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:
What is Love? 
A homily given on the last full days of the Nordic Bishops’ Conference, which has been in session in Trondheim this week.
1 Corinthians 8.1-13: Love makes the building grow.
Luke 6.27-38: Love your enemies.
At all times men and women have loved Read More
1 Corinthians 8.1-13: Love makes the building grow.
Luke 6.27-38: Love your enemies.
At all times men and women have loved Read More
Evangelisation From a press statement of the Nordic Bishops’ Conference: “Bishop Erik Varden OCSO (50), Bishop Prelate of Trondheim and Apostolic Administrator of Tromsø, was elected new president of the Nordic Bishops’ Conference. Bishop Raimo Goyarrola (55), bishop of Helsinki, was Read More
Contemplation The word ‘contemplation’ is currently on many lips. It is a good thing. Many aspire to attain deep prayer. They long to ‘see God’, which is an eminently Scriptural aspiration. How often, though, the spiritual quest is treated, even in Read More
Pastoral Letter Pastoral Letter to the Prelature of Tromsø. A Polish version can be found here.
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
A year has passed since the Holy Father appointed me Administrator of the Prelature of Tromsø. Like all of you, I had hoped a Read More
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
A year has passed since the Holy Father appointed me Administrator of the Prelature of Tromsø. Like all of you, I had hoped a Read More
The Body at Prayer A lecture given to open an ecumenical symposium at Bjärka Säby. The lecture was followed by a public conversation with Professor Sarah Coakley.
I was a doctoral student when a friend passed on to me a second-hand copy of a book Read More
I was a doctoral student when a friend passed on to me a second-hand copy of a book Read More
Sealed Revelations As so often, I find a life-giving, challenging perspective on life in Paulina Mariadotter. On 10 October 1963 she noted in her prayerbook:
‘All Gods’ revelations are sealed until our obedience breaks the seal – in the very moment in which Read More
‘All Gods’ revelations are sealed until our obedience breaks the seal – in the very moment in which Read More
Jargoning Jackdaws These days I daily read a page or two of Between Two Eternities: A Helen Waddell Anthology or of Mediaeval Latin Lyrics, astonished at the intelligence and musicality of Waddell’s renderings, which sweep away the distance merely apparently created by Read More
What is Love?
A homily given on the last full days of the Nordic Bishops’ Conference, which has been in session in Trondheim this week.
1 Corinthians 8.1-13: Love makes the building grow.
Luke 6.27-38: Love your enemies.
At all times men and women have loved to talk about love. Our time is no exception. It has this peculiarity, though: discourse about ‘love’ these days tends to have an edge of anger. Ubiquitous rainbow flags with the inscription ‘Love is love’ blow with an air of implicit indictment, perceived as a comfort by some, as a threat by others. What it means to ‘love’ one’s nation has become such a contentious question in many countries that certain manifestations of such ‘love’ are declared illegal. And what are we to say about the little ‘loving’ hearts people use to take up positions online, mostly anonymously? Do they not often convey disdain of the opposite? It would seem that a declaration of ‘love’ today is often an expression of self-assertion, a claim to entitlement, a way of drawing a line of demarcation between myself and those who ‘love’ things I do not ‘love’.
What a contrast with the New Testament notion of love put before us in our readings! Love, says St Paul, is the opposite of self-importance. He associates love with the growth of a building. That image is eloquent when we recall his focus elsewhere on our call to be ‘living stones’ in God’s temple. Love on this account is readiness to sustain tension, to consider one’s call and stick with it, come what may, remaining steadily in place so that others can reckon with us in Christ’s name and securely construct their existence around us, the result being an environment of shelter and security for all.
Our Lord in the Gospel is more radical still. For him, love is the overcoming of sentiment. To love as Jesus commands is to abandon, once for all, any weight-and-measure standard of reciprocity: you’ll scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours, else I’ll leave you to your itch. Jesus tells us to love ‘without any hope of return’; to pour ourselves out uncalculatingly. His is a call to self-outpouring at once heroic and unselfconscious, therefore light.
This is the stated madness of the Gospel. The risk involved is real. Christ’s cross is a reminder that we live in this way staking our lives. Yet that is not all. Even hesitant attempts to follow his teaching let us verify no less the truth of the measure pressed down, shaken together, running over into our laps as an explosion of grace — and the reality of a joyful peace this world cannot give. We begin to recognise, then, the boundlessness that marks genuine love, and the beatitude of gratuitous self-giving. For such love our time is hungry. One cannot live on substitutes indefinitely, and love is what we’re made for.
May we know the real deal, then, and share it freely. Amen.
Thursday of the 23rd week of Year B, Ordinary Time
Detail from the interior of the cathedral of Braga.
1 Corinthians 8.1-13: Love makes the building grow.
Luke 6.27-38: Love your enemies.
At all times men and women have loved to talk about love. Our time is no exception. It has this peculiarity, though: discourse about ‘love’ these days tends to have an edge of anger. Ubiquitous rainbow flags with the inscription ‘Love is love’ blow with an air of implicit indictment, perceived as a comfort by some, as a threat by others. What it means to ‘love’ one’s nation has become such a contentious question in many countries that certain manifestations of such ‘love’ are declared illegal. And what are we to say about the little ‘loving’ hearts people use to take up positions online, mostly anonymously? Do they not often convey disdain of the opposite? It would seem that a declaration of ‘love’ today is often an expression of self-assertion, a claim to entitlement, a way of drawing a line of demarcation between myself and those who ‘love’ things I do not ‘love’.
What a contrast with the New Testament notion of love put before us in our readings! Love, says St Paul, is the opposite of self-importance. He associates love with the growth of a building. That image is eloquent when we recall his focus elsewhere on our call to be ‘living stones’ in God’s temple. Love on this account is readiness to sustain tension, to consider one’s call and stick with it, come what may, remaining steadily in place so that others can reckon with us in Christ’s name and securely construct their existence around us, the result being an environment of shelter and security for all.
Our Lord in the Gospel is more radical still. For him, love is the overcoming of sentiment. To love as Jesus commands is to abandon, once for all, any weight-and-measure standard of reciprocity: you’ll scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours, else I’ll leave you to your itch. Jesus tells us to love ‘without any hope of return’; to pour ourselves out uncalculatingly. His is a call to self-outpouring at once heroic and unselfconscious, therefore light.
This is the stated madness of the Gospel. The risk involved is real. Christ’s cross is a reminder that we live in this way staking our lives. Yet that is not all. Even hesitant attempts to follow his teaching let us verify no less the truth of the measure pressed down, shaken together, running over into our laps as an explosion of grace — and the reality of a joyful peace this world cannot give. We begin to recognise, then, the boundlessness that marks genuine love, and the beatitude of gratuitous self-giving. For such love our time is hungry. One cannot live on substitutes indefinitely, and love is what we’re made for.
May we know the real deal, then, and share it freely. Amen.
Thursday of the 23rd week of Year B, Ordinary Time
Detail from the interior of the cathedral of Braga.
Evangelisation
From a press statement of the Nordic Bishops’ Conference: “Bishop Erik Varden OCSO (50), Bishop Prelate of Trondheim and Apostolic Administrator of Tromsø, was elected new president of the Nordic Bishops’ Conference. Bishop Raimo Goyarrola (55), bishop of Helsinki, was elected vice-president. Bishop David Tencer (61), bishop of Reykjavik, was re-elected as the third member of the Permanent Council. […] In a first statement Bishop Varden said: ‘The conference’s task is essential in order to nurture our endeavour of evangelisation through deep conversations and trustful friendship. The Catholic presence in our countries is growing. We want to accompany this growth intelligently and to support all good initiatives.’ He further stated: ‘Our post-secular society is opening itself anew to metaphysical questions and spiritual values. Many people are searching. Christ is and remains the light of the world, the goal of human existence! It is our responsibility to represent him credibly and faithfully’.”
Contemplation
The word ‘contemplation’ is currently on many lips. It is a good thing. Many aspire to attain deep prayer. They long to ‘see God’, which is an eminently Scriptural aspiration. How often, though, the spiritual quest is treated, even in manuals of prayer, as if it were distinct from the general demands of Christian discipleship. We need the realism of St Bernard in the text which the Church this morning lets us read at Vigils: ‘The first stage of contemplation is to consider constantly what God wants, what is pleasing to him, and what is acceptable in his eyes. We all offend in many things; our strength cannot match the rightness of God’s will and cannot be joined to it or made to fit with it. So let us humble ourselves under the powerful hand of the most high God and make an effort to show ourselves unworthy before his merciful gaze, saying Heal me, Lord, and I shall be healed; save me and I shall be saved […]. Once the eye of the soul has been purified by such considerations, we no longer abide within our spirit in a sense of sorrow, but abide rather in the Spirit of God with great delight. No longer do we consider what is the will of God for us, but rather what it is in itself. For our life is in his will. Thus we are convinced that what is according to his will is in every way better for us, and more fitting. And so, if we are concerned to preserve the life of our soul, we must be equally concerned to deviate as little as possible from his will.’ From Sermo V de diversis, 4-5.
Pastoral Letter
Pastoral Letter to the Prelature of Tromsø. A Polish version can be found here.
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
A year has passed since the Holy Father appointed me Administrator of the Prelature of Tromsø. Like all of you, I had hoped a new local bishop would be appointed swiftly. Like all of you, I have ascertained that the old proverb still holds: sometimes God’s mills grind slowly.
To wait is a difficult business for us humans. It has always been thus. The circumstances that are ours have made the experience worse. We live in a time of immediacy. We expect, and are constantly promised, that everything we wish for will be delivered quickly. That is why we become restless and frustrated, perhaps even angry, when we have to wait. Let us remind ourselves, then, that a time of waiting can be a time of benediction.
Even if the Sunday liturgy takes precedence, the Church celebrates today, on 8 September, the birthday of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I would like to say a few words about that feast. It concerns the accomplishment of a hope nurtured for hundres of years, yes, even since the beginning of the world. The Fathers didn’t hesitate to recognise a prophetic image of Mary in Scripture’s prophecy about the eternal Word of God — a feminine figure — ‘playing before the face of God’ at the beginning of creation (Proverbs 8.30).
With careful deliberation God prepared his work of salvation, which Mary’s Yes enabled, throughout the generations. Age by age he made mankind ready. The amazing thing is: Man knew it not. This great work happened on the terms Jesus describes in his parable about the astonished husbandman who woke up one fine morning to find his field wonderfully flourishing: ‘The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed upon the ground, and should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should sprout and grow, he knows not how’ (Mark 4.26-27). This, says the Lord, is simply the way it is in affairs concerning the kingdom of God.
When we contemplate the life and vocation of Mary, the ‘seed’ in question is the hope of redemption; it is the gracious assurance that God has a plan for human history that he can and will fulfil. The older I get, the more I am fascinated by the genealogy the Church lets us read on the birthday of Mary. It shows how the promise made to Abraham, the promise that in him all peoples of the earth would be blessed (Genesis 22.18), matures through time.
About some of the women and men mentioned in the genealogy we know quite a lot. The Patriarchs, Ruth, David, and Solomon are intimately familiar to us. About many others we know nothing at all. That is of no importance. They were vehicles of God’s purpose whether they knew it or not. They were a blessing.
It is often the case that we, when we look back over our private or collective lives, discern a kind of necessity in the way things have worked out: this thing had to happen for that to be realised; this person had to meet that person, and so forth. One of the exciting things about growing older is the broader perspective on existence we acquire. It enables us to see patterns, the fingerprints of God’s providence.
When we look ahead, things are different. Then we can often feel anxious and confused. Which choices should we make? What will happen to us? How can we relate to all that makes us afraid, to what appears as the world’s outrageous unpredictability?
We must remember that God has a plan he mysteriously realises without limiting our freedom and without having any illusions about our moral and physical frailty. His outlook exceeds ours. As we read in the Second Letter of Peter: ‘For the Lord one day is alike a thousand years, a thousand years like a single day (3.8). Peter, who had seen God’s glory on Tabor and confronted his own smallness in Caiaphas’s courtyard, knew the abyss that separates God’s reality from ours; at the same time he knew that God in Christ, born of the Virgin Mary, has laid a bridge across the abyss so that we, when we hold his hand and hers, can cross it safely.
Dear brothers and sisters, I am reminding you of these things, already well known to you, to share my conviction that our own wait here and now serves a purpose, that it constitutes a task. There is immense beauty in the Catholic Church in the North of Norway; there is a harvest waiting to be gathered in, of that I am certain. After decades of secularisation, our nation has hit material rock bottom; we could hardly become more materialised. Yet the human being remains human, possessed of a longing for sense, truth, and substance. God’s eternal Word, who is the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1.15), is imprinted on our being. Only in him do we find a remedy for the disquiet that inhabits us.
Let us use this time well to be deeply rooted in Christ, to experience what it means to live in him. Let us, like the Virgin Mary, say Yes to God’s call even when we don’t know where it leads, trusting that God knows, and that that is enough. His purpose is to sanctify our lives, to make us into new men and women, bearers of hope for the world, and joy. He who calls us is faithful. He does not abandon his Church. Be assured that he is working a blessing in your midst.
Thank you for receiving me so warmly thus far. I have been happy to get to know many of you. I look forward to getting to know many more. You are all in my daily prayer.
In the name of Christ!
+fr Erik Varden OCSO
Bishop of Trondheim and Apostolic Administrator of Tromsø
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
A year has passed since the Holy Father appointed me Administrator of the Prelature of Tromsø. Like all of you, I had hoped a new local bishop would be appointed swiftly. Like all of you, I have ascertained that the old proverb still holds: sometimes God’s mills grind slowly.
To wait is a difficult business for us humans. It has always been thus. The circumstances that are ours have made the experience worse. We live in a time of immediacy. We expect, and are constantly promised, that everything we wish for will be delivered quickly. That is why we become restless and frustrated, perhaps even angry, when we have to wait. Let us remind ourselves, then, that a time of waiting can be a time of benediction.
Even if the Sunday liturgy takes precedence, the Church celebrates today, on 8 September, the birthday of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I would like to say a few words about that feast. It concerns the accomplishment of a hope nurtured for hundres of years, yes, even since the beginning of the world. The Fathers didn’t hesitate to recognise a prophetic image of Mary in Scripture’s prophecy about the eternal Word of God — a feminine figure — ‘playing before the face of God’ at the beginning of creation (Proverbs 8.30).
With careful deliberation God prepared his work of salvation, which Mary’s Yes enabled, throughout the generations. Age by age he made mankind ready. The amazing thing is: Man knew it not. This great work happened on the terms Jesus describes in his parable about the astonished husbandman who woke up one fine morning to find his field wonderfully flourishing: ‘The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed upon the ground, and should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should sprout and grow, he knows not how’ (Mark 4.26-27). This, says the Lord, is simply the way it is in affairs concerning the kingdom of God.
When we contemplate the life and vocation of Mary, the ‘seed’ in question is the hope of redemption; it is the gracious assurance that God has a plan for human history that he can and will fulfil. The older I get, the more I am fascinated by the genealogy the Church lets us read on the birthday of Mary. It shows how the promise made to Abraham, the promise that in him all peoples of the earth would be blessed (Genesis 22.18), matures through time.
About some of the women and men mentioned in the genealogy we know quite a lot. The Patriarchs, Ruth, David, and Solomon are intimately familiar to us. About many others we know nothing at all. That is of no importance. They were vehicles of God’s purpose whether they knew it or not. They were a blessing.
It is often the case that we, when we look back over our private or collective lives, discern a kind of necessity in the way things have worked out: this thing had to happen for that to be realised; this person had to meet that person, and so forth. One of the exciting things about growing older is the broader perspective on existence we acquire. It enables us to see patterns, the fingerprints of God’s providence.
When we look ahead, things are different. Then we can often feel anxious and confused. Which choices should we make? What will happen to us? How can we relate to all that makes us afraid, to what appears as the world’s outrageous unpredictability?
We must remember that God has a plan he mysteriously realises without limiting our freedom and without having any illusions about our moral and physical frailty. His outlook exceeds ours. As we read in the Second Letter of Peter: ‘For the Lord one day is alike a thousand years, a thousand years like a single day (3.8). Peter, who had seen God’s glory on Tabor and confronted his own smallness in Caiaphas’s courtyard, knew the abyss that separates God’s reality from ours; at the same time he knew that God in Christ, born of the Virgin Mary, has laid a bridge across the abyss so that we, when we hold his hand and hers, can cross it safely.
Dear brothers and sisters, I am reminding you of these things, already well known to you, to share my conviction that our own wait here and now serves a purpose, that it constitutes a task. There is immense beauty in the Catholic Church in the North of Norway; there is a harvest waiting to be gathered in, of that I am certain. After decades of secularisation, our nation has hit material rock bottom; we could hardly become more materialised. Yet the human being remains human, possessed of a longing for sense, truth, and substance. God’s eternal Word, who is the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1.15), is imprinted on our being. Only in him do we find a remedy for the disquiet that inhabits us.
Let us use this time well to be deeply rooted in Christ, to experience what it means to live in him. Let us, like the Virgin Mary, say Yes to God’s call even when we don’t know where it leads, trusting that God knows, and that that is enough. His purpose is to sanctify our lives, to make us into new men and women, bearers of hope for the world, and joy. He who calls us is faithful. He does not abandon his Church. Be assured that he is working a blessing in your midst.
Thank you for receiving me so warmly thus far. I have been happy to get to know many of you. I look forward to getting to know many more. You are all in my daily prayer.
In the name of Christ!
+fr Erik Varden OCSO
Bishop of Trondheim and Apostolic Administrator of Tromsø
The Body at Prayer
A lecture given to open an ecumenical symposium at Bjärka Säby. The lecture was followed by a public conversation with Professor Sarah Coakley.
I was a doctoral student when a friend passed on to me a second-hand copy of a book by the Belgian Benedictine Jean Déchanet, a monk of Saint-André de Bruges. Déchanet, born in 1906, was known to me as a medieval scholar. His work on William of Saint-Thierry, the chief intellectual among the twelfth-century school of Cistercian Fathers, has defined much modern reception of that attractive, subtle thinker. Déchanet established a Latin edition of William’s Golden Epistle, which he also translated. Given this backdrop, I was puzzled by the title and content of the book given me. In French it was published in 1956, complete with an Imprimatur, as, La Voie du silence: Yoga pour chrétien. The English version produced four years later by Harper in New York was called more straightforwardly, Christian Yoga.
So was this austere examiner of manuscripts, a man seemingly at home in a monastic environment à la Eco’s The Name of the Rose, at the same time some kind of hippie, drawn like the Beatles by the mystique and stillness of the fragrant Orient?
Fr Déchanet countered this predictable objection in his preface to the third edition of La Voie du silence, out in 1963 after the book had sold tens of thousands of copies. Not only, he pointed out, was his interest in yoga not at odds with his study of the medieval theologian. It was a consequence of such engagement. He wrote:
I was led to Yoga by William of Saint-Thierry. For twenty years I lived under the aegis and influence of his living psychology, which in turn had been taken and adapted from Origen (himself an Oriental). My chief concern has been to ensure that in me there should exist that balance of anima, animus and spiritus which he makes the precondition […] of the unfolding in man of the grace of our Lord, and of the transition from the image (the mark of which is clearly set on these ‘three’) to divine resemblance. The creature, cut off from God by sin and divided, moreover, within himself, cannot entertain the hope of finding his Creator or his lost intimacy with him otherwise than by first of all making use of the grace of Christ the Redeemer and of his power and example, in order to fashion himself anew in the image of God, to re-establish unity in himself, and to rediscover the natural order in the order of charity.
William’s position as retold by Déchanet instances a soaring intuition that informed much twelfth-century enterprise as European Christians increasingly sensed the potential nobility of embodied human nature. Of course, this intuition was not universally shared. It struggled, like any new life, to be born. By way of example, Helen Waddell amiably contrasts the perception of Bernard of Clairvaux with that of his younger contemporary, the philosopher Bernard Sylvestris, herald of a catholic synthesis accomplished in the next, thirteenth century, which produced persons and monuments that still hold out to us a measure of what we think of as ‘humane’. Waddell calls this synthesis a ‘Truce of God’, a reconciliation that ended at last an age-old war between the spirit and the flesh, ‘even as the Last Judgement of the Western rose-window in Chartres melts into “heaven’s own colour, blue”.’ Where Bernard of Clairvaux had spoken of ‘the dungheap of the flesh’, she notes, Bernard Sylvestris saw in the union of flesh and spirit ‘a discipline that made for greatness, and the body itself a not ignoble hospice for the pilgrim soul.’
The Cistercian Bernard, harsh in his quips, treated his own flesh harshly. Excessive mortification forced him early in his abbacy to take a time of monastic sick-leave in a hermitage near Clairvaux. That was where William of Saint Thierry, still a Benedictine, first met him in 1118. The two became firm friends. It is plausible that they talked even then of the body’s status in man’s spiritual quest. William harboured the conviction that our body is intrinsic to who we are, constituting not just a tent to shelter our sojourn in this vale of tears but an intentionally imaged reality susceptible of Godlikeness. William’s tripartite anthropology, to which Déchanet refers, conceives of the human being as a composite of physicality, soul-reason, and spirit. These distinctions shape The Golden Epistle’s three-part division taking us from Animal Man (the human being considered in its embodiment), through Rational Man (accounting for man’s intellective faculties), to Spiritual Man (envisaging transformation by grace), not as if these were successive scores to be rehearsed, one surpassing the other, but as a perfectly balanced polyphonic motet.
Déchanet was not content to expound this anthropology in monographs. He wanted, he says, to ‘to ensure that in me there should exist that balance of anima, animus and spiritus’. He was a monk, pursuing theology as part of his overall quest, on which he had staked his life, to behold what St Benedict calls ‘the deifying light’ and to be transformed, remade by it. Déchanet’s personal circumstances raised the stakes. He says he had been ‘an invalid from childhood on’ — suffering cruelly from epilepsy — ‘but when I was about forty, I was providentially cured, and felt a consuming urge to live’. The French original speaks of ‘un impérieux besoin de vivre’, a need entertained as an imperative, as if in intimate response to an oracle like that addressed to Ezekiel in the parable of the unsalted, unswaddled infant whom the Lord picks up and raises high: ‘I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live; yea, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live’ (16.6).
I was stirred by that passage when I read it as a young man. I also wanted, needed to live. I still find Déchanet’s text a compelling statement of Christian purpose. That is not, though, my reason for invoking it today. I want instead to point to a self-evident but still curious paradox: when this cultured Belgian Benedictine avid for life in his fifth decade, having taught himself to swim at 42, loosening up his limbs, sought an effective tool with which to spiritualise his body in pursuit of his animus’s harmonious union with anima and spiritus, he spontaneously looked towards yoga, rehearsing asanas after vigils in his cell before an open window.
Yoga, of course, was in the air. Paramahansa Yogananda had published his Autobiography of a Yogi in 1946 after a quarter-century of energetic teaching in the United States. Millions read, and still read, this book. Steve Jobs had copies handed out to all those who attended his memorial service at Stanford on 16 October 2011, a posthumous benefaction. In the 1950s the West encountered, too, the hugely influential teachings of B.K.S. Iyengar whose chief ambassador was the violinist Yehudi Menuhin. Menuhin maintained that the practice of yoga had liberated his playing. He called Iyengar ‘my best violin teacher’. Yogananda and Iyengar are but two high-profile proponents of a more general trend eliciting in Boston, London, and Paris a massive, enchanted response. Monks, like everyone else, became curious. Fr Bede Griffiths practised yoga at Farnborough in the years following World War II, and left for India in 1955 as did Fr Francis Acharya, a Trappist of Scourmont who founded Kurisumala. Fr Jules Monchanin, a diocesan priest with monastic aspirations, had lived in India since 1939 and was joined there in 1948 by Fr Henri Le Saux of Kergonan, later known throughout the world as Abishiktananda.
These Catholic clerics were intelligent and articulate. Their reports from the spiritual front line, thought by many to lie in the Far East, trickled into the remotest cloisters, setting off a wave of interest, enquiry, and experimentation. Déchanet may have practised ‘The Serpent’, ‘The Dolphin’, ‘The Folded Leaf’, and other yogic postures in solitude at Saint André, but all over Europe were monks and nuns, not to mention countless lay people, doing the the same. The lasting impact of this movement is obvious. So-called ‘Christian Yoga’ is a mainstream phenomenon now.
I have sketched an aspirational movement that began gently in Europe and the US after the First World War, picked up momentum after the Second, then became a tidal wave in the 1960s, corresponding to the yearning of people in a fast-moving, ever more materialist West truly to inhabit their bodies and to realise a deeply-felt hunch that their physical self is a reliable bearer of sense. Menuhin wrote in a foreword to Iyengar’s book Light on Yoga in 1980:
Reduced to our own body, our first instrument, we learn to play it, drawing from it maximum resonance and harmony. With unflagging patience we refine and animate every cell […], unlocking and liberating capacities otherwise condemned to frustration and death.
This purpose of self-realisation acquires special poignancy in a Christian optic which holds that the human being is made, made entirely, in the image of God. One can see how a sincere and thoughtful Christian like Fr Déchanet would pursue it with contemplative conviction, giving rise to a school of practice.
Having established as much, let us leave our Christian yogis distended in a posture of repose while we turn our minds to a simultaneous, in many ways parallel development in Western Christianity during the second half of the twentieth century.
For is it not both interesting and odd that the corporate turning of attention towards the Far East of both Catholics and Protestants avid for spirituality grounded in ritualised physical discipline should have coincided with a thoroughgoing deritualisation of inherited forms of worship at home? This topic is a hot potato now, at any rate in Roman Catholic circles, where young people are keen to rediscover aspects of liturgy and ascetic practice abandoned in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, not, mostly, because the Council required it, but because the Council’s reception to such an extent unfolded within the context of a cultural climate enthused by prospects of starting out afresh from clean slates with minimalist utilitarian means: the equivalence in ecclesiastical reform of Cripps’s architecture.
Today’s young seekers find themselves reprimanded by a predominantly elderly establishment formed by the thrills and anxieties of that revolutionary time, which, to state the obvious, is chronologically further removed from them than the Treaty of Versailles was from youths waving banners on Parisian barricades in 1968, and in many ways quite as significant of a lost world.
It is not my purpose to engage in polemics. What interests me, rather, is to explore an aspect of today’s so-called liturgical ‘conservatism’ that I sense has been overlooked, namely its physical and ascetic, if you like, its ‘yogic’ aspect, which cannot be brushed aside, it seems to me, as an expression of purportedly ‘retrograde’ or ‘rigid’ tendency, for it stands for the opposite: a yearning to be made new in Christ, and malleable. I will make my case by means of a brisk analysis of the Ritual of the pre-conciliar Roman missal, which can, over and above its sublime aspect, be read as a manual of sacred gymnastics.
The possibility of Mass taking place at all rests on two paragraphs, 807-8, of the 1917 Code of Canon Law. Laying down parameters for licit celebration, they define that ‘priests conscious of grave sin, no matter how contrite they believe themselves to be, shall not dare to celebrate Mass without prior sacramental confession’; next, that ‘it is not licit for priests to celebrate without having observed a natural fast from midnight’. The celebrant is submitted to a discipline both moral and corporal. Soul and body are readied in advance for the eucharistic sacrifice, which no one may presume to improvise. The ordained are to be configured to it, not it to them.
The requirement of fasting may have seemed innocuous enough to a cheerily rotund cathedral canon going to bed at 11 to rise at 6 and say Mass at 7, just downstairs, thereafter to tuck into sausages and eggs. But imagine being a priest in Nigeria, say, walking for hours in the forenoon sun to an outstation, carrying your portable altar on your back, without being able even to take a sip of water. Certain verses of the Psalms — ‘my flesh faints for thee’ (Ps 63.1), ’my soul thirsts for thee like a parched land’ (Ps 143.6) — will have seemed overwhelmingly real, then. One would have been conscious of the ‘supersubstantial bread’ as truly nourishment.
The double requirement of confession and fasting was incumbent not only on priests but on any Catholic going to communion. In The Burning Bush, Sigrid Undset tells of the novel’s hero Paul Selmer, a Catholic convert, attending a bridge night in stodgy gentlemanly company during World War I. The other players noticed that he did not refill his whisky-and-soda past midnight. Asked why, Paul said he would go to Mass in the morning and intended to receive the sacrament. At this, the company was aghast (ch. II.2). It is a trivial scene, in a way. At the same time it is a lofty one. It speaks of the deliberate integration of spiritual discipline into ordinary life; of an existence oriented, even in its social aspect, towards a transcendent goal.
No doubt some revision of the Church’s rules was called for: the admission to break the fast with water, say, or medication. The erosion, though, went much further. The current rule is to fast for an hour before taking communion, which more or less just rules out munching sandwiches in the pews, a practice from which most churchgoers would anyway refrain from considerations of courtesy.
A communicant under the old dispensation knew that the state of one’s body is not indifferent to the state of one’s soul. People these days must latch on to guru-dieticians for such insight, and are evidently hungry for it. Fasting is a fashionable lifestyle option now, but almost entirely divorced from the practice of faith.
The Ritual stipulates that a priest, before offering Mass, must recite Vigils and Lauds, then spend time in silent prayer. In today’s secular context this would be called a mindfulness exercise. He prepares the missal and sacred vessels, then washes his hands, praying: ‘Give strength to my hands, Lord, to wipe away every stain, that I may be apt to serve you in purity of mind and body.’ The commitment implicit in his fasting is explicitly affirmed.
This is when the rite proper begins and all spontaneity ceases, much the way a woman or man attending a yoga class will, after warm-up, embark on a series of asanas minutely defined even in the subtle transitions from one to the next, requiring concentration and balance, enabling practitioners to be caught up in a movement that exceeds them. The priest is reminded that he is not the subject of the impending celebration; he is its vehicle. His task is to disappear into the words and gestures assigned to him, submitting, as a deliberate subject, to an objective reality.
The procedure of vesting recalls the last chapter of Ephesians which itemises ‘the armour of God’, associating specific parts of kit with distinct virtues (6.10-17). Taking the amict that covers his head like a hood before Mass, the priest asks the Lord to furnish a ‘helmet of salvation’ to ward off diabolical distraction. Putting on the alb, a linen garment covering his body, he prays that, ‘washed in the Blood of the Lamb’, he may live up to the grace won for him by obtaining a clean heart. Binding the cincture round his waist he prays for continence and chaste strength. The maniple tied to his left arm is symbolically a handkerchief with which to wipe the tears he will not fail to weep if he invests himself in the eucharistic mystery. The stole represents the primordial dignity of Adam issuing from God’s creative hand: ‘Restore to me, Lord’, prays the priest, ‘the stole of immortality I lost in my forefather’s prevarication. I am unworthy to approach your great mystery! Grant me nonetheless to know eternal joy!’ Finally, on top of all this comes the chasuble symbolising Christ’s sweet yoke, his light burden, held in place by strings wound tightly round the celebrant’s body before being tied upon his heart in a knot. At this point he is like a soldier fit for battle, helmeted and cuirassed. The outward exercise of doffing ordinary garments and donning sacred ones prompts the interiorisation, day by day, of the Pauline injunction to shed the old man and put on the new.
The priest proceeds to the altar ‘with eyes downcast, at a grave pace, his body held erect’. The postural specification regards the verticality specific to man in which the Fathers saw a sign of dignity and a heavenward call. One does not approach the living God slouching. Yet the celebrant’s attention is fixed on what lies ahead. He is not to look curiously around, but to focus on the task awaiting him, praying: ‘I shall approach the altar of the Lord, the God who gives joy to my youth’’ (Ps 42.4).
The liturgy begins at the altar steps, with the priest and acolyte performing a little set dialogue. It moves from a statement of purpose through a cry for God’s help to a confession of sin. The priest confesses first. He receives the prayer for forgiveness from his minister, which is noteworthy. He cannot function at the altar unless, first, he is prayed for by a server who traditionally has been a child. Thus he is exhorted, again, that he acts, not in his own strength but in grace received; even as he openly confesses before, during, and after Mass his personal unworthiness.
To observe from a distance this preliminary rite, the ascent to the altar, then the unfolding of Mass is to witness, when the rubrics are carefully kept, a sacred choreography made up of steps to the right, a return to the centre, steps to the left, revolutions, genuflexions and bows, inclinations and benedictions, all within a continuous fluency of movement, quite as in a yogic session. The smallest gestures carry messages. A nod of the head shows a mention of the name of Jesus, his Mother, or the saint of the day. The priest’s bended knee, like Solomon’s at the dedication of the temple, speaks of God’s bright presence in his sanctuary. The priest is tactilely referenced to the altar, resting his hands there when they are not otherwise engaged, kissing it before turning round to address the congregation, visibly the altar’s emissary. Even the configuration of his fingertips is kerygmatic.
What does this sort of practice do to a person performing it? All ritual can in theory become mindless performance, naturally. The secret is therefore to keep the mind engaged, the will mobilised, with animus, anima, and spiritus invested in the same unifying purpose: a corporate Godward movement in union with Christ, to render his saving sacrifice present and effective for the sustenance and sanctification of the Church. It requires presence of mind and determined self-surrender to keep this multitude of simultaneous prescriptions well. There is labour involved and notable mortification at first; but as the ritual gradually, with practice, becomes second nature body and mind are freed, enabling a singular intensity of spiritual concentration. The intelligent daily repetition of such significant actions cannot but be formative. Outward actions impact for ill or good on the conscious mind and sensitive spirit. Any yoga manual worth its salt will explain how this process works.
As for the assembly of the faithful drawn into the rite by means of an active participation properly theirs, what they behold is a person absorbed on their behalf by a noble, beautiful activity. Such a sight is always moving. Think of seeing Casals perform a cello suite by Bach or Margot Fonteyn dance the death of Giselle; think of watching an olympic diver, a stone carver fixing a gaze of tenderness in marble, a delivery man unloading a palletful of Ming vases. The most venerable of human functions, the confection of Christ’s Body and Blood in an act of rational worship, surely calls for no less a degree of deliberation and concentration?
It is this intuition, I believe, that stirs the heart of many young women and men today. I cannot see that it is false. No, in a time weighed down by artificiality, leaden rhetoric, dud personality cults, frantic ‘innovations’ of terrifying banality in stagecraft, political campaigning, and liturgical practice, a quest for objective, oblative expression in sacred functions appears to me sound, and forward-looking.
I hazard a further proposition, aware of the risk attached. The Catholic Church lives with a modern legacy of clerical abuse that constitutes an open gash in the ecclesiastical Body. Abuse is an age-old phenomenon present in every period, each cultural environment; in our day, other churches and institutions, too, are afflicted by it. At one level it pertains to a timeless mysterium iniquitatis and to man’s capacity for wickedness. There seems to be no doubt, though, that the incidence of priestly abuse in the Roman Catholic Church rose sharply from the early 1960s, coinciding with the relinquishing of physical, ritual discipline in life and worship.
Clearly, many priests had found the old liturgical form, the Mass with its inflexible rubrics, 16 genuflexions and 52 signs of the cross, suffocating. Many were hungry for spontaneous expression. What followed was the often tedious, sometimes destructive emergence of the priest as personality. Whether or not endowed with much charisma, whether or not a learned theologian or able preacher, he found himself in the centre as service-provider and visual focus of attention, with substantial executive freedom to mould rites to his form and whim, promoting or discarding at will others’ partaking. It is documented that physical abuse is almost always prepared and preceded by spiritual manipulation sprung from claims to personal authority or even fancied omnipotence based on some delusional, semi-mystical idea amounting to the claim: ‘I am special, I am in charge, I do as I please’.
All of us are susceptible to such megalomaniac illusion. The more closely we are associated with a sacred office, the more potentially lethal and luciferian this tendency becomes, inflating our perception of self. There may have been wisdom in an economy that ascetically reined in the presumption of sacred ministers, requiring them daily to regulate their appetites, to multiply restate their vocational purpose, to enact an intricate ritual calling for an ex officio obliteration of self, thereby to grow in the grace of discipleship and to be effective, christophorous channels of grace, not deluding themselves for a moment that they are somehow grace’s source.
I am not saying that the answer to all today’s ecclesiastical traumas is found in a return to old usages. Complex issues do not have such easy remedies, alas. What I am saying is this: it seems short-sighted to brush aside the hunger of many young Christians for ritual, ascesis, symbols, and formality by branding it as imbecile nostalgia, with the supreme indictment of it being anti-modern, anti-inclusive, or, in a Catholic context, anti-conciliar. The watchword of Vatican II was: ‘Return to the sources!’ To drink deeply from the sources is precisely what the young want. Why not help them? Why not enable them to find within their own tradition, a patrimony rightfully theirs, time-tested practices apt to help them grow in Christ instead of leaving them to the vaguely ethereal hunches of Steve Jobs?
The great Christian problem today is the problem of the human person and of the human body. We need a Christocentric conversion in mind and manners to make sense of our significant being, to account for our origin and end, our longings and frustrations, our wounds and our capacity for healing. To engage and counter a secular insinuation that ‘I’ — whatever ‘I’ might be — am a stranger in my body and that my body is potentially inimical to ‘me’, we need a revival of William of Saint Thierry’s reasoned conviction that my body is me, that its call is noble, even beatific, inseparable from the potential of my intellective and spiritual faculties. We may find then that our endeavour to operate a personal union of animus, anima, and spiritus does not necessarily need to take a detour via yoga. The Christian West could do with recovering a love for and a confidence in its own tradition, much the way the Cistercians did in the twelfth century, inaugurating a period of manifold flourishing.
Why cross the river in order to draw water? The Church has vast experience when it comes to the embodied application of Christian faith in God’s incarnation, which elevates our nature indescribably. Christians have sought to join the body to the spirit’s pursuits in various ways. My superficial perusal of the Ritual pointed towards a particular treasure. There are others. A re-evaluation of Christian fasting is overdue. Much can be learnt from the ascesis of monastics, at once idealists and realists. The practice of prostrations in prayer is worthy of recovery; it is a feature, not just of Byzantine piety but also, in the West, of Cistercian, Carthusian, and Mendicant devotion. Processions and pilgrimages, prominent in our tradition, provide privileged means of exercising the body in prayer. And of course, there is the prayer of the heart, whose blatantly physical aspect can appear disconcerting.
The best modern disquisition known to me on this subject happens to be of western origin. It is a treatise written by Dom André Poisson, prior of La Grande Chartreuse, so superior general of the Carthusian Order, from 1967-97, the decades during which so many western Christians turned towards the Far East in search of body-spirit unity. The treatise, dated ‘Christmas 1983’, is redolent with the grace of the Word’s incarnation, ever the foundation of Christian anthropology.
Dom Poisson insists that the ‘prayer of the heart’ cannot be reduced to an abstraction as if the ‘heart’, in this instance, were purely symbolic. ‘Every movement of the heart’, he says, ‘that contributes to our relation with the Father is linked to our sensible, material being. From experience, perhaps at some cost to our health, we know that truly profound emotions attain our physical heart.’ He stresses that ‘we cannot enter the prayer of the heart unless we accept to live deliberately and determinedly at the level of our body’. Why do we find this so hard to take on board within our normal setting, looking instead for exotic practices and new idioms?
Possibly because we tend to live and think as implicit dualists, conceiving of our bodies as repositories of appetites, pains, pleasures, and intimate excretions with no bearing on what we think of as our ‘higher’ self, as unwieldy frames of which we are often embarrassed, so that we rule out their involvement in the realisation of our theological finality. Do we in fact own our body as a place of encounter with God not just in the eschaton but now? Do we believe in the body’s fitness for resurrection?
Dom Poisson, truly a monk and therefore a person steeped in liturgy, develops his perspective within a eucharistic ecclesiology:
Even as it is impossible to approach life in community as if our brothers were disincarnate beings of pure spirit, to be reached somehow beyond their physical wrapping, it would be a denial of the reality of God’s love to turn the physical, material, palpable presence of the Son-with-us into an abstraction.
St Antony the Great said, ‘With our neighbour is life and death’, an insight St Silouan of Athos distilled into, ‘My brother is my life’. That affirmation is at once experiential and conceptual, enabled by a mystery of communion effected through material realities that are the Son of God. ‘Similarly’, writes Dom Poisson — and there is considerable daring in that only apparently casual adverb:
Similarly, our own body, with its heaviness, limits, and constraints, is the reality of what we are. It is my body that touches that other reality of which Jesus said: ‘This is my Body.’ […] I cannot possibly pray without praying in my body. When I turn towards God, I cannot abstract my incarnate reality. It is not just a question of religious discipline if certain gestures are prescribed, if certain material conditions direct me, when I turn to God. These are pointers to the one and only truth: God loves me the way he made me. Why should I want to be more spiritual than he?
The question is rhetorical. It nonetheless challenges a number of ecclesiastical projects, strategies, reforms, and synodal ventures of the past six or seven decades, during which the Church, bang in the middle of the sexual revolution, has often tended, weirdly, to leave the body behind, preferring concepts to praxis. Impatience with this state of affairs seems to me a sign of Christian health. In the coming year we shall commemorate the seventeenth centenary of the Council of Nicaea at which the Church of East and West proclaimed with one voice the reality of the Word’s incarnation. It would seem a fitting opportunity to reaffirm the grace bestowed thereby upon our flesh, and the prospect of worshipful dignity such grace enables.
The Cistercian nuns of Boulaur prostrate during the Liturgy of Good Friday.
I was a doctoral student when a friend passed on to me a second-hand copy of a book by the Belgian Benedictine Jean Déchanet, a monk of Saint-André de Bruges. Déchanet, born in 1906, was known to me as a medieval scholar. His work on William of Saint-Thierry, the chief intellectual among the twelfth-century school of Cistercian Fathers, has defined much modern reception of that attractive, subtle thinker. Déchanet established a Latin edition of William’s Golden Epistle, which he also translated. Given this backdrop, I was puzzled by the title and content of the book given me. In French it was published in 1956, complete with an Imprimatur, as, La Voie du silence: Yoga pour chrétien. The English version produced four years later by Harper in New York was called more straightforwardly, Christian Yoga.
So was this austere examiner of manuscripts, a man seemingly at home in a monastic environment à la Eco’s The Name of the Rose, at the same time some kind of hippie, drawn like the Beatles by the mystique and stillness of the fragrant Orient?
Fr Déchanet countered this predictable objection in his preface to the third edition of La Voie du silence, out in 1963 after the book had sold tens of thousands of copies. Not only, he pointed out, was his interest in yoga not at odds with his study of the medieval theologian. It was a consequence of such engagement. He wrote:
I was led to Yoga by William of Saint-Thierry. For twenty years I lived under the aegis and influence of his living psychology, which in turn had been taken and adapted from Origen (himself an Oriental). My chief concern has been to ensure that in me there should exist that balance of anima, animus and spiritus which he makes the precondition […] of the unfolding in man of the grace of our Lord, and of the transition from the image (the mark of which is clearly set on these ‘three’) to divine resemblance. The creature, cut off from God by sin and divided, moreover, within himself, cannot entertain the hope of finding his Creator or his lost intimacy with him otherwise than by first of all making use of the grace of Christ the Redeemer and of his power and example, in order to fashion himself anew in the image of God, to re-establish unity in himself, and to rediscover the natural order in the order of charity.
William’s position as retold by Déchanet instances a soaring intuition that informed much twelfth-century enterprise as European Christians increasingly sensed the potential nobility of embodied human nature. Of course, this intuition was not universally shared. It struggled, like any new life, to be born. By way of example, Helen Waddell amiably contrasts the perception of Bernard of Clairvaux with that of his younger contemporary, the philosopher Bernard Sylvestris, herald of a catholic synthesis accomplished in the next, thirteenth century, which produced persons and monuments that still hold out to us a measure of what we think of as ‘humane’. Waddell calls this synthesis a ‘Truce of God’, a reconciliation that ended at last an age-old war between the spirit and the flesh, ‘even as the Last Judgement of the Western rose-window in Chartres melts into “heaven’s own colour, blue”.’ Where Bernard of Clairvaux had spoken of ‘the dungheap of the flesh’, she notes, Bernard Sylvestris saw in the union of flesh and spirit ‘a discipline that made for greatness, and the body itself a not ignoble hospice for the pilgrim soul.’
The Cistercian Bernard, harsh in his quips, treated his own flesh harshly. Excessive mortification forced him early in his abbacy to take a time of monastic sick-leave in a hermitage near Clairvaux. That was where William of Saint Thierry, still a Benedictine, first met him in 1118. The two became firm friends. It is plausible that they talked even then of the body’s status in man’s spiritual quest. William harboured the conviction that our body is intrinsic to who we are, constituting not just a tent to shelter our sojourn in this vale of tears but an intentionally imaged reality susceptible of Godlikeness. William’s tripartite anthropology, to which Déchanet refers, conceives of the human being as a composite of physicality, soul-reason, and spirit. These distinctions shape The Golden Epistle’s three-part division taking us from Animal Man (the human being considered in its embodiment), through Rational Man (accounting for man’s intellective faculties), to Spiritual Man (envisaging transformation by grace), not as if these were successive scores to be rehearsed, one surpassing the other, but as a perfectly balanced polyphonic motet.
Déchanet was not content to expound this anthropology in monographs. He wanted, he says, to ‘to ensure that in me there should exist that balance of anima, animus and spiritus’. He was a monk, pursuing theology as part of his overall quest, on which he had staked his life, to behold what St Benedict calls ‘the deifying light’ and to be transformed, remade by it. Déchanet’s personal circumstances raised the stakes. He says he had been ‘an invalid from childhood on’ — suffering cruelly from epilepsy — ‘but when I was about forty, I was providentially cured, and felt a consuming urge to live’. The French original speaks of ‘un impérieux besoin de vivre’, a need entertained as an imperative, as if in intimate response to an oracle like that addressed to Ezekiel in the parable of the unsalted, unswaddled infant whom the Lord picks up and raises high: ‘I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live; yea, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live’ (16.6).
I was stirred by that passage when I read it as a young man. I also wanted, needed to live. I still find Déchanet’s text a compelling statement of Christian purpose. That is not, though, my reason for invoking it today. I want instead to point to a self-evident but still curious paradox: when this cultured Belgian Benedictine avid for life in his fifth decade, having taught himself to swim at 42, loosening up his limbs, sought an effective tool with which to spiritualise his body in pursuit of his animus’s harmonious union with anima and spiritus, he spontaneously looked towards yoga, rehearsing asanas after vigils in his cell before an open window.
Yoga, of course, was in the air. Paramahansa Yogananda had published his Autobiography of a Yogi in 1946 after a quarter-century of energetic teaching in the United States. Millions read, and still read, this book. Steve Jobs had copies handed out to all those who attended his memorial service at Stanford on 16 October 2011, a posthumous benefaction. In the 1950s the West encountered, too, the hugely influential teachings of B.K.S. Iyengar whose chief ambassador was the violinist Yehudi Menuhin. Menuhin maintained that the practice of yoga had liberated his playing. He called Iyengar ‘my best violin teacher’. Yogananda and Iyengar are but two high-profile proponents of a more general trend eliciting in Boston, London, and Paris a massive, enchanted response. Monks, like everyone else, became curious. Fr Bede Griffiths practised yoga at Farnborough in the years following World War II, and left for India in 1955 as did Fr Francis Acharya, a Trappist of Scourmont who founded Kurisumala. Fr Jules Monchanin, a diocesan priest with monastic aspirations, had lived in India since 1939 and was joined there in 1948 by Fr Henri Le Saux of Kergonan, later known throughout the world as Abishiktananda.
These Catholic clerics were intelligent and articulate. Their reports from the spiritual front line, thought by many to lie in the Far East, trickled into the remotest cloisters, setting off a wave of interest, enquiry, and experimentation. Déchanet may have practised ‘The Serpent’, ‘The Dolphin’, ‘The Folded Leaf’, and other yogic postures in solitude at Saint André, but all over Europe were monks and nuns, not to mention countless lay people, doing the the same. The lasting impact of this movement is obvious. So-called ‘Christian Yoga’ is a mainstream phenomenon now.
I have sketched an aspirational movement that began gently in Europe and the US after the First World War, picked up momentum after the Second, then became a tidal wave in the 1960s, corresponding to the yearning of people in a fast-moving, ever more materialist West truly to inhabit their bodies and to realise a deeply-felt hunch that their physical self is a reliable bearer of sense. Menuhin wrote in a foreword to Iyengar’s book Light on Yoga in 1980:
Reduced to our own body, our first instrument, we learn to play it, drawing from it maximum resonance and harmony. With unflagging patience we refine and animate every cell […], unlocking and liberating capacities otherwise condemned to frustration and death.
This purpose of self-realisation acquires special poignancy in a Christian optic which holds that the human being is made, made entirely, in the image of God. One can see how a sincere and thoughtful Christian like Fr Déchanet would pursue it with contemplative conviction, giving rise to a school of practice.
Having established as much, let us leave our Christian yogis distended in a posture of repose while we turn our minds to a simultaneous, in many ways parallel development in Western Christianity during the second half of the twentieth century.
For is it not both interesting and odd that the corporate turning of attention towards the Far East of both Catholics and Protestants avid for spirituality grounded in ritualised physical discipline should have coincided with a thoroughgoing deritualisation of inherited forms of worship at home? This topic is a hot potato now, at any rate in Roman Catholic circles, where young people are keen to rediscover aspects of liturgy and ascetic practice abandoned in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, not, mostly, because the Council required it, but because the Council’s reception to such an extent unfolded within the context of a cultural climate enthused by prospects of starting out afresh from clean slates with minimalist utilitarian means: the equivalence in ecclesiastical reform of Cripps’s architecture.
Today’s young seekers find themselves reprimanded by a predominantly elderly establishment formed by the thrills and anxieties of that revolutionary time, which, to state the obvious, is chronologically further removed from them than the Treaty of Versailles was from youths waving banners on Parisian barricades in 1968, and in many ways quite as significant of a lost world.
It is not my purpose to engage in polemics. What interests me, rather, is to explore an aspect of today’s so-called liturgical ‘conservatism’ that I sense has been overlooked, namely its physical and ascetic, if you like, its ‘yogic’ aspect, which cannot be brushed aside, it seems to me, as an expression of purportedly ‘retrograde’ or ‘rigid’ tendency, for it stands for the opposite: a yearning to be made new in Christ, and malleable. I will make my case by means of a brisk analysis of the Ritual of the pre-conciliar Roman missal, which can, over and above its sublime aspect, be read as a manual of sacred gymnastics.
The possibility of Mass taking place at all rests on two paragraphs, 807-8, of the 1917 Code of Canon Law. Laying down parameters for licit celebration, they define that ‘priests conscious of grave sin, no matter how contrite they believe themselves to be, shall not dare to celebrate Mass without prior sacramental confession’; next, that ‘it is not licit for priests to celebrate without having observed a natural fast from midnight’. The celebrant is submitted to a discipline both moral and corporal. Soul and body are readied in advance for the eucharistic sacrifice, which no one may presume to improvise. The ordained are to be configured to it, not it to them.
The requirement of fasting may have seemed innocuous enough to a cheerily rotund cathedral canon going to bed at 11 to rise at 6 and say Mass at 7, just downstairs, thereafter to tuck into sausages and eggs. But imagine being a priest in Nigeria, say, walking for hours in the forenoon sun to an outstation, carrying your portable altar on your back, without being able even to take a sip of water. Certain verses of the Psalms — ‘my flesh faints for thee’ (Ps 63.1), ’my soul thirsts for thee like a parched land’ (Ps 143.6) — will have seemed overwhelmingly real, then. One would have been conscious of the ‘supersubstantial bread’ as truly nourishment.
The double requirement of confession and fasting was incumbent not only on priests but on any Catholic going to communion. In The Burning Bush, Sigrid Undset tells of the novel’s hero Paul Selmer, a Catholic convert, attending a bridge night in stodgy gentlemanly company during World War I. The other players noticed that he did not refill his whisky-and-soda past midnight. Asked why, Paul said he would go to Mass in the morning and intended to receive the sacrament. At this, the company was aghast (ch. II.2). It is a trivial scene, in a way. At the same time it is a lofty one. It speaks of the deliberate integration of spiritual discipline into ordinary life; of an existence oriented, even in its social aspect, towards a transcendent goal.
No doubt some revision of the Church’s rules was called for: the admission to break the fast with water, say, or medication. The erosion, though, went much further. The current rule is to fast for an hour before taking communion, which more or less just rules out munching sandwiches in the pews, a practice from which most churchgoers would anyway refrain from considerations of courtesy.
A communicant under the old dispensation knew that the state of one’s body is not indifferent to the state of one’s soul. People these days must latch on to guru-dieticians for such insight, and are evidently hungry for it. Fasting is a fashionable lifestyle option now, but almost entirely divorced from the practice of faith.
The Ritual stipulates that a priest, before offering Mass, must recite Vigils and Lauds, then spend time in silent prayer. In today’s secular context this would be called a mindfulness exercise. He prepares the missal and sacred vessels, then washes his hands, praying: ‘Give strength to my hands, Lord, to wipe away every stain, that I may be apt to serve you in purity of mind and body.’ The commitment implicit in his fasting is explicitly affirmed.
This is when the rite proper begins and all spontaneity ceases, much the way a woman or man attending a yoga class will, after warm-up, embark on a series of asanas minutely defined even in the subtle transitions from one to the next, requiring concentration and balance, enabling practitioners to be caught up in a movement that exceeds them. The priest is reminded that he is not the subject of the impending celebration; he is its vehicle. His task is to disappear into the words and gestures assigned to him, submitting, as a deliberate subject, to an objective reality.
The procedure of vesting recalls the last chapter of Ephesians which itemises ‘the armour of God’, associating specific parts of kit with distinct virtues (6.10-17). Taking the amict that covers his head like a hood before Mass, the priest asks the Lord to furnish a ‘helmet of salvation’ to ward off diabolical distraction. Putting on the alb, a linen garment covering his body, he prays that, ‘washed in the Blood of the Lamb’, he may live up to the grace won for him by obtaining a clean heart. Binding the cincture round his waist he prays for continence and chaste strength. The maniple tied to his left arm is symbolically a handkerchief with which to wipe the tears he will not fail to weep if he invests himself in the eucharistic mystery. The stole represents the primordial dignity of Adam issuing from God’s creative hand: ‘Restore to me, Lord’, prays the priest, ‘the stole of immortality I lost in my forefather’s prevarication. I am unworthy to approach your great mystery! Grant me nonetheless to know eternal joy!’ Finally, on top of all this comes the chasuble symbolising Christ’s sweet yoke, his light burden, held in place by strings wound tightly round the celebrant’s body before being tied upon his heart in a knot. At this point he is like a soldier fit for battle, helmeted and cuirassed. The outward exercise of doffing ordinary garments and donning sacred ones prompts the interiorisation, day by day, of the Pauline injunction to shed the old man and put on the new.
The priest proceeds to the altar ‘with eyes downcast, at a grave pace, his body held erect’. The postural specification regards the verticality specific to man in which the Fathers saw a sign of dignity and a heavenward call. One does not approach the living God slouching. Yet the celebrant’s attention is fixed on what lies ahead. He is not to look curiously around, but to focus on the task awaiting him, praying: ‘I shall approach the altar of the Lord, the God who gives joy to my youth’’ (Ps 42.4).
The liturgy begins at the altar steps, with the priest and acolyte performing a little set dialogue. It moves from a statement of purpose through a cry for God’s help to a confession of sin. The priest confesses first. He receives the prayer for forgiveness from his minister, which is noteworthy. He cannot function at the altar unless, first, he is prayed for by a server who traditionally has been a child. Thus he is exhorted, again, that he acts, not in his own strength but in grace received; even as he openly confesses before, during, and after Mass his personal unworthiness.
To observe from a distance this preliminary rite, the ascent to the altar, then the unfolding of Mass is to witness, when the rubrics are carefully kept, a sacred choreography made up of steps to the right, a return to the centre, steps to the left, revolutions, genuflexions and bows, inclinations and benedictions, all within a continuous fluency of movement, quite as in a yogic session. The smallest gestures carry messages. A nod of the head shows a mention of the name of Jesus, his Mother, or the saint of the day. The priest’s bended knee, like Solomon’s at the dedication of the temple, speaks of God’s bright presence in his sanctuary. The priest is tactilely referenced to the altar, resting his hands there when they are not otherwise engaged, kissing it before turning round to address the congregation, visibly the altar’s emissary. Even the configuration of his fingertips is kerygmatic.
What does this sort of practice do to a person performing it? All ritual can in theory become mindless performance, naturally. The secret is therefore to keep the mind engaged, the will mobilised, with animus, anima, and spiritus invested in the same unifying purpose: a corporate Godward movement in union with Christ, to render his saving sacrifice present and effective for the sustenance and sanctification of the Church. It requires presence of mind and determined self-surrender to keep this multitude of simultaneous prescriptions well. There is labour involved and notable mortification at first; but as the ritual gradually, with practice, becomes second nature body and mind are freed, enabling a singular intensity of spiritual concentration. The intelligent daily repetition of such significant actions cannot but be formative. Outward actions impact for ill or good on the conscious mind and sensitive spirit. Any yoga manual worth its salt will explain how this process works.
As for the assembly of the faithful drawn into the rite by means of an active participation properly theirs, what they behold is a person absorbed on their behalf by a noble, beautiful activity. Such a sight is always moving. Think of seeing Casals perform a cello suite by Bach or Margot Fonteyn dance the death of Giselle; think of watching an olympic diver, a stone carver fixing a gaze of tenderness in marble, a delivery man unloading a palletful of Ming vases. The most venerable of human functions, the confection of Christ’s Body and Blood in an act of rational worship, surely calls for no less a degree of deliberation and concentration?
It is this intuition, I believe, that stirs the heart of many young women and men today. I cannot see that it is false. No, in a time weighed down by artificiality, leaden rhetoric, dud personality cults, frantic ‘innovations’ of terrifying banality in stagecraft, political campaigning, and liturgical practice, a quest for objective, oblative expression in sacred functions appears to me sound, and forward-looking.
I hazard a further proposition, aware of the risk attached. The Catholic Church lives with a modern legacy of clerical abuse that constitutes an open gash in the ecclesiastical Body. Abuse is an age-old phenomenon present in every period, each cultural environment; in our day, other churches and institutions, too, are afflicted by it. At one level it pertains to a timeless mysterium iniquitatis and to man’s capacity for wickedness. There seems to be no doubt, though, that the incidence of priestly abuse in the Roman Catholic Church rose sharply from the early 1960s, coinciding with the relinquishing of physical, ritual discipline in life and worship.
Clearly, many priests had found the old liturgical form, the Mass with its inflexible rubrics, 16 genuflexions and 52 signs of the cross, suffocating. Many were hungry for spontaneous expression. What followed was the often tedious, sometimes destructive emergence of the priest as personality. Whether or not endowed with much charisma, whether or not a learned theologian or able preacher, he found himself in the centre as service-provider and visual focus of attention, with substantial executive freedom to mould rites to his form and whim, promoting or discarding at will others’ partaking. It is documented that physical abuse is almost always prepared and preceded by spiritual manipulation sprung from claims to personal authority or even fancied omnipotence based on some delusional, semi-mystical idea amounting to the claim: ‘I am special, I am in charge, I do as I please’.
All of us are susceptible to such megalomaniac illusion. The more closely we are associated with a sacred office, the more potentially lethal and luciferian this tendency becomes, inflating our perception of self. There may have been wisdom in an economy that ascetically reined in the presumption of sacred ministers, requiring them daily to regulate their appetites, to multiply restate their vocational purpose, to enact an intricate ritual calling for an ex officio obliteration of self, thereby to grow in the grace of discipleship and to be effective, christophorous channels of grace, not deluding themselves for a moment that they are somehow grace’s source.
I am not saying that the answer to all today’s ecclesiastical traumas is found in a return to old usages. Complex issues do not have such easy remedies, alas. What I am saying is this: it seems short-sighted to brush aside the hunger of many young Christians for ritual, ascesis, symbols, and formality by branding it as imbecile nostalgia, with the supreme indictment of it being anti-modern, anti-inclusive, or, in a Catholic context, anti-conciliar. The watchword of Vatican II was: ‘Return to the sources!’ To drink deeply from the sources is precisely what the young want. Why not help them? Why not enable them to find within their own tradition, a patrimony rightfully theirs, time-tested practices apt to help them grow in Christ instead of leaving them to the vaguely ethereal hunches of Steve Jobs?
The great Christian problem today is the problem of the human person and of the human body. We need a Christocentric conversion in mind and manners to make sense of our significant being, to account for our origin and end, our longings and frustrations, our wounds and our capacity for healing. To engage and counter a secular insinuation that ‘I’ — whatever ‘I’ might be — am a stranger in my body and that my body is potentially inimical to ‘me’, we need a revival of William of Saint Thierry’s reasoned conviction that my body is me, that its call is noble, even beatific, inseparable from the potential of my intellective and spiritual faculties. We may find then that our endeavour to operate a personal union of animus, anima, and spiritus does not necessarily need to take a detour via yoga. The Christian West could do with recovering a love for and a confidence in its own tradition, much the way the Cistercians did in the twelfth century, inaugurating a period of manifold flourishing.
Why cross the river in order to draw water? The Church has vast experience when it comes to the embodied application of Christian faith in God’s incarnation, which elevates our nature indescribably. Christians have sought to join the body to the spirit’s pursuits in various ways. My superficial perusal of the Ritual pointed towards a particular treasure. There are others. A re-evaluation of Christian fasting is overdue. Much can be learnt from the ascesis of monastics, at once idealists and realists. The practice of prostrations in prayer is worthy of recovery; it is a feature, not just of Byzantine piety but also, in the West, of Cistercian, Carthusian, and Mendicant devotion. Processions and pilgrimages, prominent in our tradition, provide privileged means of exercising the body in prayer. And of course, there is the prayer of the heart, whose blatantly physical aspect can appear disconcerting.
The best modern disquisition known to me on this subject happens to be of western origin. It is a treatise written by Dom André Poisson, prior of La Grande Chartreuse, so superior general of the Carthusian Order, from 1967-97, the decades during which so many western Christians turned towards the Far East in search of body-spirit unity. The treatise, dated ‘Christmas 1983’, is redolent with the grace of the Word’s incarnation, ever the foundation of Christian anthropology.
Dom Poisson insists that the ‘prayer of the heart’ cannot be reduced to an abstraction as if the ‘heart’, in this instance, were purely symbolic. ‘Every movement of the heart’, he says, ‘that contributes to our relation with the Father is linked to our sensible, material being. From experience, perhaps at some cost to our health, we know that truly profound emotions attain our physical heart.’ He stresses that ‘we cannot enter the prayer of the heart unless we accept to live deliberately and determinedly at the level of our body’. Why do we find this so hard to take on board within our normal setting, looking instead for exotic practices and new idioms?
Possibly because we tend to live and think as implicit dualists, conceiving of our bodies as repositories of appetites, pains, pleasures, and intimate excretions with no bearing on what we think of as our ‘higher’ self, as unwieldy frames of which we are often embarrassed, so that we rule out their involvement in the realisation of our theological finality. Do we in fact own our body as a place of encounter with God not just in the eschaton but now? Do we believe in the body’s fitness for resurrection?
Dom Poisson, truly a monk and therefore a person steeped in liturgy, develops his perspective within a eucharistic ecclesiology:
Even as it is impossible to approach life in community as if our brothers were disincarnate beings of pure spirit, to be reached somehow beyond their physical wrapping, it would be a denial of the reality of God’s love to turn the physical, material, palpable presence of the Son-with-us into an abstraction.
St Antony the Great said, ‘With our neighbour is life and death’, an insight St Silouan of Athos distilled into, ‘My brother is my life’. That affirmation is at once experiential and conceptual, enabled by a mystery of communion effected through material realities that are the Son of God. ‘Similarly’, writes Dom Poisson — and there is considerable daring in that only apparently casual adverb:
Similarly, our own body, with its heaviness, limits, and constraints, is the reality of what we are. It is my body that touches that other reality of which Jesus said: ‘This is my Body.’ […] I cannot possibly pray without praying in my body. When I turn towards God, I cannot abstract my incarnate reality. It is not just a question of religious discipline if certain gestures are prescribed, if certain material conditions direct me, when I turn to God. These are pointers to the one and only truth: God loves me the way he made me. Why should I want to be more spiritual than he?
The question is rhetorical. It nonetheless challenges a number of ecclesiastical projects, strategies, reforms, and synodal ventures of the past six or seven decades, during which the Church, bang in the middle of the sexual revolution, has often tended, weirdly, to leave the body behind, preferring concepts to praxis. Impatience with this state of affairs seems to me a sign of Christian health. In the coming year we shall commemorate the seventeenth centenary of the Council of Nicaea at which the Church of East and West proclaimed with one voice the reality of the Word’s incarnation. It would seem a fitting opportunity to reaffirm the grace bestowed thereby upon our flesh, and the prospect of worshipful dignity such grace enables.
The Cistercian nuns of Boulaur prostrate during the Liturgy of Good Friday.
Wakolda
Lucía Puenzo’s Wakolda appeared to mixed reviews ten years ago. The Holocaust film, like the Holocaust book, is apt to meet a tired groan – ‘Not another!’ – yet there is something new here, at once timely and timeless. Not only is Alex Brendemühl’s portrayal of Mengele elegantly credible; it manages to make this singularly perverse personage somehow typical, so recognisable. ‘I measure and weigh what interests me’, he says; then, ‘I have a taste for beauty’. The underlying aestheticism, the pretension to perfect the race in view of putative ennoblement, necessitating by way of collateral damage obliteration of specimens subpar, brings this historical fiction close. Wakolda portrays human presumption gone off the rails, unsubmitted to any accountability; and that is increasingly the new normal. Any historical analogy is specious. When it comes to an exceptional tragedy like the Shoah utmost caution is called for. Yet the shivers sent down one’s spine by Puenzo are not just retrospective. They regard the reality of what we have become; of that to which we have largely surrendered.
Sealed Revelations
As so often, I find a life-giving, challenging perspective on life in Paulina Mariadotter. On 10 October 1963 she noted in her prayerbook:
‘All Gods’ revelations are sealed until our obedience breaks the seal – in the very moment in which you obey, light erupts. Obey God wherever he does show you his will, and at once the next question awaiting you will become apparent.’
It is Newman’s ‘one step enough for me’ in experiential clarity. And the key to a life concretely based on faith.
‘All Gods’ revelations are sealed until our obedience breaks the seal – in the very moment in which you obey, light erupts. Obey God wherever he does show you his will, and at once the next question awaiting you will become apparent.’
It is Newman’s ‘one step enough for me’ in experiential clarity. And the key to a life concretely based on faith.
Jargoning Jackdaws
These days I daily read a page or two of Between Two Eternities: A Helen Waddell Anthology or of Mediaeval Latin Lyrics, astonished at the intelligence and musicality of Waddell’s renderings, which sweep away the distance merely apparently created by the passing of centuries. Richard Ellis Roberts, translator of Peer Gynt, wrote of Waddell’s poetic versions: ‘Not a translation fails to be an original poem; and not a translation fails to give with an entrancing fidelity, the meaning and the spirit of the original.’ One can hardly imagine higher praise. And it is warranted. Consider this tenth-century poem passed on to us in MSS of Canterbury and Verona, a mariology in miniature, consummately constructed:
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