It is a rare person who possesses such an indomitable spirit and yet offends almost no one. But John Hughes was this rare person – without ambition, but able to assume with radiant humility any elevation; as innocent as a child and yet as wise as an ancient sage; full of fun and yet attuned to sorrow; able to polemicise, yet also to offer wise counsel. In debate, like no other, he knew how not to alienate while avoiding vacuity. In his sermons (several of which have or will be collected in print) he knew how to delight as well as to instruct. In his life as in his work, he managed to interweave gentleness with an optimum pitch of boldness and exactitude – and in such a way that these attributes combine as one.
As John Dryden described Henry Purcell, who died when he was just one year older and equally in the full flood of his creativity, John Hughes was a “matchless man.” It is now up to those who knew him to ask him and all the saints to assist us in dealing with this new lack in our lives. We can envisage this lack as being like guilt, since John had a strong New Testament and Patristic sense that sin and death are bound up with one another – are indeed in the end but one abyss.
Therefore we can apply his words in his Lear essay on the recognition of guilt also to the recognition of lack: “Properly, the recognition that the judge may be as guilty as the thief can be understood, not as universal innocence, but as the universal need for forgiveness and transformation.” We are all both lacking and guilty, but beyond this negative diagnosis of much secular existential and social critique, and consequent illusions as to either “natural” innocence or incurable anxiety and ferocity, lies the faith that alone allows us to build each other up once more.
This was the Christian Socialist vision of John Hughes. May he rest in peace and rise in glory.