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My time at SMV is fast running out like being in a canoe in the calm but accelerating water above the Niagara Falls knowing that very soon things are going to change pretty radically, but you’ve no idea what it will feel like. Yesterday I received the service rota to fill in, but since my involvement stops half way through, I had to send it back incomplete, with three large metaphorical dots. And now I have to think what to say in my ‘last sermon’. Not as easy as you might think. There’ll not be time for a review of thirty years and yet I’m frightened of missing the point altogether.
Also trying to start my memoir. How about this? ‘You know, you wake up one morning suddenly aware you have a self which is separate from your parents. But there you are, trapped in their version of what life is like: their house, your grandma’s house, the house down the road at number 19, their language, their town. You then spend a large part of your life trying to build new terms of reference only for your children to be confronted by the same challenge, needing to make their own way, to find their own voice, and their own selves.’
Okay! So the Niagara Falls image is a bit too eschatological and white water rafting would have been better. I once had to sack a church organist when I worked in North London and on his last Sunday he chose for the anthem C Hubert H Parry’s, ‘Lord, let me know mine end and the number of my days.’ Apparently he had shown exactly the same humour when sacked from a church in Highgate.
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| | Services
—Tuesdays & Thursdays
Lunchtime Eucharists
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10.30am - Sung Eucharist
Preacher: Canon Brian Mountford
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| | Forthcoming Concerts & Other Events
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Saturday 16th April 7.30pm Oxford Sinfonia Tom Poster conductor
Elgar Serenade for strings
Mozart Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major, K. 467
Finzi Eclogue for piano and strings
Schubert Symphony No. 5
Tickets £15 (£12) from Tickets Oxford
Saturday 23rd April 7.30pm Music at Oxford Concert THE CITY MUSICK
Byrd, Gibbons, Holborne, Morley, Ravenscroft
Marking the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, the virtuoso players of The City Musick celebrate the musical world of Shakespeare’s London. With cornetts, shawms, curtals, sackbuts, recorders and voice the ensemble performs music by Byrd, Gibbons, Holborne, Morley, Ravenscroft and other composers associated with the theatre of the time. The scope ranges from fancys and intricate canzonas for the well-heeled gentlefolk to the robust catches, part songs and dances of the tavern-goer and groundling.
Tickets (£35 / £20 / £15 / £10) from Tickets Oxford (01865 305305 or online)
Check out our website and Facebook pages.
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| | Poetry corner —
from Dun Scotus’ Oxford
TOWERY city and branchy between towers;
Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark-charmèd, rook-racked, river-rounded;
The dapple-eared lily below thee; that country and town did
Once encounter in, here coped and poisèd powers…
- Gerard Manley Hopkins
10th April is the day of commemoration of William of Ockham. Born in 1285, he was a Franciscan friar who studied theology at Merton College from 1309 to 1321; he was ordained in June 1318 and licensed to hear confession.
Along with Duns Scotus, he was a proponent of voluntarism – a theology which promotes that God is led by will rather than reason. His theology was based upon the self and faith. Regarded as one of the great late-medieval theologians, he is mostly famous for Ockham’s Razor. However, the place that nurtured him intellectually was almost his undoing, as John Lutterell – former chancellor of the University – questioned his orthodoxy; Ockham was summoned, accused of heresy, to Avignon for an examination by Pope John XXII. Later, he died in Munich.
He would certainly have known parts of the University Church still extant today – the tower and possibly the building of the Adam de Brome and Old Library – and might well have attended lectures here.
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