It is my fifth Trinity Sunday today, and so I was reading some of the things I wrote around the time that I learned what Trinity Sunday was, when I lived in Trinity College. I don’t know that they gave me much insight into the triune God, but they did make me feel tired, as if all the trips back and forth across the Atlantic had caught up with me. I’d completely forgotten how preoccupied I’d been with class guilt then. I thought that had only come later, when the romance of being in the same places as Symonds and reading Newman and Thomas Arnold and Jowett for the first time wore off, and I met more British historians who weren’t at Oxford. But it was there then, too, the culture shock mingling with a sense that I was becoming complicit in an exploitative system, not sure how to grapple with the fact that things which perpetuate class inequality can also sometimes be very fun.
The Church and me: to tell the story properly involves as many awkward phrasings and convoluted metaphors as your classic Trinity Sunday sermon. (There was the one I remember that involved the weird anecdote about ducks that didn’t make any sense. And then there was this morning’s, in which the preacher resorted to pointing out some of the church’s stained-glass windows which depict the different parts of the Trinity.) But I suppose the Church and me is a lot like the story of Oxford and me, a conflictual and confusing relationship in which I keep feeling a lot of painful, glukúpikron love despite all evidence to the contrary. Trinity term is named for Trinity Sunday, and it is impossible not to attain some measure of happiness in Trinity term, despite the knowledge that you ought to reject the institution in which Trinity term can be passed, reject all it stands for, reject especially the characteristic decadent trappings of Trinity term–like the end-of-the-year parties at any university, except turned up a class notch or five. Trinity Sunday is a very Oxford feast: attempts to explain it start out highly, abstractly intellectual and wind up in paradox and nonsense, there’s good music, and it seems very old–though actually not too old, more closely linked to its Cranmer collect than to Anglo-Saxon folk tradition. “Almighty and everlasting God, who hast given unto us thy servants grace, by the confession of a true faith, to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity, and in the power of the Divine Majesty to worship the Unity: We beseech thee, that thou wouldest keep us stedfast in this faith, and evermore defend us from all adversities, who livest and reignest, one God, world without end.” The American Episcopal Church doesn’t even use Trinity Sunday to count the weeks of long summer ordinary time: it sings to me thus of another place, another time in my life, another person that I am, another path my fortunes could have taken, if I had stayed there for my PhD. I am so glad for a thousand reasons that I didn’t, but having made that decision I wish I could leave Oxford behind, and not be yet another American thinking wistfully of her time in England, with no thought for the fact that class is real and that there is every reason to hate Oxford and what it represents.
Yet every day my mind is there, ranging across a landscape of past and present, conjuring up from my bedroom with its view of Butler Library another city, full of ghosts. I’m going back in two weeks, just for a short time, and my heart is full of longing and apprehension, pain and desire, faith and doubt.
Emily Rutherford 