Rev'd Dr. Jonathan Arnold. Vocation Sunday
Sermon. Vocation Sunday. 25th April 2010 Worcester College. Isaiah 52: 7-10; Mark 1: 1-15
An Anglican priest and a Methodist minister, both wearing dog collars, were hammering a sign into the verge of a road. The sign read “The end is Near! Turn yourself around now before it is too late!” Almost immediately, a car drives past and a voice from the car window yells, “Leave us alone you religious nutters!”. The car speeds on, there is a screeching of tyres and a splash. The priest turns to the minister and says: “Oh dear! Do you think the sign should say: Danger Bridge Collapsed?”
I mention this story to illustrate how it can sometimes be a dangerous thing to wear a dog collar in public, especially at a time when the image of a male priest might not conjure up the happiest of associations. To walk down Cornmarket or travel on a train in clerical dress is to risk a few stares, bizarre conversations about religion, being asked to give someone or something a blessing, or even receiving verbal abuse from a disaffected church-goer or sometime believer. I remember a former Chaplain to the Bishop of London, Mark Oakley, telling how he went to work in an ordinary shirt and tie, instead of dog collar one day. When the Bishop asked him what he was doing, Mark simply said that he was fed up with travelling on the tube dressed as a priest and being stared at or harangued. The roadside story might also point to how religion, especially religion that calls you to repent and turn your life around, in western secular society, is seen as a minority and unpopular interest, and I want to explore why this might, paradoxically, be a really good thing.
This Sunday is vocation Sunday, when you might think we celebrate and pray for those who have been called to the increasingly rare vocation of ordained ministry. But I think it is particularly appropriate, at the beginning of Trinity Term, when so many students are thinking about their future lives and careers, that we remember exactly what vocation is, and who it affects and I have chosen the readings for the eve of the feast of St. Mark deliberately to illustrate that vocation is something that relates to us all very deeply regardless of our occupation.
The readings from the prophecy of Isaiah and Mark, demonstrates how blessed is the person who witnesses to the gospel of peace and heralds the good news of Christ in their lives. The beginning of Mark’s gospel also places baptism as a central act of faith, a seal of the commitment to follow the calling of Christ: a vocation. Following this call can be done in many ways: John the Baptist fulfilled Isaiah’s prophecy and came preaching a baptism of repentance and forgiveness of sins and is arrested and imprisoned for his troubles. The history of an unpopular and persecuted Christian faith has its origins at the very beginning of the life of Christ and unpopularity has always been, to some extent, part of the Christian story.
I found this illustrated recently in the most unlikely of people. I have known the work of the comedian Frank Skinner for many years. But, until recently, I hadn’t realised that he was a commited Roman Catholic Christian. And this I found out through reading an article that he wrote in the Times a few weeks ago. It was entitled: ‘Persecute me, I’m after the brownies points.’ In the article he wrote about how Christians should not be ashamed of who they are in an increasingly secularized country and shouldn’t worry about being laughed at.
‘To many British people’, he writes, ‘Christianity seems like a weird but unexciting theme park. Personally, I like our ever-dwindling status. I even like our ever-dwindling numbers. There was a time when social pressure made people go to church. If anything the reverse is now true. Most adults you see in church nowadays are there because they want to be there. That’s not decline, it’s progress.’ He goes on, ‘Christians have always worked best as an unpopular minority. We were surely at our most dynamic when we knelt, eyes to Heaven, hands clasped in prayer, with a Colosseum lion bounding towards us. ... Surely the central image of Christianity is someone who can shoot fireballs out of his fingertips allowing himself to be nailed to a wooden cross — submission as the ultimate show of strength — love as impenetrable armour. Most British Christians are badly dressed, unattractive people. We’re not pushy and aggressive members of society. We’re a bit like Goths — no one can remember us being fashionable and we talk about death a lot. I love the glorious un-coolness of that.’
Christians tend to save their best work for the “voice in the wilderness” genre. We are most impressive when operating as a secret sect, kneeling in small, candle-lit rooms and scrawling fishes on walls. I’m enjoying this current dose of persecution. It’s definitely good for the soul.’
Sometimes being a Christian is hard, and the minor inconveniences we may experience from a lack of tolerance in this country are nothing compared to real persecution that people of faith in other countries have to endure, but whatever difficulties we go through for our faith, we, as followers of Christ, have a calling, a vocation, to remember, that Christ’s victory has already been won. In this Easter season witness to the gospel that Jesus’s death and resurrection are the ultimate demonstration of love and that love is victorious. If we are to acknowledge the vocation that we all share, we must remember that our armour against the persecution, or mockery of the world, is to be love – love for God and love for one another.
At the beginning of this Trinity term, which may be the last in this college some, questions of what is the right path for the future may loom large. But whatever we do with our lives, let us all remember our primary calling to serve Christ in love, a vocation sealed at our baptism, into whatever denomination. Whatever you do, if you have faith, I urge you to cherish it, and nurture it and not to be ashamed of it, regardless of whether it happens to be popular or not. It is the greatest gift you have and the greatest gift you will ever have. Amen.
Sunday After Ascension 2010 Rev'd Dr. Peter Groves
Easter 7 Worcester evensong
Ephesians 4:7-16
At this time of year, the Christian church celebrates the Ascension of Christ, and it's a season that always takes me back. In this particular environment, I hardly need remind you of the importance of good teaching. Those who teach are in particular positions of authority. We rely on our teachers both to be able to pass on genuine knowledge, and to stimulate interest in the application of that knowledge. Unreliable teaching is a very dangerous thing. Those of you studying history would be surprised to be told in a tutorial that the English Civil War was basically a dispute between people who disagreed about fashion. Medics would be rightly suspicious of a lecturer who told them not about hormones, but about humours. And so on.
Theological teaching might wrongly be thought to be above reproach. Certainly, if you study theology in this college, your teachers are unimpeachable. Or at least, I am. But when I was studying for the priesthood, I was bemused to discover at my theological college the following annual practice: each year on Ascension Day the pews would be removed from the chapel. We would have to sit on the floor, or cushions, or whatever, for the rest of term. And this was done to remind us of – and I quote – “the goneness of Christ”.
Now first of all, that is absolutely daft. But far more dangerously, it is also absolutely wrong, because the doctrine of the Ascension of Christ is not about absence, it is about presence. Jesus has “gone” only in one very limited sense, that is that the flesh and blood of the human being Jesus of Nazareth are no longer walking around this earth in the way that you are and I am. But that is the case precisely because the presence of Jesus has been transformed into something which cannot be contained. What Christians call the Ascension takes Jesus not from here to there, but from here to everywhere.
Even the transformed presence of Christ is not enough, however. Where Westcott House went so profoundly wrong in its understanding of the Ascension was firstly in its assumption that the doctrine teaches the absence of Christ, rather than his presence: but also in its failure to understand that there is another presence central to the Ascension, at that is the presence of humanity at the right hand of God. It is not so much Christ who has gone, as we, because humanity is changed decisively by being drawn into the perfect life of the Trinity.
What does this really mean? Well, something like this. Christianity teaches that the reality of God is what we call the Trinity, the perfect self giving of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. There is nothing in the life of God, which is not always and eternally being given in love. Human beings are created in the image of God, they are created with this capacity, the selfless love, but all too often they fail to realise it. We recognize this in our own experience. However well we would like to do, the fact is that most of the time we human beings are not very good at being loving, but all too good at being selfish. But God's will for us is so much more. The love of God which overflows in the life of the Trinity, pours itself out in the creation of the world, and will recreate that world. In what Christians call the doctrine of the incarnation, the taking on of human life by God himself God-made-man transforms humanity, because he lives on earth the life of God himself, a life of perfect self giving. This selfless love is, of course, not quite what we expect. It is challenging, unsettling, disconcerting. And so we try to do away with it, we condemn it to death, we remove it from our sight and shut it up in the cold sterility of the tomb. But Love will not be contained, and the life of God, which is love incarnate, bursts forth at Easter, bringing the new life of the resurrection to all. The doctrine of the Ascension forms part of this teaching. By uniting himself to humanity, God draws it up into his own life, so that the perfect offering of love which we are unable to make for ourselves, is made for us by Christ, who represents, who re-presents, human life in the life of God himself.
I am rather fond of the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose remarkable sonnet beginning “As kingfishers catch fire”, contrasts the world of me, mine and self with the world of gift with which we are entrusted in creation. “Each mortal thing does one thing and the same, selves, goes itself, myself it speaks and spells, crying, what I do is me, for that I came.” Rather than this individualistic world, Hopkins sees another: “I say more. The just man justices, Keeps grace, that keeps all his goings graces, Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is – Christ.”
For Hopkins, as for Christian orthodoxy, creation and redemption are not to be held apart. I am redeemed because, in the incarnation, death, resurrection and – importantly- the ascension of the Lord, Christ has become my humanity, Christ has transformed my nature so that when God looks on me in my sin, what he sees is Christ in his love.
The ludicrous ignorance of my theological College might well be improved were it to read more Hopkins. Indeed, were it just to read more theology. For the Ascension of Christ is not about absence. It is about the presence of Christ in you and me and the presence of you and me in the worship of heaven itself. The just man, Hopkins writes, “acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is”.
The doctrine of the Ascension teaches us that we – as human beings – are present and active in the worship of heaven because the perfect love of Christ has transformed humanity into something which can at last stand and live in the presence of God, because humanity has been, and is represented, re-presented, by Jesus Christ the Word made flesh. When God looks on you and me in our sin and our weakness what he sees is Christ in his selflessness and love “for Christ plays in ten thousand places,/ lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not his / to the Father, by the features of men’s faces”.
Pentecost. Canon Stephen Shipley 23rd May 2010
Pentecost 23 May 2010 Worcester College Oxford
‘The letter kills but the Spirit gives life.’ Three weeks ago I was sitting in the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester soaking up the exhilarating sounds of Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand. Now you wouldn’t expect me to speak for long here without giving a little BBC plug – so I have to tell you straightaway that you too can hear this extraordinary performance – ‘cosmic’ as one critic described it - tomorrow evening on Radio 3 when it will be broadcast as part of the Mahler in Manchester series. Any rendition of Mahler 8 is an occasion of course. It was first performed almost exactly 100 years ago in Munich with over 500 voices, an orchestra of over 150, a children’s choir of 350 and 8 soloists – so it’s no wonder it became known as the Symphony of a Thousand, a title deplored by Mahler himself because he thought it suggested a circus!
Mahler was a deeply religious man, more by temperament than faith. Though he was Jewish by birth, Judaism held little attraction for him. He was more drawn to Catholicism, though his Catholic conversion at the age of 37 was more a pragmatic necessity in order that he could be eligible for the post of Director of the Vienna Opera. He put his religious ideas into his symphonies, three of which, the Second, the Third and the Eighth, present a comprehensive spiritual view of life. But it is the Eighth which seems to sum up his central belief in the aspiration of every creature towards God. His wife, Alma, looking back on her husband’s life saw it almost as a mission. ‘His battle for the eternal values,’ she wrote, ‘his elevation above trivial things and his unfailing devotion to truth are an example of the saintly life.’
Now you may think I’m putting Gustav Mahler on too high a spiritual pedestal, but it struck me three weeks ago, when listening to that performance – and on the two occasions I’ve sung the symphony too – how Mahler’s musical inspiration is no mere contemplation of an idea. It’s a strongly willed plea for a renewal of the inward fire from the source of all life and light. And that’s why it’s appropriate, I believe, to draw your attention to it on Pentecost Sunday – not least because the first movement is a setting of the ancient hymn for Pentecost ‘Veni Creator Spiritus’ – that great invocation to the Holy Spirit as creator and inspirer with its central prayer: ‘Accende lumen sensibus, infunde amorem cordimus’ – ‘Guide our minds with your blest light and with love our hearts inflame.’
And that’s what the Apostle Paul is wanting for his friends in Corinth, as we heard in the New Testament reading tonight. ‘The letter kills but the Spirit gives life,’ he says. He compares the old written covenant that God gave through Moses (our first reading tonight) with the Gospel - not contrasting bad with good but good with better. The new covenant isn’t a matter of written words alone, but the word is animated, brought to life, by the activity of God’s Spirit. Real encounter with the Christian Gospel changes us on the inside - and what Paul is doing is urging his readers to see God in a new way, to recognise the glory around them and allow that glory to infuse their inner being. So how do we do that?
I remember when I first joined the BBC a few months after leaving university, one of the programmes I worked on as a sound engineer that made a deep impression on me was a series called ‘Priestland’s Progress’ - one man’s search for Christianity – Gerald Priestland, then the BBC’s Religious Affairs Correspondent, armed with his tape recorder interviewing nearly a hundred people about their experience of God. It had a huge following. Strangely enough what I recall most about the series was the ritual, repeated nearly everywhere we went, of concluding each interview by recording at least three minutes of the silence of the room – whether it was a bishop’s study or a suburban front parlour. Each time we explained our curious custom and told our victims that they were free to go and put the kettle on. Almost without exception though they chose to stay – and I mean no disrespect to their eloquence when I say it was usually the best part of the interview! Words about God are not to be despised. But when the words are done, there’s still more, unsaid, in the silence.
I really ought then to finish there! But let me spend just another minute or two trying to define the recognition of the work of the Spirit in our lives by citing one of Gerald Priestland’s most perceptive interviewees, the saintly John V Taylor, one time Bishop of Winchester, who over twenty years ago led a Mission to this University and gave five memorable addresses on consecutive evenings in the Sheldonian Theatre. I remember him talking about ‘bumpings into God’ (an expression which annoyed the atheists) – those experiences which are very common to us all – experiences of recognition, sudden insight, an influx of awareness when you wake up and become alive to something. It may be another person or the solution to a problem – and suddenly the penny drops. Every time a human being cries ‘Ah! I see it now.’ That’s the work of the Holy Spirit – what the Christian creed calls ‘the Lord, the Giver of Life’. And that Creator Spirit has always been quietly, anonymously at work within every human life, within me, within you, drawing our attention to this, to that, opening our eyes, awakening all that is truly human in us, all that is most real.
Of course we can resist the Spirit. Sometimes it’s too painful, too disturbing, to be made fully alive. It’s more comfortable to be a bit insensitive, a bit dead. There are times when we’re stirred with the excitement of a new project, a different interest, an issue of justice that calls for support – but it’s too much trouble to make room for it. Then there are the moments when something strangely beautiful claims our attention, demands that we stand and stare – but it’s too embarrassing in front of our friends. When, unexpectedly, God has become more real, we can’t let ourselves stay with it. These experiences are common to every life, whether they’ve taken a religious form or not. But thank God that his Spirit isn’t easily rebuffed for it’s the Spirit of love, the Spirit of life, striving with our dull, frightened spirits to bring us alive.
‘The letter kills but the Spirit gives life,’ says Paul. He was speaking of what he felt constantly, that what Jesus had brought into the world was a life, an energy and a transforming power. And on this day, the day of Pentecost, we can know this power for ourselves. For this isn’t something that happened in the past and has now died down like a mere gust. The question is rather whether the world will allow this Spirit of God to transform the way we live, or fail to grasp what is possible for us with God. There are in truth innumerable books to read, and vast amounts to learn if we wish. But it’s all vain and stultifying if the Spirit of God doesn’t fill our lives. Come Holy Spirit and fill the lives of those who without you are dead! And teach us to lift our hearts to life with you! Amen.
Music, Theology and the Chapel by Dr. Susan Gillingham
Worcester Chapel 6 June 2010
Music, Theology and the Chapel
We have had a wonderful year of chapel music. So, as we approach the end of this academic year, it seems appropriate to say something about the relationship between music, faith and worship. In part this is a way of thanking the choir – and the chaplain – for all they have given those of us who come to sit, listen and pray. In part it is to help us all reflect more on how music evokes a faith in quite a different way from any exhortation dependent upon the abundance of words.
So I start tonight with a visual aid: this is our alabaster candlestick which serves as a lectern, quoted by one art critic as representing an upside-down melted candle. I wonder how many of you have ever looked closely at it. This was a gift from the scholars of the college in 1865: you can see it in the writing on the base: ‘D.D. Scholares Coll. Vigor.n. A.D. MDCCCLXV’. The silver-bound lecterns on each side were also a gift - in this case, from one Charles Henry Olive Daniel, a great supporter of Burges and a Fellow of the College who was later to become Provost. The candlestick was finally placed in its present position when the work on the mosaic pavement had been completed: you can see the way it neatly separates the twelve saints of the English church from the four earlier saints of the Western church. Once situated where we have it now, it has become all but immoveable; it was taken aside when the refurbishment of the chapel took place in 2002, but other than then I have never seen it other than approximately halfway between the two pillars at the West End and the two pillars at the East end. For some, it interrupts the aesthetic sweep from the narthex up to the chancel; and for others, it is a real practical nuisance when it comes to liturgical processions and dramatic and musical performances. But it does imitate rather well the two axes of the chapel: the vertical axis is represented not only by the pillars, but also by the downward sequence of the seven scrolls and seven windows, with the fourteen frescos on each side and the seven friezes underneath; whereas the horizontal axis is represented by the words of the two canticles, one running right around the cornice and the other around the back of the benches. The candlestick has been placed more or less at the very centre of this axis right under the dome. It echoes our cross-shaped faith, pointing us to the crucifixion window at the East end.
But I wonder how many of you have really looked at this in detail. William Burges, the chapel’s architect, left us his sketch of it, in silhouette form, and it is now in the College Library. Burges had eclectic tastes, and one of them was for Renaissance Art and Architecture. He had entered competitions for designs for a church in Florence, for example, and the designs for the candlestick were undoubtedly influenced by that Quattrocento style of fourteenth century Florence - a style which in turn imitated Greek and Roman classical forms. If any of you have ever been to the Duomo in Florence, you might have seen in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo a work by Luca della Robia, dating from 1428-31, entitled ‘Cantoria’: it was built as one of two marble ‘organ pulpits’ over the two sacristy doors in the Duomo (the other was designed later by Donatello). ‘Cantoria’ comprises ten reliefs of children playing, singing and dancing Psalm 150, set on three different levels. When we were in Florence, I found these different cameos, taken as a piece, incredibly moving, for they suggested the unconstrained, jubilant nature of children’s praise, which to my mind is a most apt way of depicting Psalm 150, with all its calls to praise God with trumpet, lute and harp, with tambourine, dance, strings and pipe, with clashing symbols and with one’s voice. The choir’s earlier rendition of Psalm 150, to that familiar setting by Stanford, with the trebles more than playing their part, did full justice to this psalm.
If you look closely at our candlestick you will see that around the upper base we have a group of eleven youths – I’ve no idea where the twelfth singer has disappeared! – who are perhaps a little older than the children in Luca della Robia’s work, and older too than our choirboy trebles, but not much – and they are singing diligently from six different books. Perhaps it does not have quite the vibrancy and joyful spontaneity of of the 15c. Florentine work, but it has undoubtedly been influenced by Luca della Robia. The sculptor responsible for transforming Burges’s sketches into reality was Thomas Nicholls. Nicholls - who had worked with Burges on previous projects - was responsible for the three different sculptural projects in the chapel - firstly, the animals, in walnut wood, on top of the bench ends; secondly, the four statues of the Gospel writers, inlaid with gilt, in each of the four niches in the corners of the chapel; and, third, this candlestick, carved from alabaster. The statues of the four Gospels produced the most controversy, because some of the Fellows thought they were too close to what they saw as the idolatrous practices in the Roman and High Anglican Churches growing around Oxford in the 1860s, encouraging devotion to images.
The carvings and candlestick were not controversial, and you can see the way each project has been integrated into the heart of the chapel. For example, look at the cornice of the chapel: you will see, in twelve sections, that morning canticle called the Benedicite, which calls on all creation to give praise to God - the light and darkness, the green things of earth, the fowls of the air, the beasts of the field, the fish of the sea, the mountains and hills. In the carvings of the animals all around you Nicholls has focused particularly on the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air which, implicitly, are giving their own praise to God their Creator. Now look, if you can, at the backs of the pews against the chapel wall: there you will find, rather more hidden, the other morning canticle, the Te Deum,. which is split up so that one word runs into another. This is a call to the angels and saints in heaven above to join with the choir and saints on earth below in praise of God: ‘We praise Thee O God, we acknowledge Thee to be the Lord; to thee all angels… continually do cry, Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts’ . Just as Nichols carved out the animals to illustrate more of the Benedicite, so too he carved out this alabaster candlestick-lectern, in Florentine Quattrocento style, to echo the Te Deum. So it is not of Psalm 150; and although marble has worn somewhat thin to give any indication on their song books, our library sources tell us that this anthem is, as appropriate for our chapel, the Te Deum.
Worcester Chapel is by far the most visual and sensory chapel in Oxford. Every available space has been taken up with highly symbolic drawings, covering the walls by way of frescos, windows, murals, and using every available inch of the ceiling and the floor. But Burges and Nichols – and Henry Holiday, who was responsible for the windows – did not intend this to be a chapel where the praise of God is only encountered visually. As well as the two canticles, and as well as our singers on this candle, there are several other instances where Burges points us to how we can encounter God not only by what we see but by what we hear. Look first at the frieze on the north side, immediately to my right - there you see the heavenly host of angels making music to God - Uriel, Raphael, Gabriel, Michael, and the Choir of Eight. (It was pointed out to me recently by Matthew Salisbury that one of these angels is holding a book with exactly the same psalm chant on it as the chant running across the organ bench.) This frieze conveys to us the music of the heavenly host, of which not only the Te Deum but also the Benedicite speaks: if you look up you will see the writing above this frieze which reads “Oh ye angels of the Lord, bless the Lord: praise him, and magnify him for ever”. This fits with the sculpting of four angels at the base of the candlestick joining the choir of eleven in the ‘Te Deum’. So heavenly praise intermingles with earthly praise and raises it back to heaven. Earthly praise is of course important: look now at the gold-plated frieze further down the chapel, and you should see David, the founder of Hebrew psalmody, playing on his harp, along with Solomon his son, the founder of the Temple, carrying a model of it in a typical Medieval pose. Then at the other side of the chapel look at the frieze just along from the Provost’s stall, which is of the martyrs of the Christian Church, where you can see St. Cecelia of Rome, the founder of Christian music, with her pipes, here with St. Catherine of Alexandria (and her wheel). And then, on the floor, you see in the mosaics St. Wilfrid, holding his psalms scroll.
So despite its intense visual impact, we also have a chapel which is about hearing as well as seeing the praise of God. Furthermore, we are reminded that we in what has been called a ‘Temple masking a Church’, where, like the Temple of Solomon, heavenly mysteries are made incarnate on earth and earthly realities are transformed by a vista of heaven.
I deliberately chose tonight’s readings with this idea of earthly praise and heavenly praise in mind. Our Old Testament lesson told us about the celebrations after the completion of the Temple of Solomon. Here we read that the celebrations focussed not on sacrifice but on processional songs. We read how the Levitical Singers took their cymbals, harps, lyres and trumpets ‘and other musical instruments’ and sang praises to the Lord, using a song found in many psalms, especially 118 and 136: "For he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever!". After they had sung, the mystery of the glory of God filled the Temple. So music preceded sacrifice, and it was the praise to God in music and song which apparently drew the presence of God into the midst of the sanctuary. This is a typical example of how the gift of music attunes human hearts to the hear and see the glory of God.
Our New Testament lesson spoke of earthly praise and heavenly praise in a reverse way. The setting for this reading was of a heavenly Temple, and the assembled company included the twenty-four elders, each holding a harp, singing a new song of praise to the Lamb of God: “You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, for by your blood you ransomed for God saints from every tribe and language and people and nation”. The praise of these heavenly saints was augmented by the praises of many angels, singing “Worthy is the Lamb that was slaughtered to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!" At this point the praise in heaven moved down to earth, with the whole company in heaven and earth singing “To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!”. This is what John in Revelation both sees and hears: here the gift of music from angelic voices attunes those on earth to hear and see the glory of God.
I started by saying that I wanted to speak about the music of the chapel, and I have tried to show how music is to be found in the chapel already, even before the choir adds their own voices to it. I also said I wanted to reflect on how music gives rise to faith, often surpassing what words can do. I realise now this latter aim is really a contradiction in terms: how can I use mere words to describe music and faith when I am saying music and faith transcend them? This is the point at which I think music and theology, my own subject, are really about the same things. The score of music, like the text of Scripture, is a prism to help us encounter the divine, but it only comes to life when we move beyond the notations of the musical score (or beyond the words of a scriptural text) into some sort of performance. The score on its own, and the text alone, need to be brought to life. Music has the capacity to offer to us ‘a little incarnation’ as we perceive through a performance the presence of God within us and beyond us. T.S. Eliot once said that poetry was ‘a raid on the inarticulate’.
I think this also applies to music as well. So- ‘thanks be to God’ for those who have sung so wonderfully throughout this year, not least for their ‘raid on the inarticulate’ which has lifted our hearts to God and also brought God down to us.
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