# In Memoriam: Hugh McKinley

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> Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Ismael Velasco, In Memoriam: Hugh McKinley, bahai-library.com.
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> 
> OJBS: Online Journal of Bahá‟í Studies                                      Volume 1 (2007), 462-468
> URL: http://www.ojbs.org                                                            ISSN 1177-8547
> 
> In Memoriam: Hugh McKinley1
> 
> Ismael Velasco
> Tenerife, Spain, Independent Scholar
> 
> Upon his thirteenth birthday, Hugh McKinley‟s mother devised a means to
> test empirically her knowledge of astrology: she cast a detailed and
> elaborate chart made up of arcane symbols, crescent moons and star-sign
> emblems, derived from the single fact of her son‟s birth in Oxford, England,
> at precisely 1:55 am Greenwich Meridian time, on the 18th of February,
> 1924. He weighed a full eight and a half pounds. A series of epigrammatic
> prognostications followed, predicting year by year Hugh McKinley‟s future
> till his 58th birthday, set down concisely in a small red notebook titled in
> neat script:
> 
> Natal and Progressed Horoscopes.
> Hugh McKinley
> cast by his mother
> DATE: 1935
> 
> Thereafter at year‟s end, till her own very last, she faithfully inscribed below
> her divinations an equally brief survey of the most notable among his life‟s
> actual happenings. This allowed her - and us - to compare life‟s vicissitudes
> to the omens and augurations of the stars.
> 
> The portents intimated to Violet McKinley, mother, lifelong companion and
> co-sharer in the spiritual knighthood of her only son, that there awaited him
> an eventful and on the whole a trying life, with many episodes of illness,
> with accidents and financial misfortunes or stress, and two or three
> catastrophic years, punctuated by fewer years of spiritual abundance,
> deepening friendships and domestic happiness. While year by year the
> predictions varied in their accuracy from the startlingly correct to the
> humorously off course, the anticipated pattern proved itself on the whole
> accurate, and Hugh McKinley‟s life was indeed marked by an undertone of
> hardship, by serious accidents and periodic bouts of ill-health, by troubled
> relationships and consoling friendships, by financial stringencies and ever
> burgeoning spirituality. His years of ease, over his seven decades and four,
> were less than those of challenge, yet he was happy in the evening of his
> life, with a strong and loving marriage, a home in nature, and a spirit
> reconciled and peaceful, if ever active, ever struggling, ever visioning new
> possibilities and new friendships.
> 
> See also Olive McKinley, The Life of Hugh McKinley, Knight of Bahá‟u‟lláh, Solas, 2004, 4:59-71
> 
> OJBS:Online Journal of Bahá‟í Studies                 462                                     1 (2007), 462-468
> © 2007 XXXX
> 463       Ismael Velasco                                             In Memoriam: Hugh McKinley
> 
> Be that as it may, it was sometime after September 1923, when Violet was
> some half way through her pregnancy and David McKinley still engaged in
> his osteopath‟s practice, that an occasional visitor to the Oxford
> Theosophical Society placed in their hands a newly published copy of a
> book that revolutionised the labours of the Bahá‟í community for decades to
> come: John Esslemont‟s Bahá’u’lláh and the New Era. 2
> “One night at the Theosophical Society in Oxford, one of the 'friends', as
> they were then referred to (and I've only ever met one believer in England
> who knew him) was called Robert somebody. I don't know his name. But
> Alice Phillips, who was an isolated believer in the late 1940s down in
> Arundel, knew his name and had met him. He left mother and father a copy
> of Dr. Esslemont's book Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era.” 3
> 
> For the McKinleys, the book was a source of spiritual insomnia: “they sat
> up in bed all night and read that book from cover to cover.” When they
> turned the last page, the night had gone Dawn breaking, they turned to each
> other, and exclaimed: “This is it!”4
> 
> We have rather precise notions regarding the physiological development of
> the embryo in its different phases, but know next to nothing about the nature
> of its inner life while in the uterus. In this respect, if life after death is a
> mysterious subject, life before birth is only marginally less so. What is no
> longer in doubt after much investigation is that the embryo is highly
> susceptible to the mother‟s environmental influences, her state of mind, her
> moods, in short, the mother‟s consciousness and experiences. If this be so,
> then it may not be unreasonable to suggest that the experience of that night,
> profound, thrilling and fundamentally life-changing, full mid-way or more
> through her pregnancy, may well have had some impact on the child within
> her womb whose first, if vicarious encounter with the “spirit of faith” may
> perhaps be said to have taken place before his consciousness was able to
> register it.
> 
> Nothing is known of the man that so fortuituously changed their lives
> forever and sealed the future of their child, except his first name, but his
> modest and potentially inconsequential act would in the fulness of time
> prove to have been the means of raising two knights of Bahá‟u‟lláh, Violet
> and her son Hugh. As so often happens, apparently small acts may have
> large impacts in seeming disproportion to their genesis. It is not clear what,
> if any, other contribution “Robert somebody” made to the growth of the
> Bahá‟í community, but by one passing talk and the sharing of one book he
> changed a nation‟s destiny.
> 
> The book was published in Spetember of 1923, which allows us to trace this event to the autumn or
> winter of that year.
> Hugh McKinley, op.cit.
> Ibid.
> 
> OJBS:Online Journal of Bahá‟í Studies                463                                              1 (2007)
> © 2007 Ismael Velasco
> 464       Ismael Velasco                                                In Memoriam: Hugh McKinley
> 
> Hugh McKinley‟s path was neither smooth nor inevitable, and perhaps
> herein lies its luminosity. Most likely the spiritual honorific, Knight of
> Bahá‟u‟lláh, an accolade conferred by Shoghi Effendi upon those Bahá‟ís
> who like Hugh McKinley settled across the world as part of the first global
> plan for the expansion of the Bahá‟í Cause,5 will grow legendary with the
> rolling of the years. But, in Hugh McKinley‟s living witness, the glory
> behind the title lies not in a frozen tableau of beatific vision, nor a tale of
> morally unambiguous heroism (heroism seldom is), nor yet in an instructive
> story of triumph over adversity and success over vicissitudes. To outward
> seeming and to worldly eyes, indeed, the tale of Hugh McKinley was a tale
> of thwarted dreams, of unrealized potential, and recurrent penury. His old
> age was not that of a man reminiscing at his ease, but rather a constant, final
> struggle against illness and poverty; not contemplative rest but one final lap
> in a long distance race that demanded the impossible.
> 
> And yet, the morning of the 28th of May, 1992, found Hugh McKinley, a
> mere seven years before his death, within the precincts of a garden of
> unusual beauty, face to face with the harvest of his life. Seldom does a
> person see, in his lifetime, even a glimmer of the true significance of the
> actions and deeds performed in years and decades past, but to Hugh
> McKinley, on this occasion, was granted the sight. For anyone receptive to
> what Rudolf Otto called the “Idea of the Holy”6 the occasion would be
> fraught with significance. For a Bahá‟í for whom a sense of spirituality was
> the motivating force of life, the event, in a region four religions coincide in
> designating as the Holy Land, was positively numinous.7
> 
> Hugh McKinley stood that day with one hundred and twelve companions
> watching an illuminated scroll bearing his name and theirs being placed, for
> centuries to come, in a chamber at the entrance door of the inner sanctuary
> of the holiest Shrine of the Bahá‟í world, guarding the mortal remains of
> Bahá‟u‟lláh, Prophet-Founder of the Bahá‟í Faith - and the One for Whose
> sake Hugh McKinley had given up his career, his reputation, his worldly
> prosperity and, little by little, it may be considered, his life. The scroll was
> a Roll of Honour, registering for posterity the names of all the Knights of
> Bahá‟u‟lláh. This spiritual knighthood was intended “to signify their acts of
> daring and devotion as teachers of the Faith”,8 and bear witness that by their
> exploits they had “realized the actual establishment of the Cause of
> Bahá'u'lláh as a world religion.”9
> 
> A campaign known in Bahá‟í literature as the Ten Year Plan (1953-1963)
> Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy. Trans. John W. Harvey. London: Oxford University Press, 1948.
> An idea of the intensity of this innate spirituality may be gathered from a telling event in his youth,
> long, long before the day of his harvesting arrived. Having had a terrible motorcycle accident provoking a grave
> head injury that threw him into a comma with little hope of recovery, he abruptly came back to consciousness
> under his mother‟s prayers after many days in a vegetative state, pronouncing a single sentence as if from another
> realm drawn: “alláh‟u‟abhá”.
> The Universal House of Justice, May 29, 1992, Centenary Tribute to Baha'u'llah, p. 3
> Ibid.
> 
> OJBS:Online Journal of Bahá‟í Studies                   464                                                1 (2007)
> © 2007 Ismael Velasco
> 465       Ismael Velasco                                            In Memoriam: Hugh McKinley
> 
> The meaning of the scroll, the significance of the Bahá‟í knighthood
> bestowed upon him, Hugh McKinley heard expounded in an ardent
> supplication addressed on that day by the Universal House of Justice, the
> body entrusted with the guidance and direction of the world Bahá‟í
> community, to Bahá‟u‟lláh:
> 
> “This is both a symbol and a promise -- a symbol registering the reality of a
> clear response, at a critical time, to the duty laid upon us by the Lord of
> Hosts to diffuse His teachings among all peoples; a promise that the
> commitment so dazzlingly displayed by these intrepid pioneers will be
> reaffirmed by generations of their successors, ensuring that the light of
> Bahá'u'lláh's Revelation, "shining in all its power and glory, will have
> suffused and enveloped the entire planet."
> 
> “This is also a mark of recognition of the power of the Hand of
> Omnipotence to turn gnats into eagles. His bounties embolden us. Broken-
> winged birds are we; yet, with His assurances resounding in our souls, we
> soar to ever greater heights in His service. "I am the royal Falcon on the arm
> of the Almighty!" He declares, benevolently adding: "I unfold the drooping
> wings of every broken bird and start it on its flight."”10
> 
> In these words - which Hugh McKinley heard read out before the assembled
> knights of Bahá‟u‟lláh on that solemn anniversary - is an intimation that, the
> reality of their heroic response notwithstanding, the birds that journeyed into
> victory had injured wings, and the eagle flights were flown by individuals
> who nevertheless partook of the quality of the gnat.
> 
> It should come as no surprise then, that to discern the implausible flight path
> implied in these assertions of irreconcilable qualities (gnathood/eaglehood)
> calls for an unusual point of view. Thus the mighty title, Knight of
> Bahá‟u‟lláh - which, were all else forgotten, would remain - was won in
> Cyprus by Hugh McKinley in the course of what was probably the hardest
> and apparently least fruitful period of his life. In attracting souls to the
> Cause of Bahá‟u‟lláh Hugh McKinley had been more successful in Britain
> than he would ever be in Cyprus. In building a vibrant Bahá‟í community
> life the interpersonal barriers proved more intractable in Cyprus than was
> the case before or subsequently. In artistic self-expression, no period was
> less productive than this one. In his personal life, no time was more
> challenging than the time of his investiture as Knight of Bahá‟u‟lláh. At the
> end of his pioneering services in Cyprus, Hugh McKinley and the handful of
> fellow-Knights in that isle, had indeed sown the seed of a future national
> community, but at the moment of departure, after years of effort, the seeds
> left behind altogether uncertain, and not one soul had been moved to join
> the Bahá‟í community.11 By the same token, it is safe to say that no other
> Ibid. p. 240
> The first Cypriot believers declared not long after in a letter to Hugh in Greece, through whose
> efforts, together with his mother, they had been attracted to the Faith.
> 
> OJBS:Online Journal of Bahá‟í Studies                465                                             1 (2007)
> © 2007 Ismael Velasco
> 466      Ismael Velasco                                             In Memoriam: Hugh McKinley
> 
> time demanded such heroism, evoked such self-sacrifice, required such
> inner fortitude, or called for such self-abnegation in Hugh McKinley as his
> time in Cyprus.
> 
> The words of the House of Justice, then, present us not with a sweet simile
> but a challenging and even painful paradox, of broken-winged birds setting
> out to imitate the falcon‟s aerial prowess, or mosquitoes embarking on
> seemingly fatuous, even self-destructive odysseys to emulate the eagle. To
> grasp the liberating, the fulfilling, the ever-cherished aspects of this journey,
> one must be prepared to see that above and beyond material circumstances
> or outward markers of success, at the heart of this paradox, was a spiritual
> process; an expression of communion, a search for faithfulness to an
> experience of truth that made the journey more than bearable - worth it.
> One must know, else guess the experience captured in poetic language by
> Bahá‟u‟lláh as the unpredicted madness of a taste, which Hugh Mckinley –
> those that knew him will agree – tasted early on:
> 
> “By My life, O friend, wert thou to taste of these fruits… yearning would
> seize the reins of patience and reserve from out thy hand, and make thy soul
> to shake with the flashing light” 12
> 
> Thus did yearning take over his life, that without reserve, he threw himself
> into seemingly quixotic ventures, abandoning a promising career in opera,
> to live an intranquil, trying life in frequently alien environments, struggling
> with poverty, illness, separation, loss, and cultural isolation, for the sake of a
> social vision, and spiritual calling, that energised and galvanised him and
> brought him more than contentment: joy.
> 
> Indeed, if a keynote could be discerned in Hugh Mckinley‟s life, it is the
> demonstration that there is more to happiness than happy circumstances (for
> Hugh McKinley was an essentially happy person, albeit schooled in grief
> and loss), that one‟s inner world can well exceed one‟s outward one, and
> that to understand Hugh McKinley one must shake the inertia of superficial
> judgements and criteria and touch the depths that motivated him and made
> him be and become who he was and who he is.
> 
> And if, as Ernest Becker held, the greatest form of heroism is the ability to
> contain the maximum paradox, then Hugh McKinley was heroic in the most
> palpable manner. This was the man whose voice was deemed to call for
> cultivation and consecration to the muse by the great Dino Borgioli and who
> studied under him in 1952 while singers waited a decade before being
> allowed to leave their countries and be trained by him – working as a farm
> labourer until he began his musical apprenticeship.13
> 
> Cf. Bahá‟ulláh, The Seven Valleys, p.4
> Borgioli, (1891 – 1960) was launched in La Scala by Toscanini himself, becoming one of opera‟s
> best-loved tenors in the 1930‟s, and in the 1950‟s one of the world‟s foremost opera teachers. The Australian
> soprano June Bronhill, OBE, changed her surname from Gough to Bronhill after the residents of the eponymous
> 
> OJBS:Online Journal of Bahá‟í Studies               466                                             1 (2007)
> © 2007 Ismael Velasco
> 467       Ismael Velasco                                            In Memoriam: Hugh McKinley
> 
> The beginnings of a professional and promising career in opera were not
> won without sacrifice, and the same year, in a positive and confident tone,
> Violet McKinley, Hugh‟s mother, wrote in her record of the year: “our
> money nearly gone, we must earn some somehow”.14 This was the man
> who, a complete autodidact with an interrupted and abandoned schooling,
> became nonetheless the cultured critic who corresponded with Erich Fromm
> and led him to review his treatment of religion; interviewed Arnold
> Toynbee, last great exponent of cyclical history; became a lasting friend of
> his contemporary and fellow poet (a world authority on Blake) Kathleen
> Raine, and likewise built most lasting ties with the famed poets Helen Shaw
> of New Zealand and the American May Sarton, best known perhaps for her
> novels. He would converse with varying ease in English, Greek, Persian,
> and French, yet never reached secondary school.
> 
> This was the man in whom the lore of ancient Celts and ancient Greeks and
> Romans combined with the exquisite appreciation of nature and its colours
> and a repertoire of memorised French, Italian and German arias that played
> in his mind and occasionally found outlet in his sonorous bass. This was
> also the man who, in the end, physically frail and past his seventies, was left
> to earn the necessities of life each day anew not by his pen or by his art or
> by his calling, but selling cleaning materials door to door to make ends
> meet, following a professional path that took him from farm labouring to
> book-keeping, to gardening, to selling double-glazing and insurance and
> eventually domestic products to neighbours and acquaintances on a
> commission-only basis.
> 
> Such contrasting journeys were the product of circumstance, but primarily
> of choice, of decisions made for love, sometimes swiftly, never lightly, and
> always hard to understand from the perspective of the perennial human
> search, and even need, for material stability and comfort.
> 
> “How well is it said: Live free of love, for its very peace is anguish; its
> beginning is pain, its end is death.”15
> 
> We stand, then, not before a creature of air but before a man, of flesh and
> bone and blood and longing who, when I knew him in the evening of his
> life, just into his seventies, glinted and smiled at once mischievously and
> miraculously amidst the difficulties that beset him and that he wore so
> lightly, as he proclaimed to a touched twenty year old passer-by who had
> approached the Bahá‟í stall that we were manning together in the paved
> indifference of Felixtowe:
> town raised a considerable sum of money to enable her to leave Australia to study under Borgioli. She was his
> pupil in the same year as Hugh McKinley, and may give an indication of what could have been - Hugh‟s potential
> professional trajectory.
> Violette McKinley, “Astrological Diary of Hugh McKinley, with additional notes by Hugh and by
> Deborah McKinley” (henceforth referred to as Astrological Diary), entry for 28 years old.
> Cf. Bahá‟ulláh, The Seven Valleys, p.41
> 
> OJBS:Online Journal of Bahá‟í Studies                467                                             1 (2007)
> © 2007 Ismael Velasco
> 468      Ismael Velasco                                              In Memoriam: Hugh McKinley
> 
> “I am a revolutionary!”
> 
> And proffered to him, urgently yet gracefully, not the Socialist Worker, but
> an invitation to spiritual transformation and an end to discordant conflict.
> 
> The little note which, in her 90th year, the great Kathleen Raine wrote upon
> hearing of Hugh McKinley‟s passing captures, perhaps best of all, the
> meaning of Hugh McKinley‟s life, and his relevance:
> 
> “I don‟t know how many years ago I first knew (by letter) Hugh who at that
> time was living on his Greek Island with his cats and writing for a little
> paper… all these years he has been a friend I have valued as one of the
> loveliest human beings I have known – „one of the pure in heart‟ who „sees
> God‟”.16
> 
> One is reminded of the words by Blake which that same poet wished could
> be said of her after her death:
> 
> “That in time of trouble, I kept the divine vision".
> 
> These ten words are, to me, the most transparent evocation of Hugh
> McKinley‟s life.
> 
> Kathleen Raine to Deborah McKinley, February 9t, 1999, in Hugh McKinley archives.
> 
> OJBS:Online Journal of Bahá‟í Studies                 468                                          1 (2007)
> © 2007 Ismael Velasco
>
> — *In Memoriam: Hugh McKinley (Used by permission of the curator)*