MissionFor almost a century, the Missionaries of the Holy Family have had a special care for the Catholic community in the Prelature of Tromsø. The Fathers who came in 1931 were predominantly German; now it is the Polish province that Read More
PremonitionsThis striking painting graces the public church of the Carmel in Tromsø. It was done by Guro Giske, who entitled it ‘Mary, Premonitions’. The shade of blue evokes the glow of ‘the blue hour’ that is a feature of winter Read More
Time Growing ShortHomily preached as part of a retreat given to the clergy of Edmonton. 1 Cor 7.25.31: Our time is growing short Admittedly, there’s something a bit weird about reading an epistle written two thousand years ago that tells us: ‘time is growing short’. What can Paul have meant? He was a man immersed in the concrete business of living. We know that from his letters and from Luke’s account of his career in Acts. Constantly travelling, teaching and exhorting, tent-making, resolving quarrels as well as igniting them, scourged and stoned, living with ‘danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brethren’ (2 Cor 11.26), Paul knew the density of time; he also made provision for a long-term future. Why else would he have bothered to criss-cross the Near East and Greece, planning trips to Rome and Spain, spending himself to bring the Gospel to the ends of the earth? His reminder that time is short is not a summons to the fatalist passivity that doomsday prophecies, secular as well as religious, are apt to produce, however. He urged people to work hard, to build and edify, plant and water; at the same time he’d have them know that no present project, however noble, has a claim to lasting finality. There is, quite simply, a passing-away imprinted on the nature of all enterprise in this world. We must learn to give our free consent to it. Paul does not want us to stop engaging in human pursuits. He tells us to engage in them in such a way that eternity will somehow shine through them. It’s in this sense those who have wives should live as if they had none, those who buy and sell should live as if they owned nothing, and so forth. The believer must do what he can to build up the earthly city, yet stay conscious that this city will fall. Further, all we construct now we must one day leave behind. If we nurture this consciousness while building, the leave-taking that must inevitably come, sooner or later, will be less of a wrench; there’s also a chance that we’ll build with greater grace, honouring the work for its sake rather than imposing ourselves on it, trapped in the wet cobweb of vanity. We shall know, then, the joy and freedom of the beatitudes, the rich blessing that comes from being poor. Relieved of having to make too much a mark in the present, from at all costs tagging everywhere, we’ll have our eyes set on the kingdom of heaven, where an eternal name awaits us, written on a white stone that alone can reveal to us the sense before God of everything we’re busy with in this world. View from Kananaskis.
Birthday of the Mother of GodHomily preached as part of a retreat given to the clergy of Edmonton. Romans 8:28-30: With those he justified he shared his glory. Matthew 1:1-16, 18-23: A genealogy of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham. The Churvh began with a cry of joy shouted into the sunrise: ‘He is not here!’ Christian Easter sets out from the empty tomb. What just yesterday seemed unthinkable is at once verifiable fact. Human experience is liberated from the hic et nunc. Christ’s resurrection bestows on human nature a share in eternal life. The first Christian confession was simply: ‘The Lord is risen, risen indeed!’ Soon, though, the wish, indeed the need, arose to look to the past. Who is the Risen One? How is the life he gives related to his teaching? Already on Easter Day the disciples began the work of remembering what had been before, in pursuit of the Big Picture. Out of this process, the testimony of the four Gospels gradually came into being. That wasn’t all. The growing Church, in search of the path it must follow, couldn’t hear enough about Christ. With great care and fresh eyes she re-read Scripture, astonished to discover in it the features of her divine Lord. What she saw, she recorded in writing. A sublime confession such as that of Paul to the Colossians expresses the faith of the first century: [Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities—all things were created through him and for him (Col 1:15-16). In this way the faithful gazed into eternity. At the same time they scrutinised history, for as Paul also wrote, to the Galatians: ‘When the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman’ (Gal 4:4). That woman was, and remains, the guarantor that God’s Son truly took on our nature; that the incarnation is not just a topic for devout meditation but a power at work for humanity’s renewal. Christians came to want to know the woman, too; they started enquiring about, retelling, and dramatising her history. The feast we keep today may only be evidenced as a liturgical celebration from the sixth century. It isn’t for that reason a late feast, for all that concerns the becoming and the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary is implicit in the Church’s faith in the incarnation. In the present day we really need a renewed Marian outlook. Why? First, to be reminded that God does not improvise his agency. The genealogy of Jesus Christ speaks of the secret gestation of redemption in persons largely unaware of the role they played in salvation history. Their unknowing preparation became deliberate in Mary, who on behalf of all Israel made an act of conscious, heroic consent to agency in God’s saving plan. Her Yes, prepared by the faith of generations, must become ours. Secondly, it would really benefit us now, I think, to consider that God, who entered history as male, with a gendered specificity that cannot be abstracted; that this God who became ‘man’ and a man, in whose image and glory we are called to have a share, began his existence in a woman’s womb. The biological process remains a paradigm for ecclesial life. Christ’s birth is both an historical given and a continuous mystery of transformation. It was not merely for aesthetic reasons that Christians of antiquity adorned the apses of their churches, just above the altar, with wondrous mosaics of the Theotokos. The Church, as we read in Lumen Gentium, is Marian in essence, presented to us as a feminine subject. As far as I can see, this is something not much spoken of much these days. It is a pity. For here, too, we find a mystery of gendered specificity that seeks coherent expression. Only by finding, and and voicing, that expression will we as believers and members of the Church, be we women or men, find our true, essential form. In this symbolic, sacramental interaction of the masculine and the feminine, fundamental to Catholic life, we shall find, of this I am pretty convinced, the true response to many painful perplexities present in our time.
Our Lady of the Inkpot in Hildesheim cathedral. Christ, holding a feather pen, writes the history of humanity anew, but for this he needs the ink that Mary provides.
MissionFor almost a century, the Missionaries of the Holy Family have had a special care for the Catholic community in the Prelature of Tromsø. The Fathers who came in 1931 were predominantly German; now it is the Polish province that provides us with priests, men of courage and generosity, who continue to do much to build up the Church both materially and spiritually. Last year Mateusz Rodziejczak produced this cinematographical account of a remarkable mission. The dialogue is in Polish, but the images speak for themselves, and need no subtitles.
Ulrik Sverdrup-Thygeson RIPRomans 14.7-9: None of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. John 14.1-6, 27: I give you my peace, not the peace the world bestows. Face to face with death, the Church sings of peace. She does so whether the deceased was a greybeard full of years or a tiny infant; whether death took place in a well-made bed surrounded by dear people or in the chaotic isolation of a trench. Requiem! The word awakens associations of comfort even in those who haven’t darkened the door of a church for years. Mozart, Verdi, Fauré have given the Requiem Mass universally accessible musical expression. We can easily forget how paradoxical it is, in fact, to sing of death in a tonality of tenderness that pulsates with hope. Humanly speaking death is shocking, also when it is foreseeable. What reverence we feel at someone’s deathbed! The dying person may be quite unconscious but is clearly and emphatically there. Then death comes; and suddenly we are keenly aware of an absence. In Norwegian we say that the dying person ‘takes leave’ of us. It’s not a daft expression. Nor is it daft to speak of those ‘left behind’. They remain at the crossroad, powerless. This experience can call forth strong reactions of grief, rebellion, rage. And yet we sing of peace? The Gospel account tells us that this peace has a twofold origin. The first concerns an act of will. ‘Let not your hearts be fearful’, Jesus tells us. Fear paralyses. When others seek to manipulate us, they try to make us afraid. Fear is not, however, determined. We can to a remarkable degree deny fear access to our mind. We do so by acknowledging things as they are: ‘So now I am here. Now it’s like this.’ We can cope with the real; what terrifies us is the fantastical. As long as we set out from facts, we can make reasoned choices. We feel trapped when we entertain the notion that what is ought not to be. In order to encounter death peacefully we must accept it as part of life. We have neither to conceal it nor to prettify it. We must simply look it in the eye as something that comes to us, as something given us. The second Gospel condition for peace is faith. ‘Have faith in God, have faith in me!’ Faith is often a complex matter for Norwegians. It’s a curious effect of Reformation rhetoric that ‘faith’ has come to seem the ultimate kind of ‘deed’. We know we must have faith, that salvation presupposes faith. But how can we know we have faith enough, that our faith possesses the requisite purity? From literature, and possibly from life, we know examples of women and men who have toiched despair on account of such questioning. It may be helpful, therefore, to shed some Biblical light on the matter. In the vocabulary of the New Testament the word for ‘faith’, pistis, can also mean ‘fidelity’. To believe in Biblical terms is no agonisingly solitary pursuit. ‘Faith’ stands for resolute certainty that Someone is keeping his hand both over me and underneath me so that I can walk, and stand, secure. ‘Thou dost beset me behind and before’, we read in a Psalm of David: ‘If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there thy hand shall lead me’. Thus speaks Biblical faith. It is founded, first, on a carefully pondered, rational understanding of God, nurtured by Scripture and theology. Next, it rests on careful observation of the lives of others. The lives of the saints are vital to us because they show, with wonderful diversity, how faith takes embodied form in a vastly various circumstances. That way we can find helpful guidance for our own lives of faith. Thirdly, faith of this kind comes from experience. The older we get, the more clearly we see that it’s true: God really is faithful; in consequence I may believe, I am gifted with faith. Fearlessness and fidelity: it is not hard to recognise Ulrik’s profile in these qualities. Many of you have known him a lot longer than I. You will see whether you agree; but for my part, I can’t really imagine Ulrik agitated. He was deliberate and upright. He called a spade a spade. Occasionally the spade appeared different to other observers. He thought that an honest business. But set out from what he saw. He had long since taken the measure of death. He spoke of it undramatically, with respect, but also with a tiny, and beneficial, touch of irony, even when he seemed to all intents and purposes to be quite well, remarkably fit for his age. He simply recognised that he was no longer young, and that death would be the next epochal transition. His genial realism generated, without needing grand words or gestures, a kind of warmth about him. That warmth was a blessing for others. Ulrik’s faith was utterly unsentimental. That is not to say it was unfeeling. Now and then he voiced the intimate importance to him of his Catholic faith. One was always a little surprised, for he was a private man. Here, too, his concern was to speak things as they are. By reflection and experience Ulrik had reached the conclusion that existence is not meaningless; that life has a direction and a goal; that we are carried by an immense power that regards us benevolently; and that this Power has made itself known in Christ Jesus, whom we, as a result, can call ‘Lord’ without any loss of personal dignity. Ulrik, a bureaucrat by profession, knew all about the formal parameters of society. He had come to see, though, that faith in Christ was the precondition for a definitive fellowship that transcends boundaries of time and space, in the context of which death is a necessary procedure, though unpossessed of defining jurisdiction. Well, if that’s the way it is, then one must say it, that was the Ulrikian approach. Then others would see for themselves whether or not they wished to enter this fellowship. Just as Ulrikian was a high regard for others’ freedom. He passed into eternity fearlessly and faithfully, with gratitude. A few days before his death he sent me a message from hospital. ‘Am being royally treated, royally!’ The adverb was twice repeated. Surrounded by his wife Tone and the rest of the family, lovingly nursed, he took peaceful leave even as he had peacefully built his tabernacle on earth, as if the passage through death was nothing but a somewhat differently configured skiing trip. His backpack was ready. He knew the way. We remember Ulrik in peace. We pray he may peacefully rejoice before the face of the eternal King. Amen. Ulrik Sverdrup-Thygeson 1944-2026
PremonitionsThis striking painting graces the public church of the Carmel in Tromsø. It was done by Guro Giske, who entitled it ‘Mary, Premonitions’. The shade of blue evokes the glow of ‘the blue hour’ that is a feature of winter in Tromsø, when light is reflected off the snow and sea, reminding us that the austerity of a long Norwegian winter is an image, somehow, of the Marian mystery of patience, exercised in the certainty that life will conquer death and light will pierce darkness. The image of Mary as Star of the Sea is especially suggestive in the north, where the night sky for much of the year is a feature also of daytime. Perhaps that is why Grieg came up with one of the most beautiful settings of the ancient poem.
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Today we remember St. Ciarán the abbot, one of the twelve Irish disciples who studied under St. Finnian 🙏 When Ciarán left for his studies, his family sent their favourite cow with him as a gift for the monastery he would Read More 5 Likes
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Today we celebrate the feast of St. Teresa of Calcutta. St. Teresa known as “Mother Teresa” dedicated her life to helping the sick and the poor and founded The Missionaries of Charity Order. She was beatified by Pope John Paul II Read More 12 Likes
Today we remember St. Mac Nissi (or Oengus) When he was born, Oengus was baptised by St. Patrick at a Holy Fountain that sprang from the earth. He studied under St. Patrick and his disciples growing up, and was gifted with Read More 2 Comments
