Ten Years On
Stratford Caldecott, the co-founder of Second Spring, died of cancer 10 years ago on the 17th July.
In the run-up to his 10th anniversary, some of his friends and collaborators are sharing short “letters” to Strat here in Second Spring Current. You can learn more about Strat here, read his widow’s longer Letter here, and buy his books from us (supporting the family directly) here.
“We used to talk about how cool it would be if you could send postcards from Heaven. Hi, wish you were here, this place is everything it’s cracked up to be and more…” He may not be able to write back to us from The Other Side, but perhaps the messages back come in other forms, like seeds he planted through his conversations with us or his work flowering unexpectedly in a new season—whispered reminders to move further up and further in.
{To scroll through the Letters, click and drag or wait for the auto-rotate. To pause the auto-rotate, hover your cursor on it.}
Dear Strat,
Ten years on, it’s remarkable how you continue to be part of our lives – in a friendship that began four decades ago when we first met you and Léonie in Boston. How often we pick up a book or a journal article because we remember that you liked it or wrestled with it. How often we reflect that, but for your friendship and influence, we would have spent untold years wandering in search of our spiritual home.
You introduced us to John Henry Newman on his home turf, in Oxford, Littlemore, and St Aloysius. We fell in love with Newman through you. We followed you as you explored the riches of the Christian mystical tradition. Though we admired Tolkien and Lewis before we knew you, you gave us a more vivid relationship with them; you drew us closer to Tolkien’s secret fire. We cherish our connection to Second Spring – the combined genius of your family, wedding faith and culture.
We’re struck by the symmetry in our friendship with you and Léonie. Like Strat and Léonie, Phil and Carol have been collaborators in work as well as faith and life. Now you are in heaven, while the rest of us carry on here below – but the symmetry is unbroken.
We’re reminded of what C. S. Lewis said to Sr. Penelope on the loss of Charles Williams: “Death has done nothing to my idea of him, but he has done – oh, I can’t say what – to my idea of death. It has made the next world much more real and palpable.” To which we add, dear Strat, that you have also made this world more unclouded. For we believe you are fulfilling your Thérèse-inspired resolve – to spend your heaven doing good on earth.
With love and prayers,
Phil and Carol Zaleski
Dear Strat,
A great deal has happened in the world since you left us 10 years ago. No doubt from your celestial perch you comprehend this better than those of us still here trying to find our way through difficult times.
But can you also see into our hearts? After all, the great events of human history find their ultimate source in the movements of the heart. Perhaps it is the special prerogative of friends in heaven to perceive our inner lives so that they can pray for us more effectively.
Our friendship, which lasted many years, had an utterly unique quality very much bound up with our shared faith. Of course, I have many friendships founded on a shared faith. But it was the quality of your faith that marked our friendship in a special way.
Some people do have a very close connection with heaven during their lives on earth. It seemed to me that this was so of you. Spiritual transcendence seemed perfectly normal during our conversations, even when we spoke of the most trivial things. You conveyed in the very manner of your being that our world is caught in an updraft of grace, a grace so kind, so gentle and so accommodating that God’s infinite love seemed both very near and very natural.
My tears at your funeral were bitter, but your gracious presence has remained. If you can see into our hearts, I take comfort from the thought, for I know that your prayers for me will be most efficacious indeed.
In everlasting friendship,
Jonathan Rowland
Dear Strat,
It seems barely possible that ten years have elapsed since you left us. Sometimes I ask myself the question: ‘What would Strat think?’ of the travails of our modern life.
I remember that you said to me several times: ‘The real problem is the accursed Enlightenment.’ At the time I did not understand, but you were very right. Like Chesterton you had little interest in conventional politics, but instead looked very deeply at society and its underlying values. Like Pope Benedict, you realized that the ‘modern project’ dated back to the Enlightenment, rejecting the idea of humanity as created beings, part of a supernatural order and subject to an innate moral law. Rousseau and Voltaire instead replaced this with the doctrine of the unlimited human will being able to do absolutely what it wants; aiming for heaven was replaced by building heaven on earth – through politics. The result was hell on earth; Hitler, Stalin, the modern ‘right’ to abortion or euthanasia.
I will highlight your preserving the Chesterton Library, originally built up by Aidan Mackey. I remember that you often juggled several jobs at a time to try and make ends meet. I often begged you to drop things like the Library, arguing that with such limited resources, you had to be more focused. ‘I know,’ you said, ‘but there are so many things I have to do.’ You realized that Chesterton was a store of wisdom, and that this needed to be safeguarded for the future.
Russell Sparkes
Dear Strat,
I wanted you to know how your Christianity and Society class and your gentle introduction of GK Chesterton to me made a profound mark in my life. As I sat with you in your small Plater College office that summer afternoon discussing ‘distributism’ in 2000, I was struck that indeed, I had discovered a gem and a purpose in life and that was when I decided to return home and found the Sierra Leone Chesterton Center (SLCC).
You feel very much alive to me, because of the seeds you sowed in me: your mentorship, your introduction to GKC’s distributist ideas and the Catholic Social Teachings I received from you are perhaps the best lessons I learned from Oxford and they are bearing fruits. Our work is making a real difference in the lives of women and youth in one of Sierra Leone’s poorest districts. We are also just about to launch the first Chesterton Academy school in Africa.
Thank you, Strat!
Your friend,
John Kanu
Dear Strat,
I write this to you ten years after you were taken from us – taken up. But then you were always ahead. Taken up through the Cross, not the easy way. You were already on the way when I met you – me, anxious over my book project. Two scholars, hunched pensively over the chocolate biscuits I brought. I think we ate the lot, feasting unashamed…but then we were discussing the heavens. “Looks fine to me,” you said. I left, grateful and reassured. Your and your family’s smiles, knowing you were on the way, seeing luminously the coming dark, undenying the pain, cherishing the sparks of little good things.
I wonder what you see now. Were you surprised, when you’d seen ahead? Perhaps you are surprised that it’s more beautiful, more various, than you imagined, eucatastrophic in the dark of falling trees, the bright heavens’ clearing. Rest well dear friend, your time is coming as closed systems grow tired and fail. Grace is catching us up with you, infinitely.
Love and prayers,
Dominic White, o.p.
[Dear Strat,
I remember when we] met at a G.K.C. conference in London; we had all gone to Mass at Westminster Cathedral and we chanced to emerge together and chatted. We sat on one of the benches in the space outside the cathedral, and I was immediately aware of an air of GOODNESS in [you] –[you], of course, had no inkling of that in himself. [Your] knowledge and intelligence were also clear to me.
Now comes the humiliating part: Whilst admiring [you] and hoping that we would have more discussions I had one reservation; I thought that [you] would not be very effectual in propagating our [Chestertonian] beliefs! My reason was that [you] spoke with a quiet and unassuming voice, quite without bombast or authority, whereas what I was good at (I have no use for false modesty, so I will declare myself to be extremely good at it) was running up and down and bellowing. That someone like me should imagine –the word thought would be quite out of place– that Stratford Caldecott was ineffectual still causes me to wake in the middle of the night blushing with shame….
Several years later [you] visited me and was impressed by the collection of G.K. material I had built, and when I told [you] that I wanted to find a more suitable home for it than my sitting room, he arranged for a place at Plater College, Oxford, and when that college changed character [you] lodged it in [your] own offices in Jericho and, later, in The Oratory. Later we had a meeting of trustees to consider the future, and that led to the new, splendid site in the N.D. campus in London.
I am now 100 years decrepit and in less than flourishing health, so you must forgive my errors. Your family are all in my prayer, my gratitude, and my admiration, and I would be grateful to be in yours.
Blessings,
Ancient Aidan [Mackey]
† 4 May 2024
Dear Strat,
I’ve been gazing at a photo – taken circa 1990 – of two young Catholic literary couples. It’s more or less a mirror image: the two couples with our not-yet-complete complement of children. Getting to know you meant so much to us – and being separated by an ocean for most of our adult lives was a genuine heart-ache, so much did we take away from the soul-communion we always felt with you both.
When we gazed into the mirror of your family – and your theological/cultural vision for renewal – we were better able to bear the kind of sacrifices and self-doubts that attend all true quixotic/redemptive enterprises. We had such respect for the way you, like us, haunted the edges of academia while knowing that the real work is often done outside of academia. We know better than most how hard that life is, but we never heard a complaint from you.
As for me personally, there was so much I wanted to talk to you about, Strat. I wanted to spar with you about aesthetics, and try to convince you there was more of value in the modern era than you might realize. But I also wanted to learn from you – I always learned from you – about so much, including the richness of the Islamic tradition (knowledge we desperately need these days).
I think all four of us – committed as we were, to conserving the traditions of Church and society – had mixed feelings about the downsides of the soi-disant traditionalists. We knew this was our community of origin but we wanted to fight against the tendency to reductive ideologies and gnostic moralism among our compatriots.
Strat, your vision was truly a magnificent exemplum of Catholic Humanism – without sacrificing anything essential, your mind and heart were more capacious than many have yet to realize. Like the Pope, you, too, were a Pontifex Maximus, a bridge-builder. You inspire us still. We miss you with an almost unseemly ferocity. Pray for us.
Yours,
Greg (& Suzanne) Wolfe
Dear Stratford,
Ten years already! That is long enough for new governments and wars, and for new problems and joys in the Catholic Church that you so loved, but it is nowhere near long enough to erase the memories. I can easily picture you explaining what you are working on – this project, and this article, but also that collaboration, and so many other things. What would they be now? I can barely imagine today’s mix of innovative theology, Goethe’s science, ecology, publishing, economics, liturgy, New Age, classical and post-classical education, science fiction, Chesterton… You were always surprising me.
I often think of one of our last conversations before you were very ill. You were so excited about the potential of print-on-demand. You explained how it could change publishing for the better, for you and for the world. I was not exactly surprised, since you had never been far from the written word in almost all of your ventures. But still, your ability to see what was good about new technology without compromising your ability to see what was wrong with the technologies of the modern world was always a delight. Now, I wonder what you would say to AI, or to space tourism, or – on the other side – the enthusiasm for the Latin Mass. I would not presume to guess. You were always surprising me.
One thing that I have learned over the last decade – but this was not a surprise – I would never see the likes of you again. No one can come close to combining your spirit of Christian curiosity, your breadth of knowledge, your mystical awareness of the world, your unfailing love as husband, father, brother, and friend, and your gentle support of any promising stranger who came to see you. I was, of course, one of those, years ago!
Edward Hadas
Dear Strat,
I know in faith that you are alive with God, that your communion with us, with the whole “Church militant,” continues unbroken. I believe in the communion of saints!
I still mourn, though. Nor am I alone in my grief, as you well know. Time may dull the pain, but it can’t heal the wound. Nor should it.
On that first July 17th, I knew—or felt—that God had been present.
And so I understood that your passing, though incomprehensible, was anything but
trivial. It was a theological mystery, and its significance transcended the universe.
Your absence among us is the shadow-outline of your presence with God.
Adrian Walker
