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I forwarded an email to Claire Browes this week, but my phone spellchecker altered ‘fyi’ (for your information) to ‘dying’. Apparently this caused immense hilarity in the office…
Linda Woodhead has been asking on Facebook what makes for a lively, growing church and I’d like to reply. But first I thought I’d run a few ideas past you. So please comment to my email address: brian.mountford@oriel.ox.ac.uk
Open and welcoming community, with an outward looking bias to engage with social projects and with people on the fringe
Aesthetically pleasing worship, which doesn’t simply mean cathedral style services or loads of incense, but an aesthetic integrity to all levels of worship and a willingness to adapt to local needs.
Honesty about Christian faith and the abandonment of lazy clichés about God, divine intervention or the supernatural. Systematic and accessible teaching about Christian ideas and beliefs. No dumbing down: people want to know about theology even if it’s not actually called that. They want to discuss the ‘meaning of life’.
Tim Hedgeland is currently fundraising for building supplies for Restless Development to help poor rural communities in Nepal, where he is working as a volunteer for the NGO for 2 months this Summer. He will be around to discuss the project at the end of this and next weeks' services over coffee and would be grateful for donations either in person or online at http://http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/nepaltim. | | Into the Wilderness: Reflection morning for Lent, Saturday 14th March
Come and share a relaxed, late breakfast to explore Jesus in the wilderness, and our experience of lent, through discussion prompted by poetry, paintings, objects and written reflections. Everyone welcome. Please sign up by emailing: layassistant.smv@gmail.com |
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| | Students at University Church TONIGHT, 6pm Joint Communion service at the Wesley Memorial Church. Followed by shared meal. |
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Services this Week
Tuesdays & Thursdays 12.15pm Lunchtime Eucharist
Sunday 8th March Lent 3 10.30am Choral Eucharist Preacher: Revd Alan Ramsey |
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Forthcoming Events
Thursday 5th March6pm: Joint student service at Wesley Memorial Church
Saturday 14th March 10.30am: Into the Wilderness: Lent reflection morning, Old Library
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Forthcoming Concerts Sunday, 8th March, 5pm St Hilda's College Choir Faure's Requiem Free admission
Monday 9th March, 7.30pm Hertford College Choir “Toward the Unknown Region” Free admission |
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Poetry Corner
In Oxford there once lived a rich old lout
Who had some guest rooms that he rented out,
And carpentry was this old fellow’s trade.
A poor young scholar boarded who had made
His studies in the liberal arts, but he
Had turned his fancy to astrology
And knew the way, by certain propositions,
To answer well when asked about conditions,
Such as when men would ask in certain hours
If they should be expecting drought or showers,
Or if they asked him what was to befall
Concerning such I can’t recount it all.
[…]
The carpenter had newly wed a wife,
One whom he loved more than his very life;
Her age was eighteen years. He jealously
Kept her as if inside a cage, for she
Was one both young and wild, and he had fears
Of being a cuckold, so advanced in years.
Not educated, he had never read
Cato: one like himself a man should wed,
He ought to marry mindful of his state,
For youth and age are often at debate.
(from The Miller’s Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer; translation by Ronald L. Ecker and Eugene J. Crook)
Oxford is a city of dualities: a busy city which is encroached on all sides by countryside; a place where some of the UK’s poorest areas abut some of the richest; and, of course, a place which has balanced civic and scholastic life for nearly a thousand years.
In “The Miller’s Tale” we see a common domestic set-up for an Oxford student of the late fourteenth century – he lodges with a townsman. The arrangement is, however, not a happy one: the clerk, Nicholas, cuckolds the carpenter as soon as an opportunity arises – the carpenter’s fruity wife, Alisoun, proving impossible to resist. By the end of the tale, the carpenter, cuckolded, also has a broken arm (having fallen from a tub in which he awaited a great Flood, “prophesised” by Nicholas, using the foretold calamity as an excuse to pay a nocturnal visit to Alisoun); Nicholas, despite having had his bottom branded, is still the chortling victor. Even the carpenter’s neighbours are unsympathetic: “But he himself was blamed for all his harm; / For when he spoke, each word was then denied / By Nicholas and Alison his bride. / They made the claim to all that he was mad[…]”. Everywhere the carpenter goes from now on, he is dismissed as unhinged. Are we supposed to side with Nicholas, the triumphant student, in this?
Until the first colleges were established (University, Balliol and Merton all make claims to be the oldest, established at some point during the mid-thirteenth century) students lodged like this in private homes and halls. However, the relationship between town and gown was always uneasy. A series of riots throughout the 13th and 14th centuries were increasingly violent; deaths were seen on the side of town and gown alike. In an early riot, escalating from the theft of an official townsman’s mace, students barricaded the University Church with its congregation inside and threatened murder. The congregation broke the windows to escape.
The situation culminated in the St Scholastica Day Riot of 1355, when a row over the quality of wine at the Swindlestock Tavern near Carfax led to 63 student and around 30 town deaths. For hundreds of years, until the abolition of the ceremony in 1825, the Mayor of Oxford was required to walk from the Town Hall to the University Church in order to pay a fine – a penny for every student killed.
By 1410, the University had decreed that all scholars must live in academic halls, rather than the houses of laymen, to prevent their “sleeping by day and haunting taverns and brothels by night, intent on robbery and homicide”.
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| Poetry Workshops: Rewriting History
As we move into the final couple of weeks of term, we have two remaining poetry workshops in which to explore history and poetry. Next week, the interplay between the sacred and the secular. Wednesdays, 7-8.30pm in the Old Library.
8th Week (11th March) Sacred and Secular. Another duality: we will see how the two complement each other.
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