Just a quick note from Ed on behalf of the family. We were so humbled by the wonderful turnout for dad’s funeral. We all agree that it was a wonderful service and a triumphantly fitting send-off for Stanley. Thank you to all who made it possible. Here, as promised, is the Eulogy for Stanley, written by Rev. Rod Prince. We are forever indebted to him.
How does a disciple bid a fitting farewell to his guru? By following the instructions of his teacher – so, Briefly! Say, if you must what you must, don’t dither! (dithering was a cardinal sin in Stanley’s book) and sit down. In fact, to quote one of Stanley’s oft used acronyms JFDI!
I am not going to give a biography – “you can Google that later” was an interjection from Stanley when it was more important to stick to the theme. As one tribute said “Very few distinguish themselves in more than one field. Some occasionally in two but rarely in three or four”. Stanley was a man of many talents. He was a brilliant academic, a Professor of Anatomy, the author of standard texts in his field, a gifted musician. He was a Fellow of the Royal College of Organists, an exceptional communicator, an inspiring mentor, a firm friend and dedicated pastor.
Stanley sought for others what he quested for himself – fullness of life which he firmly believed was impossible without a spirituality nourished by great art, music, architecture, literature, inspiring liturgy and seemly worship. In one of his comments on “Thinking Anglicans” a blog to which he often contributed, he wrote “I have spent a lifetime nurturing adolescents and young adults, provoking them to think, freeing them to set the world alight in their chosen field. So, it appalls me that some church people use their positions of trust and influence to stifle, to repress, and to maim, rather than to liberate to life abundant. Jesus came to abolish religion. This so affects me that I weep as I type”. Stanley was keen to drill into all the newly ordained that Jesus came to abolish religion. He was clear that a priest’s calling is always first to the divine and only then, a long way behind, to the institution.
It has been remarked that Stanley pricked pomposity. He didn’t, he detonated it wherever he found it. Status, rank, title – as a number of bishops discovered – and wealth accorded no advantage or protection in Stanley’s eyes. Everyone was equally of interest and equally interesting. Central to his calling as a priest was the responsibility of the ordained to “Comfort the disturbed and to disturb the comfortable”. Unfairly, he was more recognised for the latter activity than the former, yet I want share with you part of another tribute to Stan. The writer said” Memories of him are plentiful but the one that remains strongest does not come from his intellectual or academic brilliance, both of which were considerable, but of a passing moment when he was not even aware that he was being observed. Walking down the corridor of a hospital ward, I caught a glimpse of him beside a bed in one of the bays. He was knelt on the floor with his back toward me. The patient in the bed was very ill and he did not drain the patient’s strength by trying to talk to them, instead he just knelt there holding the person’s hand. Once, sometime later, I spoke to him of it. He dismissed it as nothing, as simply a passing whim, but however he might have downplayed the moment, it was something of profound significance. One does not kneel on the floor of a busy hospital ward, with people coming and going, and hold the hand of a person without that moment being imbued with significance. Jesus would have understood that moment. Jesus would have understood the importance of taking someone by the hand.” That said, of course, he was especially gifted at disturbing the comfortable. He took a funeral of a wealthy man in what is considered to be a wealthy parish. There were many “Nice” – the word was damming in Stan’s eyes – people present. Fixing them with his gimlet stare he said “One day we will all end up in a box and looking out it won’t be long for some of you”. They loved it. One elderly gentleman said to Stan that he would have attended church more often if more sermons had been like that. Stanley blamed the poor communication skills of priests for the syndrome of congregations leaving their brains in the porch. If stimulating thought meant abrading the sensitivities especially of Middle Englanders then Stanley deemed it a small price to be paid. In a sermon at Wirksworth he said that as a former Professor of Anatomy he was fascinated to know the biological processes in operation in the uterus of the Blessed Virgin Mary at the moment of the conception of Our Lord. I think we still have a bottle of smelling salts in a cupboard in the back of church against future eventualities. His theological discussion evenings on a range of themes at Wirksworth and in his later parishes were enthusiastically attended even by several declared agnostics and atheists. You were never given “the official line” or a stock answer by Stanley; all questions were welcome and usually met with a question that encouraged you to explore possible solutions for yourself. Through his blog “Rambling Rector” Stanley’s original approach to theology became known well beyond his parishes. The topics were many and various and he gained a wide following for his blog. I am delighted that the family have undertaken to ensure that it does not disappear from general access. Indeed, his blog brought him to the attention of no lesser trade publication than the Church Times who interviewed him for their back-page interview entitled “Stanley Monkhouse, anatomist, vicar, and musician” – “you can Google that later”. The last question of the interview was always “Who would you like to be shut up in a church with?” His response was classic Stanley. “I wouldn’t choose to be locked in a church with Jesus. He’d never give a straight answer, and he’d be saying to me, as he said to his mates, “Good grief, haven’t you got it yet?” I’ll go for the Dalai Lama and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. Eugene Peterson‘s The Message is fantastic; so perhaps he could join us.” Even in my short time in the Church, even shorter after this eulogy, I have come to realise that there are few things that the Church – embracing all denominations – can be relied upon to do well. One decision the Diocese of Derby got right was to appoint Stanley as a Deputy Director of Ordinands. Stan’s experience in academia nurturing young people was a blessing to many on their path to ordination.
I have briefly touched on the subject of Stanley and his bishops. As I have no plans whatsoever for a career in the church, here goes! Stanley’s bishop in Ireland once remarked that “Every diocese should have a Stanley” note the singular. Presumably thoughts of more than one Stanley per diocese occasioned episcopal visions of ecclesiastical meltdown. I have sometimes daydreamed on what a diocese with Stanley as a bishop would have been like. I find it difficult to know whether to laugh or cry as the scenario develops before me. Rest assured, it would not have been bland. Smelling salts in Church House would certainly have been an essential fixture. Surprisingly, in general, Stanley had respect for the bishops under whom he served unless or until they gave him cause to think otherwise. If you, as a bishop, received regular emails from him, you had his respect. Well, discretion and an instinctive drive for self-preservation bids me stop here on that subject.
Stanley did not do sentimentality, least of all in matters of faith. Always in his target sights was the notion of God as the Sky Pixie who existed solely to hear our shopping list of self-centred prayers and to grant our selfish whims. He firmly believed that the path to the divine required the sacrifice of ego. For him, the agony of Our Lord in the Garden of Gethsemane was a pivotal instruction on the Christian life.
The past was the past with Stanley. As I said, he was not a sentimentalist – a realist certainly – but true to his belief in the achievement of fullness of life was that the past should not be allowed to burden the present. “Eternal life is a state of mind and eternal life is now” He said. One story illustrates this view well. Stanley became the Director of Music for a church in Ireland. It’s previous and much-loved director had died. Several people had tried unsuccessfully to take on the role but the choir were stuck in the past. Enter Stanley. On arriving at a practice, the choir were taken aback to see that the picture of their beloved former director had been turned to the wall. When they had all assembled, Stanley looked up from his music and said “He is dead. It is time to move on”. Hard though it is, brothers and sisters, I believe that is also Stanley’s message to us today.
Stanley loved his family beyond measure and above all else. He never recovered from the catastrophe of the death of Hugh, his elder son, eight years ago. Susan, Ed and Victoria – you were his rock, his strength, his first love. To see Stanley with you and Shane was to see him in the fullness of life, shamelessly witty, hugely funny, truly happy and gloriously outrageous. He loved you deeply.
There was only one area on which Stanley and I differed – it was on the issue of everlasting life. Stanley was to put it mildly, sceptical – he strongly disliked what he saw as a popular notion that attendance at church was an exercise in the accumulation of sky pixie points guaranteeing a seat in the club class of everlasting life. I took a more optimistic view. Just this once, please God, let Stanley be wrong!
Rambling Rector Retired 
Ed, Thank you so much for posting this eulogy, which really captures the essence of your father, as I knew him through the messages we exchanged (thank you also to Marcus De Brun for such a fascinating reminiscence). Thank you also for your kind response on the previous post.
If the child is indeed the father of the man, I have wondered whether your father’s upbringing in Langwathby – a village ‘republic’ with a strong dissenting tradition – inoculated him for life against all forms of toadying, tuft hunting and deference. I sense that he viewed all hierarchies as barely tolerable and beheld them with a quizzical, if not sceptical, eye. In our exchanges it seems that he was as candid about hierarchies in the Church, NHS, universities or armed forces as he was of any other bureaucratic structure, and he taught me that all of these institutions give preference to insiders over outsiders, to their own survival over their own purpose (rather, the interests of the insiders become the purpose), and to their own balance sheets to the exclusion of almost everything else. It was this striking independence and dislike of being ‘bought’ that made him, amongst many other attributes, so admirable and loveable.
He also taught me a greater acceptance of things as they are. The miracle of life is life itself; that our sense of wonder should be informed chiefly by what we see (he had, as many will know, a deep aesthetic sense, and a massive knowledge of architecture); the ‘numinous’ is important chiefly in amplifying the effects of what we can see already. He had also, if you will forgive me, a great acceptance of death as a continuum of life, and of death as a form of disaggregation which is followed by successive reaggregations (and also of life as a form of continuous disaggregation and reaggregation as cells die and are replaced). Your father had so much to teach, and I had still so much to learn from him.
I very much hope that things improve for you and your family from day to day.
Thank you so much, and very best wishes!
Thank you Ed for sharing Rev Prince’s memories of Stanley. He clearly understood your father very well. Anyone who understood Stanley could not help but love him dearly, in a timeless sort of way. He was my Professor at RCSI and I am one of the many (or possibly the few) students who recognised his genius and his modest greatness. When I wrote to him I would often tease him and call him ‘Father Stan’. In my last email to him I said I would write to the Vicar of Rome and ask if, (in exceptional cases), Church of England pastors might be nominated for sainthood? I am certain that equally scurrilous rogues have been beatified a thousand times over.
During the past couple of years I enjoyed the consummate pleasure of talking with him and numerous emails wherein we discussed things under the stars and beyond. He helped me cope with the flak I took from colleagues in respect of my being critical of Covid policies here in Ireland. In fact I reached out to him in the midst of my own travails and he was there for me. Stanley had much to say on the Irish Medical system. In respect of Covid he wrote and often said “we would have been far better off if we had done nothing at all”. Stanley was a man of Science, he knew his biology better than most of his peers.
I have some knowledge of the joy that disciples must feel when they are fortunate enough to stand in the shadow of greatness. Stanley’s friendship; having his respect, consuming his kindness and beautiful words, and sometimes even his own self effacing fear, was something of an ego trip for me. To be respected by a great man is more of an achievement than reams of soft paper that might be issued from any noble institution.
I’m not so sure that Stanley would have disagreed so much on the issue of everlasting life. He often disagreed purely as a sign of affection. I suspect he was a little like Voltaire in that he would have insisted, if we wish to engage in discourse, we must first ‘define our terms’. In my own experience arguments either fall apart or fall together, if and when terms are properly defined. Stanley had an honest love of the Church, he believed in it as the guiding light for humanity and hence he remained brutally critical of it.
Everlasting time might well be defined as a single timeless moment? Stanley loved descriptions that were expansive and inclusive of the little, ostensibly distasteful details, that we like to exclude for the sake of propriety and decorum. He loved descriptions that ended with a question mark. Did Jesus have sexual relations with Magdalene? Did the Son of God use the bathroom? How did the embryonic life of Christ evolve? When did the missing 23 chromosomes appear in the picture or in the womb? These were the types of questions that Stanley loved to rub our noses in. Nietzsche would have loved each and all of his sermons, perhaps revising his own infamous notion that ‘the last Christian died on the cross’?
For Stanley, the pieces of Christ’s life that are generally excluded or withheld from the ‘Christian fable’ (Stanley’s words not mine) for the sake of decency or censorship, represent the other side of the same coin. Stanley might even insist that there is enough important detail and fact concealed within the unspoken side of the story, to form a more evolved and grounded type of religion entirely.
Of course there was a defined purpose to his antagonisms of established doctrine. Christ was a man with a biology, a man who kicked tables over in the church. Apparently he had enjoyed relations with a prostitute, one who almost invariably makes an appearance in most solemn depictions of the Crucifixion. Stanley was Magdalene’s greatest advocate, and he had no reservations when it came to turning over tables in the temple.
Personally I don’t think he really harboured doubts in respect of everlasting life. If he did, they were no different to Christ’s own pleas from the cross. I think as a scientist and as a theologian he was fully behind some broad and inclusive version of eternity and of the soul’s part within that eternity. The details? he would have defined them in vague terms; or perhaps refused to define them at all. Without definition eternal life remains open to all and sundry. Stanley would have insisted that if he makes it to heaven, then it follows that everyone else will be there too.
I recall the moment that I fell into Platonic love with my Professor of Anatomy. It was during an embryology lecture (embryology was his favourite) when he suggested that: “there is as much evidence to contradict the Theory of Evolution, as there is to support it.” I had studied Science in California, and again at Trinity before attending RCSI, and it was the very first time I encountered such Scientific blasphemy, delivered with a smooth and cavalier aplomb. Stanley then proceeded to list a number of examples that contradict the ‘theory’. I’m not suggesting that he did not believe in evolution, the thing that he disbelieved in, was absolute certainty on pretty much anything. For Stanley, the paradigm of science is always shifting. He would be the first to insist that the future will consider us as ‘primitive’, in precisely the same manner that we assign the pejorative to the past.
Outside of the existence of God and Love, ‘absolute certainty’ for Stanley (and for any good scientist) is the only primitivism he would have us eschew. Stanley might be gone, however his presence in this world, (in my world at least), was so strong that I can clearly see and hear him now; smiling, laughing and denying almost everything I have just written in respect of him.
Whether he believed in eternal life or not, he lives on in my mind and my heart, and he will be with me until I am no more. In fact, he has just told me to stop being so maudlin, to go out into the world and have some fun, as it is indeed a beautiful day!
As we couldn’t be at the service we’re so grateful to have the eulogy to enjoy and prompt thoughts about your father and our memories of him, thank you.
Thank you for sharing Ed. Indeed a lovely farewell and a beautifully written and delivered eulogy. xo