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| | e-Pistle News from the University Church |
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This week we have hosted three dinners in the Old Library for the Said Business School. On Tuesday John Kingman, Second Permanent Secretary in the Treasury, addressed a group of CEOs and public relations officers from major companies, amongst them the CEO of WONGA (a woman in her forties) which had a frisson of danger, given the Archbishop of Canterbury’s spat with pay day lenders. There was a sense of being in touch with power and it gives you an idea of the increasing reach of SMV’s ministry. And that isn’t just a fanciful idea because at the beginning of dinner I gave a talk about the history of the Old Library and was asked to evaluate the state of religion in Oxford today and the ethical values we espouse – or at least aspire to. All of which segues rather neatly into Sir Andrew Dilnot’s sermon this coming Sunday on the Ethics and Politics of the Poverty Gap. |
| | Services this Week
Tuesdays & Thursdays
12.15pm Lunchtime Eucharist
Sunday 7th June Trinity 2
10.30am Choral Eucharist
Preacher: Sir Andrew Dilnot, Warden of Nuffield College, Economist & Broadcaster
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Forthcoming Events
TONIGHT: In Numbers Poetry Series - 7pm Poetry Panel: Maths and Architecture
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Forthcoming Concerts The City of Oxford Choir, 13th June, 7.30pm Schubert, Mozart, Haydn Tickets £12/£10/£8 available from Tickets Oxford or on the door.
Schola Cantorum, 14th June, 8pm One Foot in Eden: Works by British composers on themes of nature, summer, love, as well as owls. Tickets: £12/£5 from https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/date/168982 or tickets@schola-cantorum.net
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| The Vaults and Gardens Cafe are looking for staff over the summer period, aged 17 and over. Please contact Natasha Cirou at events@thevaultsandgarden.com. |
| | TONIGHT - 7PM
The final panel discussion in our 'In Numbers' series promises to be a really interesting one. Architect Hugh Conway Morris has been in measuring all round the University Church to see what maths is in play, and to think about how medieval craftsmen - who were themselves often illiterate - would have related to the geometry they were employing in a practical way. The discussion - with the mathematician Jamshid Derakhshan - promises to shed new and intriguing light on the beautiful University Church. Free, all welcome. 7-8pm in the nave. |
| | | | | Poetry corner from The Spire
In the Bavarian steeple, on the hour,
two figures emerge from their scalloped house
carrying sledges that they clap, in turn,
against the surface of the bell. By legend
they are summer and winter, youth and age,
as though the forces of plenty and of loss
played equally on the human soul, extracted
easily the same low bronze note spreading
upward from the encumbrance of the village,
past alluvial fields to the pocked highland
where cattle shift their massive heads
at this dissonance, this faint redundant
pressure in the ears, in the air.
In the Bavarian steeple, on the hour,
two figures emerge from their scalloped house
carrying sledges that they clap, in turn,
against the surface of the bell. By legend
they are summer and winter, youth and age,
as though the forces of plenty and of loss
played equally on the human soul, extracted
easily the same low bronze note spreading
upward from the encumbrance of the village,
past alluvial fields to the pocked highland
where cattle shift their massive heads
at this dissonance, this faint redundant
pressure in the ears, in the air.
In the Bavarian steeple, on the hour,
two figures emerge from their scalloped house
carrying sledges that they clap, in turn,
against the surface of the bell. By legend
they are summer and winter, youth and age,
as though the forces of plenty and of loss
played equally on the human soul, extracted
easily the same low bronze note spreading
upward from the encumbrance of the village,
past alluvial fields to the pocked highland
where cattle shift their massive heads
at this dissonance, this faint redundant
pressure in the ears, in the air.
…
– Ellen Bryant Voigt (b. 1943)
The opening stanza of Ellen Bryant Voigt’s poem ‘The Spire’ is one long uninterrupted sentence: we have a sense of growing, of the multiplication of sound which affects more and more of the countryside it inhabits, spreading like a raindrop in a pond. The little figures causing the noise are housed in the hillside steeple, a focal point for the “encumbrance of the village”. The sound skirts over the human landscape of the village and into a more natural, timeless one, and finally just to “the air”: that is, both everywhere and nowhere in particular. The poem lights on the ability of sound to touch, both physically and emotionally; and the spire is the epicentre from which the affecting sound is generated.
We’ll be thinking a little more about the church spire tonight, in our Maths and Architecture panel discussion at 7pm, and next Wednesday in our final poetry workshop of the term on the same theme.
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