Evensong at Keble College

Considering they had been singing together for little more than a week, the choir, under the direction of the organ scholar Gavin Plumley, sounded good. With Mark Laflin on the organ, they led us through some difficult and some traditional hymns and anthems at Keble College, built in 1876 in memory of John Keble, one of the founders of the Oxford Movement who was once described as having a "beamy" smile.

Every couple of years I get invited by some unsuspecting cleric to preach a sermon, and this happened to be one of those occasions. Using the Gospel for the day, Mark 10, I discussed the decriminalisation of cannabis. Keble, perhaps because it has pews which face the altar instead of stalls which face each other, or perhaps because of the "kindly light" with which it is suffused - a legacy perhaps of John Henry Newman and the other Tractarians - is less intimidating for a preacher than some other Oxbridge chapels.

It is often forgotten that as well as the Oxford Movement this city also gave rise to Buchman’s Oxford Group, the organisation which subsequently inspired the foundation of both Moral Rearmament in Britain and Alcoholics Anonymous in America.

Making it clear that I was speaking personally and not as Religion Correspondent for The Times, I used Jesus’s saying that it is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven to argue that addicts and alcoholics must, like the rich man, be metaphorically stripped bare and persuaded to let go of all artifice and delusion before they can enter recovery. Calling my sermon: "A high church tract of our times", I went on to argue that permitting cannabis to be sold under licence - or at least prescribed for medicinal purposes - might be one way of helping to break the devastating supply link between hard and soft drugs.

Keble himself took a double First in Classics and mathematics at Oxford and on the strength of his devotional verse, The Christian Year, was elected Professor of Poetry in 1831. It was two years after this that he preached his sermon at St Mary’s, Oxford, warning the Whig government not to interfere with the rights of the Church. This led to the foundation of the Oxford Movement, which asserted the Catholic and Apostolic identity of the Church of England.

After our service, Fellows and students, including some Oxford ordinands, talked long into the night about church decline, disestablishment, House of Lords reform and the crises facing clergy in the countryside.

The choir at Keble is due to sing at Westminster Abbey later this month and has recorded a CD for release next month. Other college choirs regularly produce CDs. In addition, around 75 students each year are accepted at Oxford to study theology. Competition to join the college choirs is intense. It is difficult not to feel that, nearly two centuries on, things are moving in Oxford again.

Evensong at Keble College, Oxford

CHAPLAIN: The Rev Mark Butchers
ARCHITECTURE: Victorian Gothic by William Butterfield
SERMON: On camels, needles and addiction
MUSIC: Newly-formed college choir sang Howell and Bairstow
LITURGY: ASB Rite A for College Communion

Ruth Gledhill, writing in The Times, 21 October 2000

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