English Summer 2010 #4 - Slumming at Oxford

Look at that incredible doorway! I was wandering around with my straw hat in hand, sheepishly refusing to put the thing on my head amid the hallowed halls of learning, when we entered the courtyard of the Oxford Divinity College. This august institution has turned out students for the ministry since the early 1400s. Suddenly, the dated inscription on Unity Institute's official seal, proudly claiming New Thought antiquity due to our establishment in 1931, made be glad we call it New Thought.






Not that there is anything necessaily wrong with old thought. I suspect that more than one of our Friends in High Places has graced that courtyard on the way to class and to a life of delightfully heretical mischief-making which followed. (Divinity School interior, right.)







The pulpit of the Church of St. Mary the Virgin (left). This sanctuary is also known as "The University Church," and the pulpit overlooks the spot where Protestant church leaders like Bishop Thomas Cranmer were tried, convicted, and led forth to burn at the stake. And our students think Unity's L&O committee can be tough!


That was a baaaaaad third interview.




As I sat there in the space where people trained for the ministry over 600 years ago, it occurred to me that times and ideas change but the acts of service to which we committ ourselves continue in unbroken line. Some of these men--for they were, sadly, all men in those days--went forth to change the world. But far more of them graduated and took posts as ordinary teachers, pastors, and parish priests. They visited the sick during the great plagues. The collected food and clothing for the poor. They made the rounds of the villages and comforted widows and the elderly. And, yes, they said mass and preached doctrines which we will doubtless find outmoded today.

Yet the energy of ministry--to do good in the Name of God--unites us through the centures with these long-gone, unknown, friends in middle places. I sit on a time-worn bench and think about an average student who learned his Latin and chanted his prayers in this space half a milllenium before I was born. Across time and space, I say a quiet thank you...