Elizabeth ~ Andrew's Aunt

Hello – I am Andrew’s aunt and, since he was the oldest of the four Shanks siblings – I am probably almost the only person here who has known him his whole life. In putting together this Eulogy I have been in touch with his family and friends and Dian has shared with me some of the tributes she has received.

They all tell the same sort of story - ‘ He was a kind, sweet and generous man – I will always remember his smile’; ‘ he was always smiling and in good spirits and so interesting to talk to’; ‘even when younger I really admired his conviction in speaking up for the right thing’; ‘ Andrew was deeply compassionate especially for those going through difficult times’; ‘one of the most extraordinary people it has ever been my good fortune to meet’; ‘a gentle, thoughtful and committed person – he was a one off’; ‘the best Dad we never had’; ‘someone who made the world a better place’. And finally that Andrew’s life fulfilled Kant’s criteria for happiness: he had ‘something to do, someone to love and something to hope for’. Family members particularly remember how much he helped them through both weddings and funerals.

Reflecting on Andrew’s life I find myself marvelling at the way that that shy and introverted little boy, always in his bedroom or with his nose in a book grew up, first as an alarmingly brilliant Winchester scholar then as an interesting young man who spent his Gap Year teaching English in Ethiopia – and, of course, learning Amharic. From Ethiopia Andrew sent back long flimsy airmail letters which his mother lovingly transcribed into more legible longhand and sent around the family. Communication was different in those days! The letters talked about life in the streets, the churches and the school and its charismatic headmaster, finishing with an account of a week-long fundraising walk through the mountains at the end of which Andrew collapsed dramatically with heat exhaustion and had, somehow, to be transported to the nearest hospital.

After a history degree at Oxford Andrew returned to Africa, to teach English in a small Egyptian town on the Nile delta. I remember when he returned how dull he found it back home, complaining that there were ‘no hushed crowds murmuring Andras, Andras’ as he walked along the streets. London life was not quite like that.

As a rather intense teenager Andrew caused his parents some consternation by announcing his intention to become a monk. It was probably around the same time that, encouraged by his mother to decorate the walls of the family holiday cottage in Cornwall, he produced his own version of a Doom Painting. His graphic depiction of Hell apparently scared one visitor so much that the cottage was written up in the press as ‘the worst holiday home in England’. Andrew was particularly proud of that.

After Egypt and having learned about the hours involved in the monastic life. It was the thought of all those early morning prayers that put him off, he said recently. Andrew followed the slightly more conventional path of Theological College and training for ministry in the Church of England. Had he become a monk I feel that his life might have followed something of the same trajectory – thinking, writing, praying. But he would not have had he depth of interaction with people that he so enjoyed as a parish priest. Nor, of course, would he have met or been able to marry Dian. And that would have been a Great Pity.

Dian was the best thing that ever happened to Andrew. They met as Curates in an inner -city parish in Chapeltown in Leeds and married some months later. Dian transformed his life both as a priest and as a person. They also made each other very happy. Dian was herself one of the first women to be ordained as a priest in Ripon Cathedral and was for a time a Canon of this Cathedral. Together they forged a life of ministry that included care for those made vulnerable by life – Aids victims, refugees and asylum seekers, low paid sweat -shop workers – and political causes. While in Leeds, Andrew conducted regular peace vigils outside Menwith Military Camp in the Yorkshire hills and was until his death an active and valued member of the York Amnesty Group.

Unfortunately, his dramatic collapse in the Ethiopian mountains seems to have been a prelude to Andrew’s later health problems. He obviously inherited his father’s faulty heart gene which struck him down for the first time in his early forties. I well remember speaking to an intensive care nurse at that time who warned me that he was extremely poorly and probably would not survive the night. Fortunately, he did. But for someone so squeamish, needle averse and unable to watch even one episode of Casualty, Andrew had far more than his fair share of health scares – late night ambulances, hospital admissions, scary diagnoses. From all of it he somehow emerged fundamentally undiminished. A bit frailer, a bit slower, but still the same witty, outgoing person, still interested in people, still writing late into the night yet another theological philosophical book.

I will leave it to others better qualified than me to speak more about these books and about Andrew’s career as priest, theologian and translator of poetry – though I would like to suggest that the title of his most recent book (to be published next year) ‘Hope and Holy Anarchy. Philosophical Theology and the Solidarity of the Shaken’ somehow says it all – and promises to be a challenging read.

I would like to finish by saying something about Andrew and death. I have always found him curiously comforting on the subject. His own near-death experiences left him, he said, with no fear of dying. Like many who have had these kinds of experiences he found that it was not the dying that was difficult, it was the coming back to life. When my own husband was dying Andrew told us, quite simply, that for him death meant being with God – and that that is a good place, if not the best, to be.

None of which means, of course, that those of us who are left do not miss and mourn him – a lot!.

Elizabeth Gordon