Dear People, Neighbours, and Friends of St. Thomas’s,
I love the 1993 film Six Degrees of Separation, after the play of the same name by John Guare. (Will Smith, Donald Sutherland, Stockard Channing, Ian McKellen—what’s not to like?) I won’t get into any movie spoilers here. But the title has come to mind frequently over the past several days. It really does seem at times that we are only separated by (at most) six degrees, and this past week I have been living at the intersection of multiple social worlds.
The most recent round began with the death of Her Late Majesty and an invitation to join a parishioner for prayer in the Chapel Royal at Massey College. My parishioner was preparing to fly to England to report on the obsequies. He was presented with ceremonial pouches of tobacco as gifts for His Majesty from representatives of certain First Nations tribes. My parishioner was charged with conveying these gifts to the Domestic Chaplain to the Sovereign and Sub-Dean of the Chapel Royal at St. James’s Palace. (For those of you keeping score, that’s four degrees of separation.)
On Thursday night, a colleague and I attended a choral evensong at Christ’s Church Cathedral in Hamilton, Ontario. The preacher was the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. I remembered then that when the Summer Olympics was held in London in 2012, much was made of the amusing “entrance” of the Queen at the opening ceremonies. What surprised me was that Rowan Williams was sitting directly behind Her Majesty. A decade ago, as I was even more of an ignorant Yankee Episcopalian than I am now, I remarked on this to a friend who was a priest in the Church of England. He patiently explained to me that the Archbishop of Canterbury, so long as he is in office, ranks first in precedence among the peers of the realm after the members of the Royal Family. (So that’s two degrees of separation.)
While it’s fun to play the six degrees of separation game in reference to famous people (hence, the popular parlour game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon), I find that it’s infinitely more powerful when one discovers real-life connections that hold the potential of forging new relationships.
Case in point: While I was waiting at the Chapel Royal at Massey College, I was with a friend I met well over twenty years ago in Annapolis, Maryland. He had just introduced me to a grad student visiting from Oxford University, when along came another St. T’s parishioner. It turns out my parishioner and the Oxford student have known each other since childhood, having grown up together at the same church! As we conversed, the grad student mentioned a book that changed his life, the author of which just happens to have been in my freshman class in college, so I put them in touch via email later that day.
In the car to Hamilton, my colleague and I discovered that we both knew a former parishioner of mine in New England, whose stepson was a high school classmate of my wife. When we arrived in Hamilton, I greeted a brother of the Oratory of the Good Shepherd who has been that same former parishioner’s next-door neighbour for decades. And it went on and on like this. At that evensong, I met people in real life whom I’ve known for years only through Facebook.
We are all so connected. We often forget just how connected to each other we really are. This was particularly true when many of us felt so isolated over the past couple of years. The challenge, of course, is to go beyond mere connection, beyond the level of the parlour game, and to forge ever-deepening relationships with each other, both near and far.
While it’s always fun to make such connections, that’s only the starting point. We must want to be known and to know others in all their (and our) complexity if we are to continue to stretch and grow and learn. Communities flourish when they are outward-facing, always forging new connections that deepen over time into meaningful relationships. After all, in the Church, there’s only one degree of separation between any two people and our Saviour.
Yours in Christ’s service,
Fr. Nathan J.A. Humphrey
VIII Rector