Christ Church Incumbents’ Conference, 2007
Every two years, the incumbents of Christ Church livings are invited to a conference held at Christ Church, just before the undergraduates come back for the Michaelmas Term. It’s one of the nicest perks of being a Christ Church incumbent, and comes courtesy of the Dr South Trust. It’s an opportunity to hear some lectures from the kind of speakers you would expect Christ Church to attract. It’s an opportunity to ‘retreat’ from the parish for a couple of days and recharge spiritual batteries, sharing in the round of worship at the Cathedral. Oh, I nearly forgot: it’s an opportunity to be wined and dined in the Great Hall.
It’s a hard life, but you understand I have to make these sacrifices, in order to serve the parish...
This year’s theme was Divine Music, which sounded daunting to the musical semi-illiterate like me. (My reading music is like the person reading letters, who can tell that b is different from d and p, but can’t always remember which is which.)
My favourite talk was Emma Hornby on The Hymn: Medieval and Modern. My least favourite was Jonathan Cross on Reaching for the Spiritual through the Modern, which included pieces by Messiaen, Jonathan Harvey, and Steve Reich. Even with some explanation, I couldn’t understand these guys and most of the examples we heard felt to me like a lot of painful noise.
Then, great fun on the next day. In the morning Stephen Darlington led us through a rehearsal and performance of Alan Ridout’s 12 minute mini-opera, The Burning of Jan Palach - unpublished, rarely performed, and immensely moving - and in the evening, a trip to Stratford to see Twelfth Night at the Courtyard Theatre, with John Lithgow as an excellent, laughable and moving Malvolio.
And so home, to process it all, and pick up life in the real world again.
Going to something like that makes me really wish I could do music. At the same time, it reminds me how wonderful it is being with a group of Christians, singing. Because we love to sing, and the practice we have makes all of us - even the ‘less musical’ among us - really not at all bad at it.