Catherine Robinson
Profile
Catherine Robinson grew up on a large council estate in Nottingham and enjoyed attending the local Anglican church with her mother, for the beauty of the music and the liturgy. By the age of 15 she was questioning some of the absolutes of the faith, and wondering why there were no women priests. She came to Oxford in 1964 to read English language and literature at St Anne’s College. In her first year the evangelical Christians got a grip on her – but only for a year, after which she began taking instruction from a Tibetan Buddhist monk. The discipline was strict, as his three-hour meditations were compulsory. Finding this too much like hard work, for a time she joined the Subud faith (a spiritual movement, born out of Indonesian Islam, which works for inner perfection), but for her this proved to be too detached from the outer world. Next she found the Religious Society of Friends, which fitted her need for a Christian-based church relevant to issues of poverty and injustice. Catherine stayed with the Oxford Quaker Meeting for 15 years, but ultimately she felt that she needed a more structured style of worship. Unitarianism appealed to her because of its Christian-based universalism and the opportunity to belong to a democratic and inclusive religious community. She joined the MCO Chapel Society in 1992.
While all this was going on in Catherine’s spiritual life, she had trained as a teacher and taught for 10 years, until she found she had nothing new to say about Hamlet. She moved into publishing and worked as an editor at Oxford University Press for eight years, before moving to Oxfam, where she has worked for 15 years as an editor in the Publications Department. As well as serving as the Chair of the MCO Chapel, Catherine serves on the Unitarian Publications Panel, effectively the Board of the Lindsey Press. Their latest volume, Prospects for the Unitarian Movement, is a resource book for congregational discussion groups; and work is underway on the next projects: a collection of poems by the Revd. Cliff Reed, and a volume of essays entitled Unitarian Perspectives on Contemporary Social Issues.
Catherine is a single parent. Her daughter, Magda, is a qualified doctor, living and working in London. During the Cold War in the 1980s they were both active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and Catherine served a sentence in Holloway Prison for a non-violent protest against the basing of US nuclear bombers at Upper Heyford in Oxfordshire. Prison was a humbling experience, which taught her a lot about the sheer luck of the draw in life.
Catherine’s interests include local history and wildlife conservation. She has co-authored and published three books on local history, the most recent being A Towpath Walk in Oxford: The Canal and River Thames Between Wolvercote and the City. She is Secretary of the Friends of the Trap Grounds, an area of reedbed and scrubland near her home in north Oxford which is under threat of development, and she organises campaigning initiatives and conservation sessions and guided walks. Joan Allibone March 2002