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 21 
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.
Another time [Abba Cassian] said Read More
Another time [Abba Cassian] said Read More
A Single Melody On a journey this afternoon, I found myself in an airport lounge listening with tears in my eyes to the pope’s homily from this morning’s Mass of Inauguration: ‘In this spirit of faith, the College of Cardinals came together for Read More
5. Sunday of Easter Acts 14.21-27: We all have to experience many hardships.
Apocalypse 21.1-5: I, John, saw a new heaven and a new earth.
John 13.31-35: Love one another just as I have loved you.
The period between Christ’s resurrection and his ascension into heaven was Read More
Apocalypse 21.1-5: I, John, saw a new heaven and a new earth.
John 13.31-35: Love one another just as I have loved you.
The period between Christ’s resurrection and his ascension into heaven was Read More
La Resurrezione One of the joys of Eastertide is to listen to Handel’s oratorio La Resurrezione. It is a youthful work: the composer was 23 when it was first performed in Rome on Easter Sunday 1708, with an elite orchestra led by Corelli. Read More
The One and the Many Sermon preached at Evensong at Pusey House this evening.
Psalm 74: There is no more any among us any that knoweth how long.
Deuteronomy 30: Call them to mind among the nations, whither the Lord hath driven thee.
Acts 17.16-34: May we know Read More
Psalm 74: There is no more any among us any that knoweth how long.
Deuteronomy 30: Call them to mind among the nations, whither the Lord hath driven thee.
Acts 17.16-34: May we know Read More
Desert Fathers 20 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.
One of the old men Read More
One of the old men Read More
Good Shepherd Sunday Homily at a Confirmation Mass.
Acts 13.14-52: We must turn to the pagans.
Acts 7.9-17: They stand before the throne and before the Lamb.
John 10.27-30: My sheep hear my voice.
The iconography of piety can make the Good Shepherd, an important motif in Read More
Acts 13.14-52: We must turn to the pagans.
Acts 7.9-17: They stand before the throne and before the Lamb.
John 10.27-30: My sheep hear my voice.
The iconography of piety can make the Good Shepherd, an important motif in Read More
Desert Fathers 21
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.
Another time [Abba Cassian] said that Abba Moses told us that Abba Serapion had said: ‘When I was a young man and lived with Abba Theonas, at mealtime, I would be moved to filch a rusk after I had stood up at the end of the meal; and I would eat it without letting my elder know. I kept doing this for a while. Dominated [by the urge] I was unable to check myself. My conscience condemned me, but I was ashamed to speak to the elder. Through the disposition of God, who loves mankind, it happened, though, that some visitors came to the elder for their edification. They asked him about their own thoughts. The elder answered that nothing so much damages a monk and rejoices the devil as the practice of hiding thoughts from spiritual fathers. He also spoke to them about self-control. While he was saying these things I thought God had instructed the elder about me. Cut to the quick I began to weep. From close to my chest I produced the rusk that, according to my bad habit, I had stolen. Throwing myself on the ground I begged pardon for the things that had happened and implored steadfastness for things to come. Then the elder said: “Oh, my child, even without a word from me your confession has freed you from this imprisonment. By speaking out about yourself, you have slain the demon that wounded you through [your] silence. Even if, till now, you let him dominate you without contradicting or resisting him, he will have no place in you henceforth, having been expelled from your heart.” The elder had not yet finished speaking when, behold!, this [spiritual] movement appeared as a lamp of fire coming out of my chest. It filled the house with such a stink that those present thought there was a pile of sulphur on fire. Then the elder said: “See how the Lord, by this sign, gives proof of my words and of your liberation.”’
There are bad, angry words we should keep from speaking, fighting against them with all our might. Abba John Kolobos was once on his way up from Scetis with a cargo of rope he had made, the means by which he earned his subsistence. On the way the camel-driver talked and talked and incited him to anger. John ran away, abandoning his ropes. He would rather leave the produce of many weeks’ hard work than speak an irascible, unconsidered word. There are other words, however, that call out to be spoken. If we keep them shut up in our heart they will poison us.
This story, which the editors of the Sayings have drawn from the Conferences of St John Cassian, set out the stakes with clarity. It is quite elaborate, considerably longer than the majority of the Fathers’ apophthegmata. I think this is a deliberate measure intended to help us recognise ourselves in certain details of the drama.
Objectively speaking, two vices coincide here: kleptomania and gluttony. The desired object is hardly a fantastic indulgence. We are not talking about profiteroles. What Serapion used to pinch was a paxama, named after Paxamos, the first-century author of one of the world’s earliest cookery book. The term refers to bread baked twice: first the loaf, then slices at a low temperature for a long time until all moisture is out and the slices harden into durable, dry, rough, tasteless biscuits. This provides food for thought. For is it not often the case that our little secret vices do not in fact mobilise our appetite all that much? What ties us to them is rather a progressively obsessive, thorny mixture of subterfuge, excitement, and shame. It is the behavioural pattern that arrests us, not a consuming lust for rusks — or their equivalent.
To be caught in this rut made Serapion miserable, yet he could not bring himself to talk to Abba Theonas. It embarrassed him that he, an aspirant to a life of perfection, should be hampered by such trifles. The longer he kept quiet, the more ingrained his filching became. The Fathers, fine psychologists, remind us that a habit nurtured over time comes to seem second nature. We think we can’t live without it.
The arrival of visitors enabled the cutting of this knot. In retrospect Serapion saw them as providential agents sent, as he says, by a ‘philanthropic God’. The certainty that God loves humankind and seeks our flourishing underpins the Fathers’ spiritual doctrine at all times. Hearing Theonas address the strangers’ query, Serapion was seized by compunction. The moment he had so long dreaded — the revelation of his fault — now came naturally, producing nothing but relief. No word of reproach is uttered. On the contrary, the elder addresses him gently.
Serapion realises that the trial in whose clutches he had been was other than he had assumed. He had thought it was about a disordered craving and a predisposition for theft; but no, the basic temptation was relational, seeking to drive a wedge between him and his spiritual father, isolating him from a source of grace and forgiveness, shutting him up in despair. Theonas speaks of his ‘imprisonment’. The mere fact of choosing to be free, of putting into words what had been a mental obsession, caused the power of evil to burst, revealing it for what it is: a hellishly stinking trap. Beware, then, if you find yourself developing clandestine habits, if you start doing thing, in the real or virtual world, you would rather not have anyone catch you at; if you start telling half-truths to your spouse, your best friend, your confessor. You may be giving the Hater-of-Good an opportunity he does not deserve.
Will you risk your peace of mind, and purity of soul, for this?
Another time [Abba Cassian] said that Abba Moses told us that Abba Serapion had said: ‘When I was a young man and lived with Abba Theonas, at mealtime, I would be moved to filch a rusk after I had stood up at the end of the meal; and I would eat it without letting my elder know. I kept doing this for a while. Dominated [by the urge] I was unable to check myself. My conscience condemned me, but I was ashamed to speak to the elder. Through the disposition of God, who loves mankind, it happened, though, that some visitors came to the elder for their edification. They asked him about their own thoughts. The elder answered that nothing so much damages a monk and rejoices the devil as the practice of hiding thoughts from spiritual fathers. He also spoke to them about self-control. While he was saying these things I thought God had instructed the elder about me. Cut to the quick I began to weep. From close to my chest I produced the rusk that, according to my bad habit, I had stolen. Throwing myself on the ground I begged pardon for the things that had happened and implored steadfastness for things to come. Then the elder said: “Oh, my child, even without a word from me your confession has freed you from this imprisonment. By speaking out about yourself, you have slain the demon that wounded you through [your] silence. Even if, till now, you let him dominate you without contradicting or resisting him, he will have no place in you henceforth, having been expelled from your heart.” The elder had not yet finished speaking when, behold!, this [spiritual] movement appeared as a lamp of fire coming out of my chest. It filled the house with such a stink that those present thought there was a pile of sulphur on fire. Then the elder said: “See how the Lord, by this sign, gives proof of my words and of your liberation.”’
There are bad, angry words we should keep from speaking, fighting against them with all our might. Abba John Kolobos was once on his way up from Scetis with a cargo of rope he had made, the means by which he earned his subsistence. On the way the camel-driver talked and talked and incited him to anger. John ran away, abandoning his ropes. He would rather leave the produce of many weeks’ hard work than speak an irascible, unconsidered word. There are other words, however, that call out to be spoken. If we keep them shut up in our heart they will poison us.
This story, which the editors of the Sayings have drawn from the Conferences of St John Cassian, set out the stakes with clarity. It is quite elaborate, considerably longer than the majority of the Fathers’ apophthegmata. I think this is a deliberate measure intended to help us recognise ourselves in certain details of the drama.
Objectively speaking, two vices coincide here: kleptomania and gluttony. The desired object is hardly a fantastic indulgence. We are not talking about profiteroles. What Serapion used to pinch was a paxama, named after Paxamos, the first-century author of one of the world’s earliest cookery book. The term refers to bread baked twice: first the loaf, then slices at a low temperature for a long time until all moisture is out and the slices harden into durable, dry, rough, tasteless biscuits. This provides food for thought. For is it not often the case that our little secret vices do not in fact mobilise our appetite all that much? What ties us to them is rather a progressively obsessive, thorny mixture of subterfuge, excitement, and shame. It is the behavioural pattern that arrests us, not a consuming lust for rusks — or their equivalent.
To be caught in this rut made Serapion miserable, yet he could not bring himself to talk to Abba Theonas. It embarrassed him that he, an aspirant to a life of perfection, should be hampered by such trifles. The longer he kept quiet, the more ingrained his filching became. The Fathers, fine psychologists, remind us that a habit nurtured over time comes to seem second nature. We think we can’t live without it.
The arrival of visitors enabled the cutting of this knot. In retrospect Serapion saw them as providential agents sent, as he says, by a ‘philanthropic God’. The certainty that God loves humankind and seeks our flourishing underpins the Fathers’ spiritual doctrine at all times. Hearing Theonas address the strangers’ query, Serapion was seized by compunction. The moment he had so long dreaded — the revelation of his fault — now came naturally, producing nothing but relief. No word of reproach is uttered. On the contrary, the elder addresses him gently.
Serapion realises that the trial in whose clutches he had been was other than he had assumed. He had thought it was about a disordered craving and a predisposition for theft; but no, the basic temptation was relational, seeking to drive a wedge between him and his spiritual father, isolating him from a source of grace and forgiveness, shutting him up in despair. Theonas speaks of his ‘imprisonment’. The mere fact of choosing to be free, of putting into words what had been a mental obsession, caused the power of evil to burst, revealing it for what it is: a hellishly stinking trap. Beware, then, if you find yourself developing clandestine habits, if you start doing thing, in the real or virtual world, you would rather not have anyone catch you at; if you start telling half-truths to your spouse, your best friend, your confessor. You may be giving the Hater-of-Good an opportunity he does not deserve.
Will you risk your peace of mind, and purity of soul, for this?
A Single Melody
On a journey this afternoon, I found myself in an airport lounge listening with tears in my eyes to the pope’s homily from this morning’s Mass of Inauguration: ‘In this spirit of faith, the College of Cardinals came together for the Conclave; assembling from a variety of background stories, from different itineraries, we placed in God’s hands our desire to elect a new successor to Peter, a bishop of Rome, a pastor able to safeguard the rich patrimony of Christian faith while at the same time looking far ahead, so to go out and encounter the questions, anxieties, and challenges of today. Accompanied by your prayers we were sensitive to the work of the Holy Spirit, who managed to tune the diverse instruments of music so that the chords of our hearts vibrated with a single melody.’ He went on to summon us all from discord to concord. May we heed that call.
The full text of the Holy Father’s homily is here.
The full text of the Holy Father’s homily is here.
5. Sunday of Easter
Acts 14.21-27: We all have to experience many hardships.
Apocalypse 21.1-5: I, John, saw a new heaven and a new earth.
John 13.31-35: Love one another just as I have loved you.
The period between Christ’s resurrection and his ascension into heaven was for the apostles a time of remembrance. They spent it turning over in their minds all that he had said and done, and the prophecies about him, to draw this into a coherent whole in the light of Jesus’s victory over death. We find the most explicit description of this process at the end of Luke’s Gospel, in the story of the wanderers to Emmaus; but it is implicit in the other resurrection narratives, too.
By means of the liturgy, the Church draws us into this apostolic work of assimilation. It always moves me that she, our Mother, lets us re-read, now in Eastertide, words Jesus spoke on the eve of his sacred Passion. The grandiose teaching of the thirteenth chapter of St John strikes chords now 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 put forward in the Upper Room, the apostles connected it first and foremost with the gesture Jesus had just performed: the washing of their feet, including those of Judas, now gone into the night to betray him.
Again and again the Lord had given an example of selfless service, turning away from his own concerns to attend to the troubles of others. The eleven 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 awhile, only to find on arrival that a crowd awaited him: no word of complaint was heard, no gesture of irritation seen; instead he turned towards the interlopers cordially, all theirs. Truly he had taught them what charity looks like, embodying a paradigm that set for them, as it sets for us, a standard towards which we must strive.
The fact of Jesus’s resurrection raises our reflection into another dimension, however.
The ethical demands of Christian love remain. They are non-negotiable, timeless. By them we shall be judged. The parable of the goats and sheep make this clear. Still, ‘love’ in Biblical language stands for something more. ‘God is love’ (1 Jn 4.8): St John affirms what Scripture shows from the beginning. Divine love is manifest in acts of kindness, 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 contrary and 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.
Ordinary parlance tends to assume that the opposite of love is hatred. But no. Hatred can contain a passion that does not contradict love but is rather love’s inverted reflection.
Élie Wiesel, a survivor of Auschwitz, memorably said that the opposite of love is indifference, the carelessness that may not itself pursue the destruction of another — that may not actually put banana peel before the blind or denounce persecuted strangers — but does not bother when others do, just coldly drawing the curtains or looking away. In this manner of seeing, love comes to an end in the extinction of compassion, when individuals or collective entities, communities or even states, pursue no other goal than self-preservation while in fact sabotaging their own endeavours, in as much as ‘whoever seeks to save his life will lose it’ (Mt 16.25).
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, bitterness, spite, all those mortiferous passions that put out grace’s flame and make us ungracious, causing us to subsist in a kind of living death, for it is quite possible to have a regular pulse and a normal digestion yet to be soul-dead.
By letting himself be nailed to the wood of the cross, by his wounds and holy dying, by his harrowing of hell and glorious resurrection, Jesus despoiled the reign of death that had held sway since our first parents chose it.
‘Death with life contended’, sings the Easter sequence. It goes on: ‘Combat strangely ended!’
Indeed it does seem weird, at first sight, that the cross, an instrument of cruel execution, should be for us the emblem of life restored — but only insofar as we forget that that which died on the cross was death itself, while life was proved invincible. ‘Love is strong as death’, an ancient bard prophesied in the Song of Songs. His proposition was borne out on Calvary and, thereupon, within the grave of Joseph of Arimathea, where our lord rose from the dead.
It is this death-defying love we must invite into our lives, that it may break our alliances with sin, death’s enabler, and let whatever dead bones we carry stir and recompose themselves to make of us women and men fully, not just half alive, epiphanies by grace of God’s glory.
‘I saw’, we have heard the Seer of Patmos say, ‘a new heaven and a new earth’. That reality is not for the end of history only; it is to be inaugurated now, in our hearts, yours and mine.
Amen.
Apocalypse 21.1-5: I, John, saw a new heaven and a new earth.
John 13.31-35: Love one another just as I have loved you.
The period between Christ’s resurrection and his ascension into heaven was for the apostles a time of remembrance. They spent it turning over in their minds all that he had said and done, and the prophecies about him, to draw this into a coherent whole in the light of Jesus’s victory over death. We find the most explicit description of this process at the end of Luke’s Gospel, in the story of the wanderers to Emmaus; but it is implicit in the other resurrection narratives, too.
By means of the liturgy, the Church draws us into this apostolic work of assimilation. It always moves me that she, our Mother, lets us re-read, now in Eastertide, words Jesus spoke on the eve of his sacred Passion. The grandiose teaching of the thirteenth chapter of St John strikes chords now 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 put forward in the Upper Room, the apostles connected it first and foremost with the gesture Jesus had just performed: the washing of their feet, including those of Judas, now gone into the night to betray him.
Again and again the Lord had given an example of selfless service, turning away from his own concerns to attend to the troubles of others. The eleven 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 awhile, only to find on arrival that a crowd awaited him: no word of complaint was heard, no gesture of irritation seen; instead he turned towards the interlopers cordially, all theirs. Truly he had taught them what charity looks like, embodying a paradigm that set for them, as it sets for us, a standard towards which we must strive.
The fact of Jesus’s resurrection raises our reflection into another dimension, however.
The ethical demands of Christian love remain. They are non-negotiable, timeless. By them we shall be judged. The parable of the goats and sheep make this clear. Still, ‘love’ in Biblical language stands for something more. ‘God is love’ (1 Jn 4.8): St John affirms what Scripture shows from the beginning. Divine love is manifest in acts of kindness, 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 contrary and 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.
Ordinary parlance tends to assume that the opposite of love is hatred. But no. Hatred can contain a passion that does not contradict love but is rather love’s inverted reflection.
Élie Wiesel, a survivor of Auschwitz, memorably said that the opposite of love is indifference, the carelessness that may not itself pursue the destruction of another — that may not actually put banana peel before the blind or denounce persecuted strangers — but does not bother when others do, just coldly drawing the curtains or looking away. In this manner of seeing, love comes to an end in the extinction of compassion, when individuals or collective entities, communities or even states, pursue no other goal than self-preservation while in fact sabotaging their own endeavours, in as much as ‘whoever seeks to save his life will lose it’ (Mt 16.25).
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, bitterness, spite, all those mortiferous passions that put out grace’s flame and make us ungracious, causing us to subsist in a kind of living death, for it is quite possible to have a regular pulse and a normal digestion yet to be soul-dead.
By letting himself be nailed to the wood of the cross, by his wounds and holy dying, by his harrowing of hell and glorious resurrection, Jesus despoiled the reign of death that had held sway since our first parents chose it.
‘Death with life contended’, sings the Easter sequence. It goes on: ‘Combat strangely ended!’
Indeed it does seem weird, at first sight, that the cross, an instrument of cruel execution, should be for us the emblem of life restored — but only insofar as we forget that that which died on the cross was death itself, while life was proved invincible. ‘Love is strong as death’, an ancient bard prophesied in the Song of Songs. His proposition was borne out on Calvary and, thereupon, within the grave of Joseph of Arimathea, where our lord rose from the dead.
It is this death-defying love we must invite into our lives, that it may break our alliances with sin, death’s enabler, and let whatever dead bones we carry stir and recompose themselves to make of us women and men fully, not just half alive, epiphanies by grace of God’s glory.
‘I saw’, we have heard the Seer of Patmos say, ‘a new heaven and a new earth’. That reality is not for the end of history only; it is to be inaugurated now, in our hearts, yours and mine.
Amen.
La Resurrezione
One of the joys of Eastertide is to listen to Handel’s oratorio La Resurrezione. It is a youthful work: the composer was 23 when it was first performed in Rome on Easter Sunday 1708, with an elite orchestra led by Corelli. As Graham Abbott has written, ‘It is in fact an unstaged opera on a religious subject, with a text by Carlo Sigismondo Capece, secretary to the Queen of Poland, who was exiled in Rome.’ Capece strikingly set the Christian drama with reference to both apocryphal and pagan traditions, showing forth Christ’s Easter victory as the culmination of even implicit hopes. This is a lovely recording. My favourite, though, is this, conducted by Minkowski, with Jennifer Smith singing gloriously in the role of Maria Maddalena.
Catholic
During the past eight days, attempts to predict what will be Pope Leo XIV’s priorities, method of government, and style have been legion. The lucidest, most helpful statement I have read so far appeared yesterday in an essay published by Daniel Capó in The Objective:
‘His own biography speaks to us, moreover, of a man who is truly Catholic in the sense of universal: North American and Peruvian, a scholar and a missionary, a mathematician and a canonist, a past superior of the Augustinian Order and a Vatican Prefect, a polyglot and a diplomat. Someone with this curriculum is unlikely to yield to the temptation of engaging in a culture war that is as divisive as it is, often enough, histrionic.’
‘His own biography speaks to us, moreover, of a man who is truly Catholic in the sense of universal: North American and Peruvian, a scholar and a missionary, a mathematician and a canonist, a past superior of the Augustinian Order and a Vatican Prefect, a polyglot and a diplomat. Someone with this curriculum is unlikely to yield to the temptation of engaging in a culture war that is as divisive as it is, often enough, histrionic.’
The One and the Many
Sermon preached at Evensong at Pusey House this evening.
Psalm 74: There is no more any among us any that knoweth how long.
Deuteronomy 30: Call them to mind among the nations, whither the Lord hath driven thee.
Acts 17.16-34: May we know what this new doctrine is?
The problem of establishing the right relationship of particulars to universals, of the specific to the general has always exercised philosophers. It is not an abstract conundrum, though. It impinges on our lives tangibly. We see it in politics with painful intensity right now, as peoples and governments here and there strive to formulate statements of corporate identity with varying degrees of credibility: for how easy it is to slide from celebrations of patriotic ethos into mindless chauvinism! We see it, too, in the more intimate sphere of personal identity, where many, now, relinquish objective criteria and leave the statement of what something or someone is to pure preference, effectively atomising any meaningful notion of society.
Can Sacred Scripture help us out in this fix? Of course it can. It lists pitfalls and promises with that keen mixture of realism and elevation that typifies Holy Writ and helps us think in aspirational, hopeful terms, something few party manifestos these days, as far as I can see, manage to do.
Our reading from Deuteronomy lets us consider in retrospect Israel’s exodus by which Jacob’s descendants joined to an ethnically ‘mixed multitude’ (Ex 12.38) through trials and consolations became a people. The Lord enabled this process by three providential means: first, by shared experience, manifestations of divine power which Israel would retell its children till the end of time in collective anamnesis; secondly, by giving the law, which regulated life according to a horizontal and a vertical axis, the first teaching people to coexist in justice and delight, the second providing a model of right worship; then, thirdly, by confederative enterprise, notably the construction of the tabernacle for which people came forward, ‘every one whose spirit moved him’, bringing ‘offering to be used for the tent of meeting’ (Ex 35.21), some gold, acacia wood, skins or onyx stones, others practical or engineering skills, all participating as one in a work of creation that at once produced and sealed their unity.
We can easily see how possession of such great gifts — the remembrance, the commandments, God’s dwelling — might inspire a sense of entitlement. Awareness of being singularly blessed would seem, unto the ages of ages, to provide a guarantee of election. The assumption solidified, naturally, as people stood on the threshold of the land, about to settle into novel stability.
Well, God’s oracle denounces it as illusion. Election and belonging are not static possessions but dynamic components of a bilateral compact. One side, God’s is sure; the other, ours, is fickle. Faced with the choice between life and good on the one hand, death and evil on the other, it cannot be taken for granted, alas, that we shall choose what benefits us. To live well we must heed ever anew the call to step out of captivity, to follow God’s law, and to join in the building of his holy temple, ignoring lesser siren calls apt to distract and divert us. Is God’s heavenly word, in which all things live and move and have their being, alive in my heart as an active principle of motion and decision? Only if it is shall I be an agent of unification, not of division, a witness to a new humanity.
The Psalmist’s call Usquequo? — How long? — shows what perseverance is required of anyone resolved to fashion a life according to God’s call. Often we shall feel like the Biblical ‘owl among ruins’ (Psalm 102.6), hooting watchers in the night perched on the rubble of yesterday’s sureties. We must face an uncomfortable fact amply evidenced in Sacred Scripture: God cares less than we for monuments of reassurance.
Time and again the chosen people is sent forth again from the land of promise into exile in order that a remnant may form, a people fit to assume again the particular obligations of covenantal fidelity for the sake of universal testimony.
As the tree of Israel is rerooted near living water, chaff is surrendered to the wind, even as most of the individuals called out of Egypt, who crossed the Red Sea and saw with their eyes the chariots of Pharaoh sink like a stone (Exodus 15.4-5), were held unworthy to traverse the Jordan, their bones being buried instead in the arid, uncharted wilderness.
‘We see not our signs’, sighs the Psalmist, ‘there is no more any prophet’. To see, our eyes must be fit; to hear, our ears must be attentive to the voice that, manifest as charity speaking through truth, calls forth prophecy, the statement of things as they really are. We must not let ourselves be overwhelmed by the clamour of our foes, reduced to the foolishness that knows no other idiom than that of reproach.
The encounter of Paul with the Athenians displays a mode of proclamation beyond reproach. Having seen the city mired in idolatry, the absolutisation of provisional goods, Paul’s spirit ‘was stirred in him’, for it is an ethical imperative to let truth’s light shine in darkness.
Paul is at this stage a hardened apostle, ‘hardened’ in the sense that he — after lashings, persecutions, and shipwrecks — has developed elephant skin, impervious now to slights and physical menace; his heart meanwhile has grown soft and vulnerable, imbued with the charity of Christ, who wishes all men to be saved. He speaks graciously, attractively, in such a way that people are glad to hear more.
The Areopagus discourse is a model of primary catechesis. Paul proceeds from what his listeners know to what they know not. He shows how intuitions they have long entertained reach fulfilment in the evangelion whose messenger he is. Without bombast, and without humiliation, he displays the Athenians’ ignorance supposing that they, self-declared seekers after wisdom, will want to become wise. At the end, however, most stay non-committal: entertained but unconvinced, they go home, there to stay fixed on, and in, the familiar. Only a few, like Dionysius and Damaris, ‘clave unto Paul’, a cleaver unto Christ, ‘and believed’.
The problem with the rest is not their attachment to particular affections or loyalties; the problem is their failing readiness to let this attachment be ordered, and if need be corrected, by cleaving to the One who alone can combine myriad individual voices in symphony. That was the case during the exodus, in royal Israel, and in the early Church. It is also our case now.
Sir James Thornhill, Paul Preaching in the Areopagus (1729-31), now in the Royal Academy.
Psalm 74: There is no more any among us any that knoweth how long.
Deuteronomy 30: Call them to mind among the nations, whither the Lord hath driven thee.
Acts 17.16-34: May we know what this new doctrine is?
The problem of establishing the right relationship of particulars to universals, of the specific to the general has always exercised philosophers. It is not an abstract conundrum, though. It impinges on our lives tangibly. We see it in politics with painful intensity right now, as peoples and governments here and there strive to formulate statements of corporate identity with varying degrees of credibility: for how easy it is to slide from celebrations of patriotic ethos into mindless chauvinism! We see it, too, in the more intimate sphere of personal identity, where many, now, relinquish objective criteria and leave the statement of what something or someone is to pure preference, effectively atomising any meaningful notion of society.
Can Sacred Scripture help us out in this fix? Of course it can. It lists pitfalls and promises with that keen mixture of realism and elevation that typifies Holy Writ and helps us think in aspirational, hopeful terms, something few party manifestos these days, as far as I can see, manage to do.
Our reading from Deuteronomy lets us consider in retrospect Israel’s exodus by which Jacob’s descendants joined to an ethnically ‘mixed multitude’ (Ex 12.38) through trials and consolations became a people. The Lord enabled this process by three providential means: first, by shared experience, manifestations of divine power which Israel would retell its children till the end of time in collective anamnesis; secondly, by giving the law, which regulated life according to a horizontal and a vertical axis, the first teaching people to coexist in justice and delight, the second providing a model of right worship; then, thirdly, by confederative enterprise, notably the construction of the tabernacle for which people came forward, ‘every one whose spirit moved him’, bringing ‘offering to be used for the tent of meeting’ (Ex 35.21), some gold, acacia wood, skins or onyx stones, others practical or engineering skills, all participating as one in a work of creation that at once produced and sealed their unity.
We can easily see how possession of such great gifts — the remembrance, the commandments, God’s dwelling — might inspire a sense of entitlement. Awareness of being singularly blessed would seem, unto the ages of ages, to provide a guarantee of election. The assumption solidified, naturally, as people stood on the threshold of the land, about to settle into novel stability.
Well, God’s oracle denounces it as illusion. Election and belonging are not static possessions but dynamic components of a bilateral compact. One side, God’s is sure; the other, ours, is fickle. Faced with the choice between life and good on the one hand, death and evil on the other, it cannot be taken for granted, alas, that we shall choose what benefits us. To live well we must heed ever anew the call to step out of captivity, to follow God’s law, and to join in the building of his holy temple, ignoring lesser siren calls apt to distract and divert us. Is God’s heavenly word, in which all things live and move and have their being, alive in my heart as an active principle of motion and decision? Only if it is shall I be an agent of unification, not of division, a witness to a new humanity.
The Psalmist’s call Usquequo? — How long? — shows what perseverance is required of anyone resolved to fashion a life according to God’s call. Often we shall feel like the Biblical ‘owl among ruins’ (Psalm 102.6), hooting watchers in the night perched on the rubble of yesterday’s sureties. We must face an uncomfortable fact amply evidenced in Sacred Scripture: God cares less than we for monuments of reassurance.
Time and again the chosen people is sent forth again from the land of promise into exile in order that a remnant may form, a people fit to assume again the particular obligations of covenantal fidelity for the sake of universal testimony.
As the tree of Israel is rerooted near living water, chaff is surrendered to the wind, even as most of the individuals called out of Egypt, who crossed the Red Sea and saw with their eyes the chariots of Pharaoh sink like a stone (Exodus 15.4-5), were held unworthy to traverse the Jordan, their bones being buried instead in the arid, uncharted wilderness.
‘We see not our signs’, sighs the Psalmist, ‘there is no more any prophet’. To see, our eyes must be fit; to hear, our ears must be attentive to the voice that, manifest as charity speaking through truth, calls forth prophecy, the statement of things as they really are. We must not let ourselves be overwhelmed by the clamour of our foes, reduced to the foolishness that knows no other idiom than that of reproach.
The encounter of Paul with the Athenians displays a mode of proclamation beyond reproach. Having seen the city mired in idolatry, the absolutisation of provisional goods, Paul’s spirit ‘was stirred in him’, for it is an ethical imperative to let truth’s light shine in darkness.
Paul is at this stage a hardened apostle, ‘hardened’ in the sense that he — after lashings, persecutions, and shipwrecks — has developed elephant skin, impervious now to slights and physical menace; his heart meanwhile has grown soft and vulnerable, imbued with the charity of Christ, who wishes all men to be saved. He speaks graciously, attractively, in such a way that people are glad to hear more.
The Areopagus discourse is a model of primary catechesis. Paul proceeds from what his listeners know to what they know not. He shows how intuitions they have long entertained reach fulfilment in the evangelion whose messenger he is. Without bombast, and without humiliation, he displays the Athenians’ ignorance supposing that they, self-declared seekers after wisdom, will want to become wise. At the end, however, most stay non-committal: entertained but unconvinced, they go home, there to stay fixed on, and in, the familiar. Only a few, like Dionysius and Damaris, ‘clave unto Paul’, a cleaver unto Christ, ‘and believed’.
The problem with the rest is not their attachment to particular affections or loyalties; the problem is their failing readiness to let this attachment be ordered, and if need be corrected, by cleaving to the One who alone can combine myriad individual voices in symphony. That was the case during the exodus, in royal Israel, and in the early Church. It is also our case now.
Sir James Thornhill, Paul Preaching in the Areopagus (1729-31), now in the Royal Academy.
Desert Fathers 20
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.
One of the old men came to see Abba Achillas and saw him spitting blood from his mouth. So he asked him: ‘Father, what is that?’ The old man said: ‘It is the word of a brother, a word that caused me grief. I was fighting in order not to make it known and prayed God that he would take it away from me. The word became blood in my mouth. I spat it out, and now I am at peace. I have forgotten my grief.’
Even a seasoned desert father scorched by the sun and exposure to God’s truth remains human. Human beings are vulnerable. We are not covered by a carapace that protects us from the world or from the complex dynamics of relationships. Misunderstandings can arise, wounds can be inflicted in the desert as elsewhere. Do you want to see how far advanced a person is spiritually? Observe the way in which he or she negotiates such experience: it is an acid test.
St Benedict in his Rule urges monks to make peace before the sun goes down and to make sure it is not a false, counterfeit peace. Why extend your hand to another if in your heart resentment burns? To make peace presupposes inward battle. It is not enough just to make our minds up. The process engages us as at an affective and emotional level. Somehow we must deal with, and get over, the hurt we have endured, which may cut deep. Only in this way will we keep anger from carving out a foothold in our hearts. Such combat is non-negotiable; for nothing more effectively extinguishes the light of grace and the life of prayer in us than the passion of anger.
We catch a glimpse of Abba Achillas after one such ferocious battle. The word of a brother had hurt him. The circumstances are unknown to us. It is useless to speculate. But most of us know from experience what it is like to sustain the impact of an unfair utterance or one that touches a particular weakness of ours. We feel humiliated, at risk. We think: ‘How dare they speak to us like that?’ Inwardly we fret: ‘Help! Is this how other people, too, talk about me, view me?’ It is tempting to proceed, by way of self-defence, to attack. We usually do that by broadcasting our view, running down our adversary. We let others know what we have been through: ‘Will you believe what such-and-such had the effrontery to tell me?’ That way we readily slide down a slippery slope whose end is detraction, the death of charity.
A bitter word does not only do harm round about, however. It pollutes the source from which it springs. Think of Christ’s words to Peter about what defiles a woman or man. The context is a discourse about hypocrisy. The reference is to ‘the Pharisees and scribes’, people who make a public profession of faith and are keen to instruct others in it — rather like ourselves, in fact. They get upset when others do not punctiliously observe religious dietary rules. These rules contribute to the moral education of man. But is it ultimately what I eat that establishes my state of soul? Christ deals with the question matter-of-factly: ‘Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth passes into the stomach, and so passes on?’ It goes down the drain, literally. ‘What comes out of the mouth’, meanwhile, ‘proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a man. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a man’.
Achillas refuses to submit to such defilement. He sees that what is really at stake is not the relative gravity of the insult he has received. What matters is to stop a cycle of violence, not to respond to hurt by inflicting hurt, to halt in his own heart the spread of the curse proclaimed by Lamech: ‘If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold.’ Achillas, a disciple of Christ crucified, resolves to be true to his Master. He says: ‘This evil stays with me. I will not pass it on.’
He does not trumpet his pain. He drains its bitterness inwardly, admitting to himself his desire for vengeance and comeuppance, but only to draw from it a cause for repentance. This calls for mortification. ‘I have always liked the phrase “nursing a grudge”’, says the Reverend John Ames in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, ‘because many people are tender of their resentments, as of the thing nearest to their hearts.’ To let resentments go is costly.
God hears Achillas’s prayer for deliverance and lets him spit his wound out as blood, as if it were an ulcer; which, in fact, is what a grudge is, were we to seek a physiological simile for a spiritual malaise. Peace come at once. Achillas’s non-violence has made him apt to receive Christ’s gift. What is more, the grief which a moment ago was overwhelming is now forgotten. Once the disorder of wrath is expelled, the world once again appears ordered. By such stories the Fathers remind us that the passions to which we are subject are soul-sicknesses. In so far as we act on them, we project a sick vision of the world; we see little but sickness in it. We then perform disastrous diagnoses of persons, situations, and relationships.
It is said of Abba Agathon that he spent three years with a large pebble in his mouth until he learned to keep silence. That is how desirable it is to keep one’s tongue from speaking evil, even when the impact of evil has been endured.
A Monk of Valamo.
One of the old men came to see Abba Achillas and saw him spitting blood from his mouth. So he asked him: ‘Father, what is that?’ The old man said: ‘It is the word of a brother, a word that caused me grief. I was fighting in order not to make it known and prayed God that he would take it away from me. The word became blood in my mouth. I spat it out, and now I am at peace. I have forgotten my grief.’
Even a seasoned desert father scorched by the sun and exposure to God’s truth remains human. Human beings are vulnerable. We are not covered by a carapace that protects us from the world or from the complex dynamics of relationships. Misunderstandings can arise, wounds can be inflicted in the desert as elsewhere. Do you want to see how far advanced a person is spiritually? Observe the way in which he or she negotiates such experience: it is an acid test.
St Benedict in his Rule urges monks to make peace before the sun goes down and to make sure it is not a false, counterfeit peace. Why extend your hand to another if in your heart resentment burns? To make peace presupposes inward battle. It is not enough just to make our minds up. The process engages us as at an affective and emotional level. Somehow we must deal with, and get over, the hurt we have endured, which may cut deep. Only in this way will we keep anger from carving out a foothold in our hearts. Such combat is non-negotiable; for nothing more effectively extinguishes the light of grace and the life of prayer in us than the passion of anger.
We catch a glimpse of Abba Achillas after one such ferocious battle. The word of a brother had hurt him. The circumstances are unknown to us. It is useless to speculate. But most of us know from experience what it is like to sustain the impact of an unfair utterance or one that touches a particular weakness of ours. We feel humiliated, at risk. We think: ‘How dare they speak to us like that?’ Inwardly we fret: ‘Help! Is this how other people, too, talk about me, view me?’ It is tempting to proceed, by way of self-defence, to attack. We usually do that by broadcasting our view, running down our adversary. We let others know what we have been through: ‘Will you believe what such-and-such had the effrontery to tell me?’ That way we readily slide down a slippery slope whose end is detraction, the death of charity.
A bitter word does not only do harm round about, however. It pollutes the source from which it springs. Think of Christ’s words to Peter about what defiles a woman or man. The context is a discourse about hypocrisy. The reference is to ‘the Pharisees and scribes’, people who make a public profession of faith and are keen to instruct others in it — rather like ourselves, in fact. They get upset when others do not punctiliously observe religious dietary rules. These rules contribute to the moral education of man. But is it ultimately what I eat that establishes my state of soul? Christ deals with the question matter-of-factly: ‘Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth passes into the stomach, and so passes on?’ It goes down the drain, literally. ‘What comes out of the mouth’, meanwhile, ‘proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a man. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a man’.
Achillas refuses to submit to such defilement. He sees that what is really at stake is not the relative gravity of the insult he has received. What matters is to stop a cycle of violence, not to respond to hurt by inflicting hurt, to halt in his own heart the spread of the curse proclaimed by Lamech: ‘If Cain is avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold.’ Achillas, a disciple of Christ crucified, resolves to be true to his Master. He says: ‘This evil stays with me. I will not pass it on.’
He does not trumpet his pain. He drains its bitterness inwardly, admitting to himself his desire for vengeance and comeuppance, but only to draw from it a cause for repentance. This calls for mortification. ‘I have always liked the phrase “nursing a grudge”’, says the Reverend John Ames in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, ‘because many people are tender of their resentments, as of the thing nearest to their hearts.’ To let resentments go is costly.
God hears Achillas’s prayer for deliverance and lets him spit his wound out as blood, as if it were an ulcer; which, in fact, is what a grudge is, were we to seek a physiological simile for a spiritual malaise. Peace come at once. Achillas’s non-violence has made him apt to receive Christ’s gift. What is more, the grief which a moment ago was overwhelming is now forgotten. Once the disorder of wrath is expelled, the world once again appears ordered. By such stories the Fathers remind us that the passions to which we are subject are soul-sicknesses. In so far as we act on them, we project a sick vision of the world; we see little but sickness in it. We then perform disastrous diagnoses of persons, situations, and relationships.
It is said of Abba Agathon that he spent three years with a large pebble in his mouth until he learned to keep silence. That is how desirable it is to keep one’s tongue from speaking evil, even when the impact of evil has been endured.
A Monk of Valamo.
Good Shepherd Sunday
Homily at a Confirmation Mass.
Acts 13.14-52: We must turn to the pagans.
Acts 7.9-17: They stand before the throne and before the Lamb.
John 10.27-30: My sheep hear my voice.
The iconography of piety can make the Good Shepherd, an important motif in Scripture, seem remote, perhaps a little disagreeable. The shepherd presupposes the flock; and being likened to sheep, be they Biblical, does not flatter us. Further, we are used to seeing the shepherd carry a lamb, the hundredth, lost one supposed, the point isn’t lost on us, to represent us.
Now, once in a while we may feel like being carried in this way, when we’ve really made a mess of things and feel powerless. But in general we do prefer to walk on our own, to find our way with our own strength, to experience that we’re good for something. The image of the shepherd can seem to disenfranchise us. And we start wondering: is this what Christianity is about, becoming an animated ball of wool carried on draped shoulders into a pastel-hued sunset? This impression conditioned my own religious formation. For this is how, as far as I remember, the Gospel was presented to me the one and only time I attended Sunday School. I was appalled. When the lesson was over I marched home and declared to my parents with all the authority of my eight years: ‘Never again!’ I never did go back.
Only much later, when I started studying the Bible — and discovered what a fascinating, magnificent book it is — did I realise that the shepherd in fact stands for something rather different. Of course, ancient Israel was nomadic. People did not settle in one place. They moved around seeking favourable conditions for themselves and their flocks, which were their livelihood. A shepherd was exposed to risks: inhospitable nature, wild animals, bandits. The image par excellence of the Old Testament shepherd is David. When as a young man he faced Goliath, a trained guerilla warrior, he told King Saul, to prove himself fit for single combat:
Your servant used to keep sheep for his father; and when there came a lion, or a bear, and took a lamb from the flock, I went after him and smote him and delivered it out of his mouth; and if he arose against me, I caught him by his beard, and smote him and killed him. Your servant has killed both lions and bears (1 Samuel 17.34-6).
That is a rather different kind of shepherd profile. Such experience equipped David for a political career. For the Lord, we read in a Psalm, ‘took him from the sheepfolds; from tending the ewes that had young, he brought him to be the shepherd of Jacob his people, of Israel his inheritance’ (Psalm 78.71). The Christ-image in the parable of the shepherd does not suggest a chilled hippie pursuing an alternative lifestyle. It suggests a profile of clear strategy, courage, and a spirit of sacrifice, qualities we look for in a trustworthy leader.
When we turn to the Gospel we have just read, we find that it’s about trust above all. ‘My sheep hear my voice’, says the Lord: ‘I know them, and they follow me.’
All of us know what the sound of a beloved person can signify. Think of an infant who does not yet grasp what is being spoken around it, but who relishes the voice of its mother nursing it, caring for it, protecting it. Our Norwegian poet Per Sivle wrote a poem 150 years ago that begins with the words: ‘The first song I ever heard/was that of my mother at the cradle‘. He describes how remembrance of that song penetrated under his skin, becoming a symbol for the comfort we all long for when we’re afraid. The last stanza of the poem reads: ‘When weary I tire/in combat against what wrecks/I hear, quietly, from my mother’s grave/the song that can heal all things.’ Sivle lost his mother at the age of three and spent his childhood being moved from one foster home to the next. Bearing that in mind, we are alerted to the pathos of his text. That helps us to ask: Whose voice carries for me such promise?
We know, too, what threatening voices do to us — when we think of someone who has hurt us, perhaps, or taunted us at school or at work, belittling us. The resonance of a scornful, dangerous voice gives us goosebumps and sets our pulse racing.
At times we may find that life is like a vast resonant room in which threatening and comforting voices outshout, or outwhisper, one another. We must choose, then, which to follow. We must know how to tell the voices apart.
Today, my friends, you will receive ‘the seal of God’s gift, the Holy Spirit’. Thereby you are greatly helped in the work of voice discernment. The Spirit is the Spirit of Jesus, the Risen One. It conveys his presence and his power. It calls to mind all he has said. The Spirit teaches us what it means to live in Christ. The more we get used to living thus, the more clearly we shall know his voice. That does not necessarily mean that we will receive a lot of very specific instructions. God does not absolve us from thinking and working things out. But he helps us to think clearly.
The shepherd’s task is to lead the flock. The voice of Jesus guides us forward so that we, before the crossroads of life, where we must make essential choices, choose well and so can move forward towards goals corresponding to our true desires, where we shall find freedom and the joy of giving ourselves for something great; in other words, we shall learn to love. For the basic principle of love is not self-satisfaction, it is self-giving. It is paradoxical but true: Only by giving ourselves do we discover who we really are. I become myself when I freely say Yes! to another.
The fourth Sunday of Easter is known as Good Shepherd Sunday. It is a devout custom on this day to pray for vocations. When we hear the word ‘vocations’ the chances are we think of the call to be a priest or a religious. We do need such, and consecrated life is a wonderful adventure that can lead to great happiness: take my word for it! All young Catholics should ask themselves at some point: ‘Might I be called to serve in such a way?’ But of course the notion of vocation is broader, more variegated. God has a purpose in mind, not just for priests, monks, and nuns, but for all his children. Each of you has a vocation in the sense that a task is awaiting you that will correspond to your particular giftedness, which will let you attain your full measure. Use the grace you receive today to ask: ‘Lord, to what do you call me? Where do you need me?’ Then, follow the shepherd’s voice. It is trustworthy. It will lead you into landscapes that surpass your expectations.
Acts 13.14-52: We must turn to the pagans.
Acts 7.9-17: They stand before the throne and before the Lamb.
John 10.27-30: My sheep hear my voice.
The iconography of piety can make the Good Shepherd, an important motif in Scripture, seem remote, perhaps a little disagreeable. The shepherd presupposes the flock; and being likened to sheep, be they Biblical, does not flatter us. Further, we are used to seeing the shepherd carry a lamb, the hundredth, lost one supposed, the point isn’t lost on us, to represent us.
Now, once in a while we may feel like being carried in this way, when we’ve really made a mess of things and feel powerless. But in general we do prefer to walk on our own, to find our way with our own strength, to experience that we’re good for something. The image of the shepherd can seem to disenfranchise us. And we start wondering: is this what Christianity is about, becoming an animated ball of wool carried on draped shoulders into a pastel-hued sunset? This impression conditioned my own religious formation. For this is how, as far as I remember, the Gospel was presented to me the one and only time I attended Sunday School. I was appalled. When the lesson was over I marched home and declared to my parents with all the authority of my eight years: ‘Never again!’ I never did go back.
Only much later, when I started studying the Bible — and discovered what a fascinating, magnificent book it is — did I realise that the shepherd in fact stands for something rather different. Of course, ancient Israel was nomadic. People did not settle in one place. They moved around seeking favourable conditions for themselves and their flocks, which were their livelihood. A shepherd was exposed to risks: inhospitable nature, wild animals, bandits. The image par excellence of the Old Testament shepherd is David. When as a young man he faced Goliath, a trained guerilla warrior, he told King Saul, to prove himself fit for single combat:
Your servant used to keep sheep for his father; and when there came a lion, or a bear, and took a lamb from the flock, I went after him and smote him and delivered it out of his mouth; and if he arose against me, I caught him by his beard, and smote him and killed him. Your servant has killed both lions and bears (1 Samuel 17.34-6).
That is a rather different kind of shepherd profile. Such experience equipped David for a political career. For the Lord, we read in a Psalm, ‘took him from the sheepfolds; from tending the ewes that had young, he brought him to be the shepherd of Jacob his people, of Israel his inheritance’ (Psalm 78.71). The Christ-image in the parable of the shepherd does not suggest a chilled hippie pursuing an alternative lifestyle. It suggests a profile of clear strategy, courage, and a spirit of sacrifice, qualities we look for in a trustworthy leader.
When we turn to the Gospel we have just read, we find that it’s about trust above all. ‘My sheep hear my voice’, says the Lord: ‘I know them, and they follow me.’
All of us know what the sound of a beloved person can signify. Think of an infant who does not yet grasp what is being spoken around it, but who relishes the voice of its mother nursing it, caring for it, protecting it. Our Norwegian poet Per Sivle wrote a poem 150 years ago that begins with the words: ‘The first song I ever heard/was that of my mother at the cradle‘. He describes how remembrance of that song penetrated under his skin, becoming a symbol for the comfort we all long for when we’re afraid. The last stanza of the poem reads: ‘When weary I tire/in combat against what wrecks/I hear, quietly, from my mother’s grave/the song that can heal all things.’ Sivle lost his mother at the age of three and spent his childhood being moved from one foster home to the next. Bearing that in mind, we are alerted to the pathos of his text. That helps us to ask: Whose voice carries for me such promise?
We know, too, what threatening voices do to us — when we think of someone who has hurt us, perhaps, or taunted us at school or at work, belittling us. The resonance of a scornful, dangerous voice gives us goosebumps and sets our pulse racing.
At times we may find that life is like a vast resonant room in which threatening and comforting voices outshout, or outwhisper, one another. We must choose, then, which to follow. We must know how to tell the voices apart.
Today, my friends, you will receive ‘the seal of God’s gift, the Holy Spirit’. Thereby you are greatly helped in the work of voice discernment. The Spirit is the Spirit of Jesus, the Risen One. It conveys his presence and his power. It calls to mind all he has said. The Spirit teaches us what it means to live in Christ. The more we get used to living thus, the more clearly we shall know his voice. That does not necessarily mean that we will receive a lot of very specific instructions. God does not absolve us from thinking and working things out. But he helps us to think clearly.
The shepherd’s task is to lead the flock. The voice of Jesus guides us forward so that we, before the crossroads of life, where we must make essential choices, choose well and so can move forward towards goals corresponding to our true desires, where we shall find freedom and the joy of giving ourselves for something great; in other words, we shall learn to love. For the basic principle of love is not self-satisfaction, it is self-giving. It is paradoxical but true: Only by giving ourselves do we discover who we really are. I become myself when I freely say Yes! to another.
The fourth Sunday of Easter is known as Good Shepherd Sunday. It is a devout custom on this day to pray for vocations. When we hear the word ‘vocations’ the chances are we think of the call to be a priest or a religious. We do need such, and consecrated life is a wonderful adventure that can lead to great happiness: take my word for it! All young Catholics should ask themselves at some point: ‘Might I be called to serve in such a way?’ But of course the notion of vocation is broader, more variegated. God has a purpose in mind, not just for priests, monks, and nuns, but for all his children. Each of you has a vocation in the sense that a task is awaiting you that will correspond to your particular giftedness, which will let you attain your full measure. Use the grace you receive today to ask: ‘Lord, to what do you call me? Where do you need me?’ Then, follow the shepherd’s voice. It is trustworthy. It will lead you into landscapes that surpass your expectations.