“Let us go out with a divine dissatisfaction.” (Martin Luther King, in a speech of August 1967)

“Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you” (St Augustine, Confessions)

Dissatisfied. If I had one word to sum up the mood in this nearly-post-covid time, this is the word I would pick. Many of the conversations I have been having lately, in College and elsewhere, have come back to this same sense of frustration and restlessness. We sense that life is not quite the way it ought to be. Maybe we’re not getting as much sleep as we need, or achieving as much as we’d expected, or feeling as fulfilled and appreciated as we’d like. And perhaps, having lost so much time to the pandemic, we are less willing than before to tolerate life’s shortcomings.

I have been feeling all of this myself over the past term. As most of you know, I will be leaving the College to take up a new post at the end of this academic year. Many of you have lent a sympathetic ear to my complaints and stresses about applying for jobs! But I’ve found that the relief of getting a new job very quickly gives way to a new set of worries as I prepare to move on.

What if this dissatisfaction is part of the human condition? What if it might even be one of humanity’s greatest gifts? In our personal lives it may often amount to nothing more than trivial grumbling. But it is the same instinct which sees the scenes from Mariupol and says, this is not the way the world should be. It is the imagination to recognise that things could and should be different, and our impatience of the way things are, which pushes us to make changes in our own lives and in the world.

The Easter story starts with Mary Magdalene going to the tomb of her friend Jesus. She is grieving: something is lacking, something is missing. Her love for him is experienced now as the sense of his absence, the yearning to be close to him again. And when she arrives, she finds his tomb empty. One version of the story leaves it there. In the better known version from John’s gospel, Jesus meets her in the garden, but says he cannot stay. So Mary’s yearning for Jesus is left unsatisfied. Yet without it she would never have been driven to discover and share the good news of the Resurrection.

For a Christian, this is what it means to be human: always yearning, always incomplete, always striving to close the gap between our mortal nature and the divine. If that doesn’t sound very satisfactory or very restful, that’s because often it’s not. Yet it is what inspires us to be more than we are - even if we always fall short of what we imagine we might be.

The Revd Katherine Price, Chaplain
Easter 2022

“With the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day. The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but patient…” (2 Peter 3.8-9)

In Oxford, a week is like a year and a term is like a week… Term is over, and though the work of the College continues, there’s a moment to draw breath after the intensity of Michaelmas. For these few weeks we step out of the time-bending bubble of weeks 0-9 into the ‘normal’ calendar and rhythm of life.

Advent is a time of waiting, a time to take time. Traditionally, the last Sunday before the start of Advent was called Stir-up Sunday, from the ‘collect’ or prayer of the day: “Stir up we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people”. Many still observe the tradition of preparing Christmas cakes and puddings on that day, giving them plenty of time to mature before Christmas. But I imagine most, like me, will have decided they don’t have time, and instead will be grabbing a ready-made pudding to heat up in the microwave.

It’s a truism that the pace of life has become faster, but it seems to have really hit home this past term. Have we just forgotten what a ‘normal’ Michaelmas term is like? Or are we trying to squeeze too much into too little time?

I’ve been reflecting that hurry often comes from fear. We speak too fast in an interview because we fear being cut off. We take things too fast in a new relationship, because we fear it won’t last. My driving instructor once pointed out that, rather than slowing down towards junctions and lights, I would speed up to get it over with! And the pandemic has only sharpened the pressure to do everything right now in case we lose our chance: will we get to Christmas before omicron gets to us?

In the modern world, and particularly in Oxford, it takes courage to slow down. Many of those in academia are now on short-term contracts, under pressure to prove their worth and make a measurable difference before their time runs out. The fear of the doctoral student is the fear of having to take a long-term view: what if you invest all that time and it doesn’t work out? And if you have deadlines every week, procrastination is enemy number one! In this context, pacing yourself feels indulgent, even arrogant.

But Advent is a time for taking time. We cannot, in fact, ‘hurry to Bethlehem’. God will come in his own good time, and he will find us… waiting.

The Revd Katherine Price, Chaplain

14 December 2021

“Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels unawares.” (Hebrews 13.2)

Michaelmas Term is named for the Archangel Michael: the Feast of St Michael and All Angels falls at the end of September. It’s a grand-sounding feast, conjuring up medieval glory and mystery. Indeed, the middle ages gave rise to the elaborate study of ‘angelology’, postulating all kinds of complex hierarchies in the heavenly courts, to rival even the committee structure of The Queen’s College…! 

But angels, whatever they may be, are invisible most of the time. The message of Michaelmas is that much more work is going on behind the scenes than we are ever aware of. God may be speaking to us, or at work in our lives, in ways we don’t see or don’t know to look for. 

Much of the work of the College is also behind the scenes. Staff can feel invisible, especially when we’ve been working from home, or when we’re rattling around an empty College. We’re all sometimes guilty of talking about ‘the College’ – asking ‘the College’ to do something, or grumbling because it hasn’t - and forgetting that ‘the College’ consists of people. It’s a community, extending forwards and backwards in time. That was brought home to me this past weekend, with the new generation of freshers arriving on Sunday just a couple of days after the finalists of 2021 celebrated their graduation. It was a joyful reminder of what the College is all about and what we do it all for!

If the Feast of St Michael and All Angels teaches us anything, it is to open our eyes to what may be hiding in plain sight. Here in the College, that might mean noticing the contribution of those around us, or the pressures and burdens they may be carrying.

The Provost, speaking at the welcome dinner for Graduate Freshers, identified hospitality as one of the College’s values: welcoming the stranger, from near or far, and treating them to a slap-up meal! Over the next weeks, we’ll be meeting many new people for the first time, as well as reacquainting ourselves with some old faces. Michaelmas is an invitation to be alert to the fact that there is more to each person than meets the eye, and to greet each one as though they might just be an angel!

The Revd Katherine Price, Chaplain

3 October 2021

This week we commemorate a grim anniversary: twelve months since the start of the first national lockdown. Each day brings new recollections, as the Church’s calendar ticks round again to the date of the last service held in Chapel before covid restrictions, and the magnolia tree in the gardens buds once more, promising flowers that last year went hidden behind the College’s locked gates.

When I wrote my Easter reflection for 2020, there was a tangible sense of energy and new life. Human creativity and solidarity were bursting out of adversity just as spring began to burst and blossom from the dark earth of winter. Creativity has not been absent from College these past weeks, thanks to impressive efforts from the JCR’s Arts Week and the Eglesfield Musical Society! But let’s be honest: most of us are just exhausted. Last Easter, we were living at the emotional extremes – fear and hope, grief and gratitude, the emptiness more bleak and the blessings of the natural world more glorious. Today, everything is flattened out. Even the calendar itself is slipping and coming unmoored, occasionally in fabulous ways (Christmas decorations still clinging on in corners of the College!) but more often in ways which are draining, especially for College staff. I’m thinking also of the proposal for schoolchildren to ‘catch up’ over Summer. There is a wisdom to keeping the rhythm of term and vac, feast and fast, work and Sabbath.

christ crucified on a lily.jpg

This time a year ago, our hope was to get ‘back to normal’ as soon as possible. We imagined life would snap back like an elastic band, resuming its natural shape as soon as restrictions were lifted. But our social bonds can only be stretched so far before they lose their shape. For better or worse, we’ve formed new habits, new expectations, settled into new rhythms of life and work. As one colleague put it, we are scarred. But at this Easter season, the image of scars immediately speaks to me of the scars on Jesus’ hands and feet, the marks of Good Friday still visible on his resurrection body. The very scars by which his disciples recognised him as the friend they had lost.

Over these last few days before Easter, we are invited to walk the Way of the Cross with Jesus. It is the Christian claim that the way to resurrected life goes through the cross; Easter does not undo sin and suffering, but transforms it. In the same way, the life of the College after the pandemic will not be the same as if all this had never happened. The disciples recognised the risen Jesus as the same person they had known, not because he looked the same, but because he bore the scars of the suffering they had seen him undergo. So in the year to come we will recognise ourselves as a College community, not because our life together looks exactly as it did before, but because we recognise in each other that we are what we are because of what we have been through together.

The Revd Katherine Price, Chaplain

23 March 2021

If you want to try the imaginative exercise of ‘walking the way of the Cross’ I would recommend The Things He Carried by Stephen Cottrell, now Archbishop of York and the College’s Visitor.

You can hear the College Choir singing William Byrd’s setting of the traditional Easter Anthems on the album Christ Rising. 

The image of Christ crucified on a lily is taken from one of the Chapel windows. The lily is associated with Mary and with the Feast of the Annunciation (also known as Lady Day) on 25 March.