TrappedOnly this morning, on a visit to the medieval cathedral in Trondheim, did I notice this detail of adornment on the baptismal font, carved in the early twentieth century to patterns found on old fragments. It shows the devil, man’s Read More
Good TasteTo watch András Schiff teach is like standing next to the little child who had the courage to shout, ‘The emperor is naked!’ While remaining unfailingly courteous and kind to his pupils, he is clear in his judgements. ‘Stop the Read More
A Sense of SenseThe Stations of the Cross Henri Matisse painted for the Rosary Chapel in Vence leave me pretty cold. The ensemble is schematic, crowded, unbeautiful. I am just not able to see it as a high form of essentialism. One might be Read More
TrappedOnly this morning, on a visit to the medieval cathedral in Trondheim, did I notice this detail of adornment on the baptismal font, carved in the early twentieth century to patterns found on old fragments. It shows the devil, man’s enemy – whom the Fathers called ‘the hater of good’ – trapped in the branches and foliage of the Tree of Life. The message is clear: baptism strips him of power. Faced with the grace that issues from incorporation into Christ’s Body, he has no freedom of movement. A baptised Christian already has the resources needed for spiritual battle. He or she must just learn to put them to good use. The Christian task is to let the grace of baptism be realised through free choices for good, as we have no truck with the evil one, refusing to give him attention he does not deserve. The trapped one may growl, but has no power to harm unless we restore it by contradicting our baptismal pledges, and so give him freedom to roam.
Good TasteTo watch András Schiff teach is like standing next to the little child who had the courage to shout, ‘The emperor is naked!’ While remaining unfailingly courteous and kind to his pupils, he is clear in his judgements. ‘Stop the snake-charming!’ What is the difference between sentiment and sentimentality? Sentiment is emotion, part and parcel of who we are; sentimentality is ‘fake art, bad taste’. ‘What good taste is’, admits Schiff, ‘I don’t know; I just know that our world today is full of bad taste, and many people don’t know the difference.’ To discern it, education in depth is needed, and depth of global culture, but that is what, most of the time, we don’t get. ‘It’s like in medicine: if you’re an eye doctor, you don’t know where the nose is.’ The man who says these things can say them without rancour because he has acquired, by genius and patient slog, mastery of a vast repertoire. He is able to reproduce from memory subtle details from works by Bach, Scarlatti or Beethoven as if he’d just come up with them himself. Do we realise that in order to create something truly original and new, we need to have assimilated what is classical?
Being HumanConversation published in America on 11 May. Gina Christian: You provided the reflections for the Lenten Spiritual Exercises in the Vatican for Pope Leo XIV , and in your final reflection, you focused on the theme of communicating hope. In the U.S. there’s been a real interest in Nordic Noir films and books — often bleak and morally ambiguous — and a perception that Nordic culture is broadly the same. Do you find any irony in a Nordic bishop focusing on hope? Bishop Varden: Well, your question makes me smile, because I’ve lived in a number of different countries, mainly in Europe, and I find that the more you move south in Europe, the more people have extravagant notions of the North, the more they assume that it is an area of the world plunged in perpetual darkness, where everyone is given to drink and excess, and where everyone is on antidepressants, and where people keep killing themselves with axes. And it isn’t really quite like that. I think this idea of the long Norwegian winter powerfully impacts the imagination. But what most people don’t realize is the extreme luminosity of a Norwegian summer: exposure to light without any trace of darkness. That is intrinsic to our way of living the cycles of the year. The phenomenon of Nordic Noir is interesting. I suspect that it is a genre that has arisen precisely because a few cunning authors have noticed that it corresponds to what people expect. And so they feed the stereotype because it sells, and because people find it entertaining in a slightly perverse sort of way. But when you look at our own literature, poetry and music, it is to such an overwhelming extent a celebration of light and of spring. The amount of Norwegian poetry and music dedicated to spring, to the melting of the ice and the appearance of the first flowers, is fascinating. By all means, I’m not trying for a moment to deny that there isn’t violence, too, in our story, that the Vikings weren’t brutal… But that wasn’t all they were about. I think that there is a constructed Nordic identity that spans centuries. In your Lenten reflection about hope, you noted the modern tendency to either attach ourselves to our wounds or to airbrush them altogether. How do we avoid either extreme? It’s largely because we absolutise our own experience that our wounds are so problematic. We’re drawn either to think, “I’m carrying this thing, and this is my great tragedy, and this is the drama of my existence.” Or to think, “Let’s make absolutely sure that no one suspects this wound that I’m carrying.” We do that rather than looking around and saying, “Actually, being wounded is the human norm. And my wound may not be all that dissimilar from my neighbor’s wound.” If I learn to live with my wound, and if I learn to believe and to entertain the hope that it might actually be healable, and if I pursue the correct sort of remedies, I may even be able to step beyond it. And what will remain is a remembrance of healing. There is so much around us that encourages us to live enclosed in ourselves, as if each of us were the only significant subject on planet Earth. Immersed in my own experience and its pathos, I forget to look around, and I forget to consider others’ experience, their exhilaration, and their suffering. And I shut myself off from the motor of compassion that enables community and even communion. As a shepherd, how would you like to see community built in your parishes? What’s your master plan? Well, I’m a little bit skeptical of master plans. I’m not sufficiently entrepreneurial. But I rejoice in particulars. I think of a study day we had recently at the cathedral parish in Trondheim. It was a very, very mixed crowd, lots of people came who didn’t know one another. In the evening we had a supper together, and the room was absolutely heaving with conversation. I stood in a corner and could see all these little clusters of people who’d met one another that day, enjoying one another’s company, taking food and drink together, listening to one another, learning from one another — not even thinking of looking at their mobile phones. The more our parishes and communities can foster that sort of togetherness, the more they will have an impact also beyond themselves, because that’s the sort of thing that draws other people in. It has to be said that [the Trondheim cathedral parish event] had been a day made up of some conferences, but also of prayer. We’d had Mass, we’d celebrated the Divine Office together, we’d had a time of quiet prayer together. Because our community of the day had taken both intellectual food and spiritual nourishment, had shared both silence and conversation that it could be so effective in such a short time. Those various elements have all got to be in place — the spiritual, intellectual, social and convivial. What are your hopes and fears for artificial intelligence and its use to foster spirituality? In terms of fostering spirituality I’m afraid I have absolutely no hopes at all for AI. Anything can be used as a tool, but I don’t think AI is going to generate any spiritual renewal, because any spiritual renewal worthy of its name is one that pierces the human heart, and that is something that an algorithm can’t do. Obviously there are things I can use in digital media and artificial intelligence that may save time and even make me discover useful things, but I have little faith in it as an agent of conversion. You’ve previously spoken to the dangers of weaponizing Christianity for political aims. How do we stop that process, instead of continuing to admire the problem? Good question. You do see this tendency all over the place; I see it in my own country as well. First of all, I would stress that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is an end in itself, an end that is significant of a goal. Any attempt to instrumentalize the Gospel for a subsidiary purpose, be it cultural or ideological or political, is suspect. And we must beware of any attempt to brandish Christianity void of the message and presence of the Wounded and Risen One. Any presentation of Christianity that abstracts the scandal of the Cross or perversely uses the Cross as a weapon with which to strike others is veering toward heresy or even blasphemy. So we must remain resolutely Christocentric and resolutely committed to following Christ and to applying his commandments, as well as his promises — first of all to ourselves. And beware of too much rhetoric, beware of too many words. We must focus rather on living coherent lives. Ultimately, that is how Christianity spread and that is how Christianity renewed a weary world in late antiquity. By all means, there was an element of preaching and teaching and catechesis. But what bowled people over and turned societies round was seeing a new way of being human, and a new way of creating and fostering community, seeing and recognizing the possibility of reconciliation, of forgiveness, and of building a society, a new city, on the basis of reconciliation and forgiveness. And so when Christianity is invoked as a component of what is ultimately hate speech, we’ve just got to not jump on that train. How do we ensure that we’re not falling into the danger of getting on that train, and how do we help others to disembark from it? The foundational principle — which is an old one, it’s there in St. Paul — is to train ourselves to speak the truth in love. To love those who make mistakes is not to pretend that the mistakes don’t exist, but it is to address them in a constructive way, instead of yielding to an exacerbation of conflicts. So what matters is to speak the truth in love, to make sure I’ve really studied the truth, that I understand the truth, that I’m prepared to give an answer, that I’m prepared to give an account for the hope that is in me, and that I don’t just hold on to some tribal instinct. It’s really important. The best thing all of us can do is to study the faith more thoroughly, to read the Scriptures, to become learned in the Scriptures, to understand and live the sacramental grace of the Church deeply, in order to speak from within that. I’d say that presents the ultimate healing remedy that you addressed in your question, because when one sees the splendour of the Church as a community of the redeemed, living by grace and illumined by Christ’s love, instantiated in a concrete community, then that has an attractiveness and a beauty that makes any other allurement of allegiance just pale into insignificance. Some of that weaponization of Christianity is an effort to “hasten the coming of God’s kingdom on earth” through human means. As Christians, how do we balance that tension between the present life and our hope for a future in heaven? Above all, by practising patience, which is not a very fashionable virtue, and one that everything militates against — because we live now with the illusion that if I have a need or a desire, it must be satisfied immediately. There must be something I can download, or a number I can ring, or some delivery man who can come to the door with stuff in his rucksack that will give me what I crave, or what I long for, or what I feel I can’t live without. Such satisfaction, though, will never be final. It works out to some extent, if we have money on our credit card; it can keep us fed and clothed, and to a certain extent entertained. But a human life is a drawn-out affair. And things take time. Great things take time. That’s a principle Newman liked to stress. And to be a human is a great thing. A Norwegian summer’s night – and it’s real, not a dream.
AscensionActs 1:1-11: A cloud removed him from their sight. Ephesians 1:17-23: That you may understand hope. Matthew 28.16-20: I am with you always. Liturgically speaking, this day marks the end of the first forty days of Paschaltide, corresponding to the forty days of Lent. The two periods are like giant waves flowing up to, then away from, Easter: ebb and flow. Easter changes everything. It makes the bitter water sweet. It stills the storm of despair. The waters that, before, threatened to drown us, carry us now. The dark abyss of death and chaos is illumined and made peaceful by Christ’s victory. Having set out with tears, we now sing songs of joy. When Jesus first appeared to the disciples on Easter Sunday, displaying his resurrection, they were terrified, overwhelmed by emotion. The grief they had felt had created an inner tension that made them respond with disbelief, even, in Thomas’s case, with defiance. Gently, the Lord reassured them, making them see, ‘It is I’. Little by little, they got used to him again. Life seemed to continue much as before. ‘For forty days’, we are told by Luke, ‘he continued to appear to them.’ His mode of appearance was baffling, true, but nonetheless reasonably predictable. Christ continued to go in and out among them. He ate and drank with them. And what did he say? He continued ‘to tell them about the kingdom of God’. ‘Beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.’ He spoke also of the coming of the Spirit, but in the main this forty-day time was a time of consolidation, a time for remembrance, for calling to mind. The disciples were made to reflect in depth on the ancient experience of Israel, first; then on what they themselves had lived through. At ever new junctures, they came to exclaim, ‘Ah! That is what this means!’ The first forty days of Easter were a time of reassurance. All that changes with the Ascension, on the fortieth day. What a disconcerting feast this is, even at a distance of two thousand years! Jesus had barely finished charging his own to bear witness to the ends of the earth when ‘he was lifted up, while they looked on, and a cloud took him from their sight’. With retrospect, in the light of theology, St Paul presents the Ascension as victory: ‘When he ascended to the heights, he led captivity captive.’ To the tiny, fragile Church, however, the event must have seemed different, as if Christ were taken captive, snatched away, leaving a piercing, painful void behind. Today’s liturgy keeps the Ascension with shouts of Alleluias. The disciples greeted it with silence, staring up into heaven, perplexed, hurting once more, asking, ’What now?’ This fortieth day introduces a new dimension in the Church’s Easter faith. It calls for a widening of hearts and minds, for an explosion of categories. There are new things, now, to remember: the veiled promises of Power from on high. So far the disciples have looked back to the Passion and Rising of Christ. Now they look ahead, to the bestowal of the Spirit. The time after Ascension is marked by recollection, silence, and expectancy. Again we sense a hint of fear, as we, too, tend to be anxious before anything radically new. The Ascension marks Christ’s going away. It is likewise a pledge of his return. ‘This same Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.’ Do we think of this as much as we ought? Do we expect the Lord? Do we long for his coming? Do we beseech him to accomplish his work of redemption in our own lives and in history, crying out, ‘Maranatha!’? It is essentials that we, as Christians, consider the universe and interpret it on the basis of the mystery we celebrate today. ‘Creation’, writes St Paul, ‘groans in birth pangs’. New life is waiting to be born. For all its loveliness, our world stands for something incomplete and temporary. We may be more aware of that today than people have ever been before. Let’s remember, then, when anxiety threatens: Christ is Alpha and Omega. He is the goal towards which all things tend. And he tells us: ‘Fear not!’ The Ascension is no abduction. It does not signify the Lord’s removal to some other place, away from us. Nor does it equip him, as it were, for infinite bilocation, enabling him to be momentarily present in moments of emergency all around the world, like some celestial paramedic summonable by frantic calls of 999. Fist and foremost, the Ascension reveals the Lord Jesus, whom we dare to call our brother, as our God. In him ‘we live and move and have our being’. In him ‘all things were made’. These Scripture verses are no pious platitudes. They are the hermeneutical key to right understanding of reality. Christ ‘ascended far above all heavens in order that he might fill all things’. All things. That includes my life, and yours: our souls, our minds, our bodies. The Ascension shows us Emmanuel, God with us, in his fullest realisation. During his earthly life, Jesus showed us what it means to walk with God. Today he says, ‘the journey continues’. He is with us always, even to the end of time, in the most intimate way possible, in a presence to be sealed nine days hence by the sending of the Spirit. Let us use these days to go deep, to take on board what Christ means when he says, ‘I will not leave you orphans’. He invites us to live in union with him, to love him and be loved by him, to know the transformative power of his grace. ‘May the eyes of your hearts be filled with light’, writes St Paul to the Ephesians, ‘that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you’. That is likewise my prayer for you and for myself. For, beloved, if we come to knowledge of that hope, we shall know and understand everything else. Then we shall have a wonderful gift to bestow on our world, a gift the world needs urgently. Amen.
The Mystery of Christ’s Ascension ‘to where he was before’ (John 6:62) presupposes his eternal generation from the Father in the Spirit, as the creative Logos by which the world was made. Thus this icon of the ‘Creation of the World’, painted in 2019 by the Ukrainian iconographer Lyuba Yatskiv, provides visual focus for our meditation today.
A Sense of SenseThe Stations of the Cross Henri Matisse painted for the Rosary Chapel in Vence leave me pretty cold. The ensemble is schematic, crowded, unbeautiful. I am just not able to see it as a high form of essentialism. One might be forgiven for thinking it was work the painter did one afternoon he had indigestion or was suffering from the heat. It is remarkable to realise how painstakingly, and over what a period of time, the ensemble was prepared. An exhibition currently on display in the Baltimore Museum of Art shows eighty or so sketches chronicling the process. Through them one senses that Matisse had a real sense of what he was portraying. This Deposition, for example, not only displays formal and architectural perfection, but is deeply affecting. Why is this depth so insufficiently, at least to my eyes, rendered in the finished work? So many other aspects of the chapel are exquisite. I am mystified, though a degree of light is shed by this documentary about the Vence project, Matisse’s last great work.
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Today we celebrate the Feast of St. Brendan, May 16th. St. Brendan, is best known for his famous voyages and for his achievements as a monk labouring for Christ in the early days of Christianity in Ireland. Like St. Brendan we Read More 2 Comments
Brendan WilmotAndrew Coleman what a scholar Andy not like me lolGlanire Commercial Cleaning Long hours and steady focus like Brendan’s voyages—that’s what keeps us ahead here.
Feast of Our Lady of Fatima Today is the feast of Our Lady of Fatima. It was on this day in 1917 when Our Lady appeared to three children in Fatima and asked them to pray for sinners and an Read More 6 Comments
Today we celebrate the first anniversary of Pope Leo XIV’s pontificate. Holy Father, we thank God for your pastoral leadership and tireless work for peace & on behalf of those who suffer in the world. We remember your intentions in prayer. Trocaire Read More 1 Likes
Glanire Commercial Cleaning Long hours and steady focus like Brendan’s voyages—that’s what keeps us ahead here. 
