Near MusicThe Norwegian painter Pola Gauguin, son of Paul, wrote a review of the art of Ludvig Karsten in 1915. He remarked: ‘Rarely has painting come nearer to music than in the art of Karsten.’ I found the quotation in last Read More
Time Standing Still‘God is sweating blood. The world’s salvation is played out. And you, whoever you are, go about whistling? The contrast is immense, but recognizable. We have all experienced something of the kind: when someone we love has died, when we Read More
PresenceThe story of Benedict’s and Scholastica’s final conversation at Monte Cassino (in chapter 33 of the 2nd Book of Gregory the Great’s Dialogues) shows that even the consummate saint may need a sister to put him in his place now Read More
6 Sunday ASirach 15.15-20: If you wish, you can keep the commandments. 1 Corinthians 2.6-10: We teach the wisdom of God. Matthew 5.17-37: Say ‘Yes’ if you mean ‘Yes’. The Gospel we have heard is rich. It is about relationships, reconciliation, liturgy, marriage, desire, and pledges. We may feel a bit out of sorts after hearing it. We think of faith as a source of comfort and peace. Presented to us here is a list of obligations. They’re pretty stern. We’re reminded that words and actions have consequences. There are things we might say and do for which we’d have to answer ‘in hell fire’. The gentle Christ isn’t always gentle. We see how some who heard him in person could say: ‘This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?’ We see how some who sought to be confirmed in their own options ‘drew back and no longer went about with him’ when they awoke to what it really means to be a disciple of Jesus (cf. John 6.60-66). We must ask, then: What about me? Will I be a Christian on the Gospel’s terms, or have I fixed my own, getting upset when these are challenged and I am summoned to answer to a higher standard? Consider what Our Lord says about offerings made at the altar. It is a remark about liturgical practice, something many are interested in. It is important to celebrate the liturgy worthily and well. If we believe that God is God, we must worship him with intelligence and beauty, focused on essentials. We can’t fidget about and improvise. At the same time, if we believe that God is God, we can’t pretend he’ll be impressed by spotless choreography if the heart’s intentions are dark. He is, we read in Sirach, ‘all-seeing’. Therefore: if, before the altar, on my way to seek reconciliation with God, I perceive that I am unreconciled to another human being, I can’t abstract one relation from the other. How can I pray, ‘Lord, forgive me!’ if, in my heart, I think with regard to others, ‘To hell with them!’? Our Lord knows how hard it can be to forgive. He knows that it hurts, sometimes, to be human being. We are able to hurt one another terribly. A wound can run deep; it can paralyse us; it can make us feel dead. But the Gospel proclaims, precisely, the possibility that the dead may rise, the lame have movement restored to them, wounds be healed. God can renew our lives. He can recreate our reality. He can bring light into darkness. For that to happen, we must let him act freely. Our ‘Amen’ to God’s work of atonement, communicated to us in the Body and Blood of Christ, must be an ‘Amen’ without deceit, a ‘Yes’ that is whole-hearted. This brings us to the crux of today’s Gospel, which sums up all the specific elements: ‘Say “Yes” if you mean “Yes”, “No” if you mean “No”. Anything more than this’, remember, it is the Lord who speaks, ‘comes from the evil one.’ In the Our Father we pray: ‘Deliver us from evil’. The prayer refers to metaphysical and, for that matter, personal Evil. It refers, too, to the evil hidden in my heart. On the basis of what we’re taught today, one dimension of the prayer is: ‘Free us from ambiguity.’ This interpretation chimes in with what the priest prays after the Our Father at Mass, when he beseeches God to free us from sin and all confusion, a peccato et ab omni perturbatione. Christian conversion is movement from disarray to clarity, from illusion to truth, from an immersion in fog to a bright existence under a blue sky made resplendent by the Sun of Righteousness. God shows us the way by inviting us to follow his commandments. He sets fire and water before us, life and death. He asks us to choose what will bless us. But he does not force our hand. With maternal wisdom the Church lets today’s Gospel be introduced by a passage from Sirach, a late book in the Old Testament. It synthesises the teachings of patriarchs and prophets in pregnant aphorisms. We read: ‘If you wish, you can keep his commandments. Faithfulness is within your power.’ At all times people have tended to think themselves determined. In Antiquity, many thought they were determined by fate, or the stars. Totalitarian regimes make us think we are determined by the State or Big Brother. These days a lot of people think they are determined by things they’ve experienced, or not experienced, or by their psychological make-up. Scripture challenges such assumptions. It tells us: ‘No, you’re no one’s prisoner. You are free. Use your freedom!’ Circumstances may condition us. All of us carry some heavy stuff in our luggage. But what conditions us does not determine us. If we wish, we can let the Lord act in our lives, for his gracious will so to act precedes ours. If we wish we can be set free from captivity, healed of illness and iniquity, raised from the slumbering dead. That’s the perspective the Church opens up for us on this last Sunday before Ash Wednesday. Let us choose freedom and life. Let us choose to do what is right and good. In Christ’s name!
Near MusicThe Norwegian painter Pola Gauguin, son of Paul, wrote a review of the art of Ludvig Karsten in 1915. He remarked: ‘Rarely has painting come nearer to music than in the art of Karsten.’ I found the quotation in last week’s Dag og Tid, in connection with a review by Eva Furseth of the ‘very well composed’ Karsten exhibition currently on at the Munch Museum in Oslo: ‘Restless‘. The review points out how broad Karsten’s references are: ‘There are pointillistic works built up with splotches of colour as well as virtuosic paraphrases of known canvases by, for example, Rembrandt and Watteau; others are inspired by Van Gogh, Matisse and Cézanne.’ The Norwegian aesthetic medium is European. Furseth writes: ‘The many journeys [Karsten] undertook can seem to indicate restlessness, yet I do not find restlessness in the works themselves. What they have in common is the centrality of the composition of form, combined with a well-developed sense of colour.’ One can integrate much and refine it into original expression if one has a keen sense of form.
CaritasA speech given at the opening of the new office of Caritas Tromsø on 12 February 2026. “Caritas”, announces the webpage of Caritas Internationalis, is “the Church in action”. It’s a good phrase. Every Christian is called to action. Christianity can’t be privatised as ideology or a devotional project. When Christ enters public ministry, he proclaims: ‘Follow me!’ That call contains two complementary exhortations: the exhortation to ‘walk as Christ walked’, mercifully helping others, showing them careful attention; next, the exhortation to build up a community. The crowd of individuals who followed in Christ’s footsteps were gradually formed into the colourful, complex, generous community we know as the Church. Caritas, in is present organisational form, was founded in the 50s. Two world wars had shown people in North and South, East and West just how destructive man can be to man. One had seen the total collapse of societal order. During that same period, the Italian chemist Primo Levi, deported to Auschwitz in 1944, sat working on a book that would be published with the title If This Is a Man in 1958. The book, presented as ‘documentation for a quiet study of the human mind’, is an analytical presentation of concentration-camp hell. We read in the introduction: Many people, many nations, can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that ‘every stranger is an enemy’. For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason. But when this does come about, when the unspoken dogma becomes the major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager. […] It is in the normal order of things that the privileged oppress the unprivileged: the social structure of the camp is based on this human fact. […] The evil tidings of what man’s presumption made of man. When we consider the world we live in now, and hear the political message spouted in various quarters, it is striking that the principle, ‘every stranger is an enemy’, has gained fresh currency. The infection is spreading. Many refuse to be vaccinated. We need Caritas, then. Caritas stand for the opposite principle. It is blessedly revolutionary. Caritas works on the conviction that every stranger can become a friend. It reminds us that ‘the stranger’ is not necessarily someone else. ‘The stranger’ can be I. The stranger obliges me if I wish to call myself a Christian. Shortly before he entered into his Passion, our Lord said: ‘I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me’ (Mt 25.42-4). That is something we can’t live with. St Benedict, Father of monasticism in the West, who laid the foundation for civilisational renewal when the remains of the Roman Empire fell, prescribes that any guest turning up at the monastery, no matter where he’s from, no matter how poor and confused, should be received ‘as Christ himself’, with utmost reverence. These are the terms on which Caritas must work. This is how Caritas becomes ‘the Church in action’. Caritas is founded on the Gospel. In addition, Caritas is self-consciously and gratefully Catholic. What might that mean in the circumstances? The word ‘Catholic’ is Greek. We can translate it as ‘all-embracing’. To be a Catholic is to have a broad outlook that fathoms the earth and looks into heaven. Yet to be a Catholic is no less to have local roots — in a church, a parish; in sacred places and things, signs that God’s timeless grace passes through time, leaving traces. To live and relate as a Catholic is to subsist in tension. The Catholic community is grounded in specific soil. It wishes, following the example of St Elizabeth, to give joy and comfort to people here and now. Christian charity must manifest itself palpably. To reduce it to talk is tiresome. At the same time the Catholic community knows it is part of something greater. There is no such thing as Norwegian, or, for that matter, Northern-Norwegian, Catholicism. To speak about ‘the Norwegian Catholic Church’ would be absurd. The local church represents the Catholic Church in Norway, in Tromsø, in the parish of Our Lady, or wherever, but as part of a boundless communion which is, amazingly, differentiated yet the same whether you meet it in Borneo or on Spitzbergen. Voices in our time proclaim that we must choose between the local and the universal; that we must either extinguish all boundaries or burn all bridges. One is asked to follow one tendency. The least nod in the other direction is perceived as treason. There’s no future in such an outlook. That has been proved before. It will be proved again. The particularly Catholic challenge we must present to our time is about explaining, and demonstrating, that it is possible to say, with Winnie-the-Pooh, ‘Both, please’. It is possible to be a Tromsøer 100%, a Mack loyalist and a TIL supporter, while recognising that we are not self-sufficient, while hospitably opening our doors, of our house and heart, to that which and those who come to us embodying a larger context. That context may turn out to reveal the sense of our existence. It can be for a blessing. That is the sort of open door Caritas Tromsø is to be. I congratulate all of you who have worked hard to prepare this great day. I wish you joy in your service. May it be fruitful. Twelfth-century Spanish mural, now in The Cloisters in New York, of Christ healing the blind man.
Time Standing Still‘God is sweating blood. The world’s salvation is played out. And you, whoever you are, go about whistling? The contrast is immense, but recognizable. We have all experienced something of the kind: when someone we love has died, when we have received a serious diagnosis, when we are betrayed in friendship, when we have done something despicable: time seems to stand still. All our attention, all our powers of soul, are absorbed by this one, all-embracing reality; yet the world carries on regardless. We cannot fathom it. Are people around us then deaf and blind? Grief and rage can arise in us at such times as from an erupting volcano.’ From Healing Wounds, which has just come out in Polish.
PresenceThe story of Benedict’s and Scholastica’s final conversation at Monte Cassino (in chapter 33 of the 2nd Book of Gregory the Great’s Dialogues) shows that even the consummate saint may need a sister to put him in his place now and again. It also shows us the importance of meeting face to face. Scholastica took the evening bell seriously; she was a nun, after all. She also knew that the two of them had essential things to say to each other, and that time was short. The Lord confirmed her priority by means of bad weather. So that, too, can be a sign of celestial benediction. We whose pockets are filled with gadgets that beep, purr, flash, and stir are constantly pulled away from where we are. Scholastica reminds us of the importance of being present, of giving priority to encounters. It was Scholastica’s ‘greater love’, Gregory tells us, that made her prayer well-pleasing. Am I someone who loves? Do I even know what love is? Or is the word to me an abstraction? These are questions we might ask ourselves today, on Scholastica’s feast day.
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Sincere thanks to Bishop Crean for celebrating such a lovely Mass this evening in the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Kanturk. 🙏 A special word of thanks to Canon Toby and the Kanturk & Friends Lourdes Hospitality Group for hosting the Read More 3 Likes
Photos from Cloyne Diocese's post❤️Today we celebrate the Feast of St Valentine. ❤️St Valentine, officially known as St Valentine of Rome, is a third-century Roman saint. His heart is resides in golden box in a shrine dedicated to this saint in Whitefriar Church, Dublin. Read More 20 Likes
Sincere thanks to Bishop Crean for celebrating such a lovely Mass this evening in the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Kanturk. 🙏 A special word of thanks to Canon Toby and the Kanturk & Friends Lourdes Hospitality Group for hosting the Read More 4 Likes
