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Thank you for the warmth of your welcome on Tuesday evening. It was a wonderful and moving celebration, and I am absolutely delighted to be here as your new Vicar. I am particularly grateful to the churchwardens, the staff, the choir, the stewards and all those who made the arrangements run so smoothly. I also want to say that I - along with you - owe Charlotte and Alan a huge debt for all their hard work in the course of the interregnum. St Mary’s is in good heart, and there is a busy and exciting programme organised for this term. I look forward very much to meeting you and getting to know you in the weeks and months ahead. There is a huge amount for me to learn and I ask for your patience and your prayers as I begin this new ministry alongside the other members of the team.
Today marks the Feast of the English Saints and Martyrs of the Reformation Era. It is particularly poignant to mark this festival in St Mary’s. Not only are its stones marked with some of the conflicts and tensions of that period, but there stands on the north wall a memorial to Protestant and Catholic Martyrs of the Reformation period. While it is controversial in the minds of some, I think it can be a sign of the hope of reconciliation between different Christian traditions, and an expression of the kind of radical hospitality characteristic of a place like St Mary’s.
The Collect for today may provide an appropriate focus for our thoughts and prayers:
Merciful God,
who, when your Church on earth was torn apart
by the ravages of sin,
raised up men and women in this land
who witnessed to their faith with courage and constancy:
give to your Church that peace which is your will,
and grant that those who have been divided on earth
may be reconciled in heaven
and share together in the vision of your glory;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.
The Revd Dr William Lamb
Vicar |
| | Services
—Tuesdays & Thursdays at 12.15pm
Lunchtime Eucharist —
Sunday 7th May Easter 4
10.30am - Choral Eucharist with University Sermon
Preacher - The Revd Dr Jane Leach
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| | | | Moot, Old Library, 7.45pm, Thursday 4th May
On your knees or on the couch: therapy or spiritual direction?
The journey to living well, and life in all its fullness can be a rocky road. Sometimes we avoid taking spiritual counsel, sometimes we prefer to avoid a secular framework. Are there two different languages speaking of the same thing? Or are they two very distinct and different pathways? Do we need therapy or spiritual direction? Bruce Kinsey Chaplain of Balliol and sometime chair of the Psychoanalytic section of the UKCP tries to chart these turbulent waters.
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| | | Appearance of the Lasting: Art, Spirit and the Digital Age - An evening with Dr Gareth Polmeer Art’s relation to reason has become obscure in the digital age. Postmodernism and its legacies influence the humanities, with relativism and determinism negating central questions of culture and selfhood. In an age
marked by impermanence can the digital image represent anything lasting? And in what ways might art reconcile reason with the spiritual, in a contemporary world that has variously divided them?
Join us on Friday 20th May at 7.30p.m. in the Old Library for a unique lecture by Dr Gareth Polmeer who will explore these questions in a number of ways, considering themes of eternity, time and the work of art. Gareth will discuss his own work in relation to the philosophy of art, and works by several prominent thinkers on the relation of reason, aesthetics and spirit.
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| | | Architecture and the Medieval Mind
A six-part series of talks on the important role that architecture – both physical and representational – played in the imaginative, artistic, and theological life of early medieval England.
10th May: Helen Appleton – The Long Home in the Narrow House Dr Helen Appleton, Career Development Fellow in Old and Early Medieval English, will look at the (sometimes playful) use of architectural images in association with death as a prompt to contrition in the early medieval lyric tradition. It will address questions such as: ‘When the turf is your tower and the pit is your bower, what help to you then are all the world’s joys?’, and will also examine what the worms think about it all.
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| | | Forthcoming Concerts & Other Events
Friday 12th May, 7.30pm: Half Moon Brass Tickets on the door
Check our website and Facebook pages for more events.
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| | | Poetry Corner
To Violets
Welcome, maids-of-honour!
You do bring
In the spring,
And wait upon her.
She has virgins many,
Fresh and fair;
Yet you are
More sweet than any.
You're the maiden posies,
And so grac'd
To be plac'd
'Fore damask roses.
Yet, though thus respected,
By-and-by
Ye do lie,
Poor girls, neglected.
Robert Herrick (1591-1674)
This week: back to the texts Benjamin Britten set for the Spring Symphony. ‘To Violets’ is, very sweetly, addressed to these little ‘Maids of Honour’ to the Queen (Spring). Violets traditionally represent nobility and goodness; in Herrick’s poem they are the meek and unassuming handmaidens who are, despite their inherent goodness, forgotten about and overlooked. Perhaps their form isn’t as showy as the damask roses, but they are the most faithful.
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