By Canon Treasurer, Chris Palmer
Adapted from a sermon preached at Choral Evensong on Sunday 12 October.
If you read the Dean’s article in last week’s Cathedral Life – and I’m sure there’s not a person here who could have missed it – you will know that last Sunday was the birthday of Ralph Vaughan Williams. He is 153 years old. His contribution to the musical landscape of our country and church is huge. And our own choir sang his setting of the Te Deum for the legal service last Sunday. But you can read about Vaughan Williams by going back to the Dean’s piece.
What you may not know is that last Sunday was also the birthday of another significant musician of the Church of England, Sir Frederick Arthur Gore Ouseley. Indeed not just any birthday, for Ouseley has just turned 200! Now he is not quite the household name that Vaughan Williams is, but the precentor and Director of Music said to me, with only a small degree of exaggeration, ‘none of us would be here if it wasn’t for Ouseley’. I think they meant that the English Cathedral choral tradition wouldn’t be what it is, for Frederick Ouseley made it his life’s work to improve the standard of music in the Church of England, including its cathedrals.
Born on 12 October 1825 into a family of minor aristocracy, he was educated in Oxford, and then ordained and served initially in parishes Knightsbridge and Pimlico. From a young age he was musically precocious, and returned to Oxford to study composition and theory of music, and eventually attained the degree of Doctor of Music. His aristocratic contemporaries rather despised his enthusiasm for actually performing church music; being a priest was just about fine if you were from the upper rungs of society, but they thought he should confine himself to listening to church musicians, not to being one. Ouseley was having none of it.
In 1855, when he was just 30, he took on not one but two significant jobs. He became precentor of Hereford Cathedral and at the same time the Heather Professor of Music in the University of Oxford; he held both posts for the rest of his life. And then, not content with two prestigious roles, the very next year he founded and endowed out of his own pocket St Michael’s College, Tenbury, a choir school intended to serve as a model of Anglican Church music, and where daily services on a cathedral model were sung for the next 130 years. Indeed the former Director of Music here, Lucian Nethsingha, came here from being Organist at St Michael’s College. My own prior knowledge of Frederick Ouseley, I’m ashamed to say, is limited to his Epiphany anthem, ‘From the rising of the sun unto the going down of same, my name shall be great among the Gentiles’, beloved of parish church choirs. I sang it countless times as a child chorister. It’s humming in my head as I mention it.
Now, what is remarkable about this story is that someone with a big vision, the confidence of youth, and quite a lot of money could make this all happen because he was determined.
Today we are also remembering another pioneer, St Edward the confessor. He was a little older when he decided to found Exeter Cathedral, but it required the same vision, confidence, and quite a lot of money to make that happen, too. And it’s no exaggeration to say that if it weren’t for Edward, none of us would be here today.
I say vision, confidence, and money. But, of course, the other thing Edward the Confessor and Frederick Ouseley had in spades was faith in God, that is a deep trust that it is not our work, but God’s work in which we are engaged, and God is faithful. They both believed that the possibility of renewing the church was a way of providing for the wellbeing of our nation and those whom God calls to worship. A church at peace, a church with ministers able to bring God’s comfort and hope to the people, a church equipped with skills and buildings and resources to worship God and serve the population – these things mattered to them. And they still matter.
As God appears to retreat from the consciousness of our nation (of course God isn’t retreating anywhere; it’s merely an illusion), there is a temptation for the church simply to become a chaplaincy service for those who like this sort of thing. Neither Edward nor Frederick Ouseley would have had any truck with such a move: the Church of England is here to minister to the entire nation, and its buildings, its clergy, and its music belong to everyone.
We delight at Exeter Cathedral in saying that this Cathedral belongs to all the people of Devon. That isn’t just its building; it is also its story, its worship, its music, its treasures. But more intangibly, it is its faith – that sense that we are engaged in God’s work, and God is faithful. By telling this story we are not communicating a message alien or foreign to the world in which we live, this message is not our possession which we graciously impart to those to whom it doesn’t belong. The Gospel belongs to the people of Devon – and rest of the world – and to hear the voice of God is to hear your own story told, the most authentic account of who you are in God’s sight, what God is doing in and for you, and who God is inviting you to become.
Just listen to what Jesus says in this vein: ‘I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit… I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.’
We are precious to God, chosen by him, called friends, appointed to go, destined for love. In a sense, all the great work of founding cathedrals, renewing their music and serving God in this place are possible because Edward and Frederick Ouseley, and we have heard this good news, have it ringing in our ears, and our lives can bear fruit because of it.
So thanks be to God for Edward the Confessor; thanks be to God for Sir Frederick Arthur Gore Ouseley; and thanks be to God that we are here today to hear and live the Gospel.