Of course, I didn’t know Eric when he was
here, but I did have first-hand experience of its importance to him. When,
after what he regarded as an almost indecently short period as Warden
of Keble, he was urged in 1961 by Harold MacMillan to accept the Deanery
of Westminster, he travelled ‘home’ to Lincoln to consider
his response. At his request, I came over from Huddersfield where I was
a curate at the Parish Church, and stayed with him at the White Hart here
for two days. Perhaps there was never any real doubt about what his decision
would be, but I think he needed somehow to be in this beloved and significant
place to make it. Ill health had forced him earlier to refuse the Bishopric
of Lincoln, and to opt for the academic world, but now the answer to the
call back into the mainstream Ministry of the Established Church was best
arrived at here, and my real involvement made me realise, as never before,
that I was the privileged participant in a very special relationship.
So, from that position, what can I most helpfully say today? Much has
already be splendidly and truly said already – there has been speculation.
I would like to try to say something positive about Eric’s ill health
and his last days, which I witnessed and indeed experienced at very close
hand. I do this not in any way to be morbid but to suggest that a great
man, whose spirituality did not seem sometimes at all contemporary, came
nonetheless to and, I believe, through, a highly contemporary crisis of
faith and being. And was this crisis perhaps subconsciously anticipated
by Eric himself as a boy? He ended a ‘sermon’ composed at
the age of eleven, “…We must win in the struggle with Self
and Ease….one of the best ways is to be a missionary and in that
occupation live and work till health forbids you to go on longer in the
work of converting the world.”
In 1974 the anonymous author of the Preface to Crockford wrote in the
section called “Retiring Deans”, “Dr. Abbott retired
from Westminster at the beginning of 1974, after a remarkable ministry
carried on courageously and effectively in spite of grave ill health…”.
The fact is that Eric’s ill health had become an important and significant
part of his life and ministry – not least because of the way he
bore it and indeed transformed it into a real asset and blessing so that
Michael Marshall, then Bishop of Woolwich, could describe it as the thing
which above all else made Eric so accessible pastorally and so empathetic
towards the vulnerabilities of others. And yet he never complained and
he certainly never played on his weakness. In fact, he relentlessly drove
himself on through it with increasingly adverse effects to himself so
that visits to intensive care units became more and more frequent.
When I first met him, he had already had (in 1952) his first major coronary.
I reckon that before his final illness there were some eight coronary
and four cerebral incidents of varying degrees of seriousness We went
to Greece on holiday in 1963 and were delayed by storms at Athens Airport
on the way back, arriving at Heathrow at 3.00 in the morning. Eric found
on his return to the Deanery 1100 personal letters awaiting his attention.
He went to bed for three hours and got up to begin dealing with them.
I went off to visit friends and feeling anxious, rang at lunchtime to
find he had been taken to the Westminster suffering from his first ‘stroke’.
A later one left him effectively with a blocked carotid artery, but fortunately
the clots were in the brain stem and his mental capacities were unimpaired.
But the weakness to his right side was established and particularly the
lameness which worried him so much on big ceremonial occasions in the
Abbey in front of TV cameras; lameness which could not be wholly hidden
under the copes and the discreet use of his verger Algy’s shoulder
as he ascended the steps of the Sacrarium. He confided to his doctor that
he was always especially nervous of walking up the Abbey aisle with someone
like Archbishop Michael Ramsey, who never steered a very straight course!
But, not only did he not end up in a heap on television, I remember the
BBC commentator at Princess Anne’s wedding speaking of the “fine
figure of the Dean of Westminster”. Indeed it was astonishing how
he maintained a truly strong physical presence at that time – astonishing
really that he was able to carry on with the burden at all. He left the
medical side to his doctors, whom he trusted completely. He obeyed them
in everything except instructions to ease up, and got on with the work.
His wit sparkled as ever and his wisdom continued unabated to comfort
and reassure and build up. Of course, the ‘cover up’ fooled
no-one, but it was essential, not just for him but for others as well.
I believe there was no deep ‘psychology’ involved, just a
profoundly natural intuitive response to his vocation and the needs of
others. In any case, it was the result that mattered, and that was wonderfully
positive and creative. But a terrible price was to be paid.
Eric retired from the Deanery in 1974 at the age of sixty-seven and
the acquisition of his flat in Vincent Square kept him still very much
at the centre of things. He remained a Westminster figure, and the fact
that a generous friend enabled him to keep his beloved little country
cottage meant that he was able to live for a time a relatively busy life
as guide, philosopher and friend and, of course, prolific correspondent
and devotee of the cottage garden. As he assiduously dead-headed the roses,
he would sometimes almost wistfully say, “She (i.e Salome) was offered
half a kingdom, but all she wanted was a dead head.” He ‘gave
in’ to his lameness to the extent of effecting a walking stick which
became a potent symbol of defiance – a real extension of his personality.
In the small flat and with the devoted help of Zillah Hislop, who ‘did’,
and some lady cooks who kept the freezer stocked, he was able to manage
without a housekeeper and to entertain in something of the old style.
He also perfected the art of ‘lying doggo’ when he was not
actually working and ‘giving out’.
But illness would not be denied. It slowly but inexorably tightened
its grip. He was in the I.T.U. at the Westminster Hospital in December
1980 and another heart ‘do’ followed in November 1981. After
that he went on to convalesce in Malvern, but was soon admitted to a coronary
care unit in Worcester As soon as my term ended he demanded to return
to London, and despite the fact that the long, hard winter had started
and the only passable route through the snow was via the centre of Birmingham
and the M1, we ‘unplugged’ him and set off – just the
two of us - by car. The feeling amongst the doctor in the hospital at
Worcester was that he wanted to go home to die, and I am sure that never
having been a driver, he had no idea of the folly of attempting the journey.
However, we made it, and he did not die. His “poor old body”,
as he felt it to be, was so resilient, but he did spend that Christmas
in the I.T.U. at the Westminster and on Christmas Day itself the doctors
could not get his pulse rate below 150 all day. He survived that and was
delighted when Bob Runcie called to spend a private hour with him just
before going abroad a few days later. He was equally moved by a visit
from Princess Margaret and from other dear, close friends shortly afterwards
when he was back at Vincent Square. But by now it was obvious that he
could not stay there on his own. There was much ‘angsting’,
and when the offer of a lovely flat in a Friends of the Elderly Home at
Haslemere came up, it could not be turned down. But…Eric was very
uneasy about the move from the first. Having a cottage in the country
was fine, but living there, something else. The fact is that we should
somehow have kept him in London. Despite everyone’s great kindness
he felt “without a city wall”, and he could not in his debilitated
state cope with it. The truly staggering view only made the ‘imprisonment’
worse, for by now he could not get out and about and, of course, it was
so much more difficult for friends and others to get to see him there.
His angina (his father had died of it) got very bad and the somehow positive
‘lying doggo’ changed to sitting for hours on end with his
head in his hands, bearing the pain and enduring the fearful grimness
of the depression that descended like a terrible, almost Satanic vengeance.
It was terrible to witness and almost worse trying to help. I wrote to
various people who were greatly concerned, but apparently quite unable
to be of practical use. It was as though a spiritual director who, like
Eric, had functioned from, so to speak, a great height or even pedestal,
was not in a position to be himself ministered to. It was quite frightening.
Some friends in the renewal movement wanted to provide ‘healing’;
Eric politely but firmly resisted that. A nice Freudian analyst who lived
locally went to see him; Eric politely but firmly rejected her! He did
accept some anti-depressant drugs prescribed by his doctor, but they seemed
to do little. He read and obviously approved of, but did not comment upon,
a little booklet on Depression by Gonville Ffrench-Beytagh. He became
very frail and woebegone. It was impossible really to know what was going
on inside, and certainly Eric never wanted to talk about his mental or
spiritual state – he simply suffered it. Once, after I had been
away on a potentially hazardous trip, Eric did vouchsafe that all he had
been able to do by way of ‘praying’ during my absence was
to recite children’s hymns. But at least he did that, and his Office
Book was always by him. The course of the depression was relentless and
unremitting, and further collapse and hospitalisation early in 1983 presaged
the end.
After he died, someone sent me a piece written by the ‘Liberation
Theologian’, Daniel Berrigan. To those of us who loved Eric and
just a little suffered the depression with him, it made sublime sense
and tells, I am sure, how it was with him at that time. Berrigan says:
“Suffering often takes the most personally humiliating and opaque
character. It incapacitates a man from the very good which was the cause
of his greatness in the first place. He can no longer act with that spontaneity
and clarity which had so won others. He is now thrown upon the mercy of
others, a burden to himself. He cannot explain why or how he suffers;
even though once he could reveal, winningly and joyfully, why life took
the shape it did, why it was right and fitting that it did so. The scandal
of such suffering, suffering that plucks the tongue from the head and
the voice from the heart! even to the point that others are scandalised
and bewildered. They had concluded over the years that whatever came to
pass this man would never cease to be their oracle; the years would only
confer on him a clearer, more communicable wisdom. But to be reduced to
a deaf mute?
Cui bono? (To what advantage is it?) Man does not suffer that a world
may be won; he does not suffer, even, that the will of God may be accomplished.
He is, in fact, in the deepest suffering, evacuated of all real purpose
at all. He is not suffering ‘in order that’. His anguish does
not allow him to be carried beyond the fact of suffering. And this is
true so that the truth of suffering, its value as a sign, may shine forth.
But only for the few who are ready to read such a sign. Achievements,
great moments, visible accomplishments, have always about them so much
danger of distraction, egoism, ambiguity. But the sufferer who believes
and takes his stand, not precisely on his suffering, nor on the quality
of his faith, nor on the ‘good’ he is doing, nor on the response
of his friends, but on Christ alone …. which is to say, on the living
truth of things – this man, perhaps for the first time, has become
a true sign. He is the sign of the cross. There is quite possibly no other
in the world today.”
I could end there and it would be, in one sense, a wonderful place to
do so. But it would not be true. I cannot see how Eric came through but
I know he did, and I can only thank God.
On his 77th birthday, 26th May 1983, I took Eric to his cottage after
a pub lunch. Despite the fact that the little house felt rather neglected
and bleak, and the angina was bad, we had a good day and after a supper
of fresh prawns and strawberries he tucked himself happily into bed. The
following morning he went back to Haslemere with a bad cold, which worsened
and was accompanied by what St. Paul would perhaps have called “faintings
more frequent”. A doctor said that the supply of oxygen to his brain
was impaired and, having had short shrift indeed from Eric when he, like
everyone else, admired the view from the flat, sent him into the Royal
Surrey at Guildford.
The fact is that as soon as he got to the hospital, and despite all
the tests and traumas, the terrible mantle of depression lifted never
to return. Perhaps Eric felt he was truly back amongst people and in the
real world again. He was certainly always greatly at home with, and loved
and accepted by, medical folk – because, I think, of his respect
for and acceptance of them and their profession, and which he did not
attempt to understand or question. Perhaps, too, he knew he was going
to die. The previous night he had said he thought he was at that point,
and asked me to stay with him. But he did not then ‘pop off’,
to use one of his favourite euphemisms; and indeed the next morning did
not remember having mentioned it. Anyway, the ‘dark night’
seemed to have been endured, and all through the last seven days in the
Royal Surrey ‘flags of dawn’ appeared.
At first, he rallied and the doctors were full of hope, but quite of
what I never discovered. There is a point where ‘recovery’
is a highly ambiguous term. A further ‘crisis’ took Eric into
a state where he fluctuated between a conscious relating to the world
around and his own inner awareness and working. On two separate days,
he thought he was first in Cheltenham and then Loughborough for a conference,
but in between he asked me who had won the Derby and had I seen it. I
was delighted to be able to tell him the name of the winner, and also
that I had sneaked out of the I.T.U. to listen to it on the car radio!
The Hospital Chaplain came and offered to bring him Communion. Eric
thanked him but also apologised and said he did not “feel up to
it”. That was , I think, a very significant remark and I believe
he had reached the point where “Sacraments shall cease”. The
Chaplain said some prayers and I think he and I were astounded at the
end by the sheer force of Eric’s “Amen”. (It was the
following night that I found in the I.T.U. relatives’ room the only
(coverless) book which was Elizabeth Basset’s Anthology, “Love
Is My Meaning” which contained the ‘Amen’
passage which I read at Eric’s Memorial Service in Westminster
Abbey.
The following morning I was summoned early to the hospital. I arrived
to be told that they had had to resuscitate Eric ten times in two hours
with electric shocks. The Registrar said how frightening it must have
been for him as he was conscious all the time, but how brave he was. Later
that day Eric wanted to get up. I told him he couldn’t. “Why
not?” he said, and I told him he wasn’t strong enough. “I
am, I am”, he said. “Well, Eric, you are probably strong enough
but your body is not. “It is, it is”, he said – but
rather less surely. At that, I swallowed hard and forced myself to say
that of course he could go anywhere, but he would have to leave his body
behind as well as the bed After some reflection he said, “I would
like to do that.”
I stayed at the hospital from then on and could only really try prayerfully
to help him on. But what more could I ask or want, after his great loving
care for me?
The following morning, Eric was very uncomfortable with all the apparatus,
and after a consultation the doctors decided to ‘let him go’.
It was actually a great relief to see all the paraphernalia of masks and
drips taken out and especially the electric shock machine.
Eric simply moved further and further away. He spent three hours just
like a child playing on the seashore with sand or something. He could
still be reached, and when the Sister asked him, he declared himself to
be very peaceful and very happy. After that he became more abstracted
and seemed intent only upon his body and need to push it away like sloughing
off a worn-out skin. But, paradoxically, there was at the same time the
feeling of coming to terms – of acceptance.
For the last hour, all activity ceased. He was peacefully curled up
like a child or as he slept on better days at the cottage, and the phenomenal
heart of flesh finally packed it in at 1.55am on Monday 6th June 1983.
I am sure that all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side, and
I believe that the echo of them is still there to be picked up now. There
may well have been in Eric’s illness and darkness much of what Martin
Israel (who Eric prepared for Ordination) would call, “necessary
suffering in the growth of the person”, but I am sure, too, that
his innate, basic, self-sacrificial, disciplined spirituality got him
there in the end, albeit battered and bruised. And I received only last
week a card from a holy lady which finished, “I was feeling particularly
low last week, but was much comforted by a visit from the invisible Eric”.
So the work goes on.
AMEN
Reading
All sit for the Reverend John Robson
to read from
The Compassion of God and the Passion of Christ
by Eric Abbott.
To God be the glory for ever and ever: Amen.” Let us then live, speak,
work and pray, “to the greater glory of God”, “ad
majorem Dei gloriam”. This will afford us the same motive as Christ
our Lord had. This will direct all our work to an end beyond ourselves.
This will afford us a worthy ambition – the glory of God and the Kingdom
of God. It will also strengthen us when life seems to lack purpose, to
lose its cogency. “Ad majorem Dei gloriam” will also lift us out of our
self-centredness, to look beyond our own glory to God’s. It will give
us a simple and salutary form of self-examination – “where is the glory
I am seeking, in the things I do and say?” It will help us to see that
we are instruments only in the hand of
our Lord; to realise that we enjoy being used; but “not unto us, not unto
us, but unto thy name give the praise”.
Then let us add to the glory that we seek to give to God, the very important
word “Amen”. “To him be the glory: Amen”. “Amen” is our saying Yes to
God’s will. “This,” says God, “is what must be”; and we say “Amen”. “Amen”
is what Christ’s Mother said at the Annunciation. “Amen” is what all the
saints have said to the demands our Lord has made upon them. “Amen” is
what every Christian man and woman must say in accepting their particular
vocation. “Amen” is what we say when things are hard but inevitable. It
is not false passivity, it is active acceptance of God’s will. Try to
say “Amen” to those things in your life which are clearly the will of
God. Try not to say “Amen” to things which should not be accepted.
“Amen” is the last word to be spoken. Therefore in speaking it, we shall
try to finish our work, finish the tasks that God has given us to do,
believing that he will not summon us away from this world until we have
had our chance to show him at least a token of what we would do for him
perfectly, if only we could.
Then we realise that our life and our work can never be quite tidily
finished. But this is only to say that the final “Amen” to our lives which
alone can make them good, can only be spoken by God; by God who spoke
the “Amen” to his beloved Son’s life on earth, raised him from the dead,
and then by the Holy Spirit’s power made his life and his death endlessly
fruitful for good, until the end of time.
When we come to the end, therefore, let us commend our spirits to God
our Creator and Redeemer in faith, believing that he who raised Jesus
from the dead will be able to take what we have done for him, whether
explicitly or implicitly, and will gather it into his Kingdom, to be in
that Kingdom that particular enrichment of the Kingdom’s glory which our
particular life had to contribute.
For there is something which only you
can bring into the Kingdom of God.
Therefore let us live this life to the greater
glory of God, say our “Amen” when the end comes, and trust that Almighty
God from his side will forgive us, will accept us in his beloved Son,
and will himself pronounce upon our little life his own “Amen”.