Farewell to all that
Well, here it is. The last day in Oxford. This week has been great; superb dinners out, long warm evenings with friends in pubs eating till bursting point, wide-ranging conversation and fits of hilarity. I went to the Kilns and sat for a last time in C S Lewis’s study, marvelling yet again that I was part of the place. I’ve said goodbye to Betty and Anne, church friends and the ladies in the shop, and worked my way round most of the little maze of streets in the centre of town that I love so well. Yesterday was the last service at dear St Ebbe’s and last cycle home from the Victoria Arms.
Without doubt, I have profoundly changed in the last 18 months. When we arrived in Oxford, I was so insecure - felt like an outsider, a second-class citizen because I didn’t attend the University. I felt dumb and stupefied by the talent around me.
Then I started studying, reading, going to lectures, learning basic Greek, joined the Lewis Society and made friends from various colleges. I became challenged, interested, capable of arguing a point, and thrashing out why I believe certain things. I belong here now, and not just geographically. I have embraced the purpose of Oxford, and it inspires me to exceed my own expectations of myself. But that’s not the only thing that has changed. I have realised for the first time how people can change things - how ideas can change things. I have seen at close range people doing extraordinary literary work, people impacting the world politically, people passionate about some small thing that will make life better and campaigning for it. I have realised that while I don’t have the fierce intelligence of some of my friends here, I too can change things, I can have an impact on the world, however small.
I’ve also come to understand that it is possible to carve out meaning and purpose in life for oneself; circumstances may dictate some things, but our minds are our own, and it is our responsibility to use them and feed them well. I will never again go back to the small-mindedness that paralysed me before I came here, and I will never allow myself to forget what it felt like to have the world spread out like a scroll at my feet, just waiting for me to pick it up and read.
Most of all, I have found God in this small ancient city, as many others have before me. I came here with a mature faith, but Oxford taught me to look behind it, to ask why. And as I have studied the foundations of the Christian faith; the history and doctrine, the creeds and characters, and talked with people who spend their lives studying theology, it feels like an even firmer and surer foundation has been built under my faith. The more I have looked at the counterfeit religions and the reasons people hate and fear God, the more I have found reason after reason after reason to love Him and devote my life to His service. Like Sheldon Vanauken, “I tended to feel that God Himself dwelt in Oxford, His holy city, where He could hear the bells.”
So it is the end of Oxford, but the beginning of everything else.
Pale blue convolvulus in tendrils creep:
And air-swept lindens yield
Their scent, and rustle down their perfumed showers
Of bloom on the bent grass where I am laid,
And bower me from the August sun with shade;
And the eye travels down to Oxford's towers:
That sweet city with her dreaming spires,
She needs not June for beauty's heightening,
Lovely all times she lies, lovely tonight!
- Matthew Arnold
Without doubt, I have profoundly changed in the last 18 months. When we arrived in Oxford, I was so insecure - felt like an outsider, a second-class citizen because I didn’t attend the University. I felt dumb and stupefied by the talent around me.
Then I started studying, reading, going to lectures, learning basic Greek, joined the Lewis Society and made friends from various colleges. I became challenged, interested, capable of arguing a point, and thrashing out why I believe certain things. I belong here now, and not just geographically. I have embraced the purpose of Oxford, and it inspires me to exceed my own expectations of myself. But that’s not the only thing that has changed. I have realised for the first time how people can change things - how ideas can change things. I have seen at close range people doing extraordinary literary work, people impacting the world politically, people passionate about some small thing that will make life better and campaigning for it. I have realised that while I don’t have the fierce intelligence of some of my friends here, I too can change things, I can have an impact on the world, however small.
I’ve also come to understand that it is possible to carve out meaning and purpose in life for oneself; circumstances may dictate some things, but our minds are our own, and it is our responsibility to use them and feed them well. I will never again go back to the small-mindedness that paralysed me before I came here, and I will never allow myself to forget what it felt like to have the world spread out like a scroll at my feet, just waiting for me to pick it up and read.
Most of all, I have found God in this small ancient city, as many others have before me. I came here with a mature faith, but Oxford taught me to look behind it, to ask why. And as I have studied the foundations of the Christian faith; the history and doctrine, the creeds and characters, and talked with people who spend their lives studying theology, it feels like an even firmer and surer foundation has been built under my faith. The more I have looked at the counterfeit religions and the reasons people hate and fear God, the more I have found reason after reason after reason to love Him and devote my life to His service. Like Sheldon Vanauken, “I tended to feel that God Himself dwelt in Oxford, His holy city, where He could hear the bells.”
So it is the end of Oxford, but the beginning of everything else.
Pale blue convolvulus in tendrils creep:
And air-swept lindens yield
Their scent, and rustle down their perfumed showers
Of bloom on the bent grass where I am laid,
And bower me from the August sun with shade;
And the eye travels down to Oxford's towers:
That sweet city with her dreaming spires,
She needs not June for beauty's heightening,
Lovely all times she lies, lovely tonight!
- Matthew Arnold