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Coram Fratribus

Desert Fathers 39

You 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.
Abba Cassian said that a Read More

Coram Fratribus

Sts Cornelius & Cyprian

Homily given at the beginning of a retreat for the clergy of the Prelature of Tromsø.
1 Timothy 3.1-13: Let him live a worthy life.
Luke 7.11-17: Young man, I command you: Rise!
Today we commemorate two holy bishops: Cornelius and Cyprian. We Read More

Coram Fratribus

Exaltation of the Holy Cross

Genesis 21.4-9: Make a fiery serpent and put it on a standard.
Philippians 2.5-11: Put on the mind of the Lord Jesus Christ.
John 3.13-17: God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.
A sermon is no history lesson, but Read More

Coram Fratribus

Migration to Nidaros

This evening I was part of a panel debate, co-organised by the University of Trondheim, NTNU, and the city, on migration. Having been asked to speak about religious migration to Trondheim, medieval Nidaros, I wished to say something about what Read More

Coram Fratribus

Desert Fathers 39 You 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.
Abba Cassian said that a brother once came to Abba Serapion, and that the elder had invited him, as was his custom, to make a prayer. The other fellow, though, professing himself a sinner and declaring himself unworthy of the monastic habit, would not hear of it. [Abba Serapion] then wished to wash his feet, but he did not consent, saying the same sort of thing. When [the elder] let him have some food, he began, while they were eating, to exhort him in charity saying: ‘My child, if you want to profit, remain in your cell. Mind yourself and your manual labour. Being out and about does you no good; it is much more beneficial to stay put.’ When [the brother] heard this, he was irritated. His expression changed so much he could not keep it hidden from the elder. Then Abba Serapion said to him: ‘Up until now you have been saying: “I am a sinner!” You have been declaring yourself unworthy of life itself. But then, when with love I admonished you a little, you got very cross! If, then, you truly wish to become humble, learn to bear bravely what others say to you, and do not be full of empty talk.’ Having heard these things, the brother prostrated himself before the elder and retired, greatly profited.
To speak of high ideals is delightful. It is easy to assume that by talking of virtues I acquire them, rather the way we might think that by purchasing a book we have read it.
The profile of the recent convert who holds forth endlessly on subjects of ascesis and theology after picking up a few bits here and there from sermons and books (or, these days, YouTube videos), is a type we can recognise; we may even see in it a previous version of ourselves, and blush a little.
The man who came to see Serapion was not necessarily a hypocrite. Serapion was a giant among the Fathers. A friend of Antony’s, he was mentioned in his will: when Antony lay dying he bequeathed a sheepskin to Athanasius, another to Serapion, likewise a bishop, entrusted with the Church of Thmuis in lower Egypt. Jerome says of Serapion that ‘on account of his cultivated genius he was found worthy of the surname Scholasticus’; in addition, that he wrote several excellent books and was renowned as a confessor of the faith.
Any young monk would have felt overwhelmed in this august presence, thinking it unseemly to adopt a posture of prominence by presiding at prayers. We can imagine why such a one would wholeheartedly protest when the old man proposed to bow down and, like a servant, wash his sand-encrusted feet. As Queen Gertrude in Hamlet might have said, though, the monk ‘doth protest too much, methinks’. There is too much self, and a certain satisfaction, evident in all this professed selflessness.
Serapion picks this up. He resolves to use the occasion to help his visitor grow up a little. Amiably, at table, in a dynamic of fellowship, he suggests that what this man needs is to focus on essentials, practising stability and perseverance in his cell. Why run around collecting the signatures of famous people when the one thing needful is to learn quietness, gainful work, and the art of holding one’s tongue?
On hearing this, the visitor’s face underwent visible change. Like Cain on seeing his sacrifice rejected, ‘his countenance fell’. He felt angry and hurt. Clearly he had expected commendation on account of his humility, congratulations on his effort to seek out a holy man. Instead he was asked: ‘Why aren’t you at home plaiting ropes?’ He ‘could not keep [his displeasure] hidden from the elder’, try as he might. We know how useless it is to stop ourselves blushing in public when something upsets or embarrasses us. An inward conflict is revealed at Serapion’s table. What it shows up is this: pride has a deep hold on this visitor who professed himself so humble.
Serapion’s rebuke is courteous but firm. He is concerned to let the other man see he lacks integrity. His words are not in concert with who he is. He is caught in a web of pretence. This is a trap into which people who profess faith in public may readily fall. Think of the reaction of those who heard Jesus proclaiming the Sermon on the Mount. When he finished, having evoked the fearful fall of a house not founded on rock, they were astonished at his doctrine: ‘For he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.’
The Greek word for ‘authority’ is exousia. The preposition ‘ex’ means ‘out of’; ‘ousia’ is the word for ‘being’ — it comes from the same root that yields ‘ontology’. What impressed people in Jesus was the fact that his words came from what he was, an outwardly compelling, credible expression of inward truth. He was of a piece, so dependable. There is pathos in the remark, ‘not as the scribes’, a caste of religious professionals who had made the spouting of religious certainties their livelihood. Let us think twice before we look upon them with scorn. They have much in common with devout people of every age.
This story challenges us to weigh our words before we speak them. It recalls a counsel St Benedict gives in the fourth chapter of the Rule: ‘Not to wish to be called holy before one is, but to be so first, whereby one would be so called the more truly.’ It is also a story that brings me to smile wistfully. When I think back over my experience as a religious superior, I ascertain that no letters I received were more predictably obnoxious and out of touch than the ones signed, ‘Yours humbly’.
Eugène Delacroix, Hamlet and His Mother. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Coram Fratribus

Sts Cornelius & Cyprian Homily given at the beginning of a retreat for the clergy of the Prelature of Tromsø.
1 Timothy 3.1-13: Let him live a worthy life.
Luke 7.11-17: Young man, I command you: Rise!
Today we commemorate two holy bishops: Cornelius and Cyprian. We remember them not least for the common front they formed against a heresy that’s still alive and well today, anno 2025. In their day it was associated with the Novatian schism. The context for it was the persecution of Christians that had raged under the Emperor Decius.
Not all Christians were heroes back then either. Some gave in to pressure and took part in rites reckoned as idolatrous. How was one to deal with such persons retrospectively?
Cornelius and Cyprian had high expectations. They presupposed years of penitential discipline. But they did maintain that a human being can, in a Christian perspective, make up for wickedness; and that God, the patient and endlessly merciful One, enables this to happen.
Novatian, by contrast, regarded a fall as final. The Church, in his view, was for the immaculate. Novatian’s standard was heroic, but terrible. It proclaimed: ‘Oh man, you’ve a single chance. If you miss it, you must manage on your own. No hand will be extended towards you.’
Such an attitude is not Catholic. That is what Cyprian and Cornelius established. The Catholic Church is not a fellowship made up of faultless paragons of virtue. The Church consists of fallible folk who know from experience what it is to fall — and to be raised up again; folk relieved of the illusion of their own perfection, who thereby have learnt to nurture hope for others, too.
For if God has shown me such kindness, why should he not likewise embrace my neighbour?
Our times are Novatian. They are prone to idealise, but also happy to see the downfall of idealised people. We gladly throw to the lions people who have let us down, or whose behaviour or mindset is distasteful to us. We like to form small, protected conventicles in which we fancy ourselves members of a select few — until, of course, we are chucked out ourselves and experience what it is like to err in the night, freezing, finding that no one opens when we ring their doorbells.
Cornelius and Cyprian remind us that mercy is a crucial category of Christian, Catholic living. Mercy is not about taking things lightly, about shrugging our shoulders and saying, ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter’. Mercy is the divine quality that sees a life not just for what it is or has been, but for what it might become, and that lets God, the Almighty, loosen what is rigid, melt what is frozen, straighten what is crooked — even raise the dead.
Paul in his letter to Timothy shows us how this quality is realised in a specifically priestly life: by means of self-control, gentleness, hospitality, resistance to evil talk and diabolical snares.
Let us, then, called as we are to be fishers of men, live accordingly.
In the name of Christ! Amen.

Coram Fratribus

Exaltation of the Holy Cross Genesis 21.4-9: Make a fiery serpent and put it on a standard.
Philippians 2.5-11: Put on the mind of the Lord Jesus Christ.
John 3.13-17: God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.
A sermon is no history lesson, but today’s feast is so deeply rooted in particular circumstances that a little background is required. Please bear with me.
In the early seventh century, the century of Gregory the Great and Maximus the Confessor, the Persian empire, Antiquity’s Iran, was a mighty power. Persia fought against Byzantium, the continuation of Rome. The empires resemble two bulls fighting, horns interlocked. Byzantium was western in character, Persia was Oriental. Byzantium was Christian, signed with the sign of the Cross. Persia held on to its dualistic Zoroastrian creed.
In 614 the Persian Emperor Chosroes II invaded Jerusalem, then claimed as Byzantine. Chosroes was a Zoroastrian, but his wife was Christian. He understood Christian symbols, so knew what he was doing when he stole Christendom’s prime relic: the Cross of Jesus. For fifteen years the Cross remained in Persian captivity. Chosroes could have found no clearer sign of his supremacy. He displayed to his colleague, the Byzantine Emperor Heraklios, this message: ‘The crown jewel is with me!’
Only in the autumn of 629 was Heraklios able to get the cross back. He brought it to Constantinople and elevated it in Hagia Sophia. The faithful venerated the Cross, and sang. Thus the festival was founded that we keep still, with wonderful texts and tunes, like those we heard here in the cathedral at vespers last night: ‘O glorious Cross, O venerable Cross! O precious Tree and wondrous Sign! By you the evil one was conquered and the world was redeemed by the Blood of Christ.’
‘Well’, you might think, ‘that’s very nice. All worked out for the best in the end. But does this mean anything now?’
Oh yes, it does. Very much so. The story of the Cross that was looted, held hostage, instrumentalised politically; then freed and raised up in the Church, regained as a focus and criterion of faith, challenges us to think critically about how symbols of faith are used in public life. It has had that function for centuries.
Yesterday I was moved to look up the ‘Exaltation of the Cross’ in the Old Norse Book of Homilies, a collection written up in about 1200, when Trondheim, as ecclesiastical capital, was at the height of its influence and the old cathedral had acquired its own relic of the Passion in the form of a drop of Christ’s Precious Blood. The preacher takes it for granted that Norwegian churchgoers 800 years ago knew their way around the geopolitics of Antiquity. This is how he begins his homily:
[Chosroes] was the name of a heathen king of Persia. He pillaged all the way to Jerusalem, destroyed many churches, and brought away our Lord’s Cross and much other loot. Taking pride in his victory, he thought of himself as god. On a high mountain he had a glass dome built, with images of the astral bodies; there he had a seat of gold. He had water led there by means of hidden plumbing. He occasionally opened the holes in the pipes. It seemed, then, as if he provided rain from heaven, like God, and he let himself be worshiped as god.
This was what you might hear in a stave church in these parts at about the time when the first Cistercians came to Tautra. The homily lets Chosroes resemble the Old Testament King Belshazzar who, consciously blaspheming, profaned vessels pilfered from the temple in Jerusalem. He wished to prove himself superior to any institution, earthly or heavenly. You remember what happened to him. Once Belshazzar had committed abomination, ‘the fingers of a human hand appeared, and began to write on the plaster of the palace wall’. The message — mene, tekel, ufarsin — spoke of measurement, weighing, and division. It did not voice an angry judgement, simply affirmed that there are limits which for human beings are final. To transgress is to hurl oneself, and others, headlong into destruction.
According to The Old Norse Book of Homilies Khusrou ended up much like Belshazzar. It had to be. When a man thinks he is god, and makes others believe it, he falls captive to his own conceit, absolutising what is in essence pathetically finite. A painfully humiliating fall is predictable.
Belshazzar and Cosroes are recognisable as political typologies today. There is no shortage of rulers, real or aspiring, who vaunt their victories and think themselves god, who sit upon seats of pure gold and pretend to govern the heavenly bodies, squirting a little rain-pretence on the common crowd now and again.
The human model is unoriginal. What is new these days is that the Cross is again taken hostage in political discourse. This sacred sign, the image of our salvation is used (sometimes unknowingly, sometimes with cynical deliberateness) to manipulate and spur to anger, to nurture bitterness, to generate strife. This is an iniquity like that of Chosroes when from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre he stole the instrument of God’s Son’s timeless sacrifice, brought for reconciliation and the forgiveness of sin, that Adam’s fratricidal children might at last live in peace and not count as loot what is an expression of pure, unmerited grace.
As Christians, we shall bow before Christ’s Cross alone, not before any powers claiming it as theirs.
We who would truly honour the Cross shall put on the mind of Christ Jesus, not that of any demagogue.
This is a contemporaneously relevant message.
In the name of Christ! Amen.
Adam Elsheimer, The Frankfurt Altarpiece of the Exaltation of the True Cross: Heraclius on Horseback with the Cross (1603–05)

Coram Fratribus

Migration to Nidaros This evening I was part of a panel debate, co-organised by the University of Trondheim, NTNU, and the city, on migration. Having been asked to speak about religious migration to Trondheim, medieval Nidaros, I wished to say something about what got, and still gets, people moving. Here is the talk I gave.
‘Migration’ is a word that these days is negatively charged, tied up with precarious circumstances. We associate it with removal necessitated by poverty, war, or climatic change.
Migration also has another aspect, though. It can be freely embraced in pursuit of a yearned-for, desirable goal.
Biblically speaking, measurable historiography, after Genesis’s archaic accounts of creation and the fall, begins with a scene of targeted migration. Abram, a Hebrew from Haran, is told: ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you’. The dream of setting out for a homeland still unknown saturates Scripture. That dream has left its mark on our whole culture.
Positively proposed migration occurs in Greece, too. While the Hebrews regarded the sea sceptically — preferring movement inland — the Greeks pined for the waves. Odysseus’s daring voyage beyond the Pillars of Hercules is an image of an urge defining national sensibility.
Tolkien, in The Lord of the Rings, unites these two tendencies (the Hebrews’ towards Home, the Greeks’ towards an open horizon) in his notion of the Sea-Longing that stirs generous hearts, like that of the Hobbit Frodo when, safely slumbering deep in the Shire, ‘he heard a noise in the distance. He knew that it was not leaves, but the sounds of the Sea far-off; a sound he had never heard in waking life, though it had often troubled his dreams. A great desire came over him to climb the tower and see the Sea.’
Once you are possessed of Sea-Longing it is a costly business just to wander up and down along a furrow in a walled-in field. You yearn then to be away, your heart, soul, and body filled with a homesickness that makes any temporal or spatial belonging appear absurd. You wish not only to see the Sea from a high tower, but to immerse yourself in it and remain there, freed of limitation, drawn ever further towards what is open, eternal, absolute.
This perspective is needed, I believe, to understand faith-based migration to Nidaros through the centuries. People came as pilgrims here to pray before the shrine of St Olav, to venerate his relics, not because they thought of his remains as talismanic, but because they recognised Olav (not the idea of him, but the person, physically present) as a tool chosen by God to communicate divine power.
Olav, the seafarer, carried a rush of the Sea in himself across death’s boundary. People heard that rush here in the Christchurch, our cathedral, even as it echoed in the numerous Olav’s wells throughout the country. Pilgrims sought living water here. And found it.
The first migrant known to us who set out to honour Olav’s relics was no sailor. The text known as Passio Olavi, written in the mid-twelfth century, speaks of a blind man who, in the evening of 29 July 1030, the day Olav died, walked past the house up near Stiklestad where the fallen king’s body had been washed. The man turned up late, perhaps to examine whether there were things of value left on the battlefield. The king’s servants had poured the bloody water used for washing out in front of the door. The blind man slipped in it and fell. We can imagine him uttering words not found in a prayerbook. But as he lay there, struggling, he touched his face with his moist hands — and at once he, a blind man, could see.
This miracle fits into a genre well known to us from the Gospels. Jesus’s power reveals itself above all as illumination. Think of the man-born-blind in St John’s Gospel. Jesus takes dust from the ground, mixes it with spittle, materialised breath, and forms clay like that used by the Lord God on the Sixth Day to make Adam. Sight was given him who had never seen. Think of the beggar Bartimaeus who, sitting by the roadside, having called out to Jesus, bound for Calvary, ‘Lord, that I might see!’, could suddenly see and followed Jesus on his Passion-path. Think of the theologians, so sure of their clear-sightedness, who were told they were blind. And think of this: in the early Church, baptism, the gateway into Christian experience, was referred to as Photismos, ‘Enlightenment’, to designate, precisely, a definitive transition from darkness to light, death to light, blindness to sight.
Pilgrims sought out St Olav sure that he, recognised by the Church as a friend of Christ and a witness to death’s defeat, could effect for them illumination in the name of Jesus at every level. Many prayers were heard. As Sigvat Tordarson sang in Erfidrápa, a poem composed about 1040, ten years after Olav’s death: ‘The king is now with God; many a blind man come to him goes briskly away from the royal tomb, eyesight restored to him.’
Not only the physically blind turned up. Others, like Kristin Lavransdatter, sought a remedy for soul-darkness: they would atone for some unkind deed; they hoped for reconciliation after doing wrong. It is far from banal that places should exist where women and men might come without shame, though conscious of having comprised their dignity, to confess, ‘I am not, like the trolls, sufficient unto myself; I am wounded, imperfect’, in order, then, to be concretely helped to repair inward and outward damage, and to get courage required to set out afresh.
For hundreds of years Nidaros was a place where such things happened.
We now ascertain that the wave of pilgrims is rising again. It says something about awareness of fragility in our precarious world — also, I’d say, about a growing recognition that God might not, after all, be a fairytale, but supremely real. There is to this day a ray of dawn to be found in Nidaros, and the rush of the Sea.
In a late poem Tolkien wrote: ‘I sat on the ruined margin of the deep-voiced echoing sea/Whose roaring foaming music crashed in endless cadency’. He called the call he heard an ‘unfathomed breath’, sure that he would hear it ’till my death’, and even beyond.
Such luminous music resounded here in this place a thousand years ago. Listening people heard it, perceived it as a call, and followed. Some still do.
Wikimedia Commons.

Coram Fratribus

Hemingway and AI Hemingway on the creative process: ‘I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” So finally I would write the one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written. Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.’ An exercise AI could never accomplish. It matters to have ears attuned to the true.

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September 15th - Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows.
Memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows:
O God, who willed that, when your Son was lifted high on the Cross, his Mother should stand close by and share his suffering, Read More 12 Likes

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Koinonia Cloyne

Koinōnia is a two-year, one evening a week, course of Adult Faith Development and Ministry organised by the Office of Mission and Ministry in the Diocese of Cloyne and held at the Mallow Campus of Further Education and Training

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