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:
Desert Fathers 49 
You can find this episode in video format here – a dedicated page – and pick it up in audio wherever you listen to podcasts. On YouTube, the full range of episodes can be found here.
The reason we have written Read More
The reason we have written Read More
Not Worthy Homily given as part of an Advent recollection at the Dominican church in Kraków following the launch of the Polish version of my book Chastity.
When Jesus went into Capernaum a centurion came up and pleaded with him. ‘Sir,’ he said ‘my Read More
When Jesus went into Capernaum a centurion came up and pleaded with him. ‘Sir,’ he said ‘my Read More
Canta et ambula St Augustine’s sensitivity to music is well documented. In the Confessions he says how struck he was by the singing in the cathedral of Milan: ‘How I wept, deeply moved by your hymns, songs, and the voices that echoed through Read More
Tolkien’s Creation Asked by The Tablet to contribute to its annual Books of the Year supplement, I was happy to recommend a volume that has accompanied me for much of the autumn as I’ve been reading it in small chunks at breakfast: ‘What Read More
Bread Grows in Winter I’ve just received in the mail Jennifer Bryson’s translation of Ida Görres’s seminal book Bread Grows in Winter, handsomely published by Ignatius Press. I was honoured to be asked to contribute a preface. Here it is:
I picked up a battered German Read More
I picked up a battered German Read More
Desert Fathers 48 You can find this episode in video format here – a dedicated page – and pick it up in audio wherever you listen to podcasts. On YouTube, the full range of episodes can be found here.
Abba Ammoes asked [Abba Poemen] Read More
Abba Ammoes asked [Abba Poemen] Read More
Irresistible Among the many things that struck me in Tordis Ørjasæter‘s ‘personal history of the handicapped child in literature’, We Are Not Alone, was this description of Sigrid Undset, which passes on a childhood remembrance of Tordis’s husband Jo, whose father, the Read More
Veritas
Homily given as part of an Advent recollection at the Dominican church in Kraków following the launch of the Polish version of my book Chastity.
Filled with joy by the Holy Spirit, Jesus said: ‘I bless you, Father, Lord of heaven and of earth, for hiding these things from the learned and the clever and revealing them to mere children. Yes, Father, for that is what it pleased you to do. Everything has been entrusted to me by my Father; and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, and who the Father is except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. Luke 10:21-24.
So are divine realities really inaccessible to the learned and the clever? If so, it’s bad news for a community of Dominicans. Before we despair on their behalf, however, let us consider the context of the Gospel words. Jesus exclaims them as he welcomes back the seventy proto-disciples sent abroad to spread his peace and to proclaim the proximity of God’s kingdom. The seventy are amazed at what they have accomplished.
Returning with joy, they say, ‘Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name!’ Jesus assures them that he has seen Satan fall like lightning from heaven. That is what causes him to rejoice ‘in the Holy Spirit’ and to speak the words we have heard.
There is a connection, then, between the sort of ‘intelligence’ Jesus condemns and demonic presumption. The demons are intelligent but soulless creatures. They can be cunning. They excel at manipulation. But they are uninterested in truth. Their purpose is confusion.
The Gospel cuts through their stratagems by proposing, not just a theory of the universe, but new life as man’s integrity is restored by grace. Grace-filled man rises above deceit when he discovers that the ultimate reality making sense of things is not some speculative, abstract formula but love, divine love incarnate in Christ Jesus and sharable by women and men who freely let his peaceful power work through them.
Jesus does not celebrate stupidity. The power of reason is an integral aspect of his image in us. We are obliged to develop it as well as we can. St Peter, one of those to whom Jesus speaks in this scene, urges us, in his first epistle, to be always ready to make a defence to those who call us to account for the hope that is in us (1 Pet 3.15). For that, we need all our resources of learning. What we must remember, quite simply, is that arguments are not enough. Argument left to its own devices is only too prone to stray off course, abandoning the lead of truth-inspired reason for self-generated chaos.
Our Dominican friends, thank God, are kept on the straight, narrow path by their Order’s glorious motto: ‘Veritas’! Human intelligence deployed in search for truth, illumined by love, is a wonderful faculty apt to enable growth in wisdom and virtue, apt to bring light into darkness.
Let us resolve to use our intelligence responsibly and well, according to our calling or state of life. Not everyone has to give lectures or write books. Being intelligent is primarily about maintaining a concern for the meaning of things, about resisting demonic disorder, about courageously unmasking senselessness.
If you think of H.C. Andersen’s well-known tale of the emperor’s new clothes, an important use of intelligence right now is ability to state that the emperor is naked when, in fact, he is. To do that, we must indeed become like children — not by becoming childish, but by retaining, or redeveloping, an ability to see reality clearly, in truth.
Amen.
Filled with joy by the Holy Spirit, Jesus said: ‘I bless you, Father, Lord of heaven and of earth, for hiding these things from the learned and the clever and revealing them to mere children. Yes, Father, for that is what it pleased you to do. Everything has been entrusted to me by my Father; and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, and who the Father is except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. Luke 10:21-24.
So are divine realities really inaccessible to the learned and the clever? If so, it’s bad news for a community of Dominicans. Before we despair on their behalf, however, let us consider the context of the Gospel words. Jesus exclaims them as he welcomes back the seventy proto-disciples sent abroad to spread his peace and to proclaim the proximity of God’s kingdom. The seventy are amazed at what they have accomplished.
Returning with joy, they say, ‘Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name!’ Jesus assures them that he has seen Satan fall like lightning from heaven. That is what causes him to rejoice ‘in the Holy Spirit’ and to speak the words we have heard.
There is a connection, then, between the sort of ‘intelligence’ Jesus condemns and demonic presumption. The demons are intelligent but soulless creatures. They can be cunning. They excel at manipulation. But they are uninterested in truth. Their purpose is confusion.
The Gospel cuts through their stratagems by proposing, not just a theory of the universe, but new life as man’s integrity is restored by grace. Grace-filled man rises above deceit when he discovers that the ultimate reality making sense of things is not some speculative, abstract formula but love, divine love incarnate in Christ Jesus and sharable by women and men who freely let his peaceful power work through them.
Jesus does not celebrate stupidity. The power of reason is an integral aspect of his image in us. We are obliged to develop it as well as we can. St Peter, one of those to whom Jesus speaks in this scene, urges us, in his first epistle, to be always ready to make a defence to those who call us to account for the hope that is in us (1 Pet 3.15). For that, we need all our resources of learning. What we must remember, quite simply, is that arguments are not enough. Argument left to its own devices is only too prone to stray off course, abandoning the lead of truth-inspired reason for self-generated chaos.
Our Dominican friends, thank God, are kept on the straight, narrow path by their Order’s glorious motto: ‘Veritas’! Human intelligence deployed in search for truth, illumined by love, is a wonderful faculty apt to enable growth in wisdom and virtue, apt to bring light into darkness.
Let us resolve to use our intelligence responsibly and well, according to our calling or state of life. Not everyone has to give lectures or write books. Being intelligent is primarily about maintaining a concern for the meaning of things, about resisting demonic disorder, about courageously unmasking senselessness.
If you think of H.C. Andersen’s well-known tale of the emperor’s new clothes, an important use of intelligence right now is ability to state that the emperor is naked when, in fact, he is. To do that, we must indeed become like children — not by becoming childish, but by retaining, or redeveloping, an ability to see reality clearly, in truth.
Amen.
Desert Fathers 49
You can find this episode in video format here – a dedicated page – and pick it up in audio wherever you listen to podcasts. On YouTube, the full range of episodes can be found here.
The reason we have written this rule is that, by observing it in monasteries, we can show that we have some degree of virtue and the beginnings of monastic life. But for anyone hastening on to the perfection of monastic life, there are the teachings of the holy Fathers, the observance of which will lead him to the very heights of perfection. What page, what passage of the inspired books of the Old and New Testaments is not the truest of guides for human life? What book of the holy Catholic Fathers does not resoundingly summon us along the true way to reach the Creator? […] Are you hastening towards your heavenly home? Then with Christ’s help, keep this little rule that we have written for beginners. After that, you can set out for the loftier summits of the teachings and virtues we mentioned above, and under God’s protection you will reach them. Amen.
Throughout this series I have referred to the teaching of St Benedict. The time has come to speak of him specifically. Benedictine monasticism has shaped the West. Not for nothing did Pope St John Paul II in 1980 proclaim St Benedict a patron of Europe. When we think of Benedict’s legacy we may think first of imposing buildings, venerable institutions, Gregorian chant, and thick, learned, leather-bound tomes. St Benedict seems to represents the settled solidity our world today has largely lost. So we may assume that his mindset was different from that of the Desert Fathers whose humble cells were provisional, who set up no schools, who prayed in private, and were more concerned with giving books away than with gathering them in libraries.
Of course, there are distinctions. Benedict was a Roman through and through. He excelled in organisation and expressed himself in lapidary prose. His was a world of forests and broad fertile plains dotted with villas. A desert of sand he could only have imagined. Benedict was by character discreet. His governance was exquisitely balanced. It is hard to fancy him giving the sort of counsel Antony gave when, to teach a man detachment, he sent him out among birds of prey and wild dogs covered in bacon. Let us not, though, make too much of these external features. Inwardly Benedict stood in grateful continuity with those monks who had lived and fought in Egypt. If you have studied the lives and sayings of the Desert Fathers in depth, then turn to the Regula and Life of Benedict, you will pick up countless resonances. Should your ear not yet be sufficiently attuned, turn to the index pages of a critical edition of the Rule and you will see the frequency and range of its author’s references.
Let us not forget that monastic life became highly organised in Egypt as well. Already in Antony’s day, colonies were set up so that Athanasius, travelling inland from his see of Alexandria, could note: ‘there were in the mountains monastic dwellings like tents filled with heavenly choirs, singing Psalms, rejoicing in the hope of things to come, working to give alms, having love for each other and being in harmony with one another. To see it was truly to see a land like no other.’
What Antony’s spiritual descendants built was a new civilisation. Athanasius saw it and was glad. St Pachomius, born a generation later, took the task of establishing monasticism further. He brought monks together in fixed, intentional communities. At the command of an angel, Pachomius composed a monastic rule destined to have great influence. St Basil read it and used it in his ordinances. St Jerome translated it into Latin. In these ways it came to nourish St Benedict as well.
By the time Pachomius died in 348, his community had well over a hundred members. It would be wrong, therefore, to entertain the idea, a caricature, that Egyptian monasticism stayed somehow primitively pure, charismatic, and personal while in Europe it was shackled by institutions. To the south as well as to the north of the Mediterranean Basin, wise women and men worked hard to pass on and perpetuate the fire that the likes of Antony, Macarius, and Moses had lighted in many human hearts. Any charism, to last, must eventually find objective expression in a framework of sharable stability. There is no inevitable contradiction between rule and life. The challenge is to maintain the rule infused with life, and to regulate vitality.
The passage cited above is from the last chapter of Benedict’s Rule. Summing up his teaching, it provides a list of Further Reading. Benedict’s project continues that of the earlier Fathers. He distils their insights. What he modestly calls a little rule for beginners is in fact pure essence. Any monk or nun who has read it and sought to put it into practice will testify to this. Even more so will abbots or abbesses who, over time, have taught the rule to their communities, discovering what depths exist under surfaces of seeming simplicity. Benedict, too, incites us to set our sight high, to aim for ‘perfection’ in the sense I developed in the first few episodes. The wisdom of the Desert Fathers is not confined to the past, or to books. It is alive, a generator of good zeal, in countless monasteries now. Their continued flourishing is crucial to the ecosystem of the Church’s life. We may hope that generous, courageous women and men , thirsty for fullness of life, will answer the monastic call still.
St Benedict being clothed in the monastic habit. Fresco from the church of Subiaco.
The reason we have written this rule is that, by observing it in monasteries, we can show that we have some degree of virtue and the beginnings of monastic life. But for anyone hastening on to the perfection of monastic life, there are the teachings of the holy Fathers, the observance of which will lead him to the very heights of perfection. What page, what passage of the inspired books of the Old and New Testaments is not the truest of guides for human life? What book of the holy Catholic Fathers does not resoundingly summon us along the true way to reach the Creator? […] Are you hastening towards your heavenly home? Then with Christ’s help, keep this little rule that we have written for beginners. After that, you can set out for the loftier summits of the teachings and virtues we mentioned above, and under God’s protection you will reach them. Amen.
Throughout this series I have referred to the teaching of St Benedict. The time has come to speak of him specifically. Benedictine monasticism has shaped the West. Not for nothing did Pope St John Paul II in 1980 proclaim St Benedict a patron of Europe. When we think of Benedict’s legacy we may think first of imposing buildings, venerable institutions, Gregorian chant, and thick, learned, leather-bound tomes. St Benedict seems to represents the settled solidity our world today has largely lost. So we may assume that his mindset was different from that of the Desert Fathers whose humble cells were provisional, who set up no schools, who prayed in private, and were more concerned with giving books away than with gathering them in libraries.
Of course, there are distinctions. Benedict was a Roman through and through. He excelled in organisation and expressed himself in lapidary prose. His was a world of forests and broad fertile plains dotted with villas. A desert of sand he could only have imagined. Benedict was by character discreet. His governance was exquisitely balanced. It is hard to fancy him giving the sort of counsel Antony gave when, to teach a man detachment, he sent him out among birds of prey and wild dogs covered in bacon. Let us not, though, make too much of these external features. Inwardly Benedict stood in grateful continuity with those monks who had lived and fought in Egypt. If you have studied the lives and sayings of the Desert Fathers in depth, then turn to the Regula and Life of Benedict, you will pick up countless resonances. Should your ear not yet be sufficiently attuned, turn to the index pages of a critical edition of the Rule and you will see the frequency and range of its author’s references.
Let us not forget that monastic life became highly organised in Egypt as well. Already in Antony’s day, colonies were set up so that Athanasius, travelling inland from his see of Alexandria, could note: ‘there were in the mountains monastic dwellings like tents filled with heavenly choirs, singing Psalms, rejoicing in the hope of things to come, working to give alms, having love for each other and being in harmony with one another. To see it was truly to see a land like no other.’
What Antony’s spiritual descendants built was a new civilisation. Athanasius saw it and was glad. St Pachomius, born a generation later, took the task of establishing monasticism further. He brought monks together in fixed, intentional communities. At the command of an angel, Pachomius composed a monastic rule destined to have great influence. St Basil read it and used it in his ordinances. St Jerome translated it into Latin. In these ways it came to nourish St Benedict as well.
By the time Pachomius died in 348, his community had well over a hundred members. It would be wrong, therefore, to entertain the idea, a caricature, that Egyptian monasticism stayed somehow primitively pure, charismatic, and personal while in Europe it was shackled by institutions. To the south as well as to the north of the Mediterranean Basin, wise women and men worked hard to pass on and perpetuate the fire that the likes of Antony, Macarius, and Moses had lighted in many human hearts. Any charism, to last, must eventually find objective expression in a framework of sharable stability. There is no inevitable contradiction between rule and life. The challenge is to maintain the rule infused with life, and to regulate vitality.
The passage cited above is from the last chapter of Benedict’s Rule. Summing up his teaching, it provides a list of Further Reading. Benedict’s project continues that of the earlier Fathers. He distils their insights. What he modestly calls a little rule for beginners is in fact pure essence. Any monk or nun who has read it and sought to put it into practice will testify to this. Even more so will abbots or abbesses who, over time, have taught the rule to their communities, discovering what depths exist under surfaces of seeming simplicity. Benedict, too, incites us to set our sight high, to aim for ‘perfection’ in the sense I developed in the first few episodes. The wisdom of the Desert Fathers is not confined to the past, or to books. It is alive, a generator of good zeal, in countless monasteries now. Their continued flourishing is crucial to the ecosystem of the Church’s life. We may hope that generous, courageous women and men , thirsty for fullness of life, will answer the monastic call still.
St Benedict being clothed in the monastic habit. Fresco from the church of Subiaco.
Not Worthy
Homily given as part of an Advent recollection at the Dominican church in Kraków following the launch of the Polish version of my book Chastity.
When Jesus went into Capernaum a centurion came up and pleaded with him. ‘Sir,’ he said ‘my servant is lying at home paralysed, and in great pain.’ ‘I will come myself and cure him’ said Jesus. The centurion replied, ‘Sir, I am not worthy to have you under my roof; just give the word and my servant will be cured. For I am under authority myself, and have soldiers under me; and I say to one man: Go, and he goes; to another: Come here, and he comes; to my servant: Do this, and he does it.’ When Jesus heard this he was astonished and said to those following him, ‘I tell you solemnly, nowhere in Israel have I found faith like this. And I tell you that many will come from east and west to take their places with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob at the feast in the kingdom of heaven. Matthew 8.5-11.
This encounter of our Lord with the centurion is intimate to us. Each day, before Holy Communion, we repeat the officer’s words: ‘Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof!’ The meaning of the words in the Gospel seems self-evident.
Let us note, though, this this humble confession is made in response to Jesus’s benevolence. When the Lord hears of the paralysed servant, he does not hesitate, but says at once: ‘I will come myself’. Unconditional kindness prompts the centurion’s self-reflection. After all, he had not come disinterestedly. He carried a request, expected assistance. He was a military man of might. Jesus’s kindness disarms him.
If at times we find people we deal with lacking in humility, we might well examine ourselves in the light of this scenario. Does humble generosity on my part call it forth in others? Or is harshness I encounter a reflection of my own hard heart?
Jesus does not go to the centurion’s house, but sends him home with the word: ‘Go, be it done for you as you have believed.’ We are told that the servant ‘was healed at that very moment’. A visitation did, then, take place nonetheless. For God is in his word. And a word gone forth from his mouth does not return to him empty (Isa 55.11).
There is another aspect to consider. Jesus enters not under the centurion’s roof, but welcomes the centurion under his. We have heard how Isaiah, in a wonderful prophecy, says that ‘the glory of the Lord will be a canopy and a tent to give shade by day from the heat, refuge and shelter from the storm and the rain.’
God’s glorious mercy manifest in Jesus is for us this canopy. The centurion found respite underneath it, and immense spaciousness. It matters to keep this incident in mind when later in the Gospel we hear Jesus say, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel’ (Mt 15.24). By his actions he had already broadened the scope of this mission, inviting us always to interpret what he says in the light of what he does.
So how can we best make our own confession, at this Mass: ‘Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof!’? By recognising the immensity of God’s grace and our own limited graciousness; by acknowledging frankly aspects of our life that need repair; while daring to whisper nonetheless: ‘Yes, there is quite a mess under my roof, but enter anyway’. Then by resolving to get up and move without delay when the Lord summons us under his roof, there to find comfort, nourishment and strength, grace to live by and to share, that others may live. Amen.
When Jesus went into Capernaum a centurion came up and pleaded with him. ‘Sir,’ he said ‘my servant is lying at home paralysed, and in great pain.’ ‘I will come myself and cure him’ said Jesus. The centurion replied, ‘Sir, I am not worthy to have you under my roof; just give the word and my servant will be cured. For I am under authority myself, and have soldiers under me; and I say to one man: Go, and he goes; to another: Come here, and he comes; to my servant: Do this, and he does it.’ When Jesus heard this he was astonished and said to those following him, ‘I tell you solemnly, nowhere in Israel have I found faith like this. And I tell you that many will come from east and west to take their places with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob at the feast in the kingdom of heaven. Matthew 8.5-11.
This encounter of our Lord with the centurion is intimate to us. Each day, before Holy Communion, we repeat the officer’s words: ‘Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof!’ The meaning of the words in the Gospel seems self-evident.
Let us note, though, this this humble confession is made in response to Jesus’s benevolence. When the Lord hears of the paralysed servant, he does not hesitate, but says at once: ‘I will come myself’. Unconditional kindness prompts the centurion’s self-reflection. After all, he had not come disinterestedly. He carried a request, expected assistance. He was a military man of might. Jesus’s kindness disarms him.
If at times we find people we deal with lacking in humility, we might well examine ourselves in the light of this scenario. Does humble generosity on my part call it forth in others? Or is harshness I encounter a reflection of my own hard heart?
Jesus does not go to the centurion’s house, but sends him home with the word: ‘Go, be it done for you as you have believed.’ We are told that the servant ‘was healed at that very moment’. A visitation did, then, take place nonetheless. For God is in his word. And a word gone forth from his mouth does not return to him empty (Isa 55.11).
There is another aspect to consider. Jesus enters not under the centurion’s roof, but welcomes the centurion under his. We have heard how Isaiah, in a wonderful prophecy, says that ‘the glory of the Lord will be a canopy and a tent to give shade by day from the heat, refuge and shelter from the storm and the rain.’
God’s glorious mercy manifest in Jesus is for us this canopy. The centurion found respite underneath it, and immense spaciousness. It matters to keep this incident in mind when later in the Gospel we hear Jesus say, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel’ (Mt 15.24). By his actions he had already broadened the scope of this mission, inviting us always to interpret what he says in the light of what he does.
So how can we best make our own confession, at this Mass: ‘Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof!’? By recognising the immensity of God’s grace and our own limited graciousness; by acknowledging frankly aspects of our life that need repair; while daring to whisper nonetheless: ‘Yes, there is quite a mess under my roof, but enter anyway’. Then by resolving to get up and move without delay when the Lord summons us under his roof, there to find comfort, nourishment and strength, grace to live by and to share, that others may live. Amen.
Canta et ambula
St Augustine’s sensitivity to music is well documented. In the Confessions he says how struck he was by the singing in the cathedral of Milan: ‘How I wept, deeply moved by your hymns, songs, and the voices that echoed through your Church!’ Better than anyone he has made sense of the jubilus in chant, ‘a certain sound of joy without words, the expression of a mind poured forth in joy’, joy that is ineffable, yet singable. Today, on the last day of the Church’s year, the Divine Office gives us another wonderful text on singing. Augustine speaks here of the kind of singing apt to keep our courage up as we pilgrimage towards hope in a world that often appears like a vale of tears. His words have great poignancy. They resound credibly still as the counsel of a father, a friend: ‘Always go onward in goodness, right faith, good habits. Sing, and walk onwards.’ Thus we shall be preserved from discouragement and pusillanimity.
https://coramfratribus.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Canta-et-ambula-1.m4a
https://coramfratribus.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Canta-et-ambula-1.m4a
Tolkien’s Creation
Asked by The Tablet to contribute to its annual Books of the Year supplement, I was happy to recommend a volume that has accompanied me for much of the autumn as I’ve been reading it in small chunks at breakfast: ‘What happens when a classical philologist turns his mind to the study of one of modern literature’s most audacious, best-loved enterprises? Read Giuseppe Pezzini’s Tolkien and the Mystery of Literary Creation to find out. The book is at once an overview of Tolkien’s work and an essay in literary theory. It is elegantly composed. And it’s fun. It will tell you at last what Queen Berúthiel’s cats are all about.’ Professor Pezzini’s book is eye-opening and ear-opening. He invites readers to listen again to the noise Frodo heard ‘in the distance. He knew that it was not leaves, but the sounds of the Sea far-off; a sound he had never heard in waking life, though it had often troubled his dreams. A great desire came over him to climb the tower and see the Sea.’
Bread Grows in Winter
I’ve just received in the mail Jennifer Bryson’s translation of Ida Görres’s seminal book Bread Grows in Winter, handsomely published by Ignatius Press. I was honoured to be asked to contribute a preface. Here it is:
I picked up a battered German copy of Ida Görres’s Bread Grows in Winter from a junk shop years ago. This book, first published in 1970, has been a source of inspiration to me. During my first few years of episcopacy I often took it with me on journeys, as a travel companion. Trying to work out how to exercise the ministry, I found in Görres a sure guide unfailingly summoning me to focus on essentials.
Ida Görres was a woman of acute intelligence, able to fathom in herself great tensions. Her bicultural background kept her from simplifying questions of identity, cultural or ecclesiastical. When the Second Vatican Council began, she followed it enthusiastically. She remained committed to the Council’s teaching, but was increasingly appalled by the crassness with which it was instrumentalised, here and there, as an excuse for mere deconstruction. She saw spiritual and intellectual treasures being thrown overboard as the bark of the Church made its way through choppy waters. This made her grieve both on her own behalf and on that of others.
Of course, she had read enough Church history to know that such losses are never final. There will always be pearl-divers ready to descend to the bottom of the sea to fetch treasures up again, patiently removing strings of algae as they rejoice in sharing their finds. But why go to such trouble when a peaceful handing-on (in Latin, a traditio) in view of present mission and future growth remains an option?
It would be a mistake to present Ida Görres as just an antiquarian. Her concern was theological. She insisted, as had the Council Fathers in their constitution Lumen Gentium, that the Church must be understood as a sacramental, personal reality. Görres regretted the eclipse of theology in much that was said about the Church, and done to her in consequence, in the heady years of the late 60s, with the West caught up in a cultural revolution that unfolded, often enough, as a targeted assault on institutions. The Church, she kept repeating, can neither be rightly understood nor truly loved by one who regards her in institutional terms while failing to recognise her as ‘the strangest creation of God, so unique in kind, so large, so contradictory, so colourful that no single person can take stock of her and figure her out, and certainly no outsider can ever take her all in, let alone understand her and judge her’.
For much too long, the theology of Ida Görres has been a minority interest passed on among initiates who recognise each other, as it were, by way of secret handshakes or knowing looks. I rejoice that these boundaries are bursting. The publication of Görres’s work in English is a major event full of promise for the Church’s mission, at once ancient and ever new, ‘to carry forward the work of Christ under the lead of the befriending Spirit’.
I picked up a battered German copy of Ida Görres’s Bread Grows in Winter from a junk shop years ago. This book, first published in 1970, has been a source of inspiration to me. During my first few years of episcopacy I often took it with me on journeys, as a travel companion. Trying to work out how to exercise the ministry, I found in Görres a sure guide unfailingly summoning me to focus on essentials.
Ida Görres was a woman of acute intelligence, able to fathom in herself great tensions. Her bicultural background kept her from simplifying questions of identity, cultural or ecclesiastical. When the Second Vatican Council began, she followed it enthusiastically. She remained committed to the Council’s teaching, but was increasingly appalled by the crassness with which it was instrumentalised, here and there, as an excuse for mere deconstruction. She saw spiritual and intellectual treasures being thrown overboard as the bark of the Church made its way through choppy waters. This made her grieve both on her own behalf and on that of others.
Of course, she had read enough Church history to know that such losses are never final. There will always be pearl-divers ready to descend to the bottom of the sea to fetch treasures up again, patiently removing strings of algae as they rejoice in sharing their finds. But why go to such trouble when a peaceful handing-on (in Latin, a traditio) in view of present mission and future growth remains an option?
It would be a mistake to present Ida Görres as just an antiquarian. Her concern was theological. She insisted, as had the Council Fathers in their constitution Lumen Gentium, that the Church must be understood as a sacramental, personal reality. Görres regretted the eclipse of theology in much that was said about the Church, and done to her in consequence, in the heady years of the late 60s, with the West caught up in a cultural revolution that unfolded, often enough, as a targeted assault on institutions. The Church, she kept repeating, can neither be rightly understood nor truly loved by one who regards her in institutional terms while failing to recognise her as ‘the strangest creation of God, so unique in kind, so large, so contradictory, so colourful that no single person can take stock of her and figure her out, and certainly no outsider can ever take her all in, let alone understand her and judge her’.
For much too long, the theology of Ida Görres has been a minority interest passed on among initiates who recognise each other, as it were, by way of secret handshakes or knowing looks. I rejoice that these boundaries are bursting. The publication of Görres’s work in English is a major event full of promise for the Church’s mission, at once ancient and ever new, ‘to carry forward the work of Christ under the lead of the befriending Spirit’.
Desert Fathers 48
You can find this episode in video format here – a dedicated page – and pick it up in audio wherever you listen to podcasts. On YouTube, the full range of episodes can be found here.
Abba Ammoes asked [Abba Poemen] about certain impure thoughts that the human heart conceives and about fruitless desires. Abba Poemen said to him: ‘Shall the axe be vaunted over him who hews with it?’ You, likewise: do not give [your thoughts] a hand and take no pleasure in them, and they will be ineffectual. Abba Isaiah asked the same question. Abba Poemen said: ‘If somebody abandons a chest full of clothes, they will decay over time. When it comes to thoughts, the same process applies: as long as we do not put them into concrete action they will over time decay and be gone.
The battle of the heart of which we have heard Antony speak plays out to a large extent in the mind. It is unhelpful to envisage the two as categorically distinct. We are inclined nowadays to think that thinking goes on in our brain whereas our heart is the seat of feelings. At the same time, we recognise the truth of what Christ says: ‘out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks’. The heart has, Biblically speaking, intellective faculties. Affectivity and intelligence are intertwined. It follows that if we are serious about desiring a pure heart, we must first of all labour to purify our minds. But what a cesspit our mind sometimes seems to be! We dream, then, of fumigating it, seeking an instant remedy that might eliminate all noxious content.
Poemen tells us that this is an illusory dream. Once we have allowed a thought or desire into our heart and mind, it settles and makes itself comfortable. We are not built as computers: there is no ‘delete’ function that will, when a button is pressed, get rid of undesirable content. Poemen’s message to both enquirers, Isaiah and Ammoes, is the same. He assures them impure thoughts can be excised, but only over time, through a process of slow starvation. Patience is called for, and endurance.
The saying about the axe, which Poemen cites, is from Isaiah, part of an oracle about causality. A tool is only effective when someone wields it. It is not an autonomous agent. Isaiah invokes a range of examples. His point is ethical, even political: human institutions may not glory in themselves when used as instruments for purposes intended by God. The Lord enables and moves them then, none other.
We are asked, similarly, to consider where our bad thoughts come from, then to cut them off at the source. If we do, they will sooner or later lose their power and leave us in peace. For a thought or desire has no more autonomy than any old tool we may have lying about in our garden shed. Thoughts can impersonate autonomy. The Enemy of good may manipulate them in such a way. But it is by callous deceit. As long as we do not nurture the poisoned content of our mind, it will wither. We shall need to build up sticking-power to sit tight while this process takes place.
To speak concretely, we may take as an example a battle many people fight: that of pornographic addiction. A cynical industry engenders this unfreedom by playing on registers that touch our deepest desires and darkest fears, all within a miasma of vulnerability. A person may be seduced by pornographic propositions for a while, thinking perhaps they are coming to terms with sexual frustration, telling themselves this is freeing. Then the moment comes when they see that content they have watched does not stay in the ether, but lodges itself in the mind, conditioning relationships, disabling innocence.
Such a person may wake up desperate one day and think, ‘For God’s sake, get this stuff out of my head!’, only to find that no such immediate option exists. The temptation will be great to burrow more deeply into the source of impurity, to give in to its proffered promise of comfort and satisfaction. One may see through the lie of it, perhaps, yet feel there is nowhere else to go, all the while being plagued by an ever more all-encompassing unhappiness and shame.
To such a one Poemen says: despair not!
He assures him or her there is a way out of captivity. He gives them a twofold piece of advice. First they must turn off the tap of unhealthy stimuli, seeking whatever help they need to do so. Then they must take responsibility for mental, affective baggage acquired. They must learn to say, in the first person: These impulses do live in me, for I have let them in, but now I stop; when a thought or image from my hoard comes to me, I will not pick up and fondle it, but give it to the Lord with a prayer for mercy: ‘Lord, this thought was mine, but now I offer it to you; it will no longer have power over me; create a new heart in me; teach me to love beautifully’. Over time this procedure can work transformation. Of course, it applies to other addictive thought-processes, too, like wounds to our pride.
The Fathers tell of an elder who lamented in his cell: ‘On account of a single word, all this gone!’ Asked to explain, he said: ‘I know 14 books of the Bible by heart, yet a single complaint against me obsessed me for the whole of today’s liturgy!’ It can be upsetting to realise what scorpions lurk in my heart. After all, I would like it to be a pure temple to the Lord. But once I know the blighters are there, I can take action, putting a tumbler over them to curtail their movement, making sure they are not fed.
Initial D: The Fool with Two Demons (detail) in a psalter, illuminations by the Master of the Ingeborg Psalter, after 1205. Tempera colors, gold leaf, and ink on parchment bound between pasteboard covered with brown calf, each leaf 12 3/16 x 8 5/8 in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. 66, fol. 56.
Abba Ammoes asked [Abba Poemen] about certain impure thoughts that the human heart conceives and about fruitless desires. Abba Poemen said to him: ‘Shall the axe be vaunted over him who hews with it?’ You, likewise: do not give [your thoughts] a hand and take no pleasure in them, and they will be ineffectual. Abba Isaiah asked the same question. Abba Poemen said: ‘If somebody abandons a chest full of clothes, they will decay over time. When it comes to thoughts, the same process applies: as long as we do not put them into concrete action they will over time decay and be gone.
The battle of the heart of which we have heard Antony speak plays out to a large extent in the mind. It is unhelpful to envisage the two as categorically distinct. We are inclined nowadays to think that thinking goes on in our brain whereas our heart is the seat of feelings. At the same time, we recognise the truth of what Christ says: ‘out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks’. The heart has, Biblically speaking, intellective faculties. Affectivity and intelligence are intertwined. It follows that if we are serious about desiring a pure heart, we must first of all labour to purify our minds. But what a cesspit our mind sometimes seems to be! We dream, then, of fumigating it, seeking an instant remedy that might eliminate all noxious content.
Poemen tells us that this is an illusory dream. Once we have allowed a thought or desire into our heart and mind, it settles and makes itself comfortable. We are not built as computers: there is no ‘delete’ function that will, when a button is pressed, get rid of undesirable content. Poemen’s message to both enquirers, Isaiah and Ammoes, is the same. He assures them impure thoughts can be excised, but only over time, through a process of slow starvation. Patience is called for, and endurance.
The saying about the axe, which Poemen cites, is from Isaiah, part of an oracle about causality. A tool is only effective when someone wields it. It is not an autonomous agent. Isaiah invokes a range of examples. His point is ethical, even political: human institutions may not glory in themselves when used as instruments for purposes intended by God. The Lord enables and moves them then, none other.
We are asked, similarly, to consider where our bad thoughts come from, then to cut them off at the source. If we do, they will sooner or later lose their power and leave us in peace. For a thought or desire has no more autonomy than any old tool we may have lying about in our garden shed. Thoughts can impersonate autonomy. The Enemy of good may manipulate them in such a way. But it is by callous deceit. As long as we do not nurture the poisoned content of our mind, it will wither. We shall need to build up sticking-power to sit tight while this process takes place.
To speak concretely, we may take as an example a battle many people fight: that of pornographic addiction. A cynical industry engenders this unfreedom by playing on registers that touch our deepest desires and darkest fears, all within a miasma of vulnerability. A person may be seduced by pornographic propositions for a while, thinking perhaps they are coming to terms with sexual frustration, telling themselves this is freeing. Then the moment comes when they see that content they have watched does not stay in the ether, but lodges itself in the mind, conditioning relationships, disabling innocence.
Such a person may wake up desperate one day and think, ‘For God’s sake, get this stuff out of my head!’, only to find that no such immediate option exists. The temptation will be great to burrow more deeply into the source of impurity, to give in to its proffered promise of comfort and satisfaction. One may see through the lie of it, perhaps, yet feel there is nowhere else to go, all the while being plagued by an ever more all-encompassing unhappiness and shame.
To such a one Poemen says: despair not!
He assures him or her there is a way out of captivity. He gives them a twofold piece of advice. First they must turn off the tap of unhealthy stimuli, seeking whatever help they need to do so. Then they must take responsibility for mental, affective baggage acquired. They must learn to say, in the first person: These impulses do live in me, for I have let them in, but now I stop; when a thought or image from my hoard comes to me, I will not pick up and fondle it, but give it to the Lord with a prayer for mercy: ‘Lord, this thought was mine, but now I offer it to you; it will no longer have power over me; create a new heart in me; teach me to love beautifully’. Over time this procedure can work transformation. Of course, it applies to other addictive thought-processes, too, like wounds to our pride.
The Fathers tell of an elder who lamented in his cell: ‘On account of a single word, all this gone!’ Asked to explain, he said: ‘I know 14 books of the Bible by heart, yet a single complaint against me obsessed me for the whole of today’s liturgy!’ It can be upsetting to realise what scorpions lurk in my heart. After all, I would like it to be a pure temple to the Lord. But once I know the blighters are there, I can take action, putting a tumbler over them to curtail their movement, making sure they are not fed.
Initial D: The Fool with Two Demons (detail) in a psalter, illuminations by the Master of the Ingeborg Psalter, after 1205. Tempera colors, gold leaf, and ink on parchment bound between pasteboard covered with brown calf, each leaf 12 3/16 x 8 5/8 in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. 66, fol. 56.
Irresistible
Among the many things that struck me in Tordis Ørjasæter‘s ‘personal history of the handicapped child in literature’, We Are Not Alone, was this description of Sigrid Undset, which passes on a childhood remembrance of Tordis’s husband Jo, whose father, the poet Tore Ørjasæter, was a close friend of Undset’s: ‘My husband Jo remembers how as a little boy he was lifted up by a very large, very adult person impossible to contradict, but not dangerous, to be placed in an armchair with a picture-book or some toy. Sigrid Undset was not one to crawl around to play with children or to utter baby-talk. In contrast she gave him, each Christmas, well-chosen sports equipment or books.’ Undset, wholly convinced that ‘maternity is life itself’, was unsentimental with regard to the task it represented. Thereby she has something weighty and original to say to our time.