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Notes on the Dedicated Life   Herbert Kelly    by Michael Maasdorp ssm

He was born in 1860, third son of an Anglican parish priest in Lancashire, England. He was apparently excessively shy as a boy, even though he was the third son in a large family. As his writings make plain, he suffered all his life from a sense of his own inadequacy.

In 1877 he left the Manchester Grammar School and entered the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, destined for a career in the artillery. The early onset of deafness convinced him that he would not make a good officer. He resigned his commission in 1880 immediately after completing his training.

Kelly did not shine academically as an ordinand at Queen's College, Oxford. He was ordained in 1884. His first post was curate (assistant priest) in the village of Leeds, near Maidstone, in the English county of Kent.

In 1890 Kelly offered himself to the new Anglican Bishop of Korea, Charles Corfe. The Bishop had thought that the best way to begin work in Korea was to bring in a band of dedicated people, unpaid and unmarried. He asked Kelly to train them.

In those days, Anglican clergy in England were relatively well-paid. They usually qualified for ordination by completing a university degree. As a result, they mostly came from wealthy professional and landed families. Ordinary people generally could not afford to send their offspring to university.

Kelly decided to "make the men choose themselves" because he thought it wrong that anyone should be excluded from the opportunity to serve in Korea.

A house in London was rented for what was at first called the Korean Missionary Brotherhood. There were to be no servants, other than a cook. He wrote, 

Cooking takes too much time ... but at least we should scrub our own floors and doorsteps, wash up our own meals, and sweep our own passages. If we come to serve and not to be served, we might as well face it.

The first three students arrived on January 1, 1891. Two years later in 1892 the name was changed to the Society of the Sacred Mission. In 1893, Kelly and two others became "novices" - in preparation for a later full commitment to service in the mission field.

More and more young students applied for training as the years went by. But it had become plain that they wanted to train for the Anglican ministry, not necessarily for missionary service in Korea. As a result, a move was made from London to a Tudor manor house in Mildenhall, Suffolk, in 1897.

Growth in demand for training did not stop. Very soon it became necessary to make another move, this time to a large house in the village of Kelham, near Nottingham.

In 1910, as the Society grew and changed its nature, Kelly stepped down from his office as Director. He held no position of authority in the Society again. Others made of his start a bigger enterprise. As Kelly himself put it:

So many of us have purposes. We build barns to hold the products; I have built a few myself. There are other people of real capacity who know how to fill them, which is a much more important and difficult business. [1]

Why did Kelly use the image of a barn? I for one can't help supposing that he had in mind the parable of Luke 12.16-21 - perhaps reflecting how quickly his work had been taken up by others. For a while, and no doubt wisely, Kelly removed himself from the quickly growing theological college which Kelham soon became. 

His interest in the ecumenical movement  involved him in the Student Christian Movement. He was a delegate to the pivotal World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910. There followed a visit to the United States in1912. Kelly then responded to an invitation to visit Japan, where he lived from 1913 to 1919 - a time he described as the happiest of his life.

By 1920 Kelly's deafness had become a significant handicap. He returned to Kelham - by now a fast-growing community and theological college. There he began lecturing in philosophy, dogmatics and church history, a role he continued in until well past his 70th birthday.

If personal direction can be typified by a single quote, perhaps this one summarises most clearly a primary focus of his life. In 1927, while living at Kelham, Kelly wrote:

... as I remember saying [in connection with F D Maurice's reverence for authority], "It is a guide to thinking, not a substitute for it. Faith ... is a faith in God, not in doctrines. In the end, you will have to find what the doctrines mean to you."

Over the years, Kelly wrote a number of books. An Idea In the Working contained his thoughts on education and the religious life. The Church and Religious Unity in 1913 reviewed the ecumenical movement, its problems and possible directions. A "memoir of Father Kelly" entitled The Gospel of God followed in 1928. His last theological book, Catholicity, came off the press in 1932. No Pious Person, a collection of autobiographical recollections, was published by the Society posthumously in 1960.

All through these years, Kelly continued to write articles and conduct retreats. His final lecture was delivered in 1945, his 85th year.

Kelly's deafness in later years made talking to him difficult. He kept on writing to the last, although increasing frailness kept him to his room for most of the time. He died in 1950.

Kelly's writing is not easy to decipher. He did not have the gift of plain expression. Perhaps his writing reflects his thought processes. He was, however, occasionally crystal clear as this passage from The Gospel of God illustrates. About the journey beyond ourselves, as he puts it, Kelly writes:

... your soul, every soul, must make its own journey ... There is, as I imagine it, a Dialogue of the Soul, with God, more or less common to all mankind, as it cries out in the dark ...

"Lord, why have you made me thus?"
And there is an answer given to all - "Beloved, I made you for myself."

"But why am I in the dark and in confusion?"
"Beloved, you are in the dark and in confusion, because you are seeking for light and wisdom in yourself. You will not find them there."

"But why cannot I know what you are doing?"
"Because that is part of a whole universe of meaning, and you cannot know universes. You want to be a God - a Lord of the world - when you are only a little self and my child."

"But would you have me placid and content?"
"I made you for hope, desire, effort, progress, in order that you might learn. I would have you content with nothing; for content[ment], placidity, quietism, indifference, are the substance of death - except one content[ment], and that is beatitude, content to be small, content to be my child."

"Can I do nothing?"
You can do a great many things; then you will help others. And a great many things you cannot do; then others will have to help you, though you will not like it."

"What can I do? How am I to know?"
"That I shall not tell you. You must use your own judgement, make your own mistakes, and go on trying. You will fail at a lot of things, and that you will like still less."

"How can I find God?"
"Beloved, you cannot find me, but I have found you."

"If I cannot find God, how can I come to love him?"
"Love is not a thing you do or come to. It comes to, overcomes, you ..."

Kelly sometimes describes himself as "mid-Victorian". We in the 21st century may need to put aside his century-old language. We seldom think of "rotters" or "good chaps". We don't often exclaim, "Hang it all!" when we are exasperated. But Kelly's basic brilliance nevertheless shines through the dated language he inevitably uses.

Kelly's perception of the "ultimate" wasn't necessarily popular, either in his time or to those he lived with. The latter were, after all, busy doing, and doing, and doing. As he stood by, hearing little but seeing much, Kelly seems to have come to this conclusion:

No answer can be found in our idealisms; for they are our own. No answer can be found in anti-idealism; for that is a despair of all answers. The answer cannot be something which comes from, and is thereby an expression of, ourselves. It must be something which comes to us; a Gospel which is preached to us, and preached to all.

I doubt that when Kelly talked of preaching he meant the sort of preaching one finds in religious and political pulpits. I think he meant pigs. The following illustrates:

A very dear old Father visited us from America, and I said to him: "Come, and I will show you my proofs of the existence of God" ... Then I showed him our pigs ... and the good Father looked puzzled. "Oh, yes," I replied, "if I had showed you stars, flowers, a sunset you would have said, 'Ah! how true!'

As Kelly perceived it, the answers lie not in grand demonstrations and subtle argument but in "funny absurdities" like pigs, absurdities which force us to ask questions. He adds:

Intellectually, truth is never a thing you come to - not by fifty-five years at thirty-three universities. Yet it is always coming to you ... Certainly by no religious effort can I come to God ...

Unfortunately for Kelly, the institution of Kelham Theological College, the new college in Australia, and many brothers in Africa and Japan were engaged precisely in framing answers. While they did, and did, and did, Kelly thought, and thought, and thought. I have never had the sense that more than a few came to terms with his radical stance. Those that realised what he was talking about tended to leave the Society.

In contrast, Kelly lived out his idea of faithfulness and stayed to the end. If the enduring charism of the Society can be summarised, it is probably in the word "sacrifice". However Kelly changed over the years, and however much the Society as a whole moderated its early enthusiasm, that lifestyle remained central to his vision of God.
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[1] The Gospel of God, 1928

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