For nearly seven years, I worked at the Church of England’s Council for Christian Unity, as part of the staff of the Archbishops’ Council. Much of the time, I felt more ordinary in my occupation as a priest than I have before or since: I commuted to London Monday to Friday in suit and tie, sat at my desk in the open-plan office, organized meetings, drafted documents, managed staff. But sometimes, I got to do rather extraordinary things. Like helping to organize the bringing to England in 2016 of a fragment of bone from the arm of Thomas Becket, kept in Esztergom in Hungary.
The Hungarian Embassy, which was responsible for this event, wanted some help in liaising with the Church of England, with a view to including some of its most prominent churches in the itinerary of this precious relic. Somehow, the request had ended up on my desk. And so I came to be sitting behind the table for a press conference alongside the Hungarian ambassador and a couple of other highly distinguished figures. I don’t recall that I actually said very much, if anything.
What I do remember, however, is the sheer incredulity of one of the journalists present that anyone could still take seriously the veneration of relics. He spoke with profound contempt of the ignorance of former ages, and with evident pride in an enlightenment that began with the Protestant Reformation to wean us off such childish things. Back in the office, I was aware that my justification of time spent on this endeavor as promoting Anglican-Roman Catholic relations across European boundaries was perceived with a certain level of suspicion. One senior individual in particular was very forthright about the utterly un-Anglican nature of any involvement in giving honor to the body parts of supposed holy people. After all, the Church of England’s Articles of Religion were clear enough:
The Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping and Adoration, as well of Images as of Relics, and also Invocation of Saints, is a fond thing, vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God.
Before I went to work at the Council for Christian Unity, I’d taught theology to students preparing for ministry, and in classes on the origins of the Christian year I’d grown used to shocking my charges by defending what became the cult of the saints. I would remind them of how, already in the second century, the Roman authorities sometimes sought to erase any trace of the bodies of Christian martyrs, so they could not serve as a focus for continuing devotion. Practices of marking the place where their bodies were kept began very early, animated by a twofold defiance: defiance of the imperial assertion of might to crush the confession of faith in Jesus, and the deeper defiance of death, the last enemy of all, by faith in the resurrection of the body in union with him.
Thomas Becket stood in a jagged line of continuity with these formative Christian traditions. He too was remembered as a martyr whom kingly authority had wanted to silence, not just once, with Henry II, in a moment of frustrated impetuosity, but twice, when Henry VIII gave orders for the disappearance of his body, never to be found, and the erasure of his name from the Church of England’s liturgy. The preservation of a few small pieces of his mortal remains, like the one in Esztergom, might be seen as the continuing vitality of such defiance of imperial claims to final authority, fired by the same belief in the good news of resurrection. Which is not to deny the ambivalence of assertions about the shared heritage of “Christian Europe” that hung about the relic’s progress across southeast England.
It ended, fittingly enough, at Canterbury Cathedral, the site of Thomas’s murder on December 29, 1170. I lived not far away and so decided to close this rather strange chapter in my time at the Council for Christian Unity by taking part in the procession that would escort the relic from the chapel at Harbledown to the crypt of the cathedral, where following a short ceremony it would be made available for devotion. I quickly realized that I was perhaps the only non-Catholic joining the walk, and that for everyone else there was a sense of sharing in a familiar spiritual practice, and of the passing but deep community that comes from that. I was both stranger and guest, and I was moved by what I saw.
Becket was clearly a complex figure, and the meaning of his life and his death remains contested. Anglicans take different views on how we relate here and now to the reality of the communion of saints that we profess in the creed. For most, however, devotion to relics of the saints remains an alien spiritual practice. Yet as we celebrate the mystery of the Word made flesh, we remember God’s embrace of us in the wholeness of our humanity, redeemed by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Our hope is that, at the last, all the fragments will be gathered up, beyond the un-creating dominion of sin and the unthinkable abyss of death. And we know that this mystery means too that for every human person, there remains the possibility of a turning toward the light, an embrace in return of the way of Christ, costly as it is, life-giving as it truly is. When may the moment come for us when, like Thomas Becket, we see that cost, and know that life?
In the Church of England, despite the furious determination of Henry VIII to erase his memory, we pray today:
Lord God, who gave grace to your servant Thomas Becket to put aside all earthly fear and be faithful even to death: grant that we, disregarding worldly esteem, may fight all wrong, uphold your rule, and serve you to our life’s end; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
