Words on the Word
Erik Varden is a monk and bishop, born in Norway in 1974. In 2002, after ten years at the University of Cambridge, he joined Mount Saint Bernard Abbey in Charnwood Forest. Pope Francis named him bishop of Trondheim in 2019.
Please find below a selection of homilies:
Intelligence Yesterday, at the HQ of Unesco in Paris, Pope Leo XIV said: ‘Over the centuries, many tasks once performed by human beings have been entrusted to machines, whose capabilities and applications have continued to expand. More recently, certain artificial systems Read More
Don Giovanni One may agree or disagree with some of Teodor Currentzis’s approaches, but his brilliance is incontestable. Thanks to him, I heard Verdi’s Requiem as if for the first time. You can now watch his Salzburg Don Giovanni from 2021 on Read More
Two Addresses 
During our Bishops’ Conference’s session in Paderborn, we were invited to a reception in the city hall, where the mayor asked us to sign the so-called Book of Gold. We also joined the archbishop at a Mass in Herne, where Read More
Welcoming the Stranger Speech given to open the Autumn Plenary assembly of the Nordic Bishops’ Conference held in Paderborn 21-25.ix.2026.
In Sacred Scripture, measurable time — what we think of as ‘history’ — starts with the attempt to build in Babel a tower ‘with Read More
In Sacred Scripture, measurable time — what we think of as ‘history’ — starts with the attempt to build in Babel a tower ‘with Read More
Our Fishing Ground A friend has sent me this translation by John Campbell of a Gaelic poem by Dòmhnall Iain MacDhòmhnaill. It is beautiful.
May your hand O Christ, be always with us.
Our seed to grow, our garden of roses;
Our Autumn of harvest, our Read More
May your hand O Christ, be always with us.
Our seed to grow, our garden of roses;
Our Autumn of harvest, our Read More
25 Sunday A At this Mass, Fr Florian Pletscher was installed as parish priest of the cathedral parish.
Isa 55.6-9: My thoughts are not your thoughts.
Phil 1.20-27: Life to me is Christ.
Mt 20.1-16: A landowner went out at daybreak.
When we hear about the landowner Read More
Isa 55.6-9: My thoughts are not your thoughts.
Phil 1.20-27: Life to me is Christ.
Mt 20.1-16: A landowner went out at daybreak.
When we hear about the landowner Read More
Resurrection I have written about my experience of discovering Mahler’s Second Symphony as a boy aged fifteen. This singular music can touch a universal string in the human heart, a string that some of us, as a result, are made conscious Read More
Intelligence
Yesterday, at the HQ of Unesco in Paris, Pope Leo XIV said: ‘Over the centuries, many tasks once performed by human beings have been entrusted to machines, whose capabilities and applications have continued to expand. More recently, certain artificial systems have even been given the name of our human faculty of thought: intelligence. At the same time, however, our ideas and relationships risk being impoverished by a process of dehumanization. The paradox has become increasingly evident: while “intelligence” is attributed to computational systems, we struggle to recognise the inalienable dignity of human persons, whose lives are judged according to the criterion of efficiency and, when deemed no longer productive, are rejected and discarded.’ It is timely, and helpful, to have this semantic quandary pinpointed, that we may assiduously foster ‘intelligence’ in its true, humane sense, which includes not least an ability to read between lines, inter legere.
Don Giovanni
One may agree or disagree with some of Teodor Currentzis’s approaches, but his brilliance is incontestable. Thanks to him, I heard Verdi’s Requiem as if for the first time. You can now watch his Salzburg Don Giovanni from 2021 on Medici. Currentzis conducts like a man possessed; there’s at times a trace of the demonic about him. Don Giovanni has been an obsession of his for years. He has drawn sterling musicians into a quasi-monastic, quasi-regimental discipline at Perm to draw forth the essence of the work. At Salzburg he poured his distillation. It is heady stuff: musically perfect, with intelligent, audacious scenography by Romeo Castellucci (there was only a bit with a photocopier I couldn’t see the point of). The production has a theological dimension. It is not so much Don Giovanni’s lust that drives him as a Luciferian compulsion of which he is both prisoner and protagonist. The stage is set as a methodically stripped, profaned sanctuary – a powerful opening sequence. Much is communicated, sometimes very movingly, about distorted perceptions of the body. The drama comes across as eerily contemporary, but not by way of imposition. Currentzis accentuates what’s there, in Mozart. I was moved and troubled by this performance.
Two Addresses
During our Bishops’ Conference’s session in Paderborn, we were invited to a reception in the city hall, where the mayor asked us to sign the so-called Book of Gold. We also joined the archbishop at a Mass in Herne, where he is temporarily resident. Here are the addresses given at these encounters. The German original can be found below, by scrolling down.
Dear Mr Mayor,
Thanks to the generous and constructive work of the Bonifatiuswerk in our countries, we, members of the Nordic Bishops’ Conference are deeply bound to the city of Paderborn, where the Bonifatiuswerk is based. We are blessed to feel at home here. It is for us a joy and an honour to be asked, this morning, to sign the city’s Book of Gold. We thank you for this gracious gesture.
Naturally, there were connections between this region and the Nordic countries long before the foundation of the Bonifatiuswerk. Sometimes we find these connections embodied in fascinating destinies.
I think for example of Niels Steensen, the great Danish scientist who, after his conversion to Catholicism in 1667, became first a priest, then a bishop. From 1680 he served as auxiliary bishop of Münster and Paderborn.
Steensen was born during the Thirty Years’ War. Europe was deeply divided and wounded in his day. At the same time, rapid progress in the sciences opened perspectives that threatened old certainties. Contemporaries took these developments on board with a mixture of excitement and dread.
When Pope John Paul II beatified Niels Steensen in 1988, he wrote: ‘With method and rigour, Niels Steensen investigated the laws which govern our biological life […]. In the course of these studies he openly and sincerely corrected himself and his colleagues regarding ideas until then in vogue, whenever deeper investigation showed them to be wrong.’
Then the pope asked: ‘Will we be ready, like Niels Steensen, to acknowledge without prejudice the order of nature and to respect its laws, without deifying it or closing our eyes to it in fear?’ That remains a highly relevant question.
It is tremendous that a Scandinavian working in Paderborn at the time of Newton should so signally represent an ideal intellectual honesty, showing that no contradiction exists between rigorous empirical research and cordial devotion to the Church.
We are grateful to you, Mr Mayor, for letting us, through your invitation this morning, cast our minds back to a time in which Catholicism and the search for truth were consolidating, unifying elements in a Europe devoured by many worries.
Might that be the case even in our day.
Many thanks!
***
Dear Archbishop Udo, dear friends,
Today the Church commemorates St Pius of Pietrelcina, better known simply as Padre Pio. This exceptional man was born in 1887, in an Italian village where life had changed but little for many centuries. He died in the revolutionary year of 1968, when the world was allegedly made new.
Padre Pio lived through this turbulent time with wisdom and shrewdness, wholly given to the Lord and to his will, communicated through the Church.
For the office of readings this morning, the Church gave us a letter to read that Padre Pio wrote to one of his spiritual children. In this letter he cites (just as my old confessor in the monastery often did) a hymn written for the feast of the dedication of a church. The hymn likens the way in which the faithful are formed by processes of conversion to the cutting of stones for the building of a church.
Padre Pio remarks: ‘Every soul destined for eternal glory can be considered most aptly as a stone for building an eternal edifice. The builder who seeks to put up a dwelling in the best way should first polish the stones that will be used in the construction. He does this with blows of hammer and chisel. In the same way, our heavenly Father works on chosen souls who, from all eternity, by his supreme wisdom and providence, have been destined for building up the eternal dwelling.’
I dare say all Christians can recognise themselves in this image. The blows of the hammer and chisel are not always pleasant! But it is through them that the Church makes ready a house for himself in us, and in our midst; that is how we readied for our life’s ultimate goal — eternal glory.
We, the members of the Nordic Bishops’ Conference, rejoice to discover, during this visit, how God’s providence is at work here in this place. We look forward to meeting you all, so that we can strengthen one another in faith, in fidelity to Christ, and in love for the Church.
Padre Pio remarks in the same letter that the Lord is not just an excellent Architect. He is also our divine Physician and the loving Spouse of the Church. What joy it is to praise and serve him together.
Thank you.
***
Sehr geehrter Herr Bürgermeister,
Durch das grosszügige, konstruktive Wirken des Bonifatiuswerkes in unseren Ländern haben die Mitglieder der nordischen Bischofskonferenz eine tiefe Verbindung zu der Stadt Paderborn. Wir dürfen uns hier ein bisschen wie zu Hause fühlen; so ist es uns eine Freude und Ehre, dass wir uns nun in das goldene Buch der Stadt eintragen dürfen. Wir danken Ihnen für dieses Zeichen der Verbundenheit.
Freilich gab es Beziehungen zwischen dieser schönen Gegend und unseren Ländern auch lange vor der Gründung des Bonifatiuswerkes. Manchmal finden wir diese Beziehungen personifiziert in faszinierenden Gestalten.
Ich denke zum Beispiel an Niels Steensen, den grossen dänischen Wissenschaftler, der nach seiner Konversion zum Katholizismus im 1667 erst Priester wurde, dann Bischof. Ab 1680 wirkte er als Weihbischof für Münster und Paderborn.
Steensen wurde während des dreissigjährigen Krieges geboren. Europa war damals tief gespalten und verletzt. Zur selben Zeit öffneten rasche Fortschritte der Wissenschaft Perspektiven, die alte Sicherheiten bedrohten. Zeitgenossen nahmen von diesen Errungenschaften Kenntnis teils mit Begeisterung, teils mit Angst.
Als Papst Johannes Paulus II im 1988 Niels Steensen seligsprach, sagte er: “Mit Methodik und Strenge erforschte Niels Steensen die Gesetze, die unser biologisches Leben bestimmen […]. Offen und aufrichtig korrigierte er sowohl sich selbst als auch seine Kollegen hinsichtlich bis dahin vorherrschender Vorstellungen, wann immer tiefgreifendere Untersuchungen zeigten, dass diese falsch waren.”
Der Papst fragte dann: “Sind wir wie Steensen bereit, die Ordnung der Natur vorurteilsfrei anzuerkennen und ihre Gesetze zu respektieren, ohne sie zu vergöttern oder aus Angst die Augen davor zu verschließen?” Immer noch eine wichtige Frage!
Schön ist es, dass ein in Paderborn wirkender Skandinav zur Zeit Newtons ein Ideal der intellektuellen Redlichkeit so deutlich verkörperte, indem er auch bewies, dass überhaupt kein Widerspruch besteht zwischen rigoroser empirischer Forschung und einer herzlichen, kirchentreuen Frommheit.
Sehr geehrter Herr Bürgermeister, wir danken Ihnen, dass Sie, durch Ihre Einladung heute, uns an Zeiten erinnern in denen Katholizismus und Wahrheitssuche verbindende Elemente waren in einem von vielen Sorgen geprägten Europa. Möge das auch in unseren Tagen so sein. Herzlichen Dank!
***
Exzellenz, lieber Erzbischof Udo, liebe Gemeinde
Die Kirche feiert heute den heiligen Pius von Pietrelcina, weit besser bekannt einfach als Padre Pio. Dieser sonderbare Mensch wurde im 1887 geboren, in einem italienischen Dorf wo sich das Leben durch Jahrhunderte nur sehr wenig verändert hatte. Er starb im Revolutionsjahr 1968, als die Welt angeblich neu wurde.
Durch diese bewegte Zeit lebte Padre Pio bewusst, klug und kühn, dem Herrn und seinem durch die Kirche ausgedrückten Willen kompromisslos ergeben.
Für die Lesehore heute morgen gab uns die Kirche einen Brief zu lesen, den Padre Pio einst an eines seiner Beichtkinder schrieb. Er zitiert darin (wie es übrigens mein alter Beichtvater im Kloster oft und gerne tat), einen für das Kirchweihfest geschriebenen Hymnus in dem die Bearbeitung der Gläubigen durch Prozesse der Bekehrung mit dem Schleifen der Steine für einen Kirchenbau verglichen wird.
Padre Pio bemerkt: “Jede Seele, die zur ewigen Herrlichkeit bestimmt ist, lässt sich treffend als Stein für den Bau eines ewigen Gebäudes betrachten. Der Baumeister, der eine Behausung bestmöglich errichten will, poliert zunächst die Steine, die für den Bau verwendet werden sollen. Dies tut er mit Schlägen von Hammer und Meißel. Auf dieselbe Weise wirkt unser himmlischer Vater an den auserwählten Seelen, die von Ewigkeit her durch seine höchste Weisheit und Vorsehung dazu bestimmt sind, die ewige Behausung zu errichten.”
Jeder Christ weiss wovon er redet. Die Hammer- und Meißelschläge sind nicht immer angenehm! Aber genau dadurch bereitet sich der Herr ein Haus in uns und unter uns; dadurch werden wir auf unseres Lebens endgültiges Ziel, die ewige Herrlichkeit, vorbereitet.
Wir, die Mitglieder der nordischen Bischofskonferenz, freuen uns, dass wir bei diesem Besuch die Arbeit der göttlichen Vorsehung hier an diesem Ort kennenlernen dürfen. Wir freuen uns auf die Begegnungen mit Ihnen allen, durch die wir einander im Glauben, in der Christustreue und in der Liebe zur Kirche stärken wollen.
Der Herr, sagt wieder Padre Pio in demselben Brief, ist nicht nur ein trefflicher Baumeister. Er ist unser göttlicher Arzt und der liebende Bräutigam der Kirche. Welche Freude ist es, ihm gemeinsam lobsingen und dienen zu können!
Herzlichen Dank.
Dear Mr Mayor,
Thanks to the generous and constructive work of the Bonifatiuswerk in our countries, we, members of the Nordic Bishops’ Conference are deeply bound to the city of Paderborn, where the Bonifatiuswerk is based. We are blessed to feel at home here. It is for us a joy and an honour to be asked, this morning, to sign the city’s Book of Gold. We thank you for this gracious gesture.
Naturally, there were connections between this region and the Nordic countries long before the foundation of the Bonifatiuswerk. Sometimes we find these connections embodied in fascinating destinies.
I think for example of Niels Steensen, the great Danish scientist who, after his conversion to Catholicism in 1667, became first a priest, then a bishop. From 1680 he served as auxiliary bishop of Münster and Paderborn.
Steensen was born during the Thirty Years’ War. Europe was deeply divided and wounded in his day. At the same time, rapid progress in the sciences opened perspectives that threatened old certainties. Contemporaries took these developments on board with a mixture of excitement and dread.
When Pope John Paul II beatified Niels Steensen in 1988, he wrote: ‘With method and rigour, Niels Steensen investigated the laws which govern our biological life […]. In the course of these studies he openly and sincerely corrected himself and his colleagues regarding ideas until then in vogue, whenever deeper investigation showed them to be wrong.’
Then the pope asked: ‘Will we be ready, like Niels Steensen, to acknowledge without prejudice the order of nature and to respect its laws, without deifying it or closing our eyes to it in fear?’ That remains a highly relevant question.
It is tremendous that a Scandinavian working in Paderborn at the time of Newton should so signally represent an ideal intellectual honesty, showing that no contradiction exists between rigorous empirical research and cordial devotion to the Church.
We are grateful to you, Mr Mayor, for letting us, through your invitation this morning, cast our minds back to a time in which Catholicism and the search for truth were consolidating, unifying elements in a Europe devoured by many worries.
Might that be the case even in our day.
Many thanks!
***
Dear Archbishop Udo, dear friends,
Today the Church commemorates St Pius of Pietrelcina, better known simply as Padre Pio. This exceptional man was born in 1887, in an Italian village where life had changed but little for many centuries. He died in the revolutionary year of 1968, when the world was allegedly made new.
Padre Pio lived through this turbulent time with wisdom and shrewdness, wholly given to the Lord and to his will, communicated through the Church.
For the office of readings this morning, the Church gave us a letter to read that Padre Pio wrote to one of his spiritual children. In this letter he cites (just as my old confessor in the monastery often did) a hymn written for the feast of the dedication of a church. The hymn likens the way in which the faithful are formed by processes of conversion to the cutting of stones for the building of a church.
Padre Pio remarks: ‘Every soul destined for eternal glory can be considered most aptly as a stone for building an eternal edifice. The builder who seeks to put up a dwelling in the best way should first polish the stones that will be used in the construction. He does this with blows of hammer and chisel. In the same way, our heavenly Father works on chosen souls who, from all eternity, by his supreme wisdom and providence, have been destined for building up the eternal dwelling.’
I dare say all Christians can recognise themselves in this image. The blows of the hammer and chisel are not always pleasant! But it is through them that the Church makes ready a house for himself in us, and in our midst; that is how we readied for our life’s ultimate goal — eternal glory.
We, the members of the Nordic Bishops’ Conference, rejoice to discover, during this visit, how God’s providence is at work here in this place. We look forward to meeting you all, so that we can strengthen one another in faith, in fidelity to Christ, and in love for the Church.
Padre Pio remarks in the same letter that the Lord is not just an excellent Architect. He is also our divine Physician and the loving Spouse of the Church. What joy it is to praise and serve him together.
Thank you.
***
Sehr geehrter Herr Bürgermeister,
Durch das grosszügige, konstruktive Wirken des Bonifatiuswerkes in unseren Ländern haben die Mitglieder der nordischen Bischofskonferenz eine tiefe Verbindung zu der Stadt Paderborn. Wir dürfen uns hier ein bisschen wie zu Hause fühlen; so ist es uns eine Freude und Ehre, dass wir uns nun in das goldene Buch der Stadt eintragen dürfen. Wir danken Ihnen für dieses Zeichen der Verbundenheit.
Freilich gab es Beziehungen zwischen dieser schönen Gegend und unseren Ländern auch lange vor der Gründung des Bonifatiuswerkes. Manchmal finden wir diese Beziehungen personifiziert in faszinierenden Gestalten.
Ich denke zum Beispiel an Niels Steensen, den grossen dänischen Wissenschaftler, der nach seiner Konversion zum Katholizismus im 1667 erst Priester wurde, dann Bischof. Ab 1680 wirkte er als Weihbischof für Münster und Paderborn.
Steensen wurde während des dreissigjährigen Krieges geboren. Europa war damals tief gespalten und verletzt. Zur selben Zeit öffneten rasche Fortschritte der Wissenschaft Perspektiven, die alte Sicherheiten bedrohten. Zeitgenossen nahmen von diesen Errungenschaften Kenntnis teils mit Begeisterung, teils mit Angst.
Als Papst Johannes Paulus II im 1988 Niels Steensen seligsprach, sagte er: “Mit Methodik und Strenge erforschte Niels Steensen die Gesetze, die unser biologisches Leben bestimmen […]. Offen und aufrichtig korrigierte er sowohl sich selbst als auch seine Kollegen hinsichtlich bis dahin vorherrschender Vorstellungen, wann immer tiefgreifendere Untersuchungen zeigten, dass diese falsch waren.”
Der Papst fragte dann: “Sind wir wie Steensen bereit, die Ordnung der Natur vorurteilsfrei anzuerkennen und ihre Gesetze zu respektieren, ohne sie zu vergöttern oder aus Angst die Augen davor zu verschließen?” Immer noch eine wichtige Frage!
Schön ist es, dass ein in Paderborn wirkender Skandinav zur Zeit Newtons ein Ideal der intellektuellen Redlichkeit so deutlich verkörperte, indem er auch bewies, dass überhaupt kein Widerspruch besteht zwischen rigoroser empirischer Forschung und einer herzlichen, kirchentreuen Frommheit.
Sehr geehrter Herr Bürgermeister, wir danken Ihnen, dass Sie, durch Ihre Einladung heute, uns an Zeiten erinnern in denen Katholizismus und Wahrheitssuche verbindende Elemente waren in einem von vielen Sorgen geprägten Europa. Möge das auch in unseren Tagen so sein. Herzlichen Dank!
***
Exzellenz, lieber Erzbischof Udo, liebe Gemeinde
Die Kirche feiert heute den heiligen Pius von Pietrelcina, weit besser bekannt einfach als Padre Pio. Dieser sonderbare Mensch wurde im 1887 geboren, in einem italienischen Dorf wo sich das Leben durch Jahrhunderte nur sehr wenig verändert hatte. Er starb im Revolutionsjahr 1968, als die Welt angeblich neu wurde.
Durch diese bewegte Zeit lebte Padre Pio bewusst, klug und kühn, dem Herrn und seinem durch die Kirche ausgedrückten Willen kompromisslos ergeben.
Für die Lesehore heute morgen gab uns die Kirche einen Brief zu lesen, den Padre Pio einst an eines seiner Beichtkinder schrieb. Er zitiert darin (wie es übrigens mein alter Beichtvater im Kloster oft und gerne tat), einen für das Kirchweihfest geschriebenen Hymnus in dem die Bearbeitung der Gläubigen durch Prozesse der Bekehrung mit dem Schleifen der Steine für einen Kirchenbau verglichen wird.
Padre Pio bemerkt: “Jede Seele, die zur ewigen Herrlichkeit bestimmt ist, lässt sich treffend als Stein für den Bau eines ewigen Gebäudes betrachten. Der Baumeister, der eine Behausung bestmöglich errichten will, poliert zunächst die Steine, die für den Bau verwendet werden sollen. Dies tut er mit Schlägen von Hammer und Meißel. Auf dieselbe Weise wirkt unser himmlischer Vater an den auserwählten Seelen, die von Ewigkeit her durch seine höchste Weisheit und Vorsehung dazu bestimmt sind, die ewige Behausung zu errichten.”
Jeder Christ weiss wovon er redet. Die Hammer- und Meißelschläge sind nicht immer angenehm! Aber genau dadurch bereitet sich der Herr ein Haus in uns und unter uns; dadurch werden wir auf unseres Lebens endgültiges Ziel, die ewige Herrlichkeit, vorbereitet.
Wir, die Mitglieder der nordischen Bischofskonferenz, freuen uns, dass wir bei diesem Besuch die Arbeit der göttlichen Vorsehung hier an diesem Ort kennenlernen dürfen. Wir freuen uns auf die Begegnungen mit Ihnen allen, durch die wir einander im Glauben, in der Christustreue und in der Liebe zur Kirche stärken wollen.
Der Herr, sagt wieder Padre Pio in demselben Brief, ist nicht nur ein trefflicher Baumeister. Er ist unser göttlicher Arzt und der liebende Bräutigam der Kirche. Welche Freude ist es, ihm gemeinsam lobsingen und dienen zu können!
Herzlichen Dank.
Welcoming the Stranger
Speech given to open the Autumn Plenary assembly of the Nordic Bishops’ Conference held in Paderborn 21-25.ix.2026.
In Sacred Scripture, measurable time — what we think of as ‘history’ — starts with the attempt to build in Babel a tower ‘with its top in the heavens’, intended to ‘make a name’ for mankind and to keep ‘the whole earth’ together (Gen 11.1-4).
This project did not find favour with God.
Why not? Was it not good for humanity to unite in joint enterprise, pursuing a single goal? What God condemned was not unanimity, but presumption. He saw that if man should succeed in building, by his own skill, a structure that would give him the illusion of being not just earth’s steward but lord of the cosmos, there would be no end to his conceit. He would think himself the measure of all things.
The temptation to become ‘like God’ had provoked original sin, the disruption which broke down the harmony that, at first, defined the relationships of humans among themselves as well as with God and the rest of creation. At Babel this drama threatened to play itself out anew. Had the building of the tower been accomplished, the outcome would not have been a societas perfecta but terror: those with resources and recklessness enough to occupy the tower’s upper storeys would have oppressed the earth. God stepped in to save man from himself. He disrupted the project, ‘confused the language of all the earth’, then scattered mankind upon it (Gen 11.9).
The story of Babel is ancient, yet speaks to our time. Pope Leo XIV strikingly sets out from it in his recent encyclical on AI, Magnifica Humanitas. The first sentence of the encyclical reads: ‘Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together’ (MH 1). The Holy Father contrasts the building of the tower, a project of fierce ambition with space for but a few, with the communal re-building of Jerusalem after Israel’s exile in, precisely, Babylon, where Babel had once towered. Jerusalem is to be a city in which all people can live together in peace and joy. Reality shall reign there, not illusion. God shall be worshiped there in truth.
What will we aim for: exclusion or communion, privileges for a small class of the elect or a true society, where, in God’s name, all can build a life together?
These questions have acquired political urgency throughout the West, also in our Nordic countries. The past decade has seen the steady rise of so called ‘populist’, exclusionist tendencies. It seems to me important to investigate them.
The word ‘populist’ was coined in the late nineteenth century to describe a variety of parties and causes. A shared feeling brought these together. It was a feeling that the voice of the ‘common people’, the nation’s numerical majority, those who make the wheels turn and the taps run, were ignored by a distant elite intent on running financial and governmental processes, quite out of touch with real life.
‘Populism’ is at heart the cry of masses that have the sense of being ignored, disenfranchised, and left in the dark. Before we write ‘populism’ off as merely noxious, we must examine whether this cry is somehow justified in our time.
The feeling of being at the mercy of forces beyond our control is one very many people share right now. Uncertainty impinges on all aspects of existence. We have just emerged from a summer of extreme weather. What we used to think of as a ‘normal’ climate is no more a reliable coordinate. In the Arctic the ice is melting fast. A predictable energy crisis impends. Wars rage, threatening to expand. Refugees arrive on our doorstep. Superpowers haughtily grab for territory, threatening to seize new swathes of land and sea, even in our region. Prophets of AI foretell the imminent outmanoeuvring of mankind by machines. Young people worry that they will be redundant in a tech-dominated age. The social fabric is rending. Traditional political parties implode. Wealth has become synonymous with power. Meanwhile, rising living costs and unemployment make of many ordinary lives a battle for survival.
That cries of protest should arise in such a context is natural, even healthy. It is not bad either that many look to their nation, their people, for stability. Nations were given a role to play in the world that came into being after Babel. Chief among these was the nation of Abraham, from whom the Saviour of the world would come forth. But other nations, too, have had, and will still have, providential tasks.
What unites a nation? A sense of common origin and of shared purpose. One presupposes the other. A nation that seeks coherence only in its real or imagined roots, by idolising, say, the chimaera of ethnic purity, becomes narrow-minded and arrogant. It tends towards a form of ancestor worship that is idolatry. A nation guided only by an ideal on the basis of which it will rewrite or cancel lived history, tends towards ideology. It will flounder when what was once a fixed objective proves unrealisable or simply passes out of fashion. We must look simultaneously back and forward. We must build up our nations hospitably, nurturing our heritage, while remaining ready to absorb the artistic, scientific, and cultural riches brought by new members. Even Israel, the most exclusive nation in Biblical history, had to learn this lesson. It was formed for the purpose of becoming a global magnet, so that Jerusalem, the city of God, might freely welcome ‘all the nations’ (Is 2.2.).
What should disquiet us about current populism is not a widespread desire to develop and express criteria of nationhood, to foster love for one’s own people. This is necessary work. What should alarm us is the tendency to define in absolute terms ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, a hardening of discourse that makes every stranger seem suspect, the strengthening of chauvinistic trends that seek, and find, violent expression. In his essential book If This is a Man, published in 1958 as ‘documentation for a quiet study of the human mind’, Primo Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz, wrote:
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. […] The evil tidings of what man’s presumption made of man.
I do not think it sensationalist to point out that such ‘evil tidings’ are heard again today, even in countries that know all too well where they might lead, that have spent the best part of the past seventy years repeating to themselves: ‘Never again!’
As Christians we must protest loudly. It is our duty to extend a helping hand to those in need, to open our doors to the homeless, to share our material wealth with the poor. If we wish, as many populist parties say they do, to protect our nations’ Christian heritage, we must first of all keep a high standard of Christian charity alive. We must counter attempts to use Christian language and symbols to a polemic end. And we must resist the silly, cheap rhetoric of so-called ‘identity politics’. On the pretext of safeguarding national ‘purity’, such rhetoric vilifies anyone who falls outside a set of narrow conditions given for belonging, conditions defined in terms of self-affirmation and self-promotion. This brand of politics thrives on resentment. Often it has little to propose by way of constructive vision and realistic strategy.
While speaking up for Christian rectitude, we must make sure that ‘identity’ does not become a dirty word. It is licit to care for one’s culture and tradition. To welcome the stranger is not to relinquish one’s home, but to invite the stranger in.
A reciprocal obligation ensues. Of this, the Church speaks clearly. The Catechism stresses the duty of prosperous nations to welcome, as far as they can, ‘the foreigner in search of the security and means of livelihood he cannot find in his country of origin.’ It commends the ‘natural right’ that ‘places a guest under the protection of those who receive him.’ At the same time it declares that immigrants have solemn duties toward their country of adoption. Immigrants are ‘obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws and to assist in carrying civic burdens’ (n. 2241).
The Christian challenge before us, at once cultural and political, is to balance two tasks: to foster national unity and character, at risk in an era suffused with global media, bombarded by the advertising of global trade; while yet cordially caring for the needy and the stranger. ‘Do not forget to entertain strangers’, we read in the Letter to the Hebrews (13.2); ‘thereby some have unknowingly received angels into their houses’. We do, therefore, need houses that are ours and a home environment.
How can this delicate balance between belonging and outreach be found?
We might take a cue from the Rule of St Benedict, written in the sixth century as societal regulation for a period marked by instability and massive migration. Regarding the imperative of welcoming guests, St Benedict sets a radical standard. He decrees that all guests — who will chiefly be paupers and homeless folk — must be received as if they were Christ himself. As soon as they knock on the door, the porter is to exclaim ‘Deo gratias!’ and ask for their blessing. The abbot is to wash their hands and feet. Every kindness is to be shown them. The community must exert itself to meet their needs. Such is the law of Christian hospitality (RB 53, 66).
A guest, however, will stay for a while, then leave, once he has been comforted and fortified. When it comes to those who wish to enter and remain, those who would become citizens of the monastic microcosm, St Benedict’s approach is different.
He urges that postulants’ motives be tested. They are to be kept waiting for a while, then to be told all the ‘difficult and hard things’ community life entails. The Rule is to be read to them repeatedly, so that they can freely decide: ‘Will I, and can I, keep this covenant of coexistence?’ St Benedict’s purpose is not to put recruits off. He wants the community to grow. Anyone is in principle a welcome candidate: no discrimination is made on the basis of blood. But he would make it clear that to belong to a community is a trying, demanding business. It requires generosity and determination. It calls for a will to nurture fellowship of intent. In this way St Benedict enabled his abbeys to be places marked by firm communal identity while staying gracious to all comers, ready to help anyone in need.
Naturally, St Benedict’s Rule cannot be applied just like that to a modern nation state. His twofold outlook seems to me, though, potentially able to orient policy (RB 58, 2).
Any true belonging confers, not primarily privilege, but responsibility. This is a point that many ‘populist’ manifestos fail to state. Before we apply St Benedict’s strictures to others, we should, for honesty’s sake, apply them critically to ourselves.
A further point is worth noting. When we consider the welcome of strangers today, we must recall that our countries have not for years reproduced themselves. None has a birth rate beyond the needed replacement level of 2.1. Without immigrants, our services, industries, and welfare systems would collapse. This fact should make us humble — and grateful for those who arrive to maintain our common home. It should make us resolve to do more to strengthen our families, against which much militates these days. The Church has a vital role to play as heir to a culture of life. We must do our best to spread it with conviction and delight.
To be at once a loyal member of a local community and creatively committed to a universal order generates interior tension. Catholics should be uniquely prepared to bear this tension well. To be a Catholic is, after all, to belong to a concrete community and to be part of a communion reaching beyond every boundary, even the apparently impenetrable one between life and death, eternity and time.
May we, then, be rooted and free, grateful for what we have received and eager to share it with others, firm in our identity and conscious that our deepest self will be fully be revealed only in eternity, when we shall find our true name written on a little white stone that, for now, is God’s secret (Rev 2.17).
To seek one’s identity is ever to be pledged to a process of attentive becoming.
If we live on such terms, and teach others to do so, this presently anxious time may reveal itself a period of conversion and grace, a great opportunity for good.
+fr Erik Varden ocso
President
In Sacred Scripture, measurable time — what we think of as ‘history’ — starts with the attempt to build in Babel a tower ‘with its top in the heavens’, intended to ‘make a name’ for mankind and to keep ‘the whole earth’ together (Gen 11.1-4).
This project did not find favour with God.
Why not? Was it not good for humanity to unite in joint enterprise, pursuing a single goal? What God condemned was not unanimity, but presumption. He saw that if man should succeed in building, by his own skill, a structure that would give him the illusion of being not just earth’s steward but lord of the cosmos, there would be no end to his conceit. He would think himself the measure of all things.
The temptation to become ‘like God’ had provoked original sin, the disruption which broke down the harmony that, at first, defined the relationships of humans among themselves as well as with God and the rest of creation. At Babel this drama threatened to play itself out anew. Had the building of the tower been accomplished, the outcome would not have been a societas perfecta but terror: those with resources and recklessness enough to occupy the tower’s upper storeys would have oppressed the earth. God stepped in to save man from himself. He disrupted the project, ‘confused the language of all the earth’, then scattered mankind upon it (Gen 11.9).
The story of Babel is ancient, yet speaks to our time. Pope Leo XIV strikingly sets out from it in his recent encyclical on AI, Magnifica Humanitas. The first sentence of the encyclical reads: ‘Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together’ (MH 1). The Holy Father contrasts the building of the tower, a project of fierce ambition with space for but a few, with the communal re-building of Jerusalem after Israel’s exile in, precisely, Babylon, where Babel had once towered. Jerusalem is to be a city in which all people can live together in peace and joy. Reality shall reign there, not illusion. God shall be worshiped there in truth.
What will we aim for: exclusion or communion, privileges for a small class of the elect or a true society, where, in God’s name, all can build a life together?
These questions have acquired political urgency throughout the West, also in our Nordic countries. The past decade has seen the steady rise of so called ‘populist’, exclusionist tendencies. It seems to me important to investigate them.
The word ‘populist’ was coined in the late nineteenth century to describe a variety of parties and causes. A shared feeling brought these together. It was a feeling that the voice of the ‘common people’, the nation’s numerical majority, those who make the wheels turn and the taps run, were ignored by a distant elite intent on running financial and governmental processes, quite out of touch with real life.
‘Populism’ is at heart the cry of masses that have the sense of being ignored, disenfranchised, and left in the dark. Before we write ‘populism’ off as merely noxious, we must examine whether this cry is somehow justified in our time.
The feeling of being at the mercy of forces beyond our control is one very many people share right now. Uncertainty impinges on all aspects of existence. We have just emerged from a summer of extreme weather. What we used to think of as a ‘normal’ climate is no more a reliable coordinate. In the Arctic the ice is melting fast. A predictable energy crisis impends. Wars rage, threatening to expand. Refugees arrive on our doorstep. Superpowers haughtily grab for territory, threatening to seize new swathes of land and sea, even in our region. Prophets of AI foretell the imminent outmanoeuvring of mankind by machines. Young people worry that they will be redundant in a tech-dominated age. The social fabric is rending. Traditional political parties implode. Wealth has become synonymous with power. Meanwhile, rising living costs and unemployment make of many ordinary lives a battle for survival.
That cries of protest should arise in such a context is natural, even healthy. It is not bad either that many look to their nation, their people, for stability. Nations were given a role to play in the world that came into being after Babel. Chief among these was the nation of Abraham, from whom the Saviour of the world would come forth. But other nations, too, have had, and will still have, providential tasks.
What unites a nation? A sense of common origin and of shared purpose. One presupposes the other. A nation that seeks coherence only in its real or imagined roots, by idolising, say, the chimaera of ethnic purity, becomes narrow-minded and arrogant. It tends towards a form of ancestor worship that is idolatry. A nation guided only by an ideal on the basis of which it will rewrite or cancel lived history, tends towards ideology. It will flounder when what was once a fixed objective proves unrealisable or simply passes out of fashion. We must look simultaneously back and forward. We must build up our nations hospitably, nurturing our heritage, while remaining ready to absorb the artistic, scientific, and cultural riches brought by new members. Even Israel, the most exclusive nation in Biblical history, had to learn this lesson. It was formed for the purpose of becoming a global magnet, so that Jerusalem, the city of God, might freely welcome ‘all the nations’ (Is 2.2.).
What should disquiet us about current populism is not a widespread desire to develop and express criteria of nationhood, to foster love for one’s own people. This is necessary work. What should alarm us is the tendency to define in absolute terms ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, a hardening of discourse that makes every stranger seem suspect, the strengthening of chauvinistic trends that seek, and find, violent expression. In his essential book If This is a Man, published in 1958 as ‘documentation for a quiet study of the human mind’, Primo Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz, wrote:
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. […] The evil tidings of what man’s presumption made of man.
I do not think it sensationalist to point out that such ‘evil tidings’ are heard again today, even in countries that know all too well where they might lead, that have spent the best part of the past seventy years repeating to themselves: ‘Never again!’
As Christians we must protest loudly. It is our duty to extend a helping hand to those in need, to open our doors to the homeless, to share our material wealth with the poor. If we wish, as many populist parties say they do, to protect our nations’ Christian heritage, we must first of all keep a high standard of Christian charity alive. We must counter attempts to use Christian language and symbols to a polemic end. And we must resist the silly, cheap rhetoric of so-called ‘identity politics’. On the pretext of safeguarding national ‘purity’, such rhetoric vilifies anyone who falls outside a set of narrow conditions given for belonging, conditions defined in terms of self-affirmation and self-promotion. This brand of politics thrives on resentment. Often it has little to propose by way of constructive vision and realistic strategy.
While speaking up for Christian rectitude, we must make sure that ‘identity’ does not become a dirty word. It is licit to care for one’s culture and tradition. To welcome the stranger is not to relinquish one’s home, but to invite the stranger in.
A reciprocal obligation ensues. Of this, the Church speaks clearly. The Catechism stresses the duty of prosperous nations to welcome, as far as they can, ‘the foreigner in search of the security and means of livelihood he cannot find in his country of origin.’ It commends the ‘natural right’ that ‘places a guest under the protection of those who receive him.’ At the same time it declares that immigrants have solemn duties toward their country of adoption. Immigrants are ‘obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws and to assist in carrying civic burdens’ (n. 2241).
The Christian challenge before us, at once cultural and political, is to balance two tasks: to foster national unity and character, at risk in an era suffused with global media, bombarded by the advertising of global trade; while yet cordially caring for the needy and the stranger. ‘Do not forget to entertain strangers’, we read in the Letter to the Hebrews (13.2); ‘thereby some have unknowingly received angels into their houses’. We do, therefore, need houses that are ours and a home environment.
How can this delicate balance between belonging and outreach be found?
We might take a cue from the Rule of St Benedict, written in the sixth century as societal regulation for a period marked by instability and massive migration. Regarding the imperative of welcoming guests, St Benedict sets a radical standard. He decrees that all guests — who will chiefly be paupers and homeless folk — must be received as if they were Christ himself. As soon as they knock on the door, the porter is to exclaim ‘Deo gratias!’ and ask for their blessing. The abbot is to wash their hands and feet. Every kindness is to be shown them. The community must exert itself to meet their needs. Such is the law of Christian hospitality (RB 53, 66).
A guest, however, will stay for a while, then leave, once he has been comforted and fortified. When it comes to those who wish to enter and remain, those who would become citizens of the monastic microcosm, St Benedict’s approach is different.
He urges that postulants’ motives be tested. They are to be kept waiting for a while, then to be told all the ‘difficult and hard things’ community life entails. The Rule is to be read to them repeatedly, so that they can freely decide: ‘Will I, and can I, keep this covenant of coexistence?’ St Benedict’s purpose is not to put recruits off. He wants the community to grow. Anyone is in principle a welcome candidate: no discrimination is made on the basis of blood. But he would make it clear that to belong to a community is a trying, demanding business. It requires generosity and determination. It calls for a will to nurture fellowship of intent. In this way St Benedict enabled his abbeys to be places marked by firm communal identity while staying gracious to all comers, ready to help anyone in need.
Naturally, St Benedict’s Rule cannot be applied just like that to a modern nation state. His twofold outlook seems to me, though, potentially able to orient policy (RB 58, 2).
Any true belonging confers, not primarily privilege, but responsibility. This is a point that many ‘populist’ manifestos fail to state. Before we apply St Benedict’s strictures to others, we should, for honesty’s sake, apply them critically to ourselves.
A further point is worth noting. When we consider the welcome of strangers today, we must recall that our countries have not for years reproduced themselves. None has a birth rate beyond the needed replacement level of 2.1. Without immigrants, our services, industries, and welfare systems would collapse. This fact should make us humble — and grateful for those who arrive to maintain our common home. It should make us resolve to do more to strengthen our families, against which much militates these days. The Church has a vital role to play as heir to a culture of life. We must do our best to spread it with conviction and delight.
To be at once a loyal member of a local community and creatively committed to a universal order generates interior tension. Catholics should be uniquely prepared to bear this tension well. To be a Catholic is, after all, to belong to a concrete community and to be part of a communion reaching beyond every boundary, even the apparently impenetrable one between life and death, eternity and time.
May we, then, be rooted and free, grateful for what we have received and eager to share it with others, firm in our identity and conscious that our deepest self will be fully be revealed only in eternity, when we shall find our true name written on a little white stone that, for now, is God’s secret (Rev 2.17).
To seek one’s identity is ever to be pledged to a process of attentive becoming.
If we live on such terms, and teach others to do so, this presently anxious time may reveal itself a period of conversion and grace, a great opportunity for good.
+fr Erik Varden ocso
President
Unspeed
Homily given at Mass on the first day of the autumn plenary assembly of the Nordic Bishops’ Conference
Proverbs 21.1-13: The Lord weighs the heart
Luke 8.19-21: My mother and brothers are those who hear the word of God.
We have become people addicted to speed. We still have speed limits on our roads (except on German motorways, of course), but in all other things we want things to happen fast. We expect fast internet, fast Deliveroo, fast responses to email.
Having become an impatient lot, we’re angered by delays.
Nature’s processes seem sluggish to us. Why wait till June to eat strawberries? We want them all year round; and if Mother Nature won’t oblige us at home, we’ll have them flown in from New Zealand.
How strange the words of the Hebrew sage sound now: ‘Too much haste, and all that comes of it is want’.
Yet do we not fondly recall a time, which was really not all that long ago, when life still had rhythm, and when everyone everywhere was not yet in a constant rush?
Wisdom is born of waiting. That is something Scripture tells us again and again. It tells us, too, that our God is a patient God. To him a thousand years are like a day. What use is it then feverishly to accelerate merely ephemeral procedures?
A healthy Christian contribution to our age would be the reconquest of deliberateness, a renewed regard for work well planned and well done, for careful thought that has had time to mature and is not just a panicked response to today’s headlines.
In the Gospel, Christ invites us into an astonishing degree of intimacy with him, to the extent of becoming his ‘mother’ and ‘brothers’. What this closeness requires on our part is ability to ‘hear the word of God and put it into practice’.
That movement from hearing through the piercing of the heart to effective action cannot be speeded up. It is like the slow gestation of a planted seed, which is why Christ keeps using imagery drawn from gardening and agriculture.
May we be men and women prepared to re-learn to abide, to re-discover the pace inscribed on the structure of things, apt to wait on God. ‘The Lord’, we have just heard, ‘weighs the heart’. For that to happen, the heart must first be at rest.
‘Like the flowers of the field’ – that give themselves time. Photograph: Margot Krebs Neale.
Proverbs 21.1-13: The Lord weighs the heart
Luke 8.19-21: My mother and brothers are those who hear the word of God.
We have become people addicted to speed. We still have speed limits on our roads (except on German motorways, of course), but in all other things we want things to happen fast. We expect fast internet, fast Deliveroo, fast responses to email.
Having become an impatient lot, we’re angered by delays.
Nature’s processes seem sluggish to us. Why wait till June to eat strawberries? We want them all year round; and if Mother Nature won’t oblige us at home, we’ll have them flown in from New Zealand.
How strange the words of the Hebrew sage sound now: ‘Too much haste, and all that comes of it is want’.
Yet do we not fondly recall a time, which was really not all that long ago, when life still had rhythm, and when everyone everywhere was not yet in a constant rush?
Wisdom is born of waiting. That is something Scripture tells us again and again. It tells us, too, that our God is a patient God. To him a thousand years are like a day. What use is it then feverishly to accelerate merely ephemeral procedures?
A healthy Christian contribution to our age would be the reconquest of deliberateness, a renewed regard for work well planned and well done, for careful thought that has had time to mature and is not just a panicked response to today’s headlines.
In the Gospel, Christ invites us into an astonishing degree of intimacy with him, to the extent of becoming his ‘mother’ and ‘brothers’. What this closeness requires on our part is ability to ‘hear the word of God and put it into practice’.
That movement from hearing through the piercing of the heart to effective action cannot be speeded up. It is like the slow gestation of a planted seed, which is why Christ keeps using imagery drawn from gardening and agriculture.
May we be men and women prepared to re-learn to abide, to re-discover the pace inscribed on the structure of things, apt to wait on God. ‘The Lord’, we have just heard, ‘weighs the heart’. For that to happen, the heart must first be at rest.
‘Like the flowers of the field’ – that give themselves time. Photograph: Margot Krebs Neale.
Our Fishing Ground
A friend has sent me this translation by John Campbell of a Gaelic poem by Dòmhnall Iain MacDhòmhnaill. It is beautiful.
May your hand O Christ, be always with us.
Our seed to grow, our garden of roses;
Our Autumn of harvest, our barley store —
Let us be in your granary at life’s end.
You are our fragrant breeze, our May-morn dew,
Our safe harbour in times of danger,
Our fishing ground, our food, our plenty —
Let us be in your nets at time of death.
In childhood may your name live for us,
In my old age may your love be with us,
Guide us through our darkest clouds,
Through storms, to our star of hope.
Death is not our end but a new beginning —
Fill us with your grace and stay close forever;
so that when the end of our time comes,
May’s young month will replace dark winter.
May your hand O Christ, be always with us.
Our seed to grow, our garden of roses;
Our Autumn of harvest, our barley store —
Let us be in your granary at life’s end.
You are our fragrant breeze, our May-morn dew,
Our safe harbour in times of danger,
Our fishing ground, our food, our plenty —
Let us be in your nets at time of death.
In childhood may your name live for us,
In my old age may your love be with us,
Guide us through our darkest clouds,
Through storms, to our star of hope.
Death is not our end but a new beginning —
Fill us with your grace and stay close forever;
so that when the end of our time comes,
May’s young month will replace dark winter.
25 Sunday A
At this Mass, Fr Florian Pletscher was installed as parish priest of the cathedral parish.
Isa 55.6-9: My thoughts are not your thoughts.
Phil 1.20-27: Life to me is Christ.
Mt 20.1-16: A landowner went out at daybreak.
When we hear about the landowner who went to the market to hire labourers, we may think of the Trondheim market on an average Saturday in the middle of the day. There are lots of people. It’s impossible to get an overview. We understand how the man overlooked a few blokes who were standing around looking for work, and only picked them up when he came back later in the day.
But hang on: the backdrop is not that of a modern metropolis (not even a modest metropolis such as ours) but of a Palestinian village of Antiquity, unlikely to have had more than a couple of hundred inhabitants. One will not have got lost in crowds. Also, the hirer first went out at daybreak, before the local traders had put up stalls. He would have had a good idea of the hands available for hire.
This consideration matters. It helps us interpret the parable correctly. Jesus is not saying that four groups of job-seekers were standing in the market from cockcrow, and that the last crowd was only noticed at dusk. Those called last had either just arrived — having had other things to do, or having spent the day lazing — else they would have been standing around with hands in pockets, not seeking work. That only occurred to them when the day was almost done.
Jesus tells us something about the landowners delicate generosity. He does not rebuke or humiliate the late arrivals. He gives them a chance to get stuck in without questioning their motivation. He knows the vineyard will form them. He chooses to believe that they can make themselves useful, even for not very long.
The vineyard, we are told, is an image of the kingdom of heaven. There’s space there for all sorts. Everyone is welcome in. It is taken for granted that we will put in an effort: it isn’t a matter of a cruise with free drinks. But it is never too late to turn up. There’ll be something to do for everyone, whatever our competence or physical condition. If we give our best, in truth, our salary is sure. Above all, work in the vineyard is its own reward. It teaches us beatitude.
This is something those first called, who’d been working since dawn, had lost sight of. When they see that the landowner, at dusk, gives to all the same reward, whether they’d worked for an hour or ten, they’re enraged. They start murmuring, something the Bible always reproves, for it stands for rebellion against God’s kindness. There had been no breach of contract. The salary for the day had been settled on before work began. It would amount to a denarius. That’s what everyone got. What provokes the early comers is not that they receive too little, but that the others get far too much.
In this attitude we encounter two tendencies that call for self-examination.
First we might ask: How do I respond when others freely, and fast, obtain grace I may have spent years of my life meriting? Do I rejoice in God’s goodness to others or turn sour when they easily get benefits for which I have laboured hard? We’ve a golden opportunity to ascertain whether we have really said yes to a life founded on grace or whether we stay avariciously cooped up, like Matthew the tax collector before he turned evangelist, counting small change.
Then there’s this other question: Do I exult in being allowed to serve in God’s vineyard, in being called to build up his Church? In a hymn by Lars Oftedal we sing: ‘Oh, what joy to be yours! Thank you for letting me take part!’ To think that I might have a share in this! To grow in Christian maturity is to become ever more grateful, to live more and more eucharistically. We move in this direction not least by being conscious of the stages through which our Christian lives pass, mindful of God’s gift and of our response to it in the form of promises. It is good to commemorate the anniversary of our baptism and confirmation; it is good for married people to celebrate their wedding anniversaries, for priests and religious to recall the day of their ordinations and vows. The more we get into this habit, the more we shall rejoice in each moment spent in the vineyard.
After all, we have tasted the new wine that gladdens the heart of man.
At this Mass I instal Fr Florian as parish priest of the cathedral parish. He has been its administrator for a while. Will he from today do anything he hasn’t done before? Not really. So what’s the fuss about? We celebrate the fact that he now more explicitly assumes responsibility for this vineyard. For a year an a half he has been getting used to the terrain. He has seen where watering and weeding are required. He has got the hang of the machinery. He has learnt to tell the different sort of grapes apart. He has got to know his co-workers, you. And he has said: ‘Yes! I wish to serve in this place.’ The responsibility rests on his shoulders now. May it be a light burden, a pleasant yoke.
After Fr Florian has made his oath of fidelity, I will conduct him to some of the crucial places of this church: to the baptismal font, to the confessional, to the tabernacle. At each station I’ll speak an exhortation that voices the specific goodness of God we receive in that place. This goodness is poured out on all who choose to receive it and correspond to it; the priest, and the bishop for that matter, is merely the goodness’s conduit and steward.
May God’s generosity not provoke us to envy. May we see what strength we are given when we collaborate with it, each according to the Lord’s specific call.
And may the vineyard of St Olav in this place bear fruit a hundredfold!
Monks of Le Barroux doing autumn work in the vineyard. Photograph from Le Grand Pastis.
Isa 55.6-9: My thoughts are not your thoughts.
Phil 1.20-27: Life to me is Christ.
Mt 20.1-16: A landowner went out at daybreak.
When we hear about the landowner who went to the market to hire labourers, we may think of the Trondheim market on an average Saturday in the middle of the day. There are lots of people. It’s impossible to get an overview. We understand how the man overlooked a few blokes who were standing around looking for work, and only picked them up when he came back later in the day.
But hang on: the backdrop is not that of a modern metropolis (not even a modest metropolis such as ours) but of a Palestinian village of Antiquity, unlikely to have had more than a couple of hundred inhabitants. One will not have got lost in crowds. Also, the hirer first went out at daybreak, before the local traders had put up stalls. He would have had a good idea of the hands available for hire.
This consideration matters. It helps us interpret the parable correctly. Jesus is not saying that four groups of job-seekers were standing in the market from cockcrow, and that the last crowd was only noticed at dusk. Those called last had either just arrived — having had other things to do, or having spent the day lazing — else they would have been standing around with hands in pockets, not seeking work. That only occurred to them when the day was almost done.
Jesus tells us something about the landowners delicate generosity. He does not rebuke or humiliate the late arrivals. He gives them a chance to get stuck in without questioning their motivation. He knows the vineyard will form them. He chooses to believe that they can make themselves useful, even for not very long.
The vineyard, we are told, is an image of the kingdom of heaven. There’s space there for all sorts. Everyone is welcome in. It is taken for granted that we will put in an effort: it isn’t a matter of a cruise with free drinks. But it is never too late to turn up. There’ll be something to do for everyone, whatever our competence or physical condition. If we give our best, in truth, our salary is sure. Above all, work in the vineyard is its own reward. It teaches us beatitude.
This is something those first called, who’d been working since dawn, had lost sight of. When they see that the landowner, at dusk, gives to all the same reward, whether they’d worked for an hour or ten, they’re enraged. They start murmuring, something the Bible always reproves, for it stands for rebellion against God’s kindness. There had been no breach of contract. The salary for the day had been settled on before work began. It would amount to a denarius. That’s what everyone got. What provokes the early comers is not that they receive too little, but that the others get far too much.
In this attitude we encounter two tendencies that call for self-examination.
First we might ask: How do I respond when others freely, and fast, obtain grace I may have spent years of my life meriting? Do I rejoice in God’s goodness to others or turn sour when they easily get benefits for which I have laboured hard? We’ve a golden opportunity to ascertain whether we have really said yes to a life founded on grace or whether we stay avariciously cooped up, like Matthew the tax collector before he turned evangelist, counting small change.
Then there’s this other question: Do I exult in being allowed to serve in God’s vineyard, in being called to build up his Church? In a hymn by Lars Oftedal we sing: ‘Oh, what joy to be yours! Thank you for letting me take part!’ To think that I might have a share in this! To grow in Christian maturity is to become ever more grateful, to live more and more eucharistically. We move in this direction not least by being conscious of the stages through which our Christian lives pass, mindful of God’s gift and of our response to it in the form of promises. It is good to commemorate the anniversary of our baptism and confirmation; it is good for married people to celebrate their wedding anniversaries, for priests and religious to recall the day of their ordinations and vows. The more we get into this habit, the more we shall rejoice in each moment spent in the vineyard.
After all, we have tasted the new wine that gladdens the heart of man.
At this Mass I instal Fr Florian as parish priest of the cathedral parish. He has been its administrator for a while. Will he from today do anything he hasn’t done before? Not really. So what’s the fuss about? We celebrate the fact that he now more explicitly assumes responsibility for this vineyard. For a year an a half he has been getting used to the terrain. He has seen where watering and weeding are required. He has got the hang of the machinery. He has learnt to tell the different sort of grapes apart. He has got to know his co-workers, you. And he has said: ‘Yes! I wish to serve in this place.’ The responsibility rests on his shoulders now. May it be a light burden, a pleasant yoke.
After Fr Florian has made his oath of fidelity, I will conduct him to some of the crucial places of this church: to the baptismal font, to the confessional, to the tabernacle. At each station I’ll speak an exhortation that voices the specific goodness of God we receive in that place. This goodness is poured out on all who choose to receive it and correspond to it; the priest, and the bishop for that matter, is merely the goodness’s conduit and steward.
May God’s generosity not provoke us to envy. May we see what strength we are given when we collaborate with it, each according to the Lord’s specific call.
And may the vineyard of St Olav in this place bear fruit a hundredfold!
Monks of Le Barroux doing autumn work in the vineyard. Photograph from Le Grand Pastis.
Resurrection
I have written about my experience of discovering Mahler’s Second Symphony as a boy aged fifteen. This singular music can touch a universal string in the human heart, a string that some of us, as a result, are made conscious of for the first time, amazed that something within us sings. I have listened to a number of recordings, but had never until last night heard the work live. When I saw the Oslo Philharmonic would perform it under Semyon Bychkov, I decided I’d go. The sonorous universe to which Mahler admits us captivates, but does not bind. It enables inward freedom to spread beneficially like soul-sunlight. The strange thing is, one feels it throughout the audience. There were a few determined coughers and recalcitrant programme-note-readers; on the whole, though, the auditorium rose in palpable unanimity towards the affirmation: ‘I’d not be dismissed! I come from God, I’ll return to God! God the Beloved will give me a spark of light and conduct me into eternal, blessed life.’ It is grandiose that music can work such shared elevation.