maggi dawn

Teach me, my God and King, in all things thee to see...

All this term we have been following a theme in our Chapel evening services - exploring the ideas, the writers, the dynamics behind the music that we sing in Chapel. What do we sing, why do we sing it, who wrote it? Often the most beautiful music turns out to be settings of rather obscure texts, or lovely sounding poetry whose words are somewhat inaccessible through layers of cultural mismatch. It's way too beautiful to throw away (after all one of the principles here is that beauty is itself a means of accessing truth) but we do sometimes need some help to get the goodness out of it.

Kathryn from Good In Parts came over on Sunday evening to talk about George Herbert. Her sermon is posted on the sermon blog of her own church - St Mary's.

Fauré Requiem

One of the things we do at Robinson, regularly but not often, is to take a classic piece of choral music that's usually heard as a concert piece, and "perform" it as a liturgy. I think we may have been unique in constructing a liturgy around the wonderful Stravinsky Symphony of Psalms. We did Karl Jenkins' The Armed Man about 3 years ago as a Eucharist for Remembrance. Not so unusual, but still a different experience from a concert, was to do Mozart's Requiem last year as a liturgy. This weekend, for Remembrance Day, we are doing the same with Fauré's Requiem. We aren't a professional choir - it's a choir of volunteers, run by two of our students. And 68% of our Choir is new this term, so they've only been singing together for 5 weeks. It's a brave move, but it was sounding nice in rehearsal, and we are looking forward to it.

Fauré said some stuff about his Requiem that may well chime with Emerging Church afficionados - he wanted to do something that was a funeral but not as we know it, church but not as we know it. His own faith and belief were an interesting mix of orthodoxy and complete maverick individualism. But then he was an artist, so that's pretty unsurprising. Creatives are often feared in the Church because they want to reshape things. Odd, perhaps, that displaying creativity - that most God-like of qualities - often sidelines artists within Church circles.  Anyway, here's what Fauré said about his Requiem:

"It has been said that my Requiem does not express the fear of death and someone has called it a lullaby of death. But it is thus that I see death: as a happy deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness above, rather than as a painful experience. The music of Gounod has been criticized for its overinclination towards human tenderness. But his nature predisposed him to feel this way: religious emotion took this form inside him. Is it not necessary to accept the artist's nature? As to my Requiem, perhaps I have also instinctively sought to escape from what is thought right and proper, after all the years of accompanying burial services on the organ! I know it all by heart. I wanted to write something different."

If you want to join us for our Choral Requiem for Remembrance, it's at Robinson College Chapel, Grange Road, Sunday 12th November. 6pm.

Jesus and interesting Heresies

The Way started up again this week. Under the title "Who is Jesus", we talked about the tension between the means we have of knowing about Jesus and the difference between that and knowing God in some connected, spiritual, living sense. It's probably impossible to have the knowing without the knowing about, but it's very easy to get lost in knowing about and lose connection with the knowing. We also thought about reading scripture and the problem of projection; and about what sense we make of the relationship between Jesus in history and the Christ we believe in now.

The Way meets again on October 23rd, and Andrew will be starting off a session on "Decisions, Decisions (or, What would Jesus do?)". This is normally only for Robinson members; anyone else needs to ask me in advance whether we have room for guests. 

wilderness - watch this space...

(don't squint... click on the image)

Tennyson, In Memoriam

We're having a poetry reading of Tennyson's In Memoriam here in the Chapel next month. I have taught in the Faculty on this poem, along with Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Manley Hopkins Wreck of the Deutschland - three poems that all deal with themes of theodicy, guilt, death and reward, and doubt and certainty. The course I taught on has just been replaced by a new thing, so I guess I'll have to mothball this particular combination for the time being. But it will be nice (in memoriam) to take part in this reading...

WILDERNESS

We are in the midst of planning a week of "Alternative" chapel -
spirituality for the non-religious as well as the faith community, Chapel for those who don't usually attend. We're going to turn various corners of the Chapel into forest, desert, theatre, hillside...  Watch this space, and put 10-17 March in your diary if you are Cambridge based!

science and faith

We're having a series of evening sessions this term looking at issues that matter to Christians. The objective is to make it as accessible for those who don't have faith but are interested, as it is for those who do have faith and want to think through the issues.

I have various different people coming along to present a starting point for each discussion. One of them is a computer scientist, very brainy and well-read, who thinks at 90 miles an hour. He has a much more interesting and well-thought out view than angry-atheist Richard Dawkins on the way in which science and faith interact; the way in which each poses a challenge and sometimes a threat to the other, and how to negotiate faith honestly in the light of it. I'm really looking forward to it. 

faith and medicine

on Sunday 8th (tomorrow) at 6 pm Rev'd James Buxton (the CHaplain of the medical and dental schols at King's College London) is coming to Robinson Chapel to give us a talk on FAITH AND MEDICINE. FOllowed by Q&A and discussion with James.

there will be a couple of musical items by the Chapel choir to get proceedings under way. Should be jolly good. Come and join us.