8 January 1936 – 21 March 2024

By Eamon Duffy

25 April 2024, Memorial Mass at St. George’s Cathedral, Southwark

FR DAVID STANDLEY, who died aged 88 in St Peter’s Residence in Vauxhall, London on 21 March, never held high office in the Church but was one of the finest and most inspiring priests of his generation. Educated at Wimbledon College and Downing College Cambridge, where he read law, he was trained and ordained at the Venerabile in Rome, and returned to England in 1968, working first as chaplain to Guy’s Hospital, and from 1970 as assistant to Richard Incledon at Fisher House, the Cambridge University Catholic chaplaincy.

The honeymoon years after the Second Vatican Council were a time of religious ferment, hope and experiment, and they shaped Standley’s tastes and priestly style. He would always prefer ceramic cups to jewelled chalices, tie-dye fabric and unbleached linen to brocade and starched solemnity. It was no surprise when he developed an enthusiasm for circle dancing, or that, when he became involved with l’Arche, one resident would appositely christen him “David Sandals”.

Temperamentally cautious and judicious, he was a man who weighed ideas carefully, who pondered: friends joked that he saw 27 sides to every question. But under the measured caution was a resolute obedience to what he discerned as the demands of the Gospel. In the last terrifying years of the Cold War he was stirred by the example of the Jesuit anti-war activist Daniel Berrigan, and by Berrigan’s inspiration, Dorothy Day: that led in the 1980s to his involvement in Catholic Peace Action, and, despite the disapproval of his archbishop, Michael Bowen, in the antinuclear demonstrations organised by Pax Christi. He was arrested on Ash Wednesday 1988, after daubing the walls of the Ministry of Defence with a cross of ashes.

Characteristically, before that arrest, he preached a sermon gently explaining to his far-from-radical Bexley Heath parishioners why, precisely as a priest, he felt driven to non-violent but unlawful protest. His six-year posting to the Isle of Sheppey from 1991 was seen by some as punitive exile but he embraced the opportunity to immerse himself in ministry in the three prisons in his parish: prison ministry would remain a commitment, even in retirement.

In 1976, while chaplain at Kent University, David first became involved with l’Arche, in whose houses people with and without learning difficulties live together on terms of equality. For the rest of his life the spontaneity and mutual support of l’Arche expressed for him the spirit of the gospels. He went to see for himself l’Arche’s work in India in 1979, and when he left Kent in 1984, he took a sabbatical to live and work as an assistant in one of the homes of l’Arche London.

Perhaps in contrast to his own tendency to overthink things, he relished the unexpectedness and fun he found in l’Arche, like the resident with cerebral palsy who livened an Ash Wednesday liturgy by carefully ashing David, the celebrant, in a long black streak down the full length of his nose. He treasured, while puzzling over, the judgement of one l’Arche resident that “I like David, I do, he’s handicapped on both sides”. One of the last events he attended was a l’Arche celebration of his 88th birthday, when, microphone in hand, he led the exuberant singing of “Soon, and very soon, we are going to see the king”.

L’Arche has been described as a school of attentive presence to other people, and for David that was the key to priesthood. Advising another priest who was new to l’Arche he told him: “Focus on what you receive, don’t try to control.” He recoiled from any association of priesthood with power or status, disliked concelebration, and avoided the annual chrism masses, because serried ranks of vested priests would process into the cathedral in what he thought was a glaring icon of male exclusivity. In each of his parishes he facilitated lay involvement, initiative and leadership. He was a remarkable confessor – wise, compassionate, non-coercive – and he was a committed ecumenist, keen to befriend and cooperate with colleagues from other Churches, respectful and appreciative of their ministries.

DAVID NEVER found celibacy easy, and believed strongly that priests should be allowed to marry. Women friends were important to him, and there were times when the strains imposed on both parties by such friendship made him question his vocation. Yet it seemed to friends that celibacy intensified his remarkable sensitivity to other people and gave him a depth and edge that he might have lacked in a more conventionally contented existence. He once said that when he presided at Mass, pronouncing the words “This is my body … given up for you” carried a very personal resonance. Above everything else, David was a priest for other people. He kept all the Christmas cards he received in a box by his bed through the year. Each night he would take the top card from the pile and spend a while thinking and praying about the sender: then he put the card back at the bottom of the pile. The same care went into the often whimsical individualised greetings cards that he crafted for friends by cutting pictures out of papers and magazines, pasting them carefully to cards trimmed exactly to size, with an appropriate personal inscription.

Retirement in 2011 from Battersea, his last parish, gave him more time for l’Arche, and to share with friends the love of music, art and books that fed the sense of reverence and wonder underlying his gentle and humane ministry. But although no longer in harness, his priesthood remained central. In lockdown he began weekly zoomed Masses, which continued on a weekday evening after lockdown ended and remained hugely important for the very diverse circle of those who shared them. He was always a man of prayer, nourished by his friendship with the Benedictine nuns of Minster, where he led annual retreats for people with learning difficulties, and his long involvement in the Jesus Caritas fraternity of priests.

IN 2018 he was diagnosed with bowel cancer, a condition whose indignities he bore with wry humour, and he used the subsequent years of remission to good effect, organising a book club, taking friends and l’Arche assistants to exhibitions and concerts; fascinated by the 2023 Marina Abramovic retrospective at the Royal Academy, he made repeated visits, and was memorably photographed passing through its mysterious illuminated portal.

Though his illness progressed more rapidly than he had hoped after his move to St Peter’s, he embraced the process without fear, even with curiosity: to one visitor he said: “I wonder what God is saying to me through this cancer: I wouldn’t want to miss it,” and he often recalled a story about a man at a talk of Dan Berrigan’s who’d said: “I’m dying”, to which Berrigan replied: “How exciting!” David said he didn’t find talk about heaven helpful – it seemed insufficiently centred on God and Christ, too knowledgeable about what can’t be known. He now found that prayer, and faith, though no easier, had become simpler. He’d stopped worrying, he said, about the big questions, increasingly resting in the one conviction that love was the heart of the mystery of God, and of our human existence. Love was in charge, so all would be well. He was much taken with a phrase from a poem by D.H. Lawrence, “dipped in God, and newcreated”: it’s what he hoped awaited us all.

Friends streamed to see him in his last weeks in St Peter’s: there, in his patient acceptance of his growing weakness, his tranquil trust in God’s love, in his affection for those who cared for or came to see him, in his desire to live every stage of what he called “the last stretch home”, he gave us the final gift of his priesthood. He showed us how to die.

—

Eamon Duffy is emeritus professor of the history of Christianity at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow and former president of Magdalene College.

Published in the Tablet, 25 April 2024

By Roger Hearing

To most of you here today, David was FATHER. To us, his family, of course, father is the one thing David wasn’t. A much-loved brother, son, uncle, a great-uncle too – the person whose choice of birthday card or Christmas present could be counted on to surprise; the card, or, often, the postcard coming with an observation, or a question – David was always keen to challenge, in the kindest way possible, our too-comfortable thoughts.

It’s hard to sum up a life so various, so full, but in the same way a family photo album holds instances, images, moments by which we remember a person, I’d like to pull out a few of our moments.

The four-year-old in wartime Worcester Park who’d done his first day at school, having to be dragged bodily back on day two – he had BEEN to school, he protested. He’d done all the learning that was necessary.

The stubborn lad who would take some pleasure insisting, to his older sister’s fury, that the weapon deployed against German bombers was an AUNTY aircraft gun

Much later – the lithe young, unreasonably cool Cambridge chaplain, enjoying a late sixties summer-of-love punting party on the river, falling in… and being unnecessarily rescued by… just about everyone.

The running, dodging protest priest determined to make it across the narrow lawn surrounding the Ministry of Defence to scrawl a cross on its concrete walls and make a point about nuclear weapons, as well as striving not to injure the policeman who rather gently rugby tackled him

The semi-retired gentleman who, confronted by the huge spiral slide at Tate Modern, decided it was not just for children, and came whizzing down, with a broad smile and a sense of perverse achievement

David could find the joy in almost anything. What echoes to me is his phrase – hands open and wide, when something really pleased him and fitted his ideal of the simple and the good –  “Lovely, lovely” I hope, I suspect – somewhere he is saying that now.