Time’s PacesA friend sent this poem inscribed on a clock case in Chester Cathedral, a text attributed to Henry Twells. It gives food for thought on this first day of the annus Domini 2026. When as a child I laughed and wept, Time Read More
Time’s PacesA friend sent this poem inscribed on a clock case in Chester Cathedral, a text attributed to Henry Twells. It gives food for thought on this first day of the annus Domini 2026. When as a child I laughed and wept, Time crept. When as a youth I waxed more bold, Time strolled. When I became a full grown man, Time ran. When older still I daily grew, Time flew. Soon I shall find, in passing on, Time gone. O Christ! wilt Thou have saved me then? Amen.
Mary the Mother of GodNumbers 6.22-27: May the Lord let his face shine on you! Galatians 4.4-7: God sent his Son born of a Woman. Luke 2.16-21: Mary pondered these things in her heart. The liturgical year gives us several thematic feasts dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Today we honour her simply as the ‘Mother of God’. The title was ascribed to her at the Council of Ephesus in 431. It soon found expression in theology, liturgical poetry, and the arts. It is not uncommon, in the Christian basilicas of Antiquity, to find a mosaic of the Mother of God in the apse, above the altar, as the visual focus of the building. Uninitiated visitors (especially if they are Norwegian, conditioned by the rhetoric of Reformation debates) easily misunderstand these. They may think that believers of old practised a Marian pity that somehow put Christ in the shade. The opposite is the case. When the Council Fathers at Ephesus solemnly called the Virgin Mary Theotokos, ‘Godbearer’, it was to put a seal on the Church’s christology. For more than a hundred years, since Nicaea, a battle had gone on to find responsible expression for the truth about Jesus Christ. Then as now, there was a tendency to conceive of him in too horizontal terms, as an exceedingly graced, attractive, lovable brother. A truly Biblical belief in Christ – a belief like the one St Paul expresses when he asserts that in Christ ‘the fullness of Godhead dwells bodily’ (Col 2:9) – is more than our thinking can sustain. Is he a man like us and still ‘Light from Light’? How can the Father’s eternal Word be subject to the limitations of time and space that define our existence and often weigh us down? To think theologically is demanding. We don’t much like thoughts that make demands. Instead we cook up our own notions of Christ. They’re frequently dull, but possess the advantage of being instantly accessible. The question is: Do we not end up worshiping an image of own making, the fabrication of our limited ideas? It says a lot that worship is a dimension very often absent from our life of prayer and from our liturgies. People like to talk, these days, about the Church’s various crises. To my mind, there is only one fundamental crisis of importance, given that all the rest spring from it – I mean the widespread loss of faith in Christ as the Son of God. Our attitude to the Virgin Mary is a good indication of where we stand in this respect. It reveals what we believe to be true about Christ, what we believe to be true about ourselves. If we believe in Christ with the faith of the Church, not with a faith of our own making, the Marian mystery will open itself before us. The call to bear the Eternal into time, the Immortal into corruptibility, the Holy One into a nature scarred by sin is a call so immense that it necessarily transforms the one to whom it is entrusted. The Mother of God shows us what human being is capable of, as the embodied image of God, in its highest potential. When she does this, it is not primarily so that we can venerate her high up on the walls of churches. She does it in order to manifest what we, by grace, are also called to become. The mystery of the incarnation continues in the Church: that is the most astonishing thing about life. Leo the Great once said: God has given to the waters of baptism what he bestowed on his Mother (‘dedit aquae quod dedit Matri’, Sermo XXV). By baptism, we have been enabled to be bearers of divine life, to partake of divine nature (2. Peter 1:4). Today’s feast honours the Virgin Mary, of course. But it also makes our own vocation explicit. Do we believe in that vocation? Will we say yes to it and give ourselves wholly over to it? Do we desire to become, in Christ, an inspired ‘new creation’ (2 Cor 5:17) — or are we in fact well satisfied with the old and worn one?
The ninth-century apse mosaic from Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.
HopeIntervjuet ble publisert i Morgenbladet på julaften. «Om krisen eller krigen kommer». Det var tittelen på en brosjyre alle husstander i Sverige nylig fikk tilsendt. Erik Varden, katolsk biskop i Trondheim nevner selv denne episoden fra det nye, mørke Europa når vi spør ham, som vi gjør i denne intervjuserien, om hvor han for tiden finner politisk håp. – At vi i skandinavisk sammenheng begynner å anerkjenne muligheten for krig er eksepsjonelt. I verden er det nå fryktelig mye som gjør en bekymret, og kanskje redd. Men håp er ikke det samme som optimisme, sier biskopen. Den 51 år gamle biskopen tilhører trappistordenen, en munkeorden grunnlagt i Frankrike på 1000-tallet som er kjent for sin strenge askese. Håp, kristent sett, begynner med realisme, sier Varden. For å finne håpet, må man anerkjenne ting som de er. Illusjonene må bort. – Enhver form for åndelighet handler om dette: å frigjøre seg fra ønsketenkning, fra idealiseringen av seg selv og av sine omstendigheter. Man kan derfor søke håpet uten å se særlig lyst på fremtiden, sier Varden. For inspirasjon har Varden de siste årene sett til den gresk-katolske erkebiskopen av Kyiv, Svyatoslav Sjevtsjuk. Da den russiske fullskalainvasjonen startet i januar 2022, begynte Sjevtsjuk å sende ut videobudskap til sine landsmenn. Han kom med oppdateringer om utviklingen ved fronten og ga praktiske opplysninger om hva som skjedde med kirken, men underviste også i troen. Varden sammenligner det med president Zelenskisj berømte video fra krigens første dager, der han han stadfestet at han fremdeles var i Kyiv og at han ikke ville forlate landet. Varden har selv møtt Sjevtsjuk i Ukraina. Da fortalte erkebiskopen om hvordan han noen uker etter angrepet hadde besøkt folk som bodde langs fronten. Da en eldre dame hadde takket for videoene, hadde han sagt noe om det ikke var så lett å vite hva man skulle si. «Dét er ikke så viktig, det viktige er at du snakker til oss», svarte damen. – Nettopp dette gjør meg håpefull. Han står på fiendens ønskeliste, men han blir ved sin post. Han taler til og trøster sitt folk og hjelper dem med praktiske ting, sier Varden. Spesielt stort inntrykk gjør trosundervisningen, eller katekesen, som biskopen sier, som gjerne utgjør siste del av Sjevtsjuks videoer. – Det å stå i en norsk kirke og snakke om fred og forsoning, med julelys på gatene og pepperkakelukten liksom i luften, kan synes litt abstrakt. Men når man er i krig og daglig konfronteres med grusom brutalitet, da er det modige saker å snakke om hva det vil si å elske sine fiender eller å være en som skaper fred. Da kan du ikke tillate deg floskler. Dette har Sjevtsjuk likevel klart gjennom flere år. For meg står han som en av de troverdige kristne stemmene i vår samtid. Han snakker med myndighet i evangelisk forstand. – Hva legger du i det? – Myndighet – exousia på gresk – betyr å tale ut av sitt vesen. Da snakker du ikke bare i teoretiske vendinger, men slik at det du sier gir uttrykk for hvem du er, ditt dypeste vesen. Det gir en form for troverdighet som er sjelden i offentlig samtale. Det gjør inntrykk når du ser det, sier Varden. Sjevtsjuk har også klart å manøvrere grenselandet mellom politikk og religion på en klok måte, mener Varden. Sjevtsjuk er nå kritisk til den amerikanske fredsplanen for Ukraina. Han sier Russlands mål er å bryte ned demokratisk tankegang og å ødelegge og trellbinde det ukrainske folket. – For ukrainerne er krigen eksistensiell: Det handler om å være eller ikke å få være. Da er det lite rom for kompromisser. Men samtidig har Sjevtsjuk gjennom hele konflikten insistert at man, også som angrepet, må gjenkjenne mennesket i den angripende. Selv i krig gjelder det å gjenkjenne personer, ikke kun abstrakte, statistiske enheter, sier Varden. Nylig utga han boken Towards Dawn: Essays in Hopefulness, en samling essays som handler om hvordan kristent tankegods kan bidra til å forstå samtiden og vise vei for fremtiden. – Jeg er bekymret på kristendommens vegne. Evangelikale i USA støtter Trump. Høyreradikale ekstremister erklærer seg frelst. I katolisismen finnes integralismen som vil at kirken skal styre samfunnet. Vil stadig flere kristne henge seg på autoritære bevegelser, fristet av en slags kulturell revansjisme? – Ja, dette er en reell fare, det bekymrer også meg. Vi må være ekstremt påpasselige med enhver instrumentalisering av tro for politiske formål, særlig når det får emosjonelt og sentimentalt fortegn. Dette vil kreve stor klartenkthet fra kirken, sier Varden. Han vender tilbake til realismen han mener er en forutsetning for både håp og forsoning. I boken skriver han blant annet om katolske presters overgrep mot barn. – Det må anerkjennes, ærlig og oppriktig og med sorg for at opplysning skal bli mulig der det har vært mørkt, sier Varden. – Når jeg kaller boken «Mot daggry» er det nettopp fordi det er så mye i verden som er nattlig. Å holde ut i natten er i en sterk bibelsk tematikk. Og det er det adventen også handler om, det er den mørkeste tiden på året. Vi er heldige her i Nord som kan se dette symbolsk i naturen. – Så hvordan gir anerkjennelsen av mørket deg håp? – Kristent sett dreier det seg om å erkjenne at det finnes en person som ikke bare er en bærer av håp, men som inkarnerer Håpet, som kom som lys inn i mørket og som forblir der, virksomt lysende, forvandlende. En Person som er inntrådt i verdens historie på et daterbart og plasserbart tidspunkt. Det er et guddommelig Nærvær som overskrider våre midlertidige kategorier av tid og rom. Det gir oss et lys vi kan leve ved, håpe med, samles rundt. Procession by the Greek Catholic Patriarchal Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ in Kyiv. Photo: Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.
Search for MeaningThe French journalist Pierre Jova came to Norway before Christmas to prepare a series of articles on the Catholic Church in Norway for La Vie. You can find the articles here. We’ve seen in Norway that many young men are interested in Catholicism… As well as a number of young women! At the moment, here in the West, we live through a time of great anxiety. It has become difficult to envisage the common good. We withdraw into little enclosures where we speak only with likeminded people. That ends up being boring! We are anxious about the climate, about our economy; we face the reality of a major war in Europe, not to mention the changing relationships between our continent and the United States; then there are all the perplexities concerning human nature. It is remarkable that a period marked by technological and scientific hyper-sophistication should have such a hard time spelling out what a man or a woman is. This loss of parameters leads almost by necessity to a new quest for sense. We begin to ask whether there is such a thing as truth and falsehood in this world. In such a context, institutions that have stood the test of time, that have shown durability not just for a few decades, but for centuries, even millennia, exercise fascination. The young wonder what this is all about. We must accompany them patiently, listening to their questions, their hopes, while presenting them with the fullness of faith. We must open for them the marvellous world of the Bible. And permit them to have a real experience of community, of communion. Pilgrims on their way to Selja.
Christmas DayIsaiah 52:2-7: How beautiful are the feet of one who brings good news. Hebrews 1:1-6: He is the radiant light of God’s glory. John 1:1-18: He was with God in the beginning. Each year on Christmas Day the Prologue of John washes over us like a thunderous waterfall. The first two Christmas Masses, at midnight and dawn, are narrative in character. We follow the circumstances of Christ’s birth among the shepherds in the field, then in the stable, surrounded by damp hay and the smell of animals. We stand as witnesses. Much Christmas devotion is focused at a horizontal level, face to face with the mystery. This is good. By the incarnation God entered our horizontality, measurable in time and space. That is where he meets us. The Church’s early preaching insisted on this fact. It seemed incredible, and scandalous, that God should come to us on our terms. So this was rehearsed again and again. These days we live with the opposite tendency. We take the homely, companionable Jesus for granted. It is natural for us to relate simply to him. We call him our brother, our friend. We are right to do so: these titles are Biblically grounded. But do we sufficiently remember that he is also our eternal Lord, God from God, Light from Light? ‘In the beginning was the Word’, writes John. What’s a word? Formally speaking a word is a combination of letters or sounds capable of rendering sense. Not all words make sense on their own. They presuppose combinations with other words. But each word does mean something. Words enable us to order our experience and to share it. To deprive a man of the use of words is to do violence to him. One of the first things totalitarian regimes will do is to restrict speech and outlaw vocabulary. I have a tattered old book that used to belong to my grandfather, who was a prisoner in the Nazi camp of Grini during the War. The book is a collection of speeches given there by Francis Bull, a man of letters, during the Second World War. There were words that, in that context, it would have been impossible to use: ‘freedom’, ‘resistance’, ‘king’, and so forth. By using them nonetheless, or by finding clever ways of suggesting them by means of other words, Bull kept the other prisoners’ courage up. He kept alive a flame that otherwise might have been blown out by the icy wind of violence. When John proclaims that the Word become flesh, the Word we revere in the manger, was ‘in the beginning’, it is to show that the Child born of Mary embodies the origin of all things. The Word became flesh not just to run a redemptive errand but also, and not least, to show us what our existence means, where we come from, the goal we are called to reach. We read that ‘all things came to be through him’. It is literally true that he, by becoming man, ‘came into his own’. When in daily life we purchase a gadget or other — a mixmaster — we are told to read the user’s manual. We need to know how the equipment is intended to work in order to use it well. Else we risk ruining it. If we come back to the shop with a wreck and it turns out we have used the thing wrongly, trying to mix cement with a Kenwood, the attendant will scoff and the shop’s warranty will do us no good. The accident was our fault. The Word became flesh to display human nature in a perfect prototype, exactly as it was intended to be. The Producer demonstrates it. He challenges us to look for ourselves in him, and for him in us. He asks us to follow his example. We are called to resemble Christ, not primarily to get a pat on the back and a nice prize in the form of eternal life; we are called to resemble him because he, and only he, can show us who we really are. If we follow other paths, our nature will not work optimally. We may even risk doing it lasting damage. To be a Christian is to surrender oneself into Jesus’s hands to be formed by them, to be repaired when needed — and to be ennobled. If only we would share God’s ambition on our behalf! The Church knows it and spells it out. Think of the audacious prayer with which this Mass began, an expression of our dearest Christmas wish: O God, who wonderfully created the dignity of human nature and still more wonderfully restored it, grant, we pray, that we may share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity.. The human being is wonderfully made. The working of our body is a mystery great enough — but what are we to say about our mind, our soul, of everything we are equipped to know, enjoy, and suffer by?! ‘I will praise thee’, says a Psalm of David, ‘for I am fearfully and wonderfully made’. It’s a good phrase. Fear and wonder often coincide as we grow in self-knowledge. So yes, the way we are made is amazing. But it will be surpassed, we are told, by our remaking in Christ. What we are of ourselves is as nothing compared to what we have the potential, in him, to become. If we dare to pray for a share in his divinity, it is because he desires to share it with us. The Word that was in the beginning is not external to us. The Word is the agent of our inward renewal. One and the same Word works in our soul by grace and holds the universe together; the Word that became flesh and was laid in a manger is that same Word that created the stars and still guides them. The ordered immensity of the cosmos is an image of the height a Christian is called to reach. We can aim for such heights if we have the courage to follow John. Not for nothing is his emblem the eagle. John soars in the vast expanse of heaven, apparently immobile but in reality sustained by vast spiritual force. John illumines the Gospel with glory. And he assures each of us: the Lord’s purpose for you is for your to become glorious, a new, infinitely beautiful creation in Christ, a bearer of eternal light into time’s night. This does not mean that our faith becomes abstract and theoretical. No one sums the Christian condition up more concentratedly than John. ‘He who loves me’, says Jesus through John, ‘must keep my commandments coherently’. The commandments are immense: ‘Abide in me’ — let nothing, no one, separate you from the grace of Jesus; ‘Love one another’, unto death if need be; ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’, that your life may became the Spirit’s holy temple. God was born like us and dwells among us to make us like him. Grateful for his confidence in us, let us live in a manner worthy of him. Amen. Initial from an Antiphonary produced in Bologna in the early 14th century, now in the Fitzwilliam Museum
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Just a reminder, Rosary and Mass tonight, January 1st at 7.30pm. 2 Likes
A Blessed and Happy New Year! Today marks the last day of the Christmas octave and the Solemnity of Mary, the Most Holy Mother of God. Prayer for the Solemnity: Father, source of light in every age, the virgin conceived and bore your Read More 2 Likes
Wishing everyone a Happy New Year from Admin. We look forward to interacting with all Parishes and Clergy in the Diocese in 2026 and thank you for all your support in the last year. Here is a lovely New Years Read More 1 Comments
What a beautiful way to thank God for all the blessings during 2025 , and for giving us the courage and trust in Him during our sufferings and troubles of this past year. Jesus we trust in You! Please note Adoration in Read More 1 Likes
