Welcoming May in an Oxonian Way

After a substantial hiatus, here is something I've written about the recent past. Over the last few months, I've traveled about a handful of countries, Britain included, and plan to write on those soon. Soon, of course, is a relative term.

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May Day in Oxford has traditionally been one of its biggest festivals: local pubs remain open all night on April 30^th (normally they close around 11.30), people dress in all types of folksy outfits, and the atmosphere is one of communal jollity, all culminating early the following morning when the town (at least those who wake up, or fortunately, and maybe a bit drunkenly, find their way, in time) congregates in front of Magdalen College’s chapel tower to hear the boys’ choir sing hymns to the rising sun. Afterward, Oxford students traditionally attempt to jump off of the Magdalen bridge into a branch of the Thames, though police have attempted to quell this effort in past years because numerous youth have broken legs on the riverbed – Oxford students, mind you. Whoops.

Though I opted for a few hours of sleep instead of the typically-collegiate all-night romp, I greeted the morning before sunrise and biked over to the bridge with my pajama shorts under a pair of jeans and a fleece to cover my sleep-drowsy head. The morning cold woke me enough to keep my balance on the bike, a welcome aid.

Weaving through the people sardined in front of Magdalen’s tower was a strange experience in itself: though I often hear people, and philosophers (who are people too), wonder if they have experienced something in reality or a dream, I could never honestly relate. Dreams were always weird or recognizable enough to be easily delineated from reality. However, this morning was slightly different, as I was still drowsy from rising, and the most of the people I saw were drowsy from the evening’s activities. Thankfully, I had my camera along with me, and can verify that, yes there were two girls and a guy fighting one another with blow-up rafts while sitting on the shoulders of friends and, yes that kid was wearing a white, three-foot hat and strumming half-hearted songs on guitar.

The choir arrived on top of the tower around 6.30, an hour after the sun had officially risen (I checked the national sunrise charts the night before to determine when I really had to wake), evidenced by the small, robed arms waving through the stone fences 44 meters (Oxford’s tallest building) above the restless and weary and merry heads. Though the morning had been mostly cloudy, the sun began peeking through blue sky at this time, and it seems that the choir director wanted to wait for this visibility for the song to start. On this morning, he gets to determine when the day begins, and it felt like we were all waiting for a new year to begin, waiting for the angelic melody to declare the day to our ready ears.

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The song the choir sang sounded similar to those I have heard at the Evensong services, those hauntingly beautiful services often sparsely attended and usually only by older members of the community that have attended from the days when their parents would bring them each evening for the daily rituals of traditional English Anglican services, who know when to kneel and when to turn and when to begin to pray: I know. I watch and follow them.

Hearing the choir sing on this morning was different in the chilling morning breeze, squeezed in the crowd of delirious and delighted and rude and hilarious strangers gathered to celebrate at an ungodly-made-Godly hour, awaiting the sun and glad at its arrival. We weren’t hearing the hymns in a silently melancholy chapel, careful not to stir, self-conscious to see if we conformed to the established rituals, isolated in our pews. People heard the Medieval Latin hymns carried clear from above the hush of the crowd, people who have heard the Christ-story so many times from Christians desperate to reach this tired, post-Christian culture that the mention of Christ sets them either to laughter, defensiveness, or exasperation. People who have stopped going to Church, or people who go to Church because it’s so embedded in their lives as a norm that they don’t think about it as Church, as meeting for worship, but as What You Do on Sunday Morning.

We listened to the hymn as humans, weary and glad and alive, united for a moment in upward-looking thankfulness that the day had arrived, and in that moment something snuck past those “watchful dragons,” as CS Lewis puts it, those criticisms or questions or hardnesses that guard the hearts of people from God’s beauty and love and risenness.

After the first hymn, Magdalen’s Dean of Divinity read a benediction during which his congregation returned to their day, to their friends, to stories from the night before, to questions of where breakfast will be had and where Mike’s shoes might be: liturgy broke the spell.

As I rode back to St. Catz on my bike, I wondered if the morning at the bridge would be significant for some of those present, or if it would merely file in line, insubstantial amongst the other happenings of May-Day eve. Recent reflection shows me that it was significant in my life, though only time shows us the experiences that endure and shape us as we gaze retrospectively through our personal and communal histories.