It is increasingly said today that the Anglican Communion is a global Christian church whose identity can no longer be restricted to a broadly Western, or more narrowly English, patrimony. Despite this claim, there is little if any attempt to gather together in a central location the narratives of Anglicans living in diverse locales, past or present. This series aims to change that by reviewing global, provincial, and regional histories, biographies of major global figures, and locally-situated theological and devotional writings. As a series dedicated to Anglicanism’s global character, it should be noted from the outset that the narratives of Western Anglicans are prized neither more nor less than the narratives of non-Western or Southern Anglicans. Many of the writings reviewed here will be recent, although some will be much older (indeed, out of print). It is trusted that Anglicanism will emerge, over the course of these reviews, neither as a Communion animated by incompatible theological and devotional trends, nor as a Communion that is the mere product of the now-defunct British Empire, but as a coherent tradition, locally rooted and expressed, and united by the deep bonds of Common Prayer, shared witness, and liturgically articulated memory.


[Click here to read Part One of this series, which looks at the Melanesian martyrs of 2003.]



Trevor Huddleston: Turbulent Priest
Piers McGrandle
Continuum (2005)
xiv + 226pp.
b/w photographs
isbn: 0826476503

Trevor Huddleston was one of the heroes of Anglicanism in the mid-20th century. It may be true that Anglican theology went into occlusion after the Second Vatican Council and the wider ecumenical movement, but it is equally true that a number of Anglicanism’s finest and most memorable figures arose during this same time period. As a monk, a bishop on three different continents and, most importantly, a tireless opponent of apartheid, Trevor Huddleston was one such figure. In Trevor Huddleston: Turbulent Priest, Piers McGrandle has given us a fine biography of this late saint that neither revels in Huddleston’s glories nor wallows in his failures. Rather, he appears as a fiery English monk in the Community of the Resurrection – and, therefore, both an Anglo-Catholic and a Socialist, with no sense of contradiction between the two – who was driven by a deep love of people. These pages, like Huddleston’s own life, are defined by alternating dynamics between the sacramental and biblical, the episcopal and political, orchestrating in McGrandle’s hands a read as moving and powerful as it is humbling and, at points, heartbreaking.

McGrandle begins his book by writing that Huddleston “mistrusted biographies” due to an experience in 1973 with the journalist Joe Rogaly who, Huddleston once wrote, “just could not grasp at all the underlying Christian motivation of my life” (ix). Rather than risking a repeat of Rogaly’s failure (whether real or imagined), Huddleston’s beliefs and motivations are front and center in McGrandle’s volume. The reason for this, however, is due in large part to his own frustration with the fact that “Trevor means nothing to people of my generation; he is as relevant to them as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the three-day week.” The purpose of this biography, therefore, is “to show them [i.e., McGrandle’s generation] why he matters and why he should be remembered” (x). It is noteworthy that McGrandle repeatedly refers to Huddleston by his first name; the effect is one of an almost overwhelming sense of intimacy, born by a boyish admiration for a genuine hero. Yet, this is no mere hagiography, for Huddleston is apprehended here as a thoroughly believable, broken saint who sustained and was in turn sustained by a coherent, magnanimous vision bound up with his own monastic vocation. Even if Huddleston is not the patron saint for our times, his witness certainly joins that of the wider litany of saints for every time – including our own.

Huddleston’s real importance was as a tireless opponent of apartheid in South Africa. He knew the young Desmond Tutu well before Tutu entered the priesthood, and he later became friends with Nelson Mandela. The first seven chapters of the book cover Huddleston’s life through the time of his ordination and early novitiate. Before moving to describe Huddleston’s time in South Africa, McGrandle discusses the longer history of the Community of the Resurrection presence there, which began in 1903. “Right from the outset”, he writes, “the Community supported the rights of blacks” and trained, over the course of the next twenty years, more than thirty South African men as clergy for the Anglican church there (47). Huddleston’s strident support for the oppressed Africans was not without precedent. His mode of support, however, left much to be desired.

Within weeks of having arrived in Sophiatown in 1943, he clashed with South African Archbishop Geoffrey Clayton, who saw the pervasive racism in South Africa as a tremendous problem, but unlike Huddleston was an advocate of gradual, rather than sudden, change. McGrandle writes that “it would be easy to place Trevor in a heroic light, casting the young cleric as a reckless rebel fighting the forces of a foetid conservatism”, but instead proposes that Huddleston “could not have begun to understand the delicate complexities of senior ecclesiastical office in South Africa” (62 – 3). The clash of viewpoints between these two men, both of whom clearly loved South Africa and cared deeply for its oppressed, is portrayed as the result of Huddleston’s brash, youthful idealism. Continued tension between the monk and the archbishop, along with Huddleston’s own political affiliation with various activist groups, eventually resulted in him being recalled to England in 1955. In McGrandle’s words, “The decision all but destroyed him” (93).

Like Huddleston’s superior Raymond Raynes, and like Huddleston himself later realized, McGrandle is clear that by this point in time Huddleston had become obsessed with his mission, and begun to put it before his primary calling as a priest. The chapter on Huddleston’s recall is one of the longest in the book; in it the spiritual oversight exercised by Raynes towards Huddleston is presented in a memorable fashion. Raynes’ refusal to let the church in South Africa be led by Huddleston’s charismatic personality was clearly a difficult decision, but it also highlights the ways in which “tough love” is sometimes the only viable form for love to take.

The second half of the book follows Huddleston’s ministry between the two poles that defined his life after his initial return to England. On the one hand was his influential book Naught for Your Comfort, which detailed his work in South Africa and the horrific segregation there; it made him an international figure and also put him in touch with civil rights leaders elsewhere in the world. Juxtaposed with this, however, is the fact that Huddleston longed more than anything to be back in South Africa. Instead, he became a bishop in Masasi in Tanzania, and then returned again to England to be the bishop of Stepney; his final episcopal appointment came when he was elected the Archbishop of Province of the Indian Ocean, after his appointment as bishop Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. He had a highly effective ministry in both places, and was described by one of his former priests there as “the father of the modern Church in Mauritius” (171). Huddleston returned to South Africa in 1991, after the release of Nelson Mandela, to much applause and warm welcome. He hoped to die in South Africa, but instead spent his last few years in Mirfield, where he passed away in 1998, shortly after Easter.

Desmond Tutu, the former Anglican Primate of South Africa, provides the Foreword for this book; Rowan Williams, the current Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, provides its afterword. In between these two tributes is a record of the life and work of a man who is everything that a late-modern saint should be: a union of flesh and spirit, blood and tears, nobility and failure. McGrandle is a notable biographer, and I have no doubt that his book will indeed bring Huddleston’s life and witness to a new generation.

[Click here to read Part Three of this series, which focuses on H. B. Dehqani-Tafti’s autobiographical The Unfolding Design of My World, and details his life as a Muslim-turned-Anglican bishop and Primate during and after the Iranian revolution.]