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:
Catholicism 
Philippians 3.3-8: I. Have come to see my advantages as disadvantages.
Luke 15.1-10: Rejoice with me! I have found what was lost.
The Church is by nature and vocation Catholic. The word ‘catholic’ comes from Greek. It is made up of the Read More
Luke 15.1-10: Rejoice with me! I have found what was lost.
The Church is by nature and vocation Catholic. The word ‘catholic’ comes from Greek. It is made up of the Read More
Discipleship Philippians 2.12-18: For his own loving purpose God puts the will into you.
Luke 14.25-33: None can be my disciple unless he gives up all his possessions.
These days, we like to communicate in such a way that our message reaches and Read More
Luke 14.25-33: None can be my disciple unless he gives up all his possessions.
These days, we like to communicate in such a way that our message reaches and Read More
Ungraciousness Phil 2.5-11: He emptied himself to assume the condition of a slave.
Luk 14.15-24: All alike started to make excuses.
Salvation history is the account of God’s kindness visited upon mankind. The story’s pathos results from repeated clash between divine grace and Read More
Luk 14.15-24: All alike started to make excuses.
Salvation history is the account of God’s kindness visited upon mankind. The story’s pathos results from repeated clash between divine grace and Read More
All Saints Revelation 7.2-14: A huge number, impossible to count.
1 John 3.1-3: We shall see him as he is.
Matthew 5.1-12: Blessed are the meek.
In shop windows around town you see phosphorously luminous skeletons. Last night, crossing the Old Town Bridge, I met Read More
1 John 3.1-3: We shall see him as he is.
Matthew 5.1-12: Blessed are the meek.
In shop windows around town you see phosphorously luminous skeletons. Last night, crossing the Old Town Bridge, I met Read More
Conversation with Vittoria Prisciandaro On your website there is a meditation on the role of the Church in today’s Europe. Your country has a shared frontier with Russia. What is the role of the Christian churches in the present geopolitical context, amidst raging wars Read More
Looking at Hats Of the many nice things I saw in the Albertina’s Batliner Collection last week, this canvas by Macke particularly struck me. It has a playful character. You feel voyeurish at first, looking at a woman who looks at something she Read More
Misappropriation It’s a feature of our time that, turning on the radio while getting the breakfast things out, you might hear terms such as ‘Palantir’, ‘Istar’, ‘Mordor’ and ‘orcs’ on the morning news. They are borrowings from Tolkien, extracted from the Read More
Catholicism
Philippians 3.3-8: I. Have come to see my advantages as disadvantages.
Luke 15.1-10: Rejoice with me! I have found what was lost.
The Church is by nature and vocation Catholic. The word ‘catholic’ comes from Greek. It is made up of the phrase kath’holon. ‘Holon’ stands for what is whole — it gives us ‘holistyczny’. ‘Kath’ is a contracted form of ‘kata’, a preposition meaning ‘according to’. To say ‘The Gospel according to Mark’ in Greek, we say to evangelion kata Markon.
The Church’s ‘catholicism’ points towards universality: the marvellous energy that pushes it out towards the ends of the earth, ready to transcend all earthly boundaries. But the Church is ‘catholic’ also in so far as it is integral, whole.
In Lumen Gentium, the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council speak of how God from all eternity ‘foreknew and predestined’ the elect to be ‘conformed to the image of his Son’, that the Church might present a perfect icon of Christ. ‘He planned to assemble in the holy Church all those who would believe in Christ’, having an intended place for each.
To get an idea of how God sees the Church, we might think of what it is like to assemble a big jigsaw puzzle, a serious one, say one with 18,000 pieces. We’ll beaver away at if for weeks, composing the image, making sure it corresponds to the prototype, delighting in seeing it come together. But what frustration we feel if, near the end, we find that a piece is missing. In such a large puzzle, a single piece is almost invisible. Still, if it isn’t there, our eye is inevitably drawn to the empty spot, leaving us sad, as if the work of putting together the 17,999 other pieces had been in vain.
Only against this background can we grasp the parables given us today: the one about the hundredth sheep and the one about the missing drachma. In both, there’s urgency about looking for what is lost: It has to be there somewhere!
The woman whose coin is missing keeps sweeping away ‘till she finds it’. Then, what rejoicing. She calls the neighbours in for a glass of sparkling wine. What was made to be perfect, yet looked depressingly faulty for a while, is again complete.
Joy in such completeness has to be shared. It’s just to much to bear on one’s own.
This, Jesus tells us, is how God builds up his Church. To be a Catholic is to be driven by determination that no single piece will, at the last, be absent from the puzzle-portrait of Christ that the Father is providentially preparing. We need to acquire the zeal of Fr Franziskus Jordan, founder of the Salvatorians, who at Christmas in 1894 wrote in his diary: ‘As long as there is a single person on earth who does not know God, who does not love God above all things, you cannot permit yourself to rest even for a moment.’
May our Christian sensibility be ever strengthened in this sense, purified by the fire of God’s generous love, so that God, when this world’s work is done, may rejoice in a Church that is truly catholic, entire, lacking nothing — and no one.
Amen.
Luke 15.1-10: Rejoice with me! I have found what was lost.
The Church is by nature and vocation Catholic. The word ‘catholic’ comes from Greek. It is made up of the phrase kath’holon. ‘Holon’ stands for what is whole — it gives us ‘holistyczny’. ‘Kath’ is a contracted form of ‘kata’, a preposition meaning ‘according to’. To say ‘The Gospel according to Mark’ in Greek, we say to evangelion kata Markon.
The Church’s ‘catholicism’ points towards universality: the marvellous energy that pushes it out towards the ends of the earth, ready to transcend all earthly boundaries. But the Church is ‘catholic’ also in so far as it is integral, whole.
In Lumen Gentium, the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council speak of how God from all eternity ‘foreknew and predestined’ the elect to be ‘conformed to the image of his Son’, that the Church might present a perfect icon of Christ. ‘He planned to assemble in the holy Church all those who would believe in Christ’, having an intended place for each.
To get an idea of how God sees the Church, we might think of what it is like to assemble a big jigsaw puzzle, a serious one, say one with 18,000 pieces. We’ll beaver away at if for weeks, composing the image, making sure it corresponds to the prototype, delighting in seeing it come together. But what frustration we feel if, near the end, we find that a piece is missing. In such a large puzzle, a single piece is almost invisible. Still, if it isn’t there, our eye is inevitably drawn to the empty spot, leaving us sad, as if the work of putting together the 17,999 other pieces had been in vain.
Only against this background can we grasp the parables given us today: the one about the hundredth sheep and the one about the missing drachma. In both, there’s urgency about looking for what is lost: It has to be there somewhere!
The woman whose coin is missing keeps sweeping away ‘till she finds it’. Then, what rejoicing. She calls the neighbours in for a glass of sparkling wine. What was made to be perfect, yet looked depressingly faulty for a while, is again complete.
Joy in such completeness has to be shared. It’s just to much to bear on one’s own.
This, Jesus tells us, is how God builds up his Church. To be a Catholic is to be driven by determination that no single piece will, at the last, be absent from the puzzle-portrait of Christ that the Father is providentially preparing. We need to acquire the zeal of Fr Franziskus Jordan, founder of the Salvatorians, who at Christmas in 1894 wrote in his diary: ‘As long as there is a single person on earth who does not know God, who does not love God above all things, you cannot permit yourself to rest even for a moment.’
May our Christian sensibility be ever strengthened in this sense, purified by the fire of God’s generous love, so that God, when this world’s work is done, may rejoice in a Church that is truly catholic, entire, lacking nothing — and no one.
Amen.
Discipleship
Philippians 2.12-18: For his own loving purpose God puts the will into you.
Luke 14.25-33: None can be my disciple unless he gives up all his possessions.
These days, we like to communicate in such a way that our message reaches and attracts the maximum number of people. We tweet. We post. We blog. Even stiff-coloured clerics venture onto TikTok, having read in good Catholic papers that this is where the young are to be found now that FaceBook has turned into a medium for grannies. Diocesan and congregational media officers anxiously count their ‘followers’.
What a contrast with the pastoral policy of Christ, our Lord.
We find him in today’s Gospel followed by ‘great crowds’. Should he should have been pleased, ready for a charismatic spiel on the benefits and joys of faith?
That’s exactly what he doesn’t provide.
Instead he utters some of the harshest words in the Gospel: ‘Anyone who does not hate those closest to him cannot be my disciple! Anyone who does not carry his cross, cannot be my disciple! Anyone who does not give up all he has, cannot be my disciple!’
What surprises us is not the fact that, after this salvo, some turned away, but that anyone at all stayed.
Elsewhere Jesus speaks with accents of tenderness. Why is he so severe here? He wants to make sure that people do not follow him on false pretences.
He does not want to inspire illusions that can’t be fulfilled.
To be a Christian is often hard; it calls for commitment, sacrifice, perseverance.
The images Christ uses to support his injunctions are telling. You can’t start a building project without an adequate budget; you can’t go to war without sufficient strategic resources. The world we live in is full of illustrations of what happens if you do.
Our Gospel speaks of the greatness of the Christian vocation. Being a divine enterprise, it calls on us to transcend ourselves. We must not instrumentalise the Gospel for purposes of self-realisation or gain, or even to maintain affections.
‘God’s loving purpose’, which Paul speaks of, is to recall what by grace we have the means to become: God’s children, apt to shine like stars in the night of human hopelessness. To shine, we must burn. That in us which is not fire-resistant must perish.
Dare we present this proposal to the world of today?
I think we must, first of all by living it out. As St Charles Borromeo, whose feast we keep, told the clergy of Milan in 1599: ‘Be sure you first preach by the way you live. If you don’t, people will notice that you say one thing, but live otherwise. Your words will then bring nothing but cynical laughter and a derisive shake of the head.’
We can’t be the servants of two masters. It makes us unhappy. It generates tension within us and around us.
We know that. At the same time a persistent little voice tells us we can always have a go. It’s really the temptation to follow that duplicitous voice the Lord tells us to ‘hate’. Once we put God first, we are free to love freely, and our love will not be troubling.
Let’s make sure our lives of faith do not end looking like this.
Luke 14.25-33: None can be my disciple unless he gives up all his possessions.
These days, we like to communicate in such a way that our message reaches and attracts the maximum number of people. We tweet. We post. We blog. Even stiff-coloured clerics venture onto TikTok, having read in good Catholic papers that this is where the young are to be found now that FaceBook has turned into a medium for grannies. Diocesan and congregational media officers anxiously count their ‘followers’.
What a contrast with the pastoral policy of Christ, our Lord.
We find him in today’s Gospel followed by ‘great crowds’. Should he should have been pleased, ready for a charismatic spiel on the benefits and joys of faith?
That’s exactly what he doesn’t provide.
Instead he utters some of the harshest words in the Gospel: ‘Anyone who does not hate those closest to him cannot be my disciple! Anyone who does not carry his cross, cannot be my disciple! Anyone who does not give up all he has, cannot be my disciple!’
What surprises us is not the fact that, after this salvo, some turned away, but that anyone at all stayed.
Elsewhere Jesus speaks with accents of tenderness. Why is he so severe here? He wants to make sure that people do not follow him on false pretences.
He does not want to inspire illusions that can’t be fulfilled.
To be a Christian is often hard; it calls for commitment, sacrifice, perseverance.
The images Christ uses to support his injunctions are telling. You can’t start a building project without an adequate budget; you can’t go to war without sufficient strategic resources. The world we live in is full of illustrations of what happens if you do.
Our Gospel speaks of the greatness of the Christian vocation. Being a divine enterprise, it calls on us to transcend ourselves. We must not instrumentalise the Gospel for purposes of self-realisation or gain, or even to maintain affections.
‘God’s loving purpose’, which Paul speaks of, is to recall what by grace we have the means to become: God’s children, apt to shine like stars in the night of human hopelessness. To shine, we must burn. That in us which is not fire-resistant must perish.
Dare we present this proposal to the world of today?
I think we must, first of all by living it out. As St Charles Borromeo, whose feast we keep, told the clergy of Milan in 1599: ‘Be sure you first preach by the way you live. If you don’t, people will notice that you say one thing, but live otherwise. Your words will then bring nothing but cynical laughter and a derisive shake of the head.’
We can’t be the servants of two masters. It makes us unhappy. It generates tension within us and around us.
We know that. At the same time a persistent little voice tells us we can always have a go. It’s really the temptation to follow that duplicitous voice the Lord tells us to ‘hate’. Once we put God first, we are free to love freely, and our love will not be troubling.
Let’s make sure our lives of faith do not end looking like this.
Ungraciousness
Phil 2.5-11: He emptied himself to assume the condition of a slave.
Luk 14.15-24: All alike started to make excuses.
Salvation history is the account of God’s kindness visited upon mankind. The story’s pathos results from repeated clash between divine grace and human ungraciousness.
The parable we have heard is instructive. It presupposes a joyful setting: a fine feast. We all know the delight of preparing a celebration for friends. We fix it in the diary well in advance, cook and clean, choose the music, rejoicing in the prospect of our guests’ having a good time. There may be last-minute cancellations on account of work commitments or a sick child — that goes without saying.
What the Gospel speaks of, though, is different. No one wants to come. All spurn the host’s invitation, not bothering even to make up decent excuses. They just say: ‘Thanks but no thanks; I’ve enough with my contentment. I find it in my property, my status symbols, my immediate circle. I can’t be bothered with your party. Please go away.’
To meet such an attitude is humiliating and hurtful. In Matthew’s account of the parable, the host, enraged, punishes those who turn his invitation down. Luke, the physician, that keen observer of human affairs, the evangelist of the nativity, presents a more tempered response. He concedes that the host is angry; but his wrath is simply turned into an extension of hospitality.
Lovely things have been prepared. The host wishes them to be enjoyed. He sends his servants out into ‘the open roads and the hedgerows’, which is to say that he invites the down-and-out, the poor and those sleeping rough. His concern is not with the elegance of the assembly; he wants to make sure his carefully prepared gifts are not wasted.
It is moving to hear this parable proclaimed in conjunction with Paul’s hymn of praise of the Son of Man who emptied himself, assumed the condition of a slave, becoming ‘as all men are’, only much humbler, more at ease out in hedgerows than at dinner parties.
Jesus Christ is God’s extended hand to us, sons and daughters of Adam, created in his image to be like him; he beckons us, all of us (as well as all those whose company we may not spontaneously desire) to eat and drink with him. Do we respond to his summons with alacrity, happy to come when we are called? Or do we really prefer to be left undisturbed at home in our own little kingdoms, where we make the rules?
In this week’s collect we ask for grace to ‘hasten without stumbling to receive the things [God has] promised’. What trips us up most, often enough, are not obstacles around us, but our own deep-seated care for our convenience.
Lord, have mercy!
‘I have bought five yokes of oxen and am on my way to try them out’, said one of the invited guests. Five yokes of oxen back in the day would have been the equivalent of a smart new car in our money.
Luk 14.15-24: All alike started to make excuses.
Salvation history is the account of God’s kindness visited upon mankind. The story’s pathos results from repeated clash between divine grace and human ungraciousness.
The parable we have heard is instructive. It presupposes a joyful setting: a fine feast. We all know the delight of preparing a celebration for friends. We fix it in the diary well in advance, cook and clean, choose the music, rejoicing in the prospect of our guests’ having a good time. There may be last-minute cancellations on account of work commitments or a sick child — that goes without saying.
What the Gospel speaks of, though, is different. No one wants to come. All spurn the host’s invitation, not bothering even to make up decent excuses. They just say: ‘Thanks but no thanks; I’ve enough with my contentment. I find it in my property, my status symbols, my immediate circle. I can’t be bothered with your party. Please go away.’
To meet such an attitude is humiliating and hurtful. In Matthew’s account of the parable, the host, enraged, punishes those who turn his invitation down. Luke, the physician, that keen observer of human affairs, the evangelist of the nativity, presents a more tempered response. He concedes that the host is angry; but his wrath is simply turned into an extension of hospitality.
Lovely things have been prepared. The host wishes them to be enjoyed. He sends his servants out into ‘the open roads and the hedgerows’, which is to say that he invites the down-and-out, the poor and those sleeping rough. His concern is not with the elegance of the assembly; he wants to make sure his carefully prepared gifts are not wasted.
It is moving to hear this parable proclaimed in conjunction with Paul’s hymn of praise of the Son of Man who emptied himself, assumed the condition of a slave, becoming ‘as all men are’, only much humbler, more at ease out in hedgerows than at dinner parties.
Jesus Christ is God’s extended hand to us, sons and daughters of Adam, created in his image to be like him; he beckons us, all of us (as well as all those whose company we may not spontaneously desire) to eat and drink with him. Do we respond to his summons with alacrity, happy to come when we are called? Or do we really prefer to be left undisturbed at home in our own little kingdoms, where we make the rules?
In this week’s collect we ask for grace to ‘hasten without stumbling to receive the things [God has] promised’. What trips us up most, often enough, are not obstacles around us, but our own deep-seated care for our convenience.
Lord, have mercy!
‘I have bought five yokes of oxen and am on my way to try them out’, said one of the invited guests. Five yokes of oxen back in the day would have been the equivalent of a smart new car in our money.
All Souls
2 Maccabees 12:43-46: The glorious reward that awaits those who die in the faith of God.
Romans 8:31b-35, 37-39: Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?
John 11:17-27: I am the Resurrection and the Life.
Some time ago, in the copious archives of Norway’s state broadcasting agency, I found a programme called Reflections on Doubt and Faith from 1969. Haagen Ringnes converses with Fr Hallvard Rieber-Mohn OP, among others things about death.
‘Death’, says the learned Dominican, ‘is a kind of taboo in our education, our conversation, our society.’ He cites Paul Tillich, said to have said that ‘death is for the people of our time what sex was in the Victorian age: it is there, but no one talks about it.’
‘We have’, he goes on, ‘a variety of indirect ways of ridding our lives of death, such as our frenetic worship of youth as the real time of life, to be prolonged artificially; then we have the marginalisation from society of the aged.’ He asks, ‘Can it be right to rob the full human register of the extremely valuable contribution made manifest by life’s final phase?’
There is much, here, to chew on to this day.
What really struck me, though, was the final remark of Rieber-Mohn, in his day a much-respected preacher:
We who lay claim to being such realists, who demand to have everything served uncensored, to know all, to try perversity and drugs and I don’t know what else – we suddenly become, when it comes to death, deeply mendacious. Death is not comme il faut. Death is not fit for polite society. Yet it is the surest thing we know about our future.
To think that half a century ago one could sit and talk like that on primetime Norwegian TV.
I hardly think we’ve become much more truthful since.
We still pretend that death isn’t there. It is wrapped up in euphemisms. And if the truth be told, what else should people do, if they think of death as a brick wall against which they’re bound, one day, to hurl themselves?
What a task, then, is ours, yours and mine! To us has been entrusted the message that death isn’t a wall, but an open door; that we are not, at the end of our earthly life, annihilated; that our essential self is called to immortality; that the choices we make here and now have eternal significance.
‘I am the Resurrection and the Life’, says our Lord Jesus Christ. To believe in him is to live in him, to exist on new terms. Then ‘neither things present nor things to come’ are the stuff of definitive anxiety. We live in a blessed hope that is not obliged to avert its gaze from death. Instead we can look death in the eye and recognise, not a faceless grim reaper, but, as St Francis put it, ‘sora nostra morte corporale’, ‘embodied death, our sister’.
Death is no laughing matter, certainly; but neither is there any reason to suppress it silently. Quite the contrary.
If we ourselves lack words to speak about death, the Church, our Mother, gives us words. The prayers in our Missal’s Requiem masses are among the loveliest that exist. In addition, we have the Church’s own compositions and prayers, not least the magnificent Dies irae we have just sung. The text is ascribed to Tommaso da Celano, one of St Francis’s companions and his first biographer. Thank God it has always kept its place as a matter of course in our Norwegian Catholic Prayer Book.
If this text is looked on askance in certain quarters, it is because it speaks so clearly of the judgement that awaits it. We don’t like the thought of being judged, we who’ve more or less abandoned tests even from school. What we like is to be affirmed.
But should this, be the culmination of life’s mystery: the realisation that nothing ultimately matters, that good remains acknowledged, evil uncondemned?
Life, after all, is a serious business; if life goes on after death, it is only natural that we happen on seriousness there, too.
The Dies irae gives voice to natural fear. It is good to express what we’re afraid of, to confess, as we do at each Mass, that we have failed to live up to the standard to which we are held; but that we nonetheless dare to hope for mercy. The Judge before whom we shall stand is no bureaucratic official. He is just, but also merciful. He placed our burden on his shoulders, and declared, ‘I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners’. The Shepherd who awaits us at the gate is the Lamb of God.
The core of the Dies irae is not the doomsday trumpets that resound majestically in Verdi’s or Mozart’s sublime renderings. It is the two stanzas that appear right in the middle of the poem, like hinges on which the drama turns. Allow me to remind you of them:
Recordare, Iesu pie/Quod sum causa tuæ viæ:/Ne me perdas illa die./Quærens me, sedisti lassus/Redemisti Crucem passus/Tantus labor non sit cassus.
Ah! If only our modern languages allowed such pregnant expression.
We have to be content with paraphrase, but at least we should try to make it exact. The first stanza sounds like this: ‘Remember, kind Jesus, that you directed your path [to our earth] for my sake; on that day, do not lose hold of me!’ We are, each of us, permitted to pray in this way; indeed, we have to pray like this if we take the Gospel seriously. For our Lord would have accomplished his work of salvation for you, for me, alone.
This insight is expressed in the second of the two central stanzas. We identify ourselves with the woman at the well in St John’s Gospel, the ostracised one who went to fetch water in the heat of midday to avoid the company of scorners. The text goes: ‘Seeking me, you sat exhausted; me you redeemed when you suffered the Cross: let not such great work be in vain!’
No, the Lord will not let that be the case. Let us, too, make sure it will not be the case.
Today we pray for all our beloved dead, and for the dead whom no one remembers. At the same time we focus our attention on the day on which we shall leave this world. None of us knows whether the time we have left is long or short. What we know is that Christ’s eternal justice and mercy await us. Let us live through him, with him in such a way that, when the hour comes, we can die in him, in peace and confidence, with gratitude in our hearts.
Amen.
All Souls: a ray of fiery light over our lives as gloriously illumining as a November sunrise in Trondheim.
Romans 8:31b-35, 37-39: Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?
John 11:17-27: I am the Resurrection and the Life.
Some time ago, in the copious archives of Norway’s state broadcasting agency, I found a programme called Reflections on Doubt and Faith from 1969. Haagen Ringnes converses with Fr Hallvard Rieber-Mohn OP, among others things about death.
‘Death’, says the learned Dominican, ‘is a kind of taboo in our education, our conversation, our society.’ He cites Paul Tillich, said to have said that ‘death is for the people of our time what sex was in the Victorian age: it is there, but no one talks about it.’
‘We have’, he goes on, ‘a variety of indirect ways of ridding our lives of death, such as our frenetic worship of youth as the real time of life, to be prolonged artificially; then we have the marginalisation from society of the aged.’ He asks, ‘Can it be right to rob the full human register of the extremely valuable contribution made manifest by life’s final phase?’
There is much, here, to chew on to this day.
What really struck me, though, was the final remark of Rieber-Mohn, in his day a much-respected preacher:
We who lay claim to being such realists, who demand to have everything served uncensored, to know all, to try perversity and drugs and I don’t know what else – we suddenly become, when it comes to death, deeply mendacious. Death is not comme il faut. Death is not fit for polite society. Yet it is the surest thing we know about our future.
To think that half a century ago one could sit and talk like that on primetime Norwegian TV.
I hardly think we’ve become much more truthful since.
We still pretend that death isn’t there. It is wrapped up in euphemisms. And if the truth be told, what else should people do, if they think of death as a brick wall against which they’re bound, one day, to hurl themselves?
What a task, then, is ours, yours and mine! To us has been entrusted the message that death isn’t a wall, but an open door; that we are not, at the end of our earthly life, annihilated; that our essential self is called to immortality; that the choices we make here and now have eternal significance.
‘I am the Resurrection and the Life’, says our Lord Jesus Christ. To believe in him is to live in him, to exist on new terms. Then ‘neither things present nor things to come’ are the stuff of definitive anxiety. We live in a blessed hope that is not obliged to avert its gaze from death. Instead we can look death in the eye and recognise, not a faceless grim reaper, but, as St Francis put it, ‘sora nostra morte corporale’, ‘embodied death, our sister’.
Death is no laughing matter, certainly; but neither is there any reason to suppress it silently. Quite the contrary.
If we ourselves lack words to speak about death, the Church, our Mother, gives us words. The prayers in our Missal’s Requiem masses are among the loveliest that exist. In addition, we have the Church’s own compositions and prayers, not least the magnificent Dies irae we have just sung. The text is ascribed to Tommaso da Celano, one of St Francis’s companions and his first biographer. Thank God it has always kept its place as a matter of course in our Norwegian Catholic Prayer Book.
If this text is looked on askance in certain quarters, it is because it speaks so clearly of the judgement that awaits it. We don’t like the thought of being judged, we who’ve more or less abandoned tests even from school. What we like is to be affirmed.
But should this, be the culmination of life’s mystery: the realisation that nothing ultimately matters, that good remains acknowledged, evil uncondemned?
Life, after all, is a serious business; if life goes on after death, it is only natural that we happen on seriousness there, too.
The Dies irae gives voice to natural fear. It is good to express what we’re afraid of, to confess, as we do at each Mass, that we have failed to live up to the standard to which we are held; but that we nonetheless dare to hope for mercy. The Judge before whom we shall stand is no bureaucratic official. He is just, but also merciful. He placed our burden on his shoulders, and declared, ‘I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners’. The Shepherd who awaits us at the gate is the Lamb of God.
The core of the Dies irae is not the doomsday trumpets that resound majestically in Verdi’s or Mozart’s sublime renderings. It is the two stanzas that appear right in the middle of the poem, like hinges on which the drama turns. Allow me to remind you of them:
Recordare, Iesu pie/Quod sum causa tuæ viæ:/Ne me perdas illa die./Quærens me, sedisti lassus/Redemisti Crucem passus/Tantus labor non sit cassus.
Ah! If only our modern languages allowed such pregnant expression.
We have to be content with paraphrase, but at least we should try to make it exact. The first stanza sounds like this: ‘Remember, kind Jesus, that you directed your path [to our earth] for my sake; on that day, do not lose hold of me!’ We are, each of us, permitted to pray in this way; indeed, we have to pray like this if we take the Gospel seriously. For our Lord would have accomplished his work of salvation for you, for me, alone.
This insight is expressed in the second of the two central stanzas. We identify ourselves with the woman at the well in St John’s Gospel, the ostracised one who went to fetch water in the heat of midday to avoid the company of scorners. The text goes: ‘Seeking me, you sat exhausted; me you redeemed when you suffered the Cross: let not such great work be in vain!’
No, the Lord will not let that be the case. Let us, too, make sure it will not be the case.
Today we pray for all our beloved dead, and for the dead whom no one remembers. At the same time we focus our attention on the day on which we shall leave this world. None of us knows whether the time we have left is long or short. What we know is that Christ’s eternal justice and mercy await us. Let us live through him, with him in such a way that, when the hour comes, we can die in him, in peace and confidence, with gratitude in our hearts.
Amen.
All Souls: a ray of fiery light over our lives as gloriously illumining as a November sunrise in Trondheim.
All Saints
Revelation 7.2-14: A huge number, impossible to count.
1 John 3.1-3: We shall see him as he is.
Matthew 5.1-12: Blessed are the meek.
In shop windows around town you see phosphorously luminous skeletons. Last night, crossing the Old Town Bridge, I met a lady on a bike who was wearing a skull-mask — apart from that she seemed nice enough. At the airport in Tromsø, the plastic polar bear by the baggage claim has been lumbered with a humiliating witch’s hat, poor fellow. Well, that’s Halloween for you.
What is Halloween? The answer will depend on whether you approach the question pragmatically or theologically.
Pragmatically, Halloween is a shop-keepers’ project, introduced to this country not so long ago — I’d say a couple of decades? The second half of October is a poor season for trade, lying between the autumn sales and the Christmas hysteria. American movies had familiarised us with dressed-up kids roaming about on 31 October asking treats while threatening tricks. That seemed a good opportunity to sell all sorts of nonsense. So marketing began. We needn’t get too exercised by this banal aspect of Halloween. But neither should we yield to it. We can use it creatively for our own purposes, the way the children of our parish do when they dress up as saints rather wraiths. They have at least as much fun as their peers. I dare say they’ll not have been short of treats either.
Theologically speaking, modern Halloween is much more complex, potentially much more sinister. The word ‘Halloween’ designates, of course, ‘the Eve of All Hallows’, that is, All Saints. Since the ninth century, the century of Charlemagne, when Norwegians awoke from corporate slumber and set out self-consciously, often unkindly, to face the world, when ‘Norvegr’, meaning ‘Way to the North’, became an established term, the Church has kept 1 November as All Saints Day. Already back then there was a large number of proclaimed saints, of course, but the canonised women and men the Church presents as Christian exemplars, sure that they now rejoice eternally before God, are but a fraction of the heavenly host we hope we ourselves may join once we’ve made our way through the hour of our death. When John caught a glimpse of this reality he saw, as we have heard him write, ‘a multitude that could not be numbered’. All Saints Day was instituted as a way of honouring this immense assembly; and to remind the faithful that the Church militant, still struggling among earthly constrains, and the Church triumphant, singing God’s heavenly praises, is a single reality. Faith builds a bridge from time into eternity. It shows us that death is not final.
All Saints Day is inextricably linked to All Souls Day, which we keep tomorrow. God wishes all people to be saved (1 Tim 2.4). That affirmation is Biblical and fundamental. God does not impose his saving will on anyone, however. We are free to resist it. It is possible to be eternally lost. It pertains to our human responsibility that we can burp God in the face and say No! to his grace.
Let’s make sure we don’t do that. Let’s be reconciled to God and to each other, renouncing all bitterness and anger. God bids us be bearers of peace who live by the Beatitudes, the royal path to heaven.
Even after a good life, a life oriented towards the divine, we may not be immediately ready to enter God’s tremendous Reality. Scripture uses the image of gold that needs to be purified of dross. Cleansing fire is needed, not to punish us, but to let us appear as we truly are: as beings created in God’s image to be like God, aflame with his glory.
‘Purgatory’ is the name we give the condition in which, when there is need, we are purified after pilgrimaging through earth’s dust. Purgatory is a place of mercy marked by joy, the way we rejoice when a white blouse, marred by ketchup stains, returns pristine after a round through the washing machine, ready to be ironed and adorned again with a brooch of gold.
This is the mystery towards which we raise out hearts on All Souls Day. We pray for all the dead, those we have known and those otherwise forgotten, who synodally are getting ready to see God face to face while the angels cry out, ‘Alleluia!’. We ask them to intercede for our own Christian progress.
On these days, then, on 1 and 2 November, we contemplate our present existence in the perspective of eternity. We remind ourselves that our life proceeds towards a goal. God wishes that goal to be blessed. Do we wish it, too, or do we choose darkness rather than light? The original purpose of Halloween was to help people ask that question, so that they might keep the Church’s feasts lucidly.
When faith began to wane in the West, the heavenly sheen retreated from Halloween. Once people no longer admit belief in God’s eternity, the only form of death-defiance they can imagine is that of the restless, lugubrious passage of ghosts through the world, as if there were nothing beyond it. A celebration once life-affirming turned, emptied of Christian content, into a magnet for the sombre powers of death.
Witches entered the picture, and wolves. At midnight yesterday I was awakened by an uncanny, and rather large, chorus of voices uniting in a wolf call. In Trondheim!
Halloween the way it is now is proof that apostasy from faith does not result in atheism; it generates superstition. It is vital, then, that we who have been gifted with faith represent that faith credibly.
We can’t be content merely to moan about Halloween’s excesses; we must use them to bear witness to Christ’s victory over death, to the dignity of man, called to share in God’s nature. Wolves may howl, but the music of the spheres will silence them. The last word in this world is not a baying of despair but a many-voiced symphony of love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. That’s what we’ll tune our lives by.
Amen.
What a gruesome and ridiculous parody all this stuff is. Image from the advert of a Norwegian chain of shops with the heading “Everything you need for Halloween – costumes, decorations, candy, and recipes”.
1 John 3.1-3: We shall see him as he is.
Matthew 5.1-12: Blessed are the meek.
In shop windows around town you see phosphorously luminous skeletons. Last night, crossing the Old Town Bridge, I met a lady on a bike who was wearing a skull-mask — apart from that she seemed nice enough. At the airport in Tromsø, the plastic polar bear by the baggage claim has been lumbered with a humiliating witch’s hat, poor fellow. Well, that’s Halloween for you.
What is Halloween? The answer will depend on whether you approach the question pragmatically or theologically.
Pragmatically, Halloween is a shop-keepers’ project, introduced to this country not so long ago — I’d say a couple of decades? The second half of October is a poor season for trade, lying between the autumn sales and the Christmas hysteria. American movies had familiarised us with dressed-up kids roaming about on 31 October asking treats while threatening tricks. That seemed a good opportunity to sell all sorts of nonsense. So marketing began. We needn’t get too exercised by this banal aspect of Halloween. But neither should we yield to it. We can use it creatively for our own purposes, the way the children of our parish do when they dress up as saints rather wraiths. They have at least as much fun as their peers. I dare say they’ll not have been short of treats either.
Theologically speaking, modern Halloween is much more complex, potentially much more sinister. The word ‘Halloween’ designates, of course, ‘the Eve of All Hallows’, that is, All Saints. Since the ninth century, the century of Charlemagne, when Norwegians awoke from corporate slumber and set out self-consciously, often unkindly, to face the world, when ‘Norvegr’, meaning ‘Way to the North’, became an established term, the Church has kept 1 November as All Saints Day. Already back then there was a large number of proclaimed saints, of course, but the canonised women and men the Church presents as Christian exemplars, sure that they now rejoice eternally before God, are but a fraction of the heavenly host we hope we ourselves may join once we’ve made our way through the hour of our death. When John caught a glimpse of this reality he saw, as we have heard him write, ‘a multitude that could not be numbered’. All Saints Day was instituted as a way of honouring this immense assembly; and to remind the faithful that the Church militant, still struggling among earthly constrains, and the Church triumphant, singing God’s heavenly praises, is a single reality. Faith builds a bridge from time into eternity. It shows us that death is not final.
All Saints Day is inextricably linked to All Souls Day, which we keep tomorrow. God wishes all people to be saved (1 Tim 2.4). That affirmation is Biblical and fundamental. God does not impose his saving will on anyone, however. We are free to resist it. It is possible to be eternally lost. It pertains to our human responsibility that we can burp God in the face and say No! to his grace.
Let’s make sure we don’t do that. Let’s be reconciled to God and to each other, renouncing all bitterness and anger. God bids us be bearers of peace who live by the Beatitudes, the royal path to heaven.
Even after a good life, a life oriented towards the divine, we may not be immediately ready to enter God’s tremendous Reality. Scripture uses the image of gold that needs to be purified of dross. Cleansing fire is needed, not to punish us, but to let us appear as we truly are: as beings created in God’s image to be like God, aflame with his glory.
‘Purgatory’ is the name we give the condition in which, when there is need, we are purified after pilgrimaging through earth’s dust. Purgatory is a place of mercy marked by joy, the way we rejoice when a white blouse, marred by ketchup stains, returns pristine after a round through the washing machine, ready to be ironed and adorned again with a brooch of gold.
This is the mystery towards which we raise out hearts on All Souls Day. We pray for all the dead, those we have known and those otherwise forgotten, who synodally are getting ready to see God face to face while the angels cry out, ‘Alleluia!’. We ask them to intercede for our own Christian progress.
On these days, then, on 1 and 2 November, we contemplate our present existence in the perspective of eternity. We remind ourselves that our life proceeds towards a goal. God wishes that goal to be blessed. Do we wish it, too, or do we choose darkness rather than light? The original purpose of Halloween was to help people ask that question, so that they might keep the Church’s feasts lucidly.
When faith began to wane in the West, the heavenly sheen retreated from Halloween. Once people no longer admit belief in God’s eternity, the only form of death-defiance they can imagine is that of the restless, lugubrious passage of ghosts through the world, as if there were nothing beyond it. A celebration once life-affirming turned, emptied of Christian content, into a magnet for the sombre powers of death.
Witches entered the picture, and wolves. At midnight yesterday I was awakened by an uncanny, and rather large, chorus of voices uniting in a wolf call. In Trondheim!
Halloween the way it is now is proof that apostasy from faith does not result in atheism; it generates superstition. It is vital, then, that we who have been gifted with faith represent that faith credibly.
We can’t be content merely to moan about Halloween’s excesses; we must use them to bear witness to Christ’s victory over death, to the dignity of man, called to share in God’s nature. Wolves may howl, but the music of the spheres will silence them. The last word in this world is not a baying of despair but a many-voiced symphony of love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. That’s what we’ll tune our lives by.
Amen.
What a gruesome and ridiculous parody all this stuff is. Image from the advert of a Norwegian chain of shops with the heading “Everything you need for Halloween – costumes, decorations, candy, and recipes”.
Conversation with Vittoria Prisciandaro
On your website there is a meditation on the role of the Church in today’s Europe. Your country has a shared frontier with Russia. What is the role of the Christian churches in the present geopolitical context, amidst raging wars and the progress of rightwing nationalisms?
To put forward the teaching of Jesus Christ as a possible foundation of the social covenant even in the complex reality of modern society; to pinpoint and articulate the causes of those frustrations that cause a hardening of the political climate, not being content simply to stand aloof in complaint; to keep the right balance between a healthy love of one’s own county and to be aware of a global order, which confers both privileges and obligations.
We hear it said: ‘We Europeans must defend ourselves’. But what is there to defend?
The rhetoric about the defence of Europe, which often evokes supposedly intrinsic ‘values’, is complex, for there is no real consensus about what Europe signifies. The history of Europe has in large part been forgotten. One of the chief ills of our time is cultural and historical amnesia. As Christians we need to be watchful of any attempt to instrumentalise the faith to cynical ends. At the same time we must find the means and occasions to speak constructively about the Christian orientation that has formed Europe. It is an urgent taks to propose a coherent answer to the question you pose. More is needed to consolidate the continent than treaties on trade and taxes, important though these are.
Why is beer ‘a neglected theological symbol’?
That observation comes from a speech I gave at the inauguration of the new brewery of our monastery in 2017. I referred to the humble simplicity of the elements that make up any beer: water and yeast, malt and hops. None of these elements is especially remarkable in isolation. But when you put them together in a favourable environment following a well thought-out recipe, their interaction enables the maturing of a new reality that is nourishing and spirited. In this sense the process of making a truly excellent beer seems to me a legitimate metaphor for the formation of communities within the Church.
***
You can read the whole text of the interview, conducted in Italian, here.
Statue of Charlemagne in the Grossmünster in Zürich, though he may not have looked exactly like that.
To put forward the teaching of Jesus Christ as a possible foundation of the social covenant even in the complex reality of modern society; to pinpoint and articulate the causes of those frustrations that cause a hardening of the political climate, not being content simply to stand aloof in complaint; to keep the right balance between a healthy love of one’s own county and to be aware of a global order, which confers both privileges and obligations.
We hear it said: ‘We Europeans must defend ourselves’. But what is there to defend?
The rhetoric about the defence of Europe, which often evokes supposedly intrinsic ‘values’, is complex, for there is no real consensus about what Europe signifies. The history of Europe has in large part been forgotten. One of the chief ills of our time is cultural and historical amnesia. As Christians we need to be watchful of any attempt to instrumentalise the faith to cynical ends. At the same time we must find the means and occasions to speak constructively about the Christian orientation that has formed Europe. It is an urgent taks to propose a coherent answer to the question you pose. More is needed to consolidate the continent than treaties on trade and taxes, important though these are.
Why is beer ‘a neglected theological symbol’?
That observation comes from a speech I gave at the inauguration of the new brewery of our monastery in 2017. I referred to the humble simplicity of the elements that make up any beer: water and yeast, malt and hops. None of these elements is especially remarkable in isolation. But when you put them together in a favourable environment following a well thought-out recipe, their interaction enables the maturing of a new reality that is nourishing and spirited. In this sense the process of making a truly excellent beer seems to me a legitimate metaphor for the formation of communities within the Church.
***
You can read the whole text of the interview, conducted in Italian, here.
Statue of Charlemagne in the Grossmünster in Zürich, though he may not have looked exactly like that.
Looking at Hats
Of the many nice things I saw in the Albertina’s Batliner Collection last week, this canvas by Macke particularly struck me. It has a playful character. You feel voyeurish at first, looking at a woman who looks at something she craves; but since the objects of her desire are hats you think, ‘Oh well’, and keep looking. The composition is exquisite, the colours perfectly balanced. What is really marvellous, though, is the way the window-shopper is both separate from and one with what she looks at. ‘Where your treasure is, there your heart’ – that is, your deepest self – ‘will be also’. I thought of that verse before this painting. Herbert and Rita Batliner gave their collection of paintings to the Albertina on a permanent loan in 2007. Unless there are several versions about, I presume they got their Macke from Christie’s, in which case it will have set them back half a million pounds or so. It is quite a thing to make that sort of investment, then to make your purchase available to the public. There’s a heart/treasure dynamic there, too. Ilse Erdmann, writing to Rilke about Macke’s painting, thought it an image of transience. I rather think there’s a kind of stability in it.
Misappropriation
It’s a feature of our time that, turning on the radio while getting the breakfast things out, you might hear terms such as ‘Palantir’, ‘Istar’, ‘Mordor’ and ‘orcs’ on the morning news. They are borrowings from Tolkien, extracted from the coherently imagined universe of The Lord of the Rings, applied haphazardly to strategic policies that make us afraid. Are such borrowings legitimate? In a carefully argued essay published a few months ago, Professor Giuseppe Pezzini argues that, more often than not, they are not: ‘This appropriation of Tolkien rests on both misunderstanding and manipulation.’ Tolkien’s epic envisages the destruction of Sauron’s Ring of Power by the guileless hobbit Frodo. Today’s Tolkien enthusiasts seek to be ring-wielders, enamoured of the ring’s promise to assure ‘invisibility, control over other minds, and the prolongation of life’. They resemble Tolkien’s Saruman, whose epithet ‘the Wise’ is ironic. Saruman affirms: ‘We must have power, power to order all things as we will’. Seeing this tendency at work in post-war reconstruction, Tolkien declared in a 1958 speech, ‘Saruman has many descendants.’ He noted, ‘We hobbits have against them no magic weapons’, yet proposed a toast ‘To the Hobbits. May they outlast the Sarumans and see spring again in the trees.’ Pezzini’s text synthesises literary criticism and political commentary with the wisdom, not of Sarumanic calculation, but of the Shires.