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Last week, in London, I saw the brilliant play Nice Fish by the Oscar-winning actor Mark Rylance – his first self-penned play, drawn from the words of the poet Louis Jenkins. It has been described as an ‘icy absurdist drama’ and likened to a ‘folksy Waiting for Godot’. Set on a frozen lake at the end of a long Minnesota winter, it follows two men drilling holes whilst hoping to find some of the last fish of the season. The play uses extracts of Jenkins’ prose poems, and while they wait for hours for a fish to appear the fisherman sit on the ice contemplate some of life’s biggest questions. Rylance’s acting and timing is superb – it’s very funny, using flat language to laconic and often heart-breaking effect. Lines like ‘Being mostly water as we are, it's not so bad living in a cold climate like this one. It gives you a certain solidity’ are typical of the characters’ and Jenkins’ insights: one critic called the play off-kilter; funny, with an undertow of deep, yet lightly-borne, melancholy. However, Rylance’s hope is that the audience ‘will see the beauty in mundane things, and in the nature around them, which they took for granted’; they'll see wilderness and ice as actually very amusing and very beautiful. In that sense the audience will experience an epiphanic moment with nature.
So as the New Year begins, as we walk in the parks or through the city, as the snow and ice fall, maybe we can experience nature – and even the presence of God in nature – through a new prism. I end with a quote from Jenkins’ prose poem ‘Too Much Snow’: ‘To you I send a single snowflake, beautiful, complex and delicate; different from all the others’.
The Revd Charlotte Bannister-Parker
Co-Acting Priest-in-charge
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| | Services
—Tuesdays & Thursdays at 12.15pm
Lunchtime Eucharist —
Sunday 15th January Epiphany 10.30am - Choral Eucharist
Preacher - Revd Canon Dr Judith Maltby Music: Mass: Darke in F
Grieg, Ave Maris Stella
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| | | | Reflection Morning
There will be a reflection morning in the Old Library at 10.30am on Saturday 21st January. We'll be continuing discussions from Advent in the light of the incarnation. Please do join us.
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| | | Ecumenical service for Christian Unity at Christ Church Cathedral
The service will take place at 6pm on Sunday 22 January. Its theme will be 'Our common calling: to care for the earth and all its inhabitants’. Young people from schools and churches across Oxford, together with the artist Nicholas Mynheer, will provide a visual focus for the service. It would be great to have people from SMV there, as we are part of Churches Together in Central Oxford, who have helped to organise it.
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| | | Homelessness Sunday, St Giles’ Homelessness Trail
For Homelessness Sunday St Giles are organising a sponsored “Homelessness Trail” starting at St Giles’ Church at 12noon on 22nd January. Speak to Victoria Mort or Revd Andrew Bunch for more details.
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| | Forthcoming Concerts & Other Events
Saturday 21st January, 7.30pm: Oxford Sinfonia Peter Bassano conductor
Mozart arias with soprano Nika Goric
Mozart symphony no 39
Beethoven symphony no 2
Check out our website and Facebook pages for more events.
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| | | Poetry Corner
An Epiphany
I have seen the Brown Recluse Spider
run with a net in her hand, or rather,
what resembled a net, what resembled
a hand. She ran down the gleaming white floor
of the bathtub, trailing a frail swirl
of hair, and in it the hull of a beetle
lay woven. The hair was my wife’s,
long and dark, a few loose strands, a curl
she might idly have turned on a finger,
she might idly have twisted, speaking to me,
and the legs of the beetle were broken.
Ted Kooser, “An Epiphany” from Weather Central (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994).
Ted Kooser’s strange, funny little poem about causality, about unconscious chains of events, was a lovely discovery this week. The microscope of his eye trains on the spider, anthropomorphising it in the process, and on her progress from (presumably) the speaker’s wife’s head all the way to the plughole. In the spider’s wake she trails a little narrative which, with strong enough magnification, the poet lets us see. The spider, the hair, the dead beetle, the wife: these aren’t discreet details, but pausing points on a journey, creating a little story in themselves.
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