| View this email online if it doesn't display correctly |
| | e-Pistle News from the University Church |
| | View this email online if it doesn't display correctly |
| |
|
| |
I’ll be honest with you. This Sunday I’m going to the Test match at the Oval - assuming the match isn’t over by then – where my host has seats beside the test Match Special commentary box. Last year I bumped into Phil Tufnell, with whom I played cricket (when he was a teenager) in Southgate. ‘Stumped Mountford, bowled Tufnell’ reads the Southgate score book on numerous occasions. It’s the nearest I got to playing for England, unless you count those Church Times Cup matches with David Sheppard (Captain of England and later Bishop of Liverpool, in case you’ve never heard of him). I know you all think it important for your clergy to have time just to be rather than to do, so I needn’t have a guilty conscience, need I? Anyway, Tess Kuin Lawton, the Chaplain of Magdalen College School has agreed to celebrate and preach in my absence and she’s bound to be a breath of fresh air.
We’re now late season and the Family Service is coming up again on 6 September and Harvest Thanksgiving on 27 September, when children are invited for the main service and there will be a lunch in the Old Library afterwards. On 20 September at the 10.30 Eucharist we have two baptisms, Samuel Lockie and Gabriel Stokes, both first babies of couples living near the centre of Oxford and within reach of St Mary’s. It will be good to support them and generally to support the annual renewal of a congregation that always changes over the summer, losing regular stalwarts and hopefully gaining new people who will bring new vitality and ideas. |
| | Services this Week
Tuesdays & Thursdays
12.15pm Lunchtime Eucharist
Sunday 20th August Trinity 12
10.30am Sung Eucharist
Address: Revd Tess Kuin Lawton
|
|
|
|
Forthcoming Events
Wednesday 26th August, 1-2pm: Poetry Seminar in the Old Library
Throughout the summer, we'll be running a family craft stall on Thursday afternoons. Pop in for colouring, sewing, stained glass-design.
|
|
Forthcoming Concerts
Looking forward to the Autumn we will be hosting concerts as part of the Oxford Chamber Festival, a performance Noyes Fludde, and a new play about the Oxford Martyrs. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| | Ride and Stride, 12th September
The annual RIDE AND STRIDE in aid of Oxfordshire Historic Churches Trust, will take place on Saturday 12th. September. If you would like to take part on either feet or bicycle, please contact Margaret Chaundy - margaret.chaundy2@btinternet.com Alternatively, if you can spare an hour on the day to welcome visiting participants, your help would be much appreciated. |
| | Poetry Corner
Apology for Understatement
Forgive me that I pitch your praise too low.
Such reticence my reverence demands,
For silence falls with laying on of hands.
Forgive me that my words come thin and slow.
This could not be a time for eloquence,
For silence falls with healing of the sense.
We only utter what we lightly know.
And it is rather that my love knows me.
It is that your perfection set me free.
Verse is dressed up that has nowhere to go.
You took away my glibness with my fear.
Forgive me that I stand in silence here.
It is not words could pay you what I owe.
- John Wain (14 March 1925 – 24 May 1994)
Wain was Professor of Poetry between 1973 and 1978, and for many years lived in Wolvercote. Grouped with the “Angry Young Men” of the 1950s and with “the Movement” (which included Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis), his work shares in common with theirs a laconic voice and, in his novels, a particular sense of humour.
This poem is in the tradition of the skilled orator downplaying his great linguistic gifts: see also Queen Elizabeth I’s Latin oration (delivered at the University Church in 1566), in which she described herself, to the assembled scholars and in perfect Latin, as “unworthy” and “a country bumpkin”. Wain here describes the “reticence” to which he must adhere at the same time as eloquently laying out his argument; his words, contrary to being “thin and slow”, are in fact chosen carefully and precisely. His existence, he says, owes a debt to the fact that his “love knows [him]”. But even with this self-conscious eloquence in mind, Wain argues that words will never be enough. The poem is short, and when we reach the last line – and, crucially, the silence after it – we begin to see what he means. A chain reaction begins in our minds only after the speaker has finished talking.
|
| |
