SeeingReading Czesław Miłosz’s Nobel Prize Lecture from 1980, I am struck by this paragraph: ‘One of the Nobel laureates whom I read in childhood influenced to a large extent, I believe, my notions of poetry. That was Selma Lagerlöf. Her Read More
CoppéliaCoppélia, first performed in 1870, the year of the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, tends to be advertised as a ‘comic ballet’ set to music by Delibes, of flower-duo fame. Coppélia is on the face of it absurd. A young man Read More
3 Sunday of Advent AIsaiah 35:1-6a, 10: Those the Lord has ransomed shall return. James 5:7-10: Think of a farmer! Matthew 11:2-11: Are you the one who is to come? The man whom we in the Western, Latin Christian tradition call John the Baptist is normally invoked in the East as προδρόμος, the ‘Forerunner’. And that, after all, is exactly what he did: he ran, ran on ahead to make paths, hearts, and minds ready for the appearance of the Lord. While the Word who became flesh was still hidden, an anonymous presence in a crowd, John saw clearly who he was: ‘See, the Lamb of God, who bears the sin of the world’ — for it is by bearing it that Jesus takes it away. John seems to have grasped all this from the beginning. Among the Christmas card we exchange these days, we may find a painting by Murillo, the Spanish Baroque master, that represents John as an amiable, slightly chubby lad radiant with joy as he stands hugging a snow-white, gentle lamb as if it were a playmate. ‘Behold the Lamb of God!’ Perhaps we’d wish for a similarly peaceful outlook on the mystery of salvation. Let us not be taken in, though, by facile tricks trying to make the Biblical drama into a pleasant fairytale. The real story of salvation is dense, complex, often dark, the way our lives are; that is why the Bible speaks with authority, about real, lived-through things. Today’s Gospel is a good example. It is tragic, full of pathos. The Forerunner runs no more. He is languishing in captivity after a shoddy arrest prompted by a weak man and an angry women. Soon he will be cruelly executed on a whim of an irresponsible child. The voice that resounded in waste places, awakening people’s half-dead consciences, has long been quiet. A few disciples remain attached to John. But he is now largely forgotten, the way prophets are. And life goes on. John the Baptist’s voice was not an accidental part of him, an expression he was free to engage in or not. The voice was who he was, his essential identity. When some Levites asked, ‘Who are you?’, John answered: ‘I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness’ (Jn 1.23). We only need to think of some things Jesus says about himself, ‘I am the life, the resurrection, the vine’, to sense the strength of the words, ‘I am the voice.’ So what does an embodied voice, made to proclaim, do when forced to silence? It examines itself with furious intensity. John’s whole existence from when he lay in his mother’s womb had been focused on Jesus. For Jesus’s sake he had left everything. In order for Jesus to increase, he had been pleased to decrease, to become, quite simple, voice (cf. 3.30). Held by Herod’s chains he asks himself: ‘Have I then been wrong? Have I wasted my life for nothing? Was the choice that has directed my existence an illusion?’ Dear brothers and sisters, who among us has not at times asked themselves these sorts of questions when life is against us, especially at night, perhaps, when we toss and turn unable to sleep, at about 3 or 4 a.m., that hour which Ingmar Bergman called ‘the hour of the wolf’, when a Lamb seems a poor, even a ridiculous ally. The questions John asks do not, though, go unanswered. And what he gets to hear is more than bleating. It is the Lion of the Tribe of Judah who declares his purpose to him, assuring him of victory. Notice how Jesus comforts John. Not with tender tappings on the shoulder and sentimental talk of ‘It’ll be alright’. Jesus’s answer can seem brusque, as if he said: ‘But open yours eyes, man, and look around! Step out of your inner prison, to which you alone have keys, and face reality: the blind see, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the dead are raised. What then do you think all this really means?’ The Gospel does not take us back to John’s dungeon to tell us how he received and experienced the answers he got. But we know him well enough to risk a responsible conjecture. The Forerunner had, after all, foreseen all this somehow. At Aenon by Salim, where there was much water, John had exclaimed to the crowd (Jn 3.29): He who has the bride is the bridegroom; the friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice; therefore this joy of mine is now full. John did understand at the end that, no, he had not been wrong. He had done what he had to do. He was no mere reed shaken by the wind; he was the Bridegroom’s friend, dressed for the wedding feast, possessed of an inner freedom no idiotic ruler could compromise. This third Sunday of Advent bids us rejoice. It is good to have John as our example, to see him ahead of us showing how joy can be kept and made to grow even in darkness, how it can bear fruit. We must step out of our myopia, see beyond our wounds and scars, not surrender to sadness. Let us train our ears to hear the Lord’s voice, not always loud; our ears to discern the signs of his nearness. For the kingdom of God is secretly growing in our midst. Joy is within reach. Dawn is calling out to us, if only we would turn our back on the night’s darkness. The pilgrims Isaiah saw return to Zion with shouts of joy were the same people who had suffered in servitude and exile. They were glad because the Lord had set them free. And this reminds us: any experience of unfreedom or confinement is potentially the first act in a joyful work of salvation, if only we let the Lord act freely. Let’s do that, then, and practise our songs of joy. Amen.
SeeingReading Czesław Miłosz’s Nobel Prize Lecture from 1980, I am struck by this paragraph: ‘One of the Nobel laureates whom I read in childhood influenced to a large extent, I believe, my notions of poetry. That was Selma Lagerlöf. Her Wonderful Adventures of Nils, a book I loved, places the hero in a double role. He is the one who flies above the Earth and looks at it from above but at the same time sees it in every detail. This double vision may be a metaphor of the poet’s vocation. I found a similar metaphor in a Latin ode of a Seventeenth-Century poet, Maciej Sarbiewski, who was once known all over Europe under the pen-name of Casimire. He taught poetics at my university. In that ode he describes his voyage – on the back of Pegasus – from Vilno to Antwerp, where he is going to visit his poet-friends. Like Nils Holgersson he beholds under him rivers, lakes, forests, that is, a map, both distant and yet concrete. Hence, two attributes of the poet: avidity of the eye and the desire to describe that which he sees.’ Our time needs such panoramic seers and careful describers.
CoppéliaCoppélia, first performed in 1870, the year of the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, tends to be advertised as a ‘comic ballet’ set to music by Delibes, of flower-duo fame. Coppélia is on the face of it absurd. A young man called Franz has the world’s loveliest fiancée, Swanilda. Everything is set for the wedding. But then Franz is intoxicated by a strange creature he sees in the village square, a life-like doll made by the local inventor-cum-magician Coppélius, who is untouched by human affections, living only for his designs. The drama of the ballet unfolds as Swanilda tries to win Franz back; yet such is Coppélia’s gracefulness that we are almost tempted to hope that Swanilda will fail and that love might somehow make the virtual real. This might all have seemed outlandish fantasy 150 years ago. Now the sight of a man made to choose between a virtual and an embodied-ensouled love is terribly real. I was struck by the power of this story when I saw it performed by students of the Roman Opera Ballet last week. Those youths showed us that the drama of Coppélia isn’t just some laughable old drivel; it is the stuff of contemporary tragedy.
Conversation with Ana Zarzalejos VicensBelow is an English version of a conversation you can read in Spanish here. Are we living, right now, in a post-secular era? I think so. I’ve said this in a couple of interviews over the last year. I think we see it quite clearly in Northern Europe. Obviously, we live in a time where cultural trends shift extremely quickly. And Catholics do like to be reassured. So we’re all very keen to say, ‘Oh, it was just a blip, this thing that happened when everyone seemed to be turning their back.’ Well, we might hope it is. But I think everything depends on how we greet the present providential moment, what sort of testimony we give, what sort of teaching we proclaim. To what do you attribute a growing interest in Catholicism? I think people feel attracted to it because it’s true. That’s the fundamental reason. And I think they increasingly feel let down by many other options. And, you know, with so much collapsing, in terms of old certainties and old institutions, with the great fragility of our political life, our cultural life, our ecological life, our financial lives, people are looking for parameters that stand some promise of resisting the flood. Could one then argue that, well, this new curiosity regarding religion or the Catholic Church is like a life-raft for people who fear drowning, without occasioning real conversions? No, no. I encounter such conversions almost on a daily basis. So I must simply say that such a claim would not correspond to empirical evidence. In the Catholic Church we also see a search for what is often called a traditionalist movement, closely linked to the liturgy and to young people, causing generational tension in the Church. How do you see this? This phenomenon occurs in some places, not everywhere. I think of Poland. I think of our own country. I wouldn’t say it is causing a lot of friction there. I think it’s connected with a search for parameters, for form, for a certain beauty. And the Church has all this. As long as we celebrate the mysteries well, as long as we stick to the simple principle that when we celebrate the liturgy, we ‘do the red and say the black’, observing the rubrics and letting the Church’s words resound, not just our own little words — as long as we stick to this, it is compelling. At times this is viewed as a retrograde phenomenon, opposed to the Second Vatican Council… I think it’s time to be a little more relaxed with regard to these parameters, which more often than not don’t correspond to facts. For instance, a lot was written about this year’s Chartres pilgrimage, a big walking pilgrimage from Paris to Chartres that takes place each Pentecost. It has a traditional, even traditionalist aspect. There were more people participating this year than ever before. Some who were there have remarked that the young taking part were impossible to categorise. They weren’t all rabid, type-cast traditionalists with ties and long skirts. Some of them might go to a charismatic service on a Saturday, then to a Latin Mass on Sunday, then go to feed the poor with Caritas on Monday. As long as we keep insisting on shoving people into narrow boxed categories, we’re just not going to understand what’s going on. Do you think the narrative of progressive versus conservative is infiltrating the church? I think it’s infiltrated it for a long time. And I think we must gently, kindly, perhaps even humorously subvert it. I think of a German Benedictine scholar, a monk of Gerleve called Elmar Salmann. He taught at Sant’Anselmo for many years. I was present at his leave-taking lecture in Rome. He said, with characteristic lucidity: People have been trying for decades to classify me as either conservative or liberal. Then he said, in Italian, ‘I prefer to consider myself classico e liberante’. That’s a great example of how we can take this conversation to a deeper, more fruitful level. Do you think we see an emergence of Christianity as a political identity? There are certainly those who want to claim it as such. We need to take great, great care here, when it comes to the instrumentalisation of Christian symbols and of Christian vocabulary, and this whole rhetoric of a civilisational struggle. The point we have to just keep hammering home is this: it is illicit to instrumentalise faith for any secular purpose. Faith is supposed to illumine and enrich and deepen the secular arena, but it can’t be held hostage to it. So what would would you say is the responsibility of a Christian today? I’m inclined to cite the counsel of Saint Antony: ‘Let Christ be the air you breathe!’ Try and live coherent, credible Christian lives; give an account of the hope that is in you; practise hospitality; bear witness to what it is to be a human being, alert both to the painfulness and the glory of the human condition; cultivate humble fascination for the mystery of God. In a recent lecture you spoke about the linguistic discovery human beings can make when they realise ‘there is more to be said and other ways of saying it’. How can the Catholic Church, after letting many people down on account of abuse scandals, convince them that it is the custodian of eternal truths? First of all by being truthful, by pursuing the work of reparation in justice and with tears. Perhaps that experience can teach us to be humbler, and thereby more hospitable. Another great and joyful challenge for the Church now is to, to remain within the linguistic metaphor, to reacquire and be re-enthused by its own specific language In the last 20 or 30 years, we in the Catholic Church have had the sense that the world has been running away from us. We’ve been trying to catch up with it and to learn to speak the way it speaks, to use the signs the world uses, to get ourselves onto TikTok and Instagram. As long as we carry on like that, we risk condemning ourselves to irrelevance, because we’re always going to be at least 10 steps behind everyone else. The Church, a big body, moves slowly. By the time we catch up, the world has moved on. But if we speak our own language, if we speak the language of Scripture, the language of the liturgy, the language of our ritual, the language of the sacraments, we can say astonishingly fresh, original, and beautiful things. People do listen to them. You have written, among many things, about chastity and redemptive suffering. These aren’t exactly things that first come to mind when one thinks about what people today want to hear. So, do they listen? I’ve been astounded by the reception of the chastity book, for instance. It’s three years now since it was published. For a long time not a day passed without letters and emails arriving, or even people coming to see me. It has been moving to find myself standing before audiences of primarily young people in Oslo, in the United States, in Portugal, in Spain. I’ve found such openness and a real desire to engage with these questions. What do you think that says about the search for the meaning of the body today? I think it has a lot to do with it. In Portugal The Shattering of Loneliness and Chastity have been published as companion volumes. That makes sense, because the two books are really about the same thing, that is, about what it is to be a human being. The first one is about dealing with remembrance and about spiritual aspirations; the second one is about dealing with the hunger and the desires and the hopes of the body. In your last book you speak of the Epic of Gilgamesh. You say that the protagonist could be our contemporary. You say he is ‘a megalomaniac, in love with his proficiency but unsure of his purpose, haunted by death, perplexed by his heart’s craving, courageous in the face of the absurd, yet weighed down by sadness’. Are these afflictions of the present moment, you think? Are contemporary men and women like that? I think so. And I purposely use the Epic of Gilgamesh because it’s one of the earliest manifestations of literature available to us. There is a little note of irony as well in my choice. Another theme of mine that I try to voice now and again is this: I’m just not convinced by our underlying doctrine of cultural exceptionalism, which seems to presuppose that we are just so different now; that no one can understand us; that we function on totally different terms and have nothing to learn from what anyone has said or experienced before us. It’s just wonderful, then, to be able to point to this text, almost 3 ,000 years old, and say, well, ‘Look at that fellow. He’s just like you!’ Is that what you mean when you say that literature can save lives? Partly. But my claim is mainly to do with simply the fact that literature, when it’s worthy of the name literature (because not every book is literature), is an attempt to articulate what life is really like. I think it can save lives in the sense that it can help me to understand that I’m not alone, that someone’s been here before, that even if in my immediate circle of acquaintances no one may understand, or I may think that no one understands what is going on inside me, I may come upon a contemporary novel, or an eighteenth-century poem, or a page of the Metamorphoses of Ovid, and think, ‘Ah! But that’s me.’ And what about music? Music takes us as close to eternity as we can come in this life. Music has this marvellous potential to express the ineffable. That which is beyond the reach of words can somehow be conveyed by music. Still on the subject of culture, you have chosen to do a series on the wisdom of the Desert Fathers. Again I would say: this isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when you think of engaging with contemporary culture. What can they offer us today? Oh, lots. Realism, wisdom, a firm spirit of faith, quite often a delicious self-irony, and a sense of the proportions of things. What’s the biggest challenge prevents contemporary man from having an encounter with God. I think the biggest challenge is that of believing we are loved. What do you wish man, homo sapiens, would understood better about himself right now? His potential for eternal life.
Desert Fathers 50You can find this episode in video format here – a dedicated page – and pick it up in audio wherever you listen to podcasts. On YouTube, the full range of episodes can be found here. There was a man of venerable life: Benedict, blessed by grace and name, who from the time of his boyhood had the heart of an old man. For, surpassing his age by his behaviour, he gave his soul to no sensual pleasure, but, while still on this earth, he despised the world in its blossoming — which he could freely have enjoyed while it lasted — as if it were already withered. He was the offspring of a good family from the province of Nursia, and had been put to his studies at Rome. But when he saw that many in such studies went by way of the steep crags of vices, he pulled back the foot which he had, as it were, put on the world’s threshold, lest, if he touched any of the world’s knowledge, he too should afterwards wholly go over a great precipice. Despising, then, the study of letters, he left his father’s home and affairs, desiring to please God alone, and sought the habit which belongs to a holy way of life. He departed, therefore, knowingly unknowing and wisely untaught. Antony’s biographer knew his subject personally. Benedict’s did not. He checked his sources, though, and was not a man given to carelessness. Gregory the Great wrote his life of Benedict while serving as pope. He says that, for research purposes, he consulted four men who had been Benedict’s pupils. He gives names and addresses. Readers might check his narrative if they pleased. Gregory was seven, more or less, when Benedict died in 547. Their experiences overlapped. The world they lived in, to which they preached, was one and the same world, though it was changing. Gregory introduces his hero with a lovely turn of phrase: ‘gratia Benedictus et nomine’. The Latin form of ‘Benedict’ means ‘blessed’, as when we sing at Mass: ‘Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini’. Gregory says Benedict’s name carried a premonition of his being. The promise inherent in him from birth was realised by grace. This statement contains a whole theology of vocation. For if God does call a woman or man to a given state of life, is it not because he, the all-knowing Maker of all, wishes to crown his work of creation and purpose it optimally? People sometimes think that the pursuit of a vocation involves great mortification. But no: if the call is God’s, you will, by following it, find joyful fulfilment. As you grow into it, it will seem to you like a tailor-made garment. It will make you flourish. It will set you free. A sense of being trapped made the boy Benedict seek his path determinedly. He was, like Antony, well-to-do, used to a certain ease. A clever boy, he was sent off to study. He did not need to earn a living. When Benedict settled in Rome, it was not any more the navel of the world. Constantine had removed the imperial capital to Byzantium in 330. Even when, later, the Western Empire regained some autonomy, it was not run from Rome, but from Ravenna. The city Benedict knew breathed the decadence of capitals once great that drift, despite themselves, like history’s flotsam, into backwaters. A certain grandeur will have remained, but the civic body was pockmarked. There were people nurturing virtue and learning; yet what struck Benedict most was urban vice. He saw how vice can acquire a momentum that draws people into self-destruction, causing them perversely to throw themselves off cliffs. This was a fate he did not wish for himself. Withdrawing the foot he had tentatively placed on the threshold of secular life, he went into the woods. Benedict was no bore. It was not exuberance that repelled him. His view of human nature, he later showed, was not only fearless, but compassionate. What irked him in the world was the nurtured illusion that what blooms today will not have to whither tomorrow. He had, Gregory writes, the heart of an old man already in his youth. What might that mean? It means, I think, that Benedict, like the Preacher in Ecclesiastes, could see that all is vanity when not held by some supernatural purpose. He saw ‘The invisible worm, / That flies in the night / In the howling storm’ to make the rose sick. He could delight in the rose; but could not force himself to pretend that it would flourish for ever. Longing for lasting things, he wished ‘to please God alone’, thereby to seek his own joy. Quite as James and John, one early morning by the sea, left Zebedee’s nets, Benedict abandoned his father’s home and affairs, with the security they offered and the culture they presupposed, to live otherwise. Gregory describes his state of mind subtly. He calls Benedict ‘knowingly unknowing and wisely untaught’. To know what is not worth knowing, or what does not further my maturing right now, may have been a considerable challenge in Benedict’s day. Now it is Gargantuan. Bombarded from all sides with information, true and false, we are terrified of missing out. Benedict’s example gives wholesome encouragement. It stands for a critical view of the turbulent, unsleeping city, of its rat-races and pleasure-hunts, inviting us to ask: Is this really what I want? Benedict could evaluate these things justly because he had the beginnings of wisdom, or, if you like, of philosophy. Untaught by conventions, he was open to fresh inspiration from on high. Faced with the world and its options, he did not just calculate. He prayed. And so got the courage he needed to choose independently, freely. The Romans in their Decadence by Thomas Couture. Wikimedia Commons.
Photos from Cloyne Diocese's postTODAY IS THE THIRD SUNDAY OF ADVENT 14th December 2025 (Gaudete Sunday also Bambellini Sunday) The Third Advent Candle which is lit today is Rose coloured and symbolises Joy . It is called the "Shepherds Candle". Bambellini means ‘BabyJesus' so on Read More 12 Likes
