The Newsletter Of The Oxford Unitarian Congregation
MAY
Sunday 3 May: Preacher: David Morgan, of the Golders Green Unitarian congregation. Followed by a sandwich lunch (please bring your own), and a report back by Jacky Woodman and Alison Butler from the annual meeting of the Unitarian General Assembly. All welcome; meeting ends 2.30 pm.
Wednesday 6 May: Revd Dr Arthur Stewart invites members of our congregation to attend a seminar on pastoral care. 10 am to 1 pm. Meet 9.55 in the college foyer.
Sunday 10 May: Preacher: Martin Gienke, Lay Leader of the Bury St Edmunds Unitarian Church. Activities for children aged 5–10 during the service today — not next week.
Sunday 17 May: No morning service (streets closed for Fun Run) and no children’s activities. Evening service at 6 pm, led by Dr Howard Oliver to honour the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Darwin; preceded at 5 pm by tea and cakes (please bring some!) in the Wellbeloved Room, with a display of books by and about Darwin.
Sunday 24 May: Preacher: Revd Frank Walker, retired minister of the Cambridge Unitarian Church.
Sunday 31 May: Preacher: Alan Ruston, President of the Unitarian Historical Society and Chair of the Watford Fellowship.
JUNE
Sunday 7 June: Preacher: Professor John Toye, Chair of the Chapel Society. After the service: a sandwich lunch and a guided tour of Oxford Castle.
Saturday 13 June: Unitarian Women’s League Garden Party at the home of Christine Jones in Standlake at 2.30 pm.
Sunday 14 June: Preacher: Val Worthington, Portsmouth Unitarian church. Special collection for this year’s good cause adopted by the Unitarian Women’s League: Meningitis UK.
Sunday 21 June: Preacher: Revd Dr Arthur Stewart, Tutor in Ministerial Studies, Harris Manchester College, and Minister of the Leicester Unitarian church. Committee meets at 1 pm.
Saturday 27 June: Midland Unitarian Association summer outing to Quarry Bank Mill and Styal Estate, Cheshire. Details on the chapel notice board.
Sunday 28 June: Preacher: Martin Gienke, Lay Leader of the Bury St Edmunds Unitarian Church.
Sunday 5 July: Preacher: Dr Evelyn Taylor, MCO Chapel Society. After the service: lunch and garden party at the home of Allie Butler and Colette Edgeworth Rhatigan in east Oxford. All welcome.
FORTHCOMING EVENTS
Guided tour of oxford castle and prison: Sunday 7 June, 2 pm. One thousand years of history brought vividly to life. If we can assemble a party of 15 people, we will get priority admission and reduced rates. Bring sandwiches to eat after the service: in the college if wet, in the castle grounds if dry.
Unitarian Women’s League: summer meeting of the Oxford branch: 2.30 pm on Saturday 13 June at the home of Chris Jones in Standlake. All welcome. There will be tea, a talk about the work of Meningitis UK (the League's good cause this year), and a chance to stroll round Norman Chart’s lovely garden next door.
Garden Party at the east Oxford home of Allie Butler and Colette Edgeworth Rhatigan after the service on Sunday 5 July. We are all invited to lunch. Please bring something to drink: fruit juice or wine, whichever you prefer. This is our chance to admire a display of Allie’s very distinctive paintings.
Congregational retreat at St Ethelwold’s House on the bank of the Thames in Abingdon, Saturday 22 August, 10 am to 4.30 pm. A series of half-hour talks by Dr Martin Pulbrook on the theme Women in the Circle of Jesus: A Radical Re-Evaluation of the Scriptural Evidence, interspersed with musical interludes, and meditations led by members of our congregation. Coffee, tea, and lunch will be provided. Join us for a day of reflection, new insights, and deepening friendship. St Ethelwold’s is a peaceful 14th-century house with a beautiful garden on the bank of the Thames in the old heart of Abingdon, easily accessible by public transport from Oxford.
NEWS …. NEWS … NEWS … NEWS … NEWS … NEWS … NEWS … NEWS
Bob Eaton, who died on 25 April 2009 at the age of 90, served the Chapel Society and the College as organist for 35 years, from 1969 to 2004, under five successive Principals. A self-taught performer, Bob was an utterly reliable and tactful accompanist for congregational hymn singing; but when given free rein to play organ voluntaries, he indulged his passion for the thunderous works of composers such as Widor and Lefébure-Wély. A self-employed builder (like his father and grandfather before him), he built the new pit for the organ console when it was moved across the chancel from its original position under the organ pipes. He and his wife Betty rescued the eagle lectern and the handsome oak table (now kept at the back of our chapel) from the jaws of a bulldozer when the old Unitarian chapel at Notting Hill was about to be demolished. For many years Bob served on the College council and on our Chapel Society committee. Bob was married to Betty for 69 devoted years. They fell in love at the age of 17, while both still at school, and were married at the age of 21. Betty survives him, with their four children and numerous grandchildren. We send loving sympathy to his family.
They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it. Death cannot kill what never dies; nor can spirits ever be divided that love and live in the same divine principle, the root and record of their friendship. (William Penn)
We welcome three new attenders:
Tess McCormick brings her baby Audrey, born on 23 December 2008. Tess and her husband Tim (an anaesthetist at the John Radcliffe Hospital) have moved to Oxford from London, where Tess worked at the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery. She is currently on maternity leave from her post as Head of Fundraising at the Ashmolean Museum. She used to attend services in our chapel as a small girl because her grandparents, Martin and Hilda Hall, had close associations with the college. (A book of poems by Martin Hall, still on sale in the college, records how they met and fell in love on Magdalen Bridge one May Morning.) Hilda’s father, Edgar Thackray, was a minister of Stand Unitarian Church in Manchester; Martin’s father was Dr Alfred Hall, a minister in Newcastle and Sheffield, and the President of Manchester College from 1945 to 1951. By coincidence Tim’s grandfather was Revd Hugh McCormick, a Unitarian minister in Northern Ireland who had a close association, in Belfast, with Tess’s great-uncle, Dr Jack MacLachlan, the Acting Principal of Manchester College from 1949 to 1951. So Audrey comes from a long line of distinguished dissenting forebears. She will be named at a blessing ceremony in the chapel, conducted by Revd Peter Hewis, on Sunday 21 June at 12.30 pm.
Tuncay Danismaz, a Turkish Muslim, became interested in Unitarianism through his friendship with chapel members John Bridgen and Jacky Woodman, whom he first met at events organised by the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford. Tuncay’s name is pronounced ‘Tunjeye’, and it means ‘Bronze Moon’. He was brought up in Istanbul, where his parents, brothers, and sister still live. His first degree was in Business Administration at the University of Istanbul; he came to Oxford to improve his English and is now studying International Management at Oxford Brookes University
Colette Edgeworth Rhatigan has been attending our services for several months without a proper introduction. Originally from Edinburgh, she was educated in St Andrew’s. She spent many years living and working abroad as a ski instructor and crewing sailing yachts before embarking on a professional career within the NHS. As a Senior Occupational Therapist, Colette has specialised over the past ten years in work within Emergency Departments in Oxford and London hospitals. Currently she is taking a career break from the NHS and is training as a Volunteer Generalist Adviser with the Citizens Advice Bureau in Oxford. Her interests include gardening, photography, visual art and film, Tai Chi, meditation, cooking, and entertaining friends. She was raised as a Roman Catholic, but her spiritual horizons have expanded to include Buddhist ideas and practices, and she says she feels comfortable in our free-thinking Unitarian congregation.
Greetings to Katie Hall and Travis Sparham, who left Oxford soon after their wedding in our chapel in 2007. They now live in Reading, where they have bought a small house. “We are finally coming to the end of a very long DIY project. It has been hard work, and we have spent almost every spare hour stripping wall paper, sanding, painting, and laying floors.” The work was finished in time for the birth of their first child, Lauren, on 16 March. Her parents hope to bring her to a service soon, to introduce her to us.
Tim Elton and Robyn Carpenter were married in the college chapel by Revd Peter Hewis on 8 March 2009. Tim plays the oboe and teaches at Wellington College; Robyn plays the violin and is a Music Editor at Oxford University Press.
AN AFRICAN MUSICAL LEGACY
To mark the recent establishment of a small choir in our congregation, Jacky Woodman writes:
I cannot conceive of a church without a choir, and I have a deep-seated need to sing as an act of worship and service. I’m an African, and I was brought up on Southern African Gospel music. In the Pentecostal church which my father served as the minister, there was a Sunday School Choir, a youth choir, a senior choir for pensioners, a women’s choir, and a male-voice choir. The very talented formed quartets, sextets, and octets for special occasions; whoever couldn’t or wouldn’t sing had to play an instrument!
Young and old, skilled and unskilled, vocalists, musicians, and percussionists were immersed in the music. It allowed for spontaneous and authentic expression of emotion. It included the rhythms and melodies of a multitude of indigenous tribes, fused with influences from trading cultures and colonial conquests.
Picture the scene on a Sunday morning in the churches of Cape Town, South Africa. At the ‘high end’ are Catholic and Anglican congregations, intoning psalms and singing Gregorian chants in Latin. In the ‘middle’ are Presbyterian and Methodist churches, which have incorporated a collection of indigenous anthems, choruses, and local hymns. At the ‘low end’ (my end!) are the numerous spiritual, charismatic, and Pentecostal churches where music-making is loud, rhythmically alive, and geared to the present. Hymns are embellished, harmony is improvised by a hit-and-miss approach, and a soloist can always liven things up by singing ahead of the beat! When classical European music is sung or played, although it is instantly recognisable, few will know the name of the composer, and no-one will have read the sheet music. Pieces such as Handel’s ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ from Messiah are taught by rote, memorised, and sung with gusto and abandon, because no-one has a clue how it’s supposed to be sung. In some churches, the sermon may be preceded by a talking drum or a chanting chorus.
Members of our own congregation will now perhaps understand my attempts to introduce rhythmic percussion into the choir, and the choir will understand my blatant disregard for sheet music! Fortunately some of the members have had years of training in singing harmony straight from sheet music. Whether or not you can sight-read, if you enjoy singing you are welcome to join the choir. Just come to a practice session any Sunday morning at 10 am in the chapel. Besides rehearsing the hymns of the day, we want to learn some new ones from the new Unitarian hymnbook Sing Your Faith. The Chapel Society has initially bought 10 copies of this book, with a view to investing in a full set at some point.
Lady Hilda (‘Nibby’) Bullock (1915–2009): a tribute by Penelope Newsome
Nibby Bullock has always been in my life, ever since her husband Alan worked under my father, Director of the BBC European Service during World War II, after which my mother and Alan and Nibby remained friends in Oxford. But I never really knew the ‘feisty’ Lady Bullock, wife of the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, described in her obituary in The Oxford Times (26 February 2009). The Nibby whom I came to know in her last seven years was a wise, serene person with a big heart and gentle ways, who was reverenced by all around her for the intelligent but modest, patient, and uncomplaining way with which she dealt with the problems of Alan’s declining years and her own old age.
In 2002, shortly after I returned from eight years away from Oxford, Nibby and I happened to meet in Brown’s Café. From that moment she and I became firm friends. She moved soon afterwards into Fairfield, a residential home where I visited her often, and then, after her stroke in 2006, to St Luke’s Home in Headington. I also visited Alan regularly in his care home until his death in 2004. They were both long-standing Unitarians and members of our Chapel Society, and it was through them that I eventually joined the Society too.
I adored Nibby from the moment our acquaintance was renewed. She was like the answer to a prayer: I had been trying to find spiritual direction for years, exploring many avenues. Nibby provided the answer by giving me a copy of Alan’s own book about his father, Building Jerusalem (Allen Lane, 2000). Anyone who has not read this beautiful and enriching book should do so immediately and keep it forever as a bedside book. It was for me like the cutting of the Gordian knot, and at the same time like a tying together of all the strands of my spiritual searching. Frank Bullock, a self-educated man who became a Unitarian Minister in 1913 and served the congregation in Chapel Lane Bradford from 1926 to 1964, developed a profound wisdom from his study of all the great religions, from Jungian psychology, and from all the great minds of history and literature. For both Nibby and me, Frank’s spiritual insights represented a satisfying blend of the rational and the mystical.
Nibby, like Frank, nourished her inner life with the beauty of Nature and with reading and music. A graduate in English from St Anne’s College, she was a great lover of poetry; one of her own profound and beautiful poems (which I hope will be reissued) is printed below. Fortunately, her stroke could not take her strong mind away. She continued to read as long as she could. We read Building Jerusalem together, and read and re-read her English poetry books; to her dying day at the age of 93, she could still memorise and repeat her favourites — chiefly William Wordsworth, a romantic but rational mystic if ever there was one.
Nibby embraced life even after the stroke had robbed her of the use of her legs and one arm. She endeared herself to all around her, to the nurses in St. Luke’s for example, by her total acceptance of life in the now, with whatever small pleasures and kindnesses it had to offer. I was deeply touched by the pleasure she always expressed at seeing me, by her lovely warmth of heart, and by the great peace that being with her gave me. She loved the garden at St Luke’s, where we spent many happy hours together. When Nibby talked of her best memories, they were of beautiful places in her native Yorkshire and Walberswick in Suffolk, where she and her family had spent such happy times, of places like the Rothschild villa in Italy where she had been a guest with Alan, and the farm where she spent childhood holidays.
Nibby’s loyalty to her own family was a major resounding chord in her life. She relished the frequent visits of her devoted and beloved children and grandchildren; and she often spoke of her adored mother, her dear brother, and of course of her very dear husband, Alan. She had a rare gift: a rich inner life.
Nibby died on 17 February 2009. In this small space I cannot properly express my appreciation of the privilege of sharing time with her in the past seven years. She was a great soul, and I am so grateful to her. But she was ready to go on to a new life, and my heart will always dance for her with the daffodils.
(A copy of Building Jerusalem may be borrowed from our chapel library. ― Ed.)
Northern Valley
In the cradle of my valley where I rock
to spring roulades of bright chaffinch song,
high cliffs of cloud leap up
and clefs of water music rainbow out
to mist the mirror of the stream below.
The long curved pauses of the moors
are held upon a curlew’s cry.
And there, behind the trees, a wake of vapour trail
unfurls and smudges into cloud
longer than cirrus.
It winds the earth, the sky and me
in maypole streamers to the wheeling sun
that crowns the glory of these Marching days.
Nibby Bullock, 2000
AS OTHERS SEE US: WHAT’S IN A BLOG?
An article
by a member of our congregation, published in the
‘Face to Faith’ column of The Guardian on 28 March 2009 (still available
at http://www.guardian.co.uk:80/
* * * Positive * * *
‘The world would clearly be a much happier place if all the doctrinaire dogmatists and fundamentalists were to become Unitarians.’
‘I’ve often thought that if I believed in a god at all, this is probably the club worth joining. Or maybe the unitarians-without-hymns, the peaceable (though sadly abstemious!) Quakers. It’s hard to think of either body causing massive public outrage, the way the usual suspects manage to do several times a week.’
‘Unitarians seem to be unique in explicitly recognising that they are not held together by intellectual consensus. Not only is there no creed, but there is no desire for a creed. What matters is the behaviour that shows where you have put your trust. When challenged over doctrine, a Unitarian will tend first to seek understanding and to withhold overt expressions of intellectual assent until the proposition has become clear. Ask me whether I believe the doctrine of the Trinity, and I will first respond by asking you to explain what it means. And if the finest teachers cannot do so, then we will just have to accept that I am too stupid to understand the doctrine, so any claim to believe it would be futile and dishonest on my part.’
‘By rejecting explicit dogma and creeds, which become simply a set of written statements that act as a totem, Unitarians force internalisation of the difficult questions and drive one to the task of finding one’s own way to Truth. This inevitably becomes reflected in the way one chooses to live. Such a faith is in many respects a far harder taskmaster than simple credal faiths, for which reciting a set formula appears to suffice.’
‘What is it that holds together the creedless Unitarians? They are full of differences, and yet they are mostly a cohesive unity. Perhaps it is simply that they are a collection of like-minded individuals whose common ground is a personally developed faith. I suppose that does demand they are self-confident free thinkers. In the modern age it is no wonder there are so few of them. Unitarianism is perhaps the religion that most deserves to prosper. “We believe in one God. We believe that Jesus was a good person, an excellent role-model, but not the son of God. God is God, and that’s that. You are responsible for your own actions. God will not judge you based on what you believe, but on what you do. Probably. We could be wrong.” This is the closest thing to a healthy religion I can think of: far more benevolent, not to mention sensible, than the abrahamic monotheisms.’
* * * Negative * * *
‘What it boils down to is that Unitarians want the warm fuzzies without the explicit codification of other superstitions. Now they only need to take one more step and become rationalists.’
‘It seems to me that Unitarians are ex-Christians who have thrown out the baby (the Incarnation) and have kept the pantheist bathwater. In what essential way do they differ from Muslims? Is their faith a cosier, friendlier, laissez-faire version of Islam?’
‘“A feather bed to catch a falling Christian” is how Erasmus Darwin described Unitarianism to his Unitarian friend Josiah Wedgwood (Charles Darwin’s paternal and maternal grandfathers respectively). It is a pity that the Unitarian Church in Britain has not gone as far as its sister Unitarian Universalist Association in North America in adopting a non-credal approach. There, a majority of members identify themselves as secular humanists, while remaining broad enough to include many who identify themselves as Wiccans, Earth Religionists, Buddhists, and so on, rather like Catherine’s heterogeneous congregation in Oxford. Only about 10 per cent of UUA members identify themselves as Christian. Though relatively small, they are, I believe, the fastest-growing denomination in the USA. Here where I live in Canada, my local Unitarian congregation (I am not a member) has had to move from its small church to one more than four times bigger in order to accommodate its growing numbers.’
‘Hmm — I dunno much about Unitarians, but I know when people are afraid to call a spade a spade. If you don’t believe in a god, you call yourself atheist, agnostic, or secular humanist. If you believe that there is some transcendent force outside of mankind that influences our lives, you can be a Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist or any other theism. Unitarianism, it seems to me, is afraid to let go of its Christian origins. There’s nothing wrong with a communitarian movement that values self-respect and ethics and which judges all people according to their deeds rather than merely by their words or intentions. There is everything wrong with a philosophy in the 21st century that is deeply sceptical about the major monotheisms but can’t do without them.’
MEMORIES OF TIM BERNERS-LEE
The recent ‘Face to Faith’ article in the Guardian mentioned Tim Berners-Lee, the Unitarian pioneer of the World Wide Web who declined to patent his invention and thus make a personal profit from it. This prompted a reader to respond: “Tim and I were contemporaries at Oxford, and we had many friends in common. I remember that in 1975 he took me to his college room to show me the word-processor he had built, saying ‘If only I could get hold of an old teletype machine, I might be able to print out the results’! And I remember him bringing his guitar on a punting expedition, and my being particularly impressed because he could sing American Pie and Alice’s Restaurant all the way through. So the seeds of IT innovation and social justice were already sprouting even then!”
MAUD’S INDUCTION
In February Peter and Heddwen Hewis, Cecily and Bob Redpath, and Evelyn Taylor attended the ‘service of mutual commitment’ between the congregation of St Mark’s Unitarian Church in Edinburgh and Revd Maud Robinson, their new Minister. Maud graduated with an MA in Theology from Harris Manchester in 2007 and was a popular preacher in our chapel while she was a student.
Bob Redpath tells us that Revd Jane Barraclough, the minister of Cross Street Chapel in Manchester, who graduated the year before Maud, led the service. Maud’s Irish roots were acknowledged in the choice of the hymn Now let us sing in loving celebration, sung to the tune ‘Danny Boy’, and a high-spirited reading of Yeats’s poem The Fiddler of Dooney, which begins ‘When I play on my fiddle in Dooney, Folk dance like a wave of the sea’.
Revd Bill Darlison, Senior Minister of Maud’s home church in Dublin, gave the Counsel to the Congregation, arguing that preachers need congregations and derive an energy from their presence, so show up on Sundays! He added that it takes a long time to prepare a service, and no sermon worth listening to takes less than four hours. Revd Peter Hewis gave the Counsel to the Minister, urging Maud to remember the advice of James Martineau: that ministers are people among the congregation and not priests set apart; ministers should know their people and be at one with them. They should see themselves as members of a team and remember that each member of the congregation has gifts to offer. Most of all, Peter urged Maud to be herself.
Maud invited a number of members to recite with her a mutual commitment to ministry which they had composed together. Bill Stephen said he hoped that, as with the Fiddler of Dooney, the Edinburgh congregation would dance to her tune like a wave on the sea. John Clifford, Secretary of the International Council of Unitarians and Universalists, welcomed her in his kilt. Jane Barraclough gave her a big hug. A lively reception was held at the Traverse Theatre following the service.
COMMUNICATION: IT’S ALL ABOUT COMMUNITY — a report by MARTYN AGASS
In February I attended the 9th annual conference of the Unitarian Communications Co-ordinators Network (UCCN) at the Nightingale Centre in Great Hucklow — my first visit to the Unitarian conference centre in the Peak District. The other delegates seemed to fall into two distinct categories: lifelong Unitarians – or very recent members. But whatever our status, the welcome was equally warm.
It was an intensive weekend, with a series of presentations, albeit informal, and lively discussion after each of them which continued during meals. Two themes emerged: how to communicate local activities at the congregational and community levels, and (perhaps more contentious) the extent to which Unitarians should promote the denomination and its values to society as a whole.
Rev. David Shaw, Minister of the Hucklow village chapel, argued the case for ‘reach-out’, in contrast to the customary and more passive ‘out-reach’ programmes operated by many denominations. From his own pastoral experience, he argued that Unitarians can respond very positively to the inherent sadness and unmet emotional needs of many people living in our communities, and it is our duty to bring these healing benefits to their notice. He strongly advocated the personal approach — time spent with people in their own homes, supported by appropriate communication by telephone and e-mail — in contrast to the more general promotion conducted by posters and websites. This brought to my mind some of the discussions that we have been having in our own congregation about pastoral care. David’s personal philosophy and charisma have encouraged growth in the congregation in Chesterfield, where he ministers on a part-time basis: from a base of just four members, it has expanded to an attendance of more than 80 at the most recent Christmas service.
David’s wife, Liz, led a complementary session entitled ‘The Accidental Publicist’. She not-so-gently chastised Unitarians for our natural coyness, urging us to be proud of our convictions and to be less reticent about them in our relations with friends and colleagues and in the wider community. She recounted how David had rather mischievously telephoned the tourist office of every participant at the conference, asking for details of the local Unitarian congregation in order to make contact and arrange a wedding. You can guess the result! In discussion afterwards we compared the strong and well-defined national profile of the Quakers with that of ourselves.
Jim Corrigall, the Chair of the Golders Green congregation and occasional visiting preacher at Oxford, distilled the wisdom of his life-long experience as a journalist and ‘word-smith’ for our benefit. Aside from a host of examples of the effective use of English to fashion leaflets, articles, and press releases, he extolled the benefits of establishing a personal relationship with the news editors of local newspapers, or the news desk of the local radio station.
James Barry, a professional photographer (accompanied by Reg, his faithful canine companion — a Staffordshire bull terrier) gave us a fascinating demonstration of portrait photography, with the aim of embellishing our newsletters and websites. Mindful of his audience, James resisted the temptation to get too technical; by sensitive use of a volunteer, he gave a fascinating exposition of how to take a good portrait photograph. He emphasised the need to convey a message about one’s subject and to arouse the emotions of the viewer. His insights were extended to the photography of buildings, with many attractive views of his home chapel at Ditchling and of the Nightingale Centre itself. In conclusion, James urged us to use the power of the visual image to complement the written word.
No discourse on communication
would be complete without mention of new technology. John Wilkinson
gave an understated but masterful demonstration of the construction
of a website, using his work for the Nightingale Centre as an example.
John, not himself a Unitarian, is the husband of Joan Wilkinson, who
has recently retired as secretary of the National Unitarian Fellowship.
This laudable organisation provides a postal and e-mail fellowship for
those who are unable to join a local congregation. Members receive bi-monthly
newsletters and articles, and may avail themselves of a postal book
service. This innovative approach is now complemented by newer Internet-based
services (www.nufonline.org.uk/
Finally Diane Bennett outlined national development priorities, which include the creation of a website for every congregation; publication of new leaflets entitled ‘Baptism and Welcome’, ‘Building Bridges – Building Communities’, and ‘Unitarianism and World Religions’; and further development of on-line worship resources.
The Nightingale Centre met all my expectations and provided a comfortable and comforting retreat in which to consider and discuss the surprisingly diverse aspects of communication. I think that our forebears would be proud of the enthusiasm with which the small but committed Unitarian community today continues to promote its message.