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:
Easter Octave 
Acts 2.42-47: The faithful had all things in common.
1 Peter 1.3-9: A cause of great joy.
John 20.19-31: These things are recorded that you may believe.
It’s the Easter Octave, the eight day. Biblically and liturgically, the eighth day stands for accomplishment. Read More
1 Peter 1.3-9: A cause of great joy.
John 20.19-31: These things are recorded that you may believe.
It’s the Easter Octave, the eight day. Biblically and liturgically, the eighth day stands for accomplishment. Read More
In-between-ness ‘Walking towards the Father’s house, drawn by the light we know shines from it, listening out for the singing within, we must accept the fact that our pilgrimage proceeds nocturnally, or at least defined by shadows. Shadows have their form, Read More
Blessed Mimesis This interview was published in La Stampa on 8 April. You can find an English version below.
I venti di guerra agitano il mondo intero. Il ritorno alla legge del più forte è anche il segno della perdita di senso che Read More
I venti di guerra agitano il mondo intero. Il ritorno alla legge del più forte è anche il segno della perdita di senso che Read More
How to Love? This Easter reflection was published in The Tablet of 4 April.
The period between Christ’s resurrection and his ascension into heaven was a time of remembrance. The apostles spent it turning over in their minds all that the Lord had said and done Read More
The period between Christ’s resurrection and his ascension into heaven was a time of remembrance. The apostles spent it turning over in their minds all that the Lord had said and done Read More
Easter Sunday Acts 10.34-43: Peter said, we are witnesses!
Colossians 3.1-4: Look for the things that are in heaven.
John 20.1-9: Peter saw and believed.
‘Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!’ With these words Christians traditionally greet each other in Eastertide. The statement Read More
Colossians 3.1-4: Look for the things that are in heaven.
John 20.1-9: Peter saw and believed.
‘Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!’ With these words Christians traditionally greet each other in Eastertide. The statement Read More
Easter Vigil The character of death is relentless. Death marks an absolute divide. We’re either alive or dead. There’s no in-between. Anyone who has sat at a death-bed knows what I mean. The dying person may be in a coma; we may Read More
Good Friday John 18.1-19.42: Jesus carried the cross by himself.
The Passion according to St John gives an elliptic account of how Jesus got from Pilate’s Praetorium to Calvary. ‘Jesus carried the cross by himself’, writes John; and that’s it. Perhaps the Beloved Read More
The Passion according to St John gives an elliptic account of how Jesus got from Pilate’s Praetorium to Calvary. ‘Jesus carried the cross by himself’, writes John; and that’s it. Perhaps the Beloved Read More
Easter Octave
Acts 2.42-47: The faithful had all things in common.
1 Peter 1.3-9: A cause of great joy.
John 20.19-31: These things are recorded that you may believe.
It’s the Easter Octave, the eight day. Biblically and liturgically, the eighth day stands for accomplishment. ‘In the beginning’ God created heaven and earth in seven days. The days in Genesis are not measurable units; but the creation narrative helps us measure time. The seven-day pattern corresponds to cosmic order. Divided into weeks, our anthill existence fits into a rhythm corresponding to the course of the sun, moon, and stars. Our experience of time is conditioned by the seven-day cycle. That’s good for us. To suffer time without predictable divisions is a burden that can make us mad. It is torture to shut a person up in a soundproof, windowless room without a watch. The vaguer our notion of time, the more we are vulnerable. Deprived of contours, time weighs crushingly on us. The seven-day pattern shapes our existence until the hour of our death.
And then?
To a Christian, death is a threshold leading into God’s eternity where time ceases. There, one day is like a thousand years, a thousand years like a day (cf. 2 Pet 3.8). The eighth day points towards the encounter that will take place when time is done. It reminds us that time, after all, is temporary. That is why the Church keeps her most solemn feasts with an octave. The octave helps us recognise that the purpose of time is to equip us for eternal life. By Christ’s victory over death, God has brought eternity into time. If we live in Christ, the Risen One, we can savour eternity now. The Easter Octave tell us: ‘You are made to live boundlessly! Your river of weeks flows into the open, sun-bathed sea!’
The Easter Octave has many names. It is called Dominica in albis, ‘Sunday in white’, since our neophytes still wear the white garments received during the Easter Vigil, at the font, where they were reborn of water and the Spirit. It is also called Quasimodo Sunday. That has nothing to do with hunchbacked ringers, whether our reference is Disney or Hugo; the expression comes from today’s introit, which begins with the words, ‘Quasi modo geniti infantes’, a verse from 1 Peter (2.2) that reads: ‘Like newborn children, desire rational milk without deceit.’
I beg your pardon?
Milk can be fresh, sweet, sour, out of date. But can milk be rational, and without deceit? The image is a daring one, but we can, I think, understand what the Apostle is getting at. He tells us: You, too, like your brethren in white, have received baptism. You, too, have been reborn to new life in God, to purity and blessedness. Do you live accordingly? Do you take sustenance that nurtures your Christian call, or do you subsist on junk food?
Our times are nutrition-conscious. We avoid cholesterol, take vitamins, buy crème fraîche light, eat avocados. But it seems we’re less cautious when it comes to the nourishment we take from papers, the internet, Twitter, and TicToc. Is my media consumption rational and guileless? Thus paraphrased, St Peter’s two thousand year-old exhortation doesn’t sound so daft after all.
At Easter in 2000, John Paul II added a further title. He declared this day ‘Divine Mercy Sunday’. The declaration coincided with his canonisation of Sr Faustyna Kowalska. The pope let us see that the message of divine love flowing from Jesus’s pierced Heart has universal relevance. It is a treasure for the whole Church. It’d be wrong, though, to think that John Paul II reduced the Easter Octave to a particular kind of devotion. The title he proposed does not narrow the Octave’s significance; it deepens it. It helps us interpret today’s Gospel, of Thomas’s meeting with the Risen Lord on the eighth day.
Thomas, the generous friend who, when Jesus went to face his enemies, said, ‘Let’s go with him to die with him’, had been out on an errand when Jesus appeared to Peter and the others on Easter Day. He no doubt trusted his apostolic colleagues; but the testimony of others was not sufficient to make him believe. Thomas, who had been so close to Jesus, wanted concrete proof. He thought: ‘If Jesus is really alive, it must have real, tangible consequence!’ That’s a healthily Catholic approach to the business of believing.
On the eighth day, the day of accomplishment, Thomas gets what he asked for. Jesus does not reproach him. He says: ‘Peace!’ Then he lets Thomas place a hand in his still open side, saying: ‘Be faithful!’
This is how mercy manifests itself in the wake of Christ’s Easter victory: wounded, realistic, peaceful, summoning us to fidelity. Thomas is allowed to to touch the fount of mercy to be made into a bearer of mercy. He would go further than any other apostle. There’s good historical reason to believe that he did in fact bring the Gospel to India.
People who profess Christianity prove themselves Christians in so far as they humbly bear their wounds, are clear-sighted, bring peace, stay faithful. It’s important to insist on this now, as more and more people instrumentalise faith in the interest of presumption, illusion, division, and ego-idolatry.
By God’s mercy we have been born anew to eternal life. Let’s, then, live as is seemly: mercifully, rationally, without deceit — and rejoicing in the fact that life is a free gift we receive in order that we, in turn, may give it.
Stained glass window by Ninian Comper at Downside Abbey.
1 Peter 1.3-9: A cause of great joy.
John 20.19-31: These things are recorded that you may believe.
It’s the Easter Octave, the eight day. Biblically and liturgically, the eighth day stands for accomplishment. ‘In the beginning’ God created heaven and earth in seven days. The days in Genesis are not measurable units; but the creation narrative helps us measure time. The seven-day pattern corresponds to cosmic order. Divided into weeks, our anthill existence fits into a rhythm corresponding to the course of the sun, moon, and stars. Our experience of time is conditioned by the seven-day cycle. That’s good for us. To suffer time without predictable divisions is a burden that can make us mad. It is torture to shut a person up in a soundproof, windowless room without a watch. The vaguer our notion of time, the more we are vulnerable. Deprived of contours, time weighs crushingly on us. The seven-day pattern shapes our existence until the hour of our death.
And then?
To a Christian, death is a threshold leading into God’s eternity where time ceases. There, one day is like a thousand years, a thousand years like a day (cf. 2 Pet 3.8). The eighth day points towards the encounter that will take place when time is done. It reminds us that time, after all, is temporary. That is why the Church keeps her most solemn feasts with an octave. The octave helps us recognise that the purpose of time is to equip us for eternal life. By Christ’s victory over death, God has brought eternity into time. If we live in Christ, the Risen One, we can savour eternity now. The Easter Octave tell us: ‘You are made to live boundlessly! Your river of weeks flows into the open, sun-bathed sea!’
The Easter Octave has many names. It is called Dominica in albis, ‘Sunday in white’, since our neophytes still wear the white garments received during the Easter Vigil, at the font, where they were reborn of water and the Spirit. It is also called Quasimodo Sunday. That has nothing to do with hunchbacked ringers, whether our reference is Disney or Hugo; the expression comes from today’s introit, which begins with the words, ‘Quasi modo geniti infantes’, a verse from 1 Peter (2.2) that reads: ‘Like newborn children, desire rational milk without deceit.’
I beg your pardon?
Milk can be fresh, sweet, sour, out of date. But can milk be rational, and without deceit? The image is a daring one, but we can, I think, understand what the Apostle is getting at. He tells us: You, too, like your brethren in white, have received baptism. You, too, have been reborn to new life in God, to purity and blessedness. Do you live accordingly? Do you take sustenance that nurtures your Christian call, or do you subsist on junk food?
Our times are nutrition-conscious. We avoid cholesterol, take vitamins, buy crème fraîche light, eat avocados. But it seems we’re less cautious when it comes to the nourishment we take from papers, the internet, Twitter, and TicToc. Is my media consumption rational and guileless? Thus paraphrased, St Peter’s two thousand year-old exhortation doesn’t sound so daft after all.
At Easter in 2000, John Paul II added a further title. He declared this day ‘Divine Mercy Sunday’. The declaration coincided with his canonisation of Sr Faustyna Kowalska. The pope let us see that the message of divine love flowing from Jesus’s pierced Heart has universal relevance. It is a treasure for the whole Church. It’d be wrong, though, to think that John Paul II reduced the Easter Octave to a particular kind of devotion. The title he proposed does not narrow the Octave’s significance; it deepens it. It helps us interpret today’s Gospel, of Thomas’s meeting with the Risen Lord on the eighth day.
Thomas, the generous friend who, when Jesus went to face his enemies, said, ‘Let’s go with him to die with him’, had been out on an errand when Jesus appeared to Peter and the others on Easter Day. He no doubt trusted his apostolic colleagues; but the testimony of others was not sufficient to make him believe. Thomas, who had been so close to Jesus, wanted concrete proof. He thought: ‘If Jesus is really alive, it must have real, tangible consequence!’ That’s a healthily Catholic approach to the business of believing.
On the eighth day, the day of accomplishment, Thomas gets what he asked for. Jesus does not reproach him. He says: ‘Peace!’ Then he lets Thomas place a hand in his still open side, saying: ‘Be faithful!’
This is how mercy manifests itself in the wake of Christ’s Easter victory: wounded, realistic, peaceful, summoning us to fidelity. Thomas is allowed to to touch the fount of mercy to be made into a bearer of mercy. He would go further than any other apostle. There’s good historical reason to believe that he did in fact bring the Gospel to India.
People who profess Christianity prove themselves Christians in so far as they humbly bear their wounds, are clear-sighted, bring peace, stay faithful. It’s important to insist on this now, as more and more people instrumentalise faith in the interest of presumption, illusion, division, and ego-idolatry.
By God’s mercy we have been born anew to eternal life. Let’s, then, live as is seemly: mercifully, rationally, without deceit — and rejoicing in the fact that life is a free gift we receive in order that we, in turn, may give it.
Stained glass window by Ninian Comper at Downside Abbey.
In-between-ness
‘Walking towards the Father’s house, drawn by the light we know shines from it, listening out for the singing within, we must accept the fact that our pilgrimage proceeds nocturnally, or at least defined by shadows. Shadows have their form, too. Cistercian architecture of the twelfth century, as we can admire it still at Pontigny, for example, is celebrated for its luminosity. The absence of stained glass and scarcity of decoration make the play of light a structural aesthetic element. But there were rainy days in the twelfth century too. There was twilight. And there was night. The formative impact over time of praying day and night in a Cistercian church comes from the interplay of light and shadow. The world we have made full of glaring lights and those maddening fixtures that switch themselves on at the merest twitch of a spider, making an option for subdued light impossible, can cause us to forget what it is to be at ease in such in-between-ness. Bright light is not always what is needed to reveal an object’s perfection. The gloss of oriental lacquerware shows to best effect in flickering candlelight; gilded medieval statuary takes for granted the flux of dawn and dusk. In the glare of a spotlight the gold just looks vulgar.’ From Alight with Hidden Glory, due out in May. The Italian version was published for Easter.
Blessed Mimesis
This interview was published in La Stampa on 8 April. You can find an English version below.
I venti di guerra agitano il mondo intero. Il ritorno alla legge del più forte è anche il segno della perdita di senso che annichilisce l’umanità?
Il presunto diritto del più forte è mai davvero scomparso? È sempre esistito e sempre resterà la norma. Ciò che è eccezionale è l’applicazione sociale di standard di empatia e compassione. È significativo che, nelle lingue europee, tali standard siano definiti “umani”. La brutalizzazione della politica disumanizza. Guadagna terreno perché abbiamo perso di vista cosa sia l’essere umano e cosa possa diventare.
Cosa ha da dire il cristianesimo a società sempre più secolarizzate e appiattiti sul consumismo?
Il cristianesimo è il racconto dell’incarnazione di Dio. Se Dio si è fatto carne, allora la carne — la natura umana nella sua forma concreta — è stata impregnata di divinità. La carne diventa così portatrice di una verità luminosa che non può morire. Questo è meno astratto di quanto sembri. Chi di noi non sa cosa significhi quando la nostra anima e i nostri sensi sono attraversati da un desiderio di gioia infinita? La fede cristiana proclama che tale desiderio non è né folle né assurdo. È un’eco che risuona in me da una Fonte personale ed eterna: Dio. Questo desiderio non può essere soddisfatto dalle cose che compro. Può trasformarsi da frustrazione in esultanza se comincio a conoscere Dio. Un’agenda secolarista non può placare la profondità del desiderio umano.
Papa Leone invoca una pace disarmata e disarmante. La sua voce ha davvero possibilità di incidere sulle dinamiche globali?
Sì. In un momento in cui molti politici nel mondo hanno perso credibilità, il suono di una voce disinteressata che parla con intelligenza e autorità pacata, rifiutando gli eccessi retorici e facendo appello alle nostre aspirazioni più nobili, avrà un impatto. Potrebbe perfino farci riflettere. E questo è un bene. La profondità di pensiero non è tipica dei manifesti globali odierni.
Joseph Ratzinger deplorò la sporcizia nella Chiesa. Quali sono oggi i mali più insidiosi all’interno della Chiesa?
Ogni anno la Quaresima della Chiesa inizia con la rilettura delle tentazioni di Cristo nel deserto. Sono tre: la tentazione di pensare che il materialismo possa soddisfare i bisogni più profondi dell’umanità; la tentazione di assolutizzare una realtà contingente e mediocre (che può essere me stesso); la tentazione di gettarsi, con fiducia mal riposta, in un’estasi di autodistruzione. Queste sono fonti perenni di mali insidiosi — vere e proprie forme di ateismo — perché ci distolgono dal riconoscimento umile che Dio è Dio, inducendoci a pensare di poter stabilire impunemente i nostri propri criteri. La sporcizia che abbiamo visto, per cui soffriamo e che cerchiamo di riparare insieme — scandali di abusi e gestione disonesta — può quasi sempre essere ricondotta alla debolezza davanti a una di queste tre tentazioni originarie. È lì, dunque, che dobbiamo intraprendere la nostra lotta spirituale
La credibilità è il patrimonio più prezioso della Chiesa. Perché tante resistenze alla lotta condotta dagli ultimi pontefici alla piaga degli abusi sui minori?
La mia esperienza è che la maggior parte delle persone desidera collaborare. Ciò che si manifesta come resistenza nasce spesso, credo, dall’idea che le linee guida riguardino gli altri, che gli abusi non possano verificarsi nella mia diocesi, parrocchia, comunità o famiglia. L’esperienza tragica dimostra che tali supposizioni non sono mai ammissibili.
Verrà beatificato il vescovo Fulton Sheen che ha dedicato la vita alla formazione dei sacerdoti. Hanno ancora senso oggi il ruolo tradizionale del prete e il celibato ecclesiastico?
Assolutamente sì. Il celibato consacrato vissuto bene — ed è possibile viverlo bene — testimonia il primato di Dio. Permette di orientare l’intera esistenza del sacerdote, rendendolo capace di essere portatore dell’amore di Cristo, agente di riconciliazione, uomo libero di donare la propria vita per gli altri. Questo è il senso del “ruolo tradizionale del prete”. Non si tratta dell’abito che si indossa.
Cosa insegna la spiritualità cristiana alla contemporaneità dominata dalla velocità delle comunicazioni digitali?
Che la velocità non equivale alla profondità. E, in definitiva, è la profondità della comunicazione ciò che desideriamo — e di cui abbiamo bisogno per costruire una vita insieme.
I nazionalismi trionfanti ovunque stanno portando ad una nuova guerra mondiale?
Sono davvero così trionfanti? A me sembrano tentativi disperati di mobilitare un senso civico ormai perduto. Questo ci riporta alla domanda iniziale: a cosa serve l’essere umano? Qual è lo scopo della società? Come possiamo articolare e rendere efficace l’idea di un bene comune? Se proponiamo risposte intelligibili e praticabili, i nazionalismi ottusi non trionferanno necessariamente. Un certo fatalismo sembra essersi insinuato nel discorso su una terza guerra mondiale. L’ipotesi è seria. Ma assicuriamoci di non considerarla inevitabile. Mostriamoci liberi. L’uomo è fatto per la libertà. La libertà conduce alla fioritura. Per osare di essere libero, ho bisogno di persone che mi mostrino cosa sia la libertà. Io — e tu — potremmo avviare un tale processo di benedetta mimesi.
***
The whole world is stirred by winds of war. Is the return of the right of the strongest also a sign of that loss of sense which reduces humankind to nought?
Did the presumption of the right of the strongest ever really disappear? It was ever, and will ever remain, the norm. Exceptional is societal application of standards of empathy and compassion. It is significant that, in European languages, such standards are referred to as humane. The brutalisation of politics dehumanises. It gains ground because we have lost sight of what the human being is, and can become.
What has Christianity to say to societies ever more secularised, ever more reduced to a focus on consumerism?
Christianity is the account of God’s incarnation. If God has become flesh, then flesh — human nature in its embodied form — has been imbued with divinity. The flesh is then the bearer of a luminous truth that cannot die. This is less abstract than it sounds. Who among us does not know what it is like when our soul and senses are assaulted by a longing for infinite joy? The Christian faith proclaims that such longing is neither mad nor absurd. It is an echo resounding in me from an everlasting, personal Source: God. This longing can’t be satisfied by stuff I buy. It can turn from frustration into exultation if I begin to know God. A secularist agenda just cannot still the depth of human desire.
Pope Leo speaks of a disarmed, disarming peace. Does his voice stand a chance of impacting on global dynamics?
Yes. At a time when many politicians worldwide have been discredited, the sound of a disinterested voice that speaks with peaceful authority, refusing to yield to rhetorical excess, appealing to our noblest aspirations will make an impact. It may even make us think. That is good. Depth of thought is not characteristic of today’s global manifestos.
Joseph Ratzinger deplored ‘filth’ in the Church. Which are the most insidious evils within the Church today?
Each year the Church’s Lent begins with a re-reading of Christ’s temptations in the wilderness. There are three: the temptation to think that materialism can meet humanity’s deepest needs; the temptation to absolutise a reality that is contingent and mediocre (a reality that might be myself); the temptation to jump, with misplaced confidence, into an ecstasy of self-destruction. These are perennial sources of insidious ills — forms of atheism, really, for they lure us away from a humble acknowledgement that God is God, making us to think we can, with impunity, set our own standards. The filth we have seen, over which we grieve and which, corporately, we seek to repair — scandals of abuse and dishonest stewardship — can almost always be traced to weakness before one of these three Ur-temptations. That, then, is where our spiritual battle must be waged.
Credibility is the Church’s choicest patrimony. Why so much resistance to the fight fought by recent pontiffs against the plague of child abuse?
My experience is that most people wish to collaborate. What manifests itself as resistance comes often, I think, from the assumption that the guidelines are for other people, that abuse could not happen in my diocese, parish, community, or family. Tragic experience shows that such assumptions are never permissible.
Fulton Sheen, who dedicated his life to the formation of priests, will be beatified. Does the traditional role of the priest make any sense today? Does priestly celibacy?
Absolutely. Consecrated celibacy well lived — and it is possible to live it well —witnesses to God’s primacy. It enables the orientation of a priest’s whole existence, making him apt to be a bearer of Christ’s love, an agent of reconciliation, a man free to give his life for others. That is what the ‘traditional role of the priest’ is about. It is not a matter of the clothes one wears.
What does Christian spirituality teach our contemporary world dominated by the speed of digital communication?
That speed is not tantamount to depth. And ultimately depth of communication is what we want — and what we need to construct our lives together.
Are triumphant nationalisms about to lead to a new world war?
Are they so triumphant? They seem to me desperate attempts to mobilise a civic purpose long lost. This brings us back to the question we set out from. What is the human being for? What is the point of society? How can we articulate and make effective the notion of a common good? If we propose intelligible, practicable answers, imbecile nationalisms need not triumph. Fatalism seems to have entered discourse about a third world war. The hypothesis is serious. But let’s make sure we don’t consider its realisation inevitable. Let’s shows ourselves free. Man is made for freedom. Freedom leads to flourishing. To risk being free, I need others to show me what freedom looks like. I — and you — could set in motion such a process of blessed mimesis.
Dawn at the monastery of Omberg. Photograph by Sofia Karlsson.
.
I venti di guerra agitano il mondo intero. Il ritorno alla legge del più forte è anche il segno della perdita di senso che annichilisce l’umanità?
Il presunto diritto del più forte è mai davvero scomparso? È sempre esistito e sempre resterà la norma. Ciò che è eccezionale è l’applicazione sociale di standard di empatia e compassione. È significativo che, nelle lingue europee, tali standard siano definiti “umani”. La brutalizzazione della politica disumanizza. Guadagna terreno perché abbiamo perso di vista cosa sia l’essere umano e cosa possa diventare.
Cosa ha da dire il cristianesimo a società sempre più secolarizzate e appiattiti sul consumismo?
Il cristianesimo è il racconto dell’incarnazione di Dio. Se Dio si è fatto carne, allora la carne — la natura umana nella sua forma concreta — è stata impregnata di divinità. La carne diventa così portatrice di una verità luminosa che non può morire. Questo è meno astratto di quanto sembri. Chi di noi non sa cosa significhi quando la nostra anima e i nostri sensi sono attraversati da un desiderio di gioia infinita? La fede cristiana proclama che tale desiderio non è né folle né assurdo. È un’eco che risuona in me da una Fonte personale ed eterna: Dio. Questo desiderio non può essere soddisfatto dalle cose che compro. Può trasformarsi da frustrazione in esultanza se comincio a conoscere Dio. Un’agenda secolarista non può placare la profondità del desiderio umano.
Papa Leone invoca una pace disarmata e disarmante. La sua voce ha davvero possibilità di incidere sulle dinamiche globali?
Sì. In un momento in cui molti politici nel mondo hanno perso credibilità, il suono di una voce disinteressata che parla con intelligenza e autorità pacata, rifiutando gli eccessi retorici e facendo appello alle nostre aspirazioni più nobili, avrà un impatto. Potrebbe perfino farci riflettere. E questo è un bene. La profondità di pensiero non è tipica dei manifesti globali odierni.
Joseph Ratzinger deplorò la sporcizia nella Chiesa. Quali sono oggi i mali più insidiosi all’interno della Chiesa?
Ogni anno la Quaresima della Chiesa inizia con la rilettura delle tentazioni di Cristo nel deserto. Sono tre: la tentazione di pensare che il materialismo possa soddisfare i bisogni più profondi dell’umanità; la tentazione di assolutizzare una realtà contingente e mediocre (che può essere me stesso); la tentazione di gettarsi, con fiducia mal riposta, in un’estasi di autodistruzione. Queste sono fonti perenni di mali insidiosi — vere e proprie forme di ateismo — perché ci distolgono dal riconoscimento umile che Dio è Dio, inducendoci a pensare di poter stabilire impunemente i nostri propri criteri. La sporcizia che abbiamo visto, per cui soffriamo e che cerchiamo di riparare insieme — scandali di abusi e gestione disonesta — può quasi sempre essere ricondotta alla debolezza davanti a una di queste tre tentazioni originarie. È lì, dunque, che dobbiamo intraprendere la nostra lotta spirituale
La credibilità è il patrimonio più prezioso della Chiesa. Perché tante resistenze alla lotta condotta dagli ultimi pontefici alla piaga degli abusi sui minori?
La mia esperienza è che la maggior parte delle persone desidera collaborare. Ciò che si manifesta come resistenza nasce spesso, credo, dall’idea che le linee guida riguardino gli altri, che gli abusi non possano verificarsi nella mia diocesi, parrocchia, comunità o famiglia. L’esperienza tragica dimostra che tali supposizioni non sono mai ammissibili.
Verrà beatificato il vescovo Fulton Sheen che ha dedicato la vita alla formazione dei sacerdoti. Hanno ancora senso oggi il ruolo tradizionale del prete e il celibato ecclesiastico?
Assolutamente sì. Il celibato consacrato vissuto bene — ed è possibile viverlo bene — testimonia il primato di Dio. Permette di orientare l’intera esistenza del sacerdote, rendendolo capace di essere portatore dell’amore di Cristo, agente di riconciliazione, uomo libero di donare la propria vita per gli altri. Questo è il senso del “ruolo tradizionale del prete”. Non si tratta dell’abito che si indossa.
Cosa insegna la spiritualità cristiana alla contemporaneità dominata dalla velocità delle comunicazioni digitali?
Che la velocità non equivale alla profondità. E, in definitiva, è la profondità della comunicazione ciò che desideriamo — e di cui abbiamo bisogno per costruire una vita insieme.
I nazionalismi trionfanti ovunque stanno portando ad una nuova guerra mondiale?
Sono davvero così trionfanti? A me sembrano tentativi disperati di mobilitare un senso civico ormai perduto. Questo ci riporta alla domanda iniziale: a cosa serve l’essere umano? Qual è lo scopo della società? Come possiamo articolare e rendere efficace l’idea di un bene comune? Se proponiamo risposte intelligibili e praticabili, i nazionalismi ottusi non trionferanno necessariamente. Un certo fatalismo sembra essersi insinuato nel discorso su una terza guerra mondiale. L’ipotesi è seria. Ma assicuriamoci di non considerarla inevitabile. Mostriamoci liberi. L’uomo è fatto per la libertà. La libertà conduce alla fioritura. Per osare di essere libero, ho bisogno di persone che mi mostrino cosa sia la libertà. Io — e tu — potremmo avviare un tale processo di benedetta mimesi.
***
The whole world is stirred by winds of war. Is the return of the right of the strongest also a sign of that loss of sense which reduces humankind to nought?
Did the presumption of the right of the strongest ever really disappear? It was ever, and will ever remain, the norm. Exceptional is societal application of standards of empathy and compassion. It is significant that, in European languages, such standards are referred to as humane. The brutalisation of politics dehumanises. It gains ground because we have lost sight of what the human being is, and can become.
What has Christianity to say to societies ever more secularised, ever more reduced to a focus on consumerism?
Christianity is the account of God’s incarnation. If God has become flesh, then flesh — human nature in its embodied form — has been imbued with divinity. The flesh is then the bearer of a luminous truth that cannot die. This is less abstract than it sounds. Who among us does not know what it is like when our soul and senses are assaulted by a longing for infinite joy? The Christian faith proclaims that such longing is neither mad nor absurd. It is an echo resounding in me from an everlasting, personal Source: God. This longing can’t be satisfied by stuff I buy. It can turn from frustration into exultation if I begin to know God. A secularist agenda just cannot still the depth of human desire.
Pope Leo speaks of a disarmed, disarming peace. Does his voice stand a chance of impacting on global dynamics?
Yes. At a time when many politicians worldwide have been discredited, the sound of a disinterested voice that speaks with peaceful authority, refusing to yield to rhetorical excess, appealing to our noblest aspirations will make an impact. It may even make us think. That is good. Depth of thought is not characteristic of today’s global manifestos.
Joseph Ratzinger deplored ‘filth’ in the Church. Which are the most insidious evils within the Church today?
Each year the Church’s Lent begins with a re-reading of Christ’s temptations in the wilderness. There are three: the temptation to think that materialism can meet humanity’s deepest needs; the temptation to absolutise a reality that is contingent and mediocre (a reality that might be myself); the temptation to jump, with misplaced confidence, into an ecstasy of self-destruction. These are perennial sources of insidious ills — forms of atheism, really, for they lure us away from a humble acknowledgement that God is God, making us to think we can, with impunity, set our own standards. The filth we have seen, over which we grieve and which, corporately, we seek to repair — scandals of abuse and dishonest stewardship — can almost always be traced to weakness before one of these three Ur-temptations. That, then, is where our spiritual battle must be waged.
Credibility is the Church’s choicest patrimony. Why so much resistance to the fight fought by recent pontiffs against the plague of child abuse?
My experience is that most people wish to collaborate. What manifests itself as resistance comes often, I think, from the assumption that the guidelines are for other people, that abuse could not happen in my diocese, parish, community, or family. Tragic experience shows that such assumptions are never permissible.
Fulton Sheen, who dedicated his life to the formation of priests, will be beatified. Does the traditional role of the priest make any sense today? Does priestly celibacy?
Absolutely. Consecrated celibacy well lived — and it is possible to live it well —witnesses to God’s primacy. It enables the orientation of a priest’s whole existence, making him apt to be a bearer of Christ’s love, an agent of reconciliation, a man free to give his life for others. That is what the ‘traditional role of the priest’ is about. It is not a matter of the clothes one wears.
What does Christian spirituality teach our contemporary world dominated by the speed of digital communication?
That speed is not tantamount to depth. And ultimately depth of communication is what we want — and what we need to construct our lives together.
Are triumphant nationalisms about to lead to a new world war?
Are they so triumphant? They seem to me desperate attempts to mobilise a civic purpose long lost. This brings us back to the question we set out from. What is the human being for? What is the point of society? How can we articulate and make effective the notion of a common good? If we propose intelligible, practicable answers, imbecile nationalisms need not triumph. Fatalism seems to have entered discourse about a third world war. The hypothesis is serious. But let’s make sure we don’t consider its realisation inevitable. Let’s shows ourselves free. Man is made for freedom. Freedom leads to flourishing. To risk being free, I need others to show me what freedom looks like. I — and you — could set in motion such a process of blessed mimesis.
Dawn at the monastery of Omberg. Photograph by Sofia Karlsson.
.
Peace
On 29 September 1938, Francis Poulenc found an excerpt from a poem by Charles d’Orléans (1394–1465) reprinted in Le Figaro. The text, profoundly topical, moved him. He set it to exquisite music. This song is ringing in my ears as the world is subject to threats, as politics seem to be overcome by madness. Truly, we need a peace the world cannot give.
Pray for peace, sweet Virgin Mary,
Queen of heaven and mistress of this world.
Kindly cause to pray
the company of saints and direct your plea
towards your Son, beseeching his highness
to have gracious regard for his people,
which he was pleased to redeem by his blood,
by bringing an end to war, which destroys all things.
Tire not of praying:
pray for peace, pray for peace,
joy’s true treasure.
Pray for peace, sweet Virgin Mary,
Queen of heaven and mistress of this world.
Kindly cause to pray
the company of saints and direct your plea
towards your Son, beseeching his highness
to have gracious regard for his people,
which he was pleased to redeem by his blood,
by bringing an end to war, which destroys all things.
Tire not of praying:
pray for peace, pray for peace,
joy’s true treasure.
How to Love?
This Easter reflection was published in The Tablet of 4 April.
The period between Christ’s resurrection and his ascension into heaven was a time of remembrance. The apostles spent it turning over in their minds all that the Lord had said and done to draw this into a coherent whole in the light of his Paschal victory.
By means of the liturgy, the Church draws us into this apostolic work of assimilation. It moves me that she, our Mother, lets us re-read in Eastertide words Jesus spoke on the eve of his Passion. The teaching of the thirteenth chapter of St John strikes chords then that differ from those struck when we heard it last on Maundy Thursday.
“Love one another; just as I have loved you, you also must love one another.”
When this “new commandment” was given in the Upper Room, the apostles connected it with the gesture just performed: the washing of their feet, including those of Judas, now gone into the night on an errand of betrayal.
The eleven will have remembered how, during the past three years, Jesus had again and again forgotten himself to attend to the troubles of others. They will have thought of the meeting with the haemorrhaging woman, of the healing of the lame man lowered through the roof, of the raising of the son of the widow of Nain.
They will have recalled the detachment required when Jesus, weary, had gone apart to rest, only to find on arrival that a crowd awaited him: no word of complaint was heard; instead he turned towards the interlopers cordially, all theirs. Truly, he had taught them what charity looks like.
The fact of Jesus’ resurrection raises our reflection into a further dimension. The ethical demands of Christian love remain. They are timeless. By them we shall be judged. Still, “love” in biblical language stands for something more.
“God is love”. Divine love shows itself in kind acts, as when the Lord, sending Adam and Eve forth from Eden, clothes them in garments of skin; when he consoles Hagar in the desert; or sends ravens out to feed his hunger-striking prophet Elijah.
But the love that is God’s Being can terrify, too. It is at work in the Egyptian plagues, in the downfall of Og, in the censuring of David after his calculated adultery with Bathsheba.
We may assume that the opposite of love is hatred. But no. Hatred can contain a passion that does not contradict love but is love’s inverted reflection.
Élie Wiesel said that the opposite of love is indifference, the carelessness that may not itself pursue the destruction of another but does not bother when others do. Love, seen in this perspective, comes to an end in the extinction of compassion, when individuals, communities or even states pursue no other goal than self-preservation.
In biblical terms, the opposite of love is death. God is love in as much as he is the principle of life, desiring things and beings to exist for the sheer delight of it, without expectation of gain. To love as God loves (“just as I have loved you”) is to nurture the existence and thriving of others while having no truck with death, resisting anger and the other passions that cause us to subsist in a kind of living death. For it is quite possible to have a regular pulse and normal digestion and yet to be soul-dead.
“Death with life contended,” sings the Easter sequence. It goes on: “Combat strangely ended!”
It seems weird, at first sight, that the cross, an instrument of execution, should be the emblem of life restored — it seems weird until we recall that that which died on the cross was death itself, while life was proved invincible. “Love is strong as death,” we read in the Song of Songs. That proposition was borne out on Calvary, then proved within the grave of Joseph of Arimathea, where Jesus rose.
We must invite this death-defying love into our lives. John proclaims: “I saw a new heaven and a new earth.” That reality is not for the end of time only; it is to be inaugurated now, in current experience.
But is this possible?
Already in the earliest times of Christianity, critical voices arose saying more or less this: “You Christians claim that Judah’s Lamb has conquered and the power of death has been trampled underfoot. But look around! Wars rage, the innocent suffer, beauty is stifled by ugliness. Friends betray friends; people once united in love hate one another. And you maintain that the kingdom of heaven is in our midst? Of all pretensions, this is surely the stupidest?”
When we consider the world we live in we must admit: the question has not gone away. It calls for an answer.
The Gospel testifies to Christ’s resurrection. He who was once dead is alive, and lives forever. On this conviction of historical, not symbolic, nature our faith is founded. The risen one was fully human, like you and me. The fact that he emerged from death’s clutches shows that death is not life’s end, but a passage from one form of life to another.
Christians of the East, like the Jews, call Easter Pascha — a Hebrew word whose root sense is, precisely, “passage.” It points towards the first Pasch in Egypt, when Israel after long captivity left Pharaoh’s domain. The angel of death passed over the dwellings of the Hebrews, marked with the blood of the Paschal lamb. What was accomplished in mystery then, in order that Israel might live, shows its significance in Jesus’s Pasch. He takes death on himself and explodes it from within.
An inadequate but suggestive image may be drawn from the realm of computers. Think of a virus invading an operating system to render it ineffective. That is what Jesus did to death, with wholly beneficent viral force. Even though death remains for us a physical fact, it is no longer a closed system. We must suffer it, but are not its captives. In Christ, we pass through it. His Pasch is ours.
Jesus calls himself “the living one”: “I was dead and now I am to live for ever and ever, and I hold the keys of seat and the underworld.” He descended into hell. He knows that sad neighbourhood. No cell of the kingdom of death is alien to him.
It is impressive that the evangelists, bearing witness to Jesus’s resurrection, expose the concrete reality of his death. They show us his wounds. Christian faith is realistic. Our religion is no magic. The God we believe in is no wizard.
The living God acts in life as it is. He sets out from what is old, from lived life, and discloses eternally salvific potential within it.
We may find it hard to believe this. It was hard for the apostles, too. Thomas doubted because he had known the meaning of despair. He had put his hope in Jesus. His devotion can be seen in the story of the raising of Lazarus. When Jesus insisted, in the face of threats, on going up to Jerusalem, Thomas cried out: “Let us go up with him, and die with him.” No one has greater love than he who gives his life for his friends.
We can understand what grief the mere thought of Jesus’ wounds must have called forth in Thomas. Jesus’ response to his doubt is no stern correction. It is rather a gentle expression of friendship: “Touch my wounds: you will see that they are not lethal”.
Thomas realises: Jesus takes away the sin of the world, not its wounds. His blood, though, flows into them and makes them clean, even glorious.
The Lord is at work in pain, also in the pain of our wounded world. The births pangs of the new creation continue, pointing towards a goal. We know the way to that goal. It carries the name of a person. Whoever says that he or she belongs to Jesus, “must walk as he walked.” The greatest temptation to which we are exposed is the temptation of hopelessness. It is to be resisted bravely.
Back then, in Jerusalem, after the first Easter, “those who were ill and tormented by unclean spirits” crowded together in the hope of being touched even by the merest shadow of the Gospel. “All of them were healed.” That can happen now, too, through Christ, with him, and in him.
Giovanni di Paolo’s Creation of the World from 1445, now in the Met – an image that points back to the beginning as well as forward to the recapitulation of all things in startling newness.
The period between Christ’s resurrection and his ascension into heaven was a time of remembrance. The apostles spent it turning over in their minds all that the Lord had said and done to draw this into a coherent whole in the light of his Paschal victory.
By means of the liturgy, the Church draws us into this apostolic work of assimilation. It moves me that she, our Mother, lets us re-read in Eastertide words Jesus spoke on the eve of his Passion. The teaching of the thirteenth chapter of St John strikes chords then that differ from those struck when we heard it last on Maundy Thursday.
“Love one another; just as I have loved you, you also must love one another.”
When this “new commandment” was given in the Upper Room, the apostles connected it with the gesture just performed: the washing of their feet, including those of Judas, now gone into the night on an errand of betrayal.
The eleven will have remembered how, during the past three years, Jesus had again and again forgotten himself to attend to the troubles of others. They will have thought of the meeting with the haemorrhaging woman, of the healing of the lame man lowered through the roof, of the raising of the son of the widow of Nain.
They will have recalled the detachment required when Jesus, weary, had gone apart to rest, only to find on arrival that a crowd awaited him: no word of complaint was heard; instead he turned towards the interlopers cordially, all theirs. Truly, he had taught them what charity looks like.
The fact of Jesus’ resurrection raises our reflection into a further dimension. The ethical demands of Christian love remain. They are timeless. By them we shall be judged. Still, “love” in biblical language stands for something more.
“God is love”. Divine love shows itself in kind acts, as when the Lord, sending Adam and Eve forth from Eden, clothes them in garments of skin; when he consoles Hagar in the desert; or sends ravens out to feed his hunger-striking prophet Elijah.
But the love that is God’s Being can terrify, too. It is at work in the Egyptian plagues, in the downfall of Og, in the censuring of David after his calculated adultery with Bathsheba.
We may assume that the opposite of love is hatred. But no. Hatred can contain a passion that does not contradict love but is love’s inverted reflection.
Élie Wiesel said that the opposite of love is indifference, the carelessness that may not itself pursue the destruction of another but does not bother when others do. Love, seen in this perspective, comes to an end in the extinction of compassion, when individuals, communities or even states pursue no other goal than self-preservation.
In biblical terms, the opposite of love is death. God is love in as much as he is the principle of life, desiring things and beings to exist for the sheer delight of it, without expectation of gain. To love as God loves (“just as I have loved you”) is to nurture the existence and thriving of others while having no truck with death, resisting anger and the other passions that cause us to subsist in a kind of living death. For it is quite possible to have a regular pulse and normal digestion and yet to be soul-dead.
“Death with life contended,” sings the Easter sequence. It goes on: “Combat strangely ended!”
It seems weird, at first sight, that the cross, an instrument of execution, should be the emblem of life restored — it seems weird until we recall that that which died on the cross was death itself, while life was proved invincible. “Love is strong as death,” we read in the Song of Songs. That proposition was borne out on Calvary, then proved within the grave of Joseph of Arimathea, where Jesus rose.
We must invite this death-defying love into our lives. John proclaims: “I saw a new heaven and a new earth.” That reality is not for the end of time only; it is to be inaugurated now, in current experience.
But is this possible?
Already in the earliest times of Christianity, critical voices arose saying more or less this: “You Christians claim that Judah’s Lamb has conquered and the power of death has been trampled underfoot. But look around! Wars rage, the innocent suffer, beauty is stifled by ugliness. Friends betray friends; people once united in love hate one another. And you maintain that the kingdom of heaven is in our midst? Of all pretensions, this is surely the stupidest?”
When we consider the world we live in we must admit: the question has not gone away. It calls for an answer.
The Gospel testifies to Christ’s resurrection. He who was once dead is alive, and lives forever. On this conviction of historical, not symbolic, nature our faith is founded. The risen one was fully human, like you and me. The fact that he emerged from death’s clutches shows that death is not life’s end, but a passage from one form of life to another.
Christians of the East, like the Jews, call Easter Pascha — a Hebrew word whose root sense is, precisely, “passage.” It points towards the first Pasch in Egypt, when Israel after long captivity left Pharaoh’s domain. The angel of death passed over the dwellings of the Hebrews, marked with the blood of the Paschal lamb. What was accomplished in mystery then, in order that Israel might live, shows its significance in Jesus’s Pasch. He takes death on himself and explodes it from within.
An inadequate but suggestive image may be drawn from the realm of computers. Think of a virus invading an operating system to render it ineffective. That is what Jesus did to death, with wholly beneficent viral force. Even though death remains for us a physical fact, it is no longer a closed system. We must suffer it, but are not its captives. In Christ, we pass through it. His Pasch is ours.
Jesus calls himself “the living one”: “I was dead and now I am to live for ever and ever, and I hold the keys of seat and the underworld.” He descended into hell. He knows that sad neighbourhood. No cell of the kingdom of death is alien to him.
It is impressive that the evangelists, bearing witness to Jesus’s resurrection, expose the concrete reality of his death. They show us his wounds. Christian faith is realistic. Our religion is no magic. The God we believe in is no wizard.
The living God acts in life as it is. He sets out from what is old, from lived life, and discloses eternally salvific potential within it.
We may find it hard to believe this. It was hard for the apostles, too. Thomas doubted because he had known the meaning of despair. He had put his hope in Jesus. His devotion can be seen in the story of the raising of Lazarus. When Jesus insisted, in the face of threats, on going up to Jerusalem, Thomas cried out: “Let us go up with him, and die with him.” No one has greater love than he who gives his life for his friends.
We can understand what grief the mere thought of Jesus’ wounds must have called forth in Thomas. Jesus’ response to his doubt is no stern correction. It is rather a gentle expression of friendship: “Touch my wounds: you will see that they are not lethal”.
Thomas realises: Jesus takes away the sin of the world, not its wounds. His blood, though, flows into them and makes them clean, even glorious.
The Lord is at work in pain, also in the pain of our wounded world. The births pangs of the new creation continue, pointing towards a goal. We know the way to that goal. It carries the name of a person. Whoever says that he or she belongs to Jesus, “must walk as he walked.” The greatest temptation to which we are exposed is the temptation of hopelessness. It is to be resisted bravely.
Back then, in Jerusalem, after the first Easter, “those who were ill and tormented by unclean spirits” crowded together in the hope of being touched even by the merest shadow of the Gospel. “All of them were healed.” That can happen now, too, through Christ, with him, and in him.
Giovanni di Paolo’s Creation of the World from 1445, now in the Met – an image that points back to the beginning as well as forward to the recapitulation of all things in startling newness.
Easter Sunday
Acts 10.34-43: Peter said, we are witnesses!
Colossians 3.1-4: Look for the things that are in heaven.
John 20.1-9: Peter saw and believed.
‘Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!’ With these words Christians traditionally greet each other in Eastertide. The statement of Jesus’s victory over death introduces all encounters. It’s a good custom. It forms consciousness. We really ought at all times to live, work, and relate to others in this way. The resurrection transforms and illumines existence as such. That is something we must recall in all circumstances, are we to convey Christ’s light, joy, and peace to the world.
‘Christ my hope has risen’, we sing in the Easter Sequence. He is indeed our hope and glory. Other kinds of glory come and go, they are ephemeral. But to be a true Christian, a witness to the resurrection, is glorious in time and eternity.
Our chief witness on Easter Sunday is Peter. On the Third Day he must still have been raw with grief and shame after the events of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. While Jesus sweated blood in the garden, Peter kipped. As Jesus was arrested by the mob, he ran. When Peter was recognised as one of Jesus’s companions, he exclaimed, not just once, but three times: ‘I know him not!’
He had let down his best friend, betrayed his own dearest promises. Had he slept at all since he lay weeping bitterly in a dark Jerusalem alley? I doubt it.
Then, early on Sunday, Mary Magdalene, Apostle to the Apostles, turns up breathless saying: ‘He’s not there!’ The first testimony to Christ’s resurrection is not marked by triumphant confidence. It’s anxiously confused. Mary, it will transpire, thought someone had stolen Jesus’s corpse. She ran to ask Peter and John investigate the callous spoiling of a grave. No reassuring presence announces the resurrection at first, but the disquieting absence of a dead body.
Death has been messed with. Death’s order has not been observed.
Who knows what the disciple thought when they set off. Perhaps their thoughts weren’t very orderly. They knew they needed to get to the grave where everything they’d lived for and hoped in seemed to be laid up on stony ground to rot. It would have been strange, though, had they not remembered Jesus’s mysterious words about the Third Day. He had repeated them so insistently.
Could they have been realistic speech, not some sort of poetic parable?
The image of these two men running through Jerusalem in the darkness before dawn, with Mary trailing behind, is a good, true image of what it means to live by faith. The believer does not always bask in the warm, contended certainty of possessing answers to all life’s questions. The believer is someone who, ever anew, lets himself be challenged by the thought, ‘But what if everything Jesus said and taught is in fact real and liveable?’, who determinedly sets about trying it out, forming his life by his faith, and doesn’t just swan around prattling about it.
When Peter and John arrive, they see that everything is the way Mary had said. They see the emptiness. They see the linen cloths on the ground. These must be significant. If someone comes to steal a dead body, they surely don’t undress it first? The cloth that had rested on Jesus’s face lies in a place by itself, neatly rolled up, the way a courteous guest, after staying overnight with friends, will fold his bed linen on departure, as a little gesture of gratitude to his hosts.
The things the disciples observe feed their detective work. By deductive reasoning, they try to work out what has happened. Illumination comes, though, at a different level. ‘Peter’, we have heard, ‘saw and believed’.
‘Belief’ denotes, here, recognition of connectedness. Peter sees beyond his immediate grief, his intimate betrayal. He remembers his own confession at Caesarea: ‘You are the Son of God!’ He remembers the light seen on Tabor, the raising of the widow’s son at Nain, the fish with the gold coin in its mouth that made Jesus say: ‘Give it for you and me’. You and me! The mere thought of those words are balm to a man who has felt irremediably alone. Peter remembers Jesus’s repeated assurance that all the painful things ‘must’ take place, but are not final. ‘When I am risen’, he said, ‘I will go ahead into Galilee’ (Mt 26.32).
Has this ‘when’ occurred?! Has he in truth passed through death?!
That night Peter meets the Risen One. Jesus comes to the disciples and says: ‘Peace!’ He bids them receive the Holy Spirit. He could have appeared to Peter at the empty tomb. But he didn’t. He wanted Peter first to come to faith by considering his own experience in the light of Jesus’s promises. That is how faith becomes substantial in a life, a foundation on which all else can rest — firm rock, not shifting sand. The humiliated Peter is in this way changed into a courageous witness, as attested by today’s first reading from the Acts of the Apostles.
All of us are called into this coming-to-faith-through-renewed-awareness. Easter asks us to reread our whole life, our failures as well as our achievements, in the light of Jesus’s victory over death in order to ascertain, not just on the basis of stuff we’ve read or watched on YouTube, but from experience: ‘He is risen!’
That is how we become credible witnesses, fit to carry his Gospel to the ends of the earth.
Amen. Alleluia!
Woodcut by Ørnulf Ranheimsæter.
Colossians 3.1-4: Look for the things that are in heaven.
John 20.1-9: Peter saw and believed.
‘Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!’ With these words Christians traditionally greet each other in Eastertide. The statement of Jesus’s victory over death introduces all encounters. It’s a good custom. It forms consciousness. We really ought at all times to live, work, and relate to others in this way. The resurrection transforms and illumines existence as such. That is something we must recall in all circumstances, are we to convey Christ’s light, joy, and peace to the world.
‘Christ my hope has risen’, we sing in the Easter Sequence. He is indeed our hope and glory. Other kinds of glory come and go, they are ephemeral. But to be a true Christian, a witness to the resurrection, is glorious in time and eternity.
Our chief witness on Easter Sunday is Peter. On the Third Day he must still have been raw with grief and shame after the events of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. While Jesus sweated blood in the garden, Peter kipped. As Jesus was arrested by the mob, he ran. When Peter was recognised as one of Jesus’s companions, he exclaimed, not just once, but three times: ‘I know him not!’
He had let down his best friend, betrayed his own dearest promises. Had he slept at all since he lay weeping bitterly in a dark Jerusalem alley? I doubt it.
Then, early on Sunday, Mary Magdalene, Apostle to the Apostles, turns up breathless saying: ‘He’s not there!’ The first testimony to Christ’s resurrection is not marked by triumphant confidence. It’s anxiously confused. Mary, it will transpire, thought someone had stolen Jesus’s corpse. She ran to ask Peter and John investigate the callous spoiling of a grave. No reassuring presence announces the resurrection at first, but the disquieting absence of a dead body.
Death has been messed with. Death’s order has not been observed.
Who knows what the disciple thought when they set off. Perhaps their thoughts weren’t very orderly. They knew they needed to get to the grave where everything they’d lived for and hoped in seemed to be laid up on stony ground to rot. It would have been strange, though, had they not remembered Jesus’s mysterious words about the Third Day. He had repeated them so insistently.
Could they have been realistic speech, not some sort of poetic parable?
The image of these two men running through Jerusalem in the darkness before dawn, with Mary trailing behind, is a good, true image of what it means to live by faith. The believer does not always bask in the warm, contended certainty of possessing answers to all life’s questions. The believer is someone who, ever anew, lets himself be challenged by the thought, ‘But what if everything Jesus said and taught is in fact real and liveable?’, who determinedly sets about trying it out, forming his life by his faith, and doesn’t just swan around prattling about it.
When Peter and John arrive, they see that everything is the way Mary had said. They see the emptiness. They see the linen cloths on the ground. These must be significant. If someone comes to steal a dead body, they surely don’t undress it first? The cloth that had rested on Jesus’s face lies in a place by itself, neatly rolled up, the way a courteous guest, after staying overnight with friends, will fold his bed linen on departure, as a little gesture of gratitude to his hosts.
The things the disciples observe feed their detective work. By deductive reasoning, they try to work out what has happened. Illumination comes, though, at a different level. ‘Peter’, we have heard, ‘saw and believed’.
‘Belief’ denotes, here, recognition of connectedness. Peter sees beyond his immediate grief, his intimate betrayal. He remembers his own confession at Caesarea: ‘You are the Son of God!’ He remembers the light seen on Tabor, the raising of the widow’s son at Nain, the fish with the gold coin in its mouth that made Jesus say: ‘Give it for you and me’. You and me! The mere thought of those words are balm to a man who has felt irremediably alone. Peter remembers Jesus’s repeated assurance that all the painful things ‘must’ take place, but are not final. ‘When I am risen’, he said, ‘I will go ahead into Galilee’ (Mt 26.32).
Has this ‘when’ occurred?! Has he in truth passed through death?!
That night Peter meets the Risen One. Jesus comes to the disciples and says: ‘Peace!’ He bids them receive the Holy Spirit. He could have appeared to Peter at the empty tomb. But he didn’t. He wanted Peter first to come to faith by considering his own experience in the light of Jesus’s promises. That is how faith becomes substantial in a life, a foundation on which all else can rest — firm rock, not shifting sand. The humiliated Peter is in this way changed into a courageous witness, as attested by today’s first reading from the Acts of the Apostles.
All of us are called into this coming-to-faith-through-renewed-awareness. Easter asks us to reread our whole life, our failures as well as our achievements, in the light of Jesus’s victory over death in order to ascertain, not just on the basis of stuff we’ve read or watched on YouTube, but from experience: ‘He is risen!’
That is how we become credible witnesses, fit to carry his Gospel to the ends of the earth.
Amen. Alleluia!
Woodcut by Ørnulf Ranheimsæter.
Easter Vigil
The character of death is relentless. Death marks an absolute divide. We’re either alive or dead. There’s no in-between. Anyone who has sat at a death-bed knows what I mean. The dying person may be in a coma; we may struggle to see whether he or she is breathing; but they are there. Then death comes, and we are left utterly alone, just with a lifeless body, conscious of an explicit, piercing absence.
Since death so clearly marks a limit, people have always regarded it with respect. This holds for all religions. It holds for most materialists as well, even if some tend, now, to present death as a product one might, and should, pre-order. The irreversibility of death is not reduced thereby. In a way it is accentuated.
An encounter with death can provoke rage, especially when children die or someone perishes by violence or accident. We spontaneously think: ‘It shouldn’t be like this!’ Our inner rebellion can take desperate, grotesque, even absurd forms.
An encounter with death can provoke deep longing. What wouldn’t we give to sit, once again, before the fire with someone we love who has died, to talk confidentially, to get a hug, to hear a laugh we may be missing sorely?
Death puts us humans in our place; it humiliates and overwhelms us; but doesn’t entirely convince us. Deep even in the souls of atheists, who insist that souls don’t exist, there’s a suspicion that death is really unreal, a performance that will as the curtain goes down, the light comes on, and we go into the air. There’s just to much life in a human being for it to be switched off as if it were a gadget.
Easter confirms our suspicion. Easter unmasks death as an impostor. Our maddest desire turns out reliable: we may live for ever. In us there is an essential core that cannot die, created to move into an ever more intense kind of life.
The Easter Vigil lets us contemplate this truth in a perspective reaching from creation to the end of time. The central point of that history is the resurrection of Jesus, the Son of God, from the dead.
Christ’s rising is the true Big Bang thanks to which it means something that the world exists. If human death is swallowed up by divine power, then all our experience, all our insight has eternal consequence. Life can’t be limited, then, to monotonous cycles of buy-use-discard, of desire-satisfaction-new desire.
No, in the light of the resurrection our existence unfolds limitlessly. An exultation vibrates in all things. We ascertain that nothing, and no one, is hopeless.
Jesus’s victory over death calls out to us: ‘Get ready to live!’ May we rise to the measure of what is promised and given us.
Amen. Alleluia!
The Harrowing of Hell by the School of Fra Angelico, in the Convent of San Marco, Florence.
Since death so clearly marks a limit, people have always regarded it with respect. This holds for all religions. It holds for most materialists as well, even if some tend, now, to present death as a product one might, and should, pre-order. The irreversibility of death is not reduced thereby. In a way it is accentuated.
An encounter with death can provoke rage, especially when children die or someone perishes by violence or accident. We spontaneously think: ‘It shouldn’t be like this!’ Our inner rebellion can take desperate, grotesque, even absurd forms.
An encounter with death can provoke deep longing. What wouldn’t we give to sit, once again, before the fire with someone we love who has died, to talk confidentially, to get a hug, to hear a laugh we may be missing sorely?
Death puts us humans in our place; it humiliates and overwhelms us; but doesn’t entirely convince us. Deep even in the souls of atheists, who insist that souls don’t exist, there’s a suspicion that death is really unreal, a performance that will as the curtain goes down, the light comes on, and we go into the air. There’s just to much life in a human being for it to be switched off as if it were a gadget.
Easter confirms our suspicion. Easter unmasks death as an impostor. Our maddest desire turns out reliable: we may live for ever. In us there is an essential core that cannot die, created to move into an ever more intense kind of life.
The Easter Vigil lets us contemplate this truth in a perspective reaching from creation to the end of time. The central point of that history is the resurrection of Jesus, the Son of God, from the dead.
Christ’s rising is the true Big Bang thanks to which it means something that the world exists. If human death is swallowed up by divine power, then all our experience, all our insight has eternal consequence. Life can’t be limited, then, to monotonous cycles of buy-use-discard, of desire-satisfaction-new desire.
No, in the light of the resurrection our existence unfolds limitlessly. An exultation vibrates in all things. We ascertain that nothing, and no one, is hopeless.
Jesus’s victory over death calls out to us: ‘Get ready to live!’ May we rise to the measure of what is promised and given us.
Amen. Alleluia!
The Harrowing of Hell by the School of Fra Angelico, in the Convent of San Marco, Florence.
Good Friday
John 18.1-19.42: Jesus carried the cross by himself.
The Passion according to St John gives an elliptic account of how Jesus got from Pilate’s Praetorium to Calvary. ‘Jesus carried the cross by himself’, writes John; and that’s it. Perhaps the Beloved Disciple just couldn’t bear recalling the details.
The Church’s tradition, as we encounter it in the Stations of the Cross, for example, tells us that Jesus fell three time on the way: three instances of physical collapse under the weight of the cross. ‘The spirit indeed is willing’, Jesus had told the disciples on the Mount of Olives, ‘but the flesh is weak.’ Going up to be crucified, he felt the weakness in his own body.
He carries the cross on our behalf. He will be fastened to it for our sake. In the three falls, we can see ourselves.
The first stands for the first fall of humanity, the tragedy that causes our nature to be afflicted by a kind of system error. ‘I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate’, writes Paul in an honest confession (Rm 7.15). I dare say we have all, at various points, thought similarly. The Bible’s story of the drama in Eden touches depths that exist in all of us. The more I engage with this story, and the more I come to know myself, the more it strikes me just how realistic is the Church’s teaching about original sin. To be human is to live within an inherited trauma defined by a breach of trust. Jesus assumes that trauma. In full view of all, he falls under the weight of it. But he does not stay down.
When Jesus falls for the second time, it is in the name of his people. He had come to fulfil the promises made to Israel. He incarnates the Glory the people had seen on Sinai. But on Good Friday he hears his brethren cry: ‘Away with him, give us Barabbas.’ The priests, anointed to worship the living God, would take his — God’s — life. The chosen people as a whole does not want to know the one who chooses them. One by one, then as a crowd, they avert their gaze. How this afflicts the sacred heart of Jesus can be seen when he weeps over Jerusalem, saying, ‘If only you knew!’ (Lk 19.41f.). Jesus falls the second time for all who are rejected by those they love most. But he stands up and moves on. ‘His faithful love lasts for ever’, David sang (Ps 136.1). The Church sternly tells us that no one may think of the Jewish people ‘as rejected or accursed by God’ (Nostra Aetate 4). Christ carries the people with him, in him, on the cross, still at work to make it reach the fulness of salvation. Jesus’s second fall shows us what steadfast, patient love looks like.
The Lord’s third fall is the most heart-rending. He has already gone far. He is tired. The consolation received along the way from his Mother, from Veronica, from Simon of Cyrene, is behind him. Before him he sees the contour of the cross, an image of how we humans, with the simplest means, devise means to torture one another. With the cross before him, Jesus falls again. This third fall stands for our betrayals, mine and yours, when we, who embrace the fullness of faith are yet faithless. Jesus falls for the third time under the weight I have put upon him. This is a fact that today I must lucidly consider, feeling the pain of my fickleness. But again Jesus rises, at first a little uncertainly, visibly worn, but still. There is hope for me, too! No sin is beyond reconciliation if only I let myself be reconciled.
With her brilliant sense of choreography, the Church makes the mystery hidden in Jesus’s three falls visible in this solemn celebration. In a few moments, after the great intercessions of Good Friday that, like rings in still pond, spread across the whole surface of the world and of history, the cross will be carried in in triumph. The tree of affliction reveals itself the tree of victory. We adore the cross as an expression of God’s invincible love. With an acclamation that has resounded in the Church for centuries, we call out: ‘By the cross, joy has entered the world!’ Light shines in darkness. Even men’s anger can turn to praise (cf. Ps 76.10).
We each make this confession our own when we come to kiss the tree of the cross. The bishop goes first, not on account of privilege associated with his charge, but simply because it is his task to carry whatever it is the Church is carrying. He goes barefoot, without pretensions, aware of his own and our collective frailty. One his way up the aisle he throws himself down on the ground three times. In this way we remember and honour the three falls of Jesus. After each fall, he gets up again, in Jesus’s name and in the name of the Church, in order to proceed, magnetically drawn towards the cross, which no longer represents an end-point but a beginning, the key to renewed existence.
No fall is definitive as long as we raise our eyes towards the cross and call Jesus’s power into our infirmity. He who made water into wine, who raised Lazarus, who gave sight to the man born blind, can heal and transform our wounds, yours and mine, however configured, whether visible or hidden. Our holy, strong, immortal God chose to appear before us weak in order that we, in our weakness, should not fear to approach him.
Illumined by the singular grace of Good Friday, we do not crawl to the cross. We walk upright, as is seeming for women and men aware of having been endowed with great dignity, prodigal children trustfully making their way back to their Father’s house.
Today’s message to each of us is this: Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the world, loves you with eternal love. Just allow it to work. Amen.
Francesco Bonsignori, Andata al Calvario, now in the Museo di Palazzo Ducale, Mantova.
The Passion according to St John gives an elliptic account of how Jesus got from Pilate’s Praetorium to Calvary. ‘Jesus carried the cross by himself’, writes John; and that’s it. Perhaps the Beloved Disciple just couldn’t bear recalling the details.
The Church’s tradition, as we encounter it in the Stations of the Cross, for example, tells us that Jesus fell three time on the way: three instances of physical collapse under the weight of the cross. ‘The spirit indeed is willing’, Jesus had told the disciples on the Mount of Olives, ‘but the flesh is weak.’ Going up to be crucified, he felt the weakness in his own body.
He carries the cross on our behalf. He will be fastened to it for our sake. In the three falls, we can see ourselves.
The first stands for the first fall of humanity, the tragedy that causes our nature to be afflicted by a kind of system error. ‘I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate’, writes Paul in an honest confession (Rm 7.15). I dare say we have all, at various points, thought similarly. The Bible’s story of the drama in Eden touches depths that exist in all of us. The more I engage with this story, and the more I come to know myself, the more it strikes me just how realistic is the Church’s teaching about original sin. To be human is to live within an inherited trauma defined by a breach of trust. Jesus assumes that trauma. In full view of all, he falls under the weight of it. But he does not stay down.
When Jesus falls for the second time, it is in the name of his people. He had come to fulfil the promises made to Israel. He incarnates the Glory the people had seen on Sinai. But on Good Friday he hears his brethren cry: ‘Away with him, give us Barabbas.’ The priests, anointed to worship the living God, would take his — God’s — life. The chosen people as a whole does not want to know the one who chooses them. One by one, then as a crowd, they avert their gaze. How this afflicts the sacred heart of Jesus can be seen when he weeps over Jerusalem, saying, ‘If only you knew!’ (Lk 19.41f.). Jesus falls the second time for all who are rejected by those they love most. But he stands up and moves on. ‘His faithful love lasts for ever’, David sang (Ps 136.1). The Church sternly tells us that no one may think of the Jewish people ‘as rejected or accursed by God’ (Nostra Aetate 4). Christ carries the people with him, in him, on the cross, still at work to make it reach the fulness of salvation. Jesus’s second fall shows us what steadfast, patient love looks like.
The Lord’s third fall is the most heart-rending. He has already gone far. He is tired. The consolation received along the way from his Mother, from Veronica, from Simon of Cyrene, is behind him. Before him he sees the contour of the cross, an image of how we humans, with the simplest means, devise means to torture one another. With the cross before him, Jesus falls again. This third fall stands for our betrayals, mine and yours, when we, who embrace the fullness of faith are yet faithless. Jesus falls for the third time under the weight I have put upon him. This is a fact that today I must lucidly consider, feeling the pain of my fickleness. But again Jesus rises, at first a little uncertainly, visibly worn, but still. There is hope for me, too! No sin is beyond reconciliation if only I let myself be reconciled.
With her brilliant sense of choreography, the Church makes the mystery hidden in Jesus’s three falls visible in this solemn celebration. In a few moments, after the great intercessions of Good Friday that, like rings in still pond, spread across the whole surface of the world and of history, the cross will be carried in in triumph. The tree of affliction reveals itself the tree of victory. We adore the cross as an expression of God’s invincible love. With an acclamation that has resounded in the Church for centuries, we call out: ‘By the cross, joy has entered the world!’ Light shines in darkness. Even men’s anger can turn to praise (cf. Ps 76.10).
We each make this confession our own when we come to kiss the tree of the cross. The bishop goes first, not on account of privilege associated with his charge, but simply because it is his task to carry whatever it is the Church is carrying. He goes barefoot, without pretensions, aware of his own and our collective frailty. One his way up the aisle he throws himself down on the ground three times. In this way we remember and honour the three falls of Jesus. After each fall, he gets up again, in Jesus’s name and in the name of the Church, in order to proceed, magnetically drawn towards the cross, which no longer represents an end-point but a beginning, the key to renewed existence.
No fall is definitive as long as we raise our eyes towards the cross and call Jesus’s power into our infirmity. He who made water into wine, who raised Lazarus, who gave sight to the man born blind, can heal and transform our wounds, yours and mine, however configured, whether visible or hidden. Our holy, strong, immortal God chose to appear before us weak in order that we, in our weakness, should not fear to approach him.
Illumined by the singular grace of Good Friday, we do not crawl to the cross. We walk upright, as is seeming for women and men aware of having been endowed with great dignity, prodigal children trustfully making their way back to their Father’s house.
Today’s message to each of us is this: Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the world, loves you with eternal love. Just allow it to work. Amen.
Francesco Bonsignori, Andata al Calvario, now in the Museo di Palazzo Ducale, Mantova.