24.09.2018
Celebrations as Sandford’s Restored Organ is Rededicated
Sandford Parish pulled out all the stops to celebrate the restoration of its organ on Sunday evening (September 23). The organ was rededicated by Archbishop Michael Jackson and following the short service there was an opening recital by David Leigh, organist of St Patrick’s Cathedral.
The restoration work was carried out over a two year period and included an overhaul of the organ’s soundboards, wind system and mechanical action together with repair, augmentation and revoicing of the organ’s pipes and repitching them to concert pitch.
Canon Sonia Gyles welcomed the congregation to Sandford Parish Church for the service in which they gave thanks to God for the ministry of music. She paid tribute to the Select Vestry for enabling the restoration to go ahead and thanked all from the parish and the local community who gave generously to the organ fund.
The Rector also thanked organ builder Trevor Crowe for his work and Sandford’s organist, David O’Shea, for his ongoing commitment to music in the parish. “Music plays a central role in the liturgy of the Church of Ireland and is an important part of our parish outreach to the wider community,” Canon Gyles commented.
In his sermon Archbishop Jackson said they had gathered to make music and give thanks for sound and noise. He said both hearing and listening were important ingredients in a vibrant faith.
“It was, after all, the hearing of the psalms being read in a nearby church that turned the heart of the stubbornly independent and by then heretical Augustine to the faith he had long before neglected and rejected,” he explained. “Augustine is not alone in modern Dublin, I suggest. Like Joyce’s Ulysses, he stalks our streets in search of emotional belonging. One of the frightening things about life today is that contemporary sophistications make it all the more difficult for people like us to break down, grow up and weep and to return to the God who has never abandoned us but whom we have disregarded, as Augustine in his day was able to do – through The Psalms.”
Archbishop Jackson said that weeping and emotion were not redundant spiritual capacities and qualities even though we resist them and fight them. He said that if we are to reintegrate and restore body, mind and spirit into a totality in our spiritual exercises we need to overcome our fear of being emotionally affected by the things we hear and the stories we are told and the prayers we say.
“The work on the organ in this church will make it all the easier for people to come to church for music itself and it will enable them to be enriched by music in ways they never expected; ways that make it possible to engage with emotion as something not to fear but to love – as a vehicle to disclose the person and the presence of God because of the sheer quality of the performance. If we are frightened of God, then we ought to move aside and make room for others. If we are estranged by excellence, then we should do the same,” he said.
You can read Archbishop Jackson’s sermon in full here.
