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:
O Key of David 
This homily for the 4th Sunday of Advent was give at Mount Saint Bernard in 2015, when the Sunday fell on 20 December. The text is included in my book Entering the Twofold Mystery.
Micah 5:1-4: And they shall dwell secure.
Hebrews Read More
Micah 5:1-4: And they shall dwell secure.
Hebrews Read More
Tromsø in Advent EWTN’s Colm Flynn has paid a pre-Christmas visit to Tromsø, producing a lovely reportage broadcast today. You can find it here. The strong invocations of the final days of Advent, ‘Let your light shine upon us!’, ‘Come, do not delay!’, Read More
Conversation with Iben Tranholm This interview was published in the Danish paper Udfordringen on 6. December 2024.
Now that even ordinary grocery stores keep sex toys on their shelves, it may be difficult to imagine why anyone should be interested in living chastely. Yet the Read More
Now that even ordinary grocery stores keep sex toys on their shelves, it may be difficult to imagine why anyone should be interested in living chastely. Yet the Read More
Challenge and Scandal of Sanctity This lecture was given as this year’s St William of York Lecture in Theology at the University of York.
‘Be Holy!’ (1 Peter 1.16): The Challenge and Scandal of Sanctity in Anxious Times
Holiness is a notion we struggle to make sense Read More
‘Be Holy!’ (1 Peter 1.16): The Challenge and Scandal of Sanctity in Anxious Times
Holiness is a notion we struggle to make sense Read More
Holy Globalism In the curious mishmash that makes up the York Art Gallery, where some very fine pieces hang among some very indifferent pieces, I came upon this portrayal of St Birgitta, one panel of a diptych in which she is flanked Read More
Life by Hope A column in the Advent issue of St Olav Kirkeblad 2024
Current instability worldwide terrifies. The UN Climate Change Conference in Baku began with a call to action no major agent will heed. The US presidential election generates perplexity at many Read More
Current instability worldwide terrifies. The UN Climate Change Conference in Baku began with a call to action no major agent will heed. The US presidential election generates perplexity at many Read More
O Key of David
This homily for the 4th Sunday of Advent was give at Mount Saint Bernard in 2015, when the Sunday fell on 20 December. The text is included in my book Entering the Twofold Mystery.
Micah 5:1-4: And they shall dwell secure.
Hebrews 10:5-10: Lo, I have come to do thy will, O God.
Luke 1:39-45: Blessed is she who believed that the Lord’s promise would be fulfilled.
Since the eighth century, the century of Charlemagne, the Latin Church has spent the last week of Advent invoking Christ under a series of solemn invocations, urging him to come quickly. We know them as ‘O Antiphons’ for each begins with an exclamatory O. Today, 20 December, we call out: O Key of David! It is a suggestive title. What does it mean? The answer lies in the twenty-second chapter of Isaiah. There, we find the City of David, Jerusalem, in total turmoil. It is at war, surrounded by overwhelming enemy forces. This crisis is a God-sent scourge. By means of it, the Lord would call the people ‘to weeping and mourning, to baldness and girding with sackcloth’. Yet what do they do instead? They indulge in an orgy of oblivion. Supposing there’ll be no tomorrow, they break down their houses to fortify the city walls for just a day or two. They slay their oxen, kill their sheep, roast the meat, pour tankardfuls of wine and chant: ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.’ There is no trace of joy in this merriment. It is charged with the dark energy of despair. A besieged city that acts like that has lost all hope of rescue. Its feasting is a mockery of fate. It is a burp in the face of the gods.
Blamed for this breakdown of morale is the city’s steward Shebna. His name is synonymous with vanity. While the nation collapsed round about him, Shebna made monuments to himself: a magnificent carved tomb; a splendid habitation. He thought he could buy immortality for money. He thought his status would make him immune to existential threat. Not so. Isaiah reveals his future: ‘The Lord will hurl you away, O strong man. He will seize hold of you, whirl you round and round, and throw you like a ball into a wide land.’ I am citing from the RSV. The Hebrew is more graphic. The word rendered ‘ball’ is literally a ‘dumpling’. So much for Shebna’s airs! The Lord will pick him up like a handful of dough, squeeze him into a compact, greasy little lump, then – plop! – chuck him out of the kitchen window. His place will be taken by another, one worthy of the steward’s robe and girdle. This man, Eliakim, will be ‘a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem’. He will care for them and take charge of their welfare. ‘And I will place on his shoulder’, the oracle continues, ‘the key of the house of David; he shall open, and none shall shut; he shall shut, and none shall open.’ O Key of David!
The desperate feasting of the Jerusalemites happens because they think they are caught in a trap. They can’t conceive of a way out. Into this despair, the Lord sends hope. He assures them that there is in fact a key, a key that both opens and shuts. There is no deadlock. There’s potentially a future. But will they want it? Will we? Our world today is in many ways like beleaguered Jerusalem. When we look at the cruel wars that are raging, at the movement of peoples, at climate change, at the state of the Church, can’t we ourselves feel tempted at times to draw the blinds, pour another large drink, and just wait for it all to end? May we always have Christian courage to resist this moral defeat, this abandonment of hope! There is no state of affairs so arrested that the Key of David can’t unlock it. It is a master key in the absolute sense. ‘Come’, we sing in today’s O Antiphon ‘come and lead forth the captive from prison, come and release those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death.’ That holds for every prison, every darkness, every death, even the most intimate. There is an exit.
Our readings for this Sunday provide rich illustration of God’s intervention in apparently hopeless situations. Our Gospel portrays the embrace of two women great with child: one of them elderly, thought to be barren, the other a virgin. Who would have thought?! The prophet Micah, a contemporary of Isaiah, affirms that the lost sons of Israel, seemingly lost to hope, will come back; that they who are fearful now ‘shall dwell secure’. A ‘new’ ruler, whose origin is ‘of old’, will make it all happen. Again, who would have thought?! The greatest paradox, though, is contained in our reading from Hebrews. It speaks daring words, placed in our Saviour’s mouth when he ‘came into this world’. His task was to redeem it, to renew creation, to destroy death and forgive sins. What sort of vast dispensation would that require, what armies of angels? Let us listen again to Christ’s declaration of the arms he takes for this battle: ‘A body thou hast prepared for me. Then I said, Lo, I have come to do thy will, O God!’ This is the key that opens and none can shut, shuts and none can open: a complete surrender to God’s will and a firm resolve to put it into practice in the body – that is, in the concrete reality of life. It is Israel’s key, Mary’s key, the key of Christ, the Son of David. Will it be our key, too, yours and mine? Christmas, brothers and sisters, is not, in essence, a cosy affair. It presents us with an offer of new life, new resolution. It calls on us to make a choice. Will we let the key of obedience and faith turn in our creaking locks? If we do, what joy, what freedom we shall know – what peace! He whom we await ‘is our peace’. Let’s not waste time seeking it anywhere or in anyone else. Amen.
Micah 5:1-4: And they shall dwell secure.
Hebrews 10:5-10: Lo, I have come to do thy will, O God.
Luke 1:39-45: Blessed is she who believed that the Lord’s promise would be fulfilled.
Since the eighth century, the century of Charlemagne, the Latin Church has spent the last week of Advent invoking Christ under a series of solemn invocations, urging him to come quickly. We know them as ‘O Antiphons’ for each begins with an exclamatory O. Today, 20 December, we call out: O Key of David! It is a suggestive title. What does it mean? The answer lies in the twenty-second chapter of Isaiah. There, we find the City of David, Jerusalem, in total turmoil. It is at war, surrounded by overwhelming enemy forces. This crisis is a God-sent scourge. By means of it, the Lord would call the people ‘to weeping and mourning, to baldness and girding with sackcloth’. Yet what do they do instead? They indulge in an orgy of oblivion. Supposing there’ll be no tomorrow, they break down their houses to fortify the city walls for just a day or two. They slay their oxen, kill their sheep, roast the meat, pour tankardfuls of wine and chant: ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.’ There is no trace of joy in this merriment. It is charged with the dark energy of despair. A besieged city that acts like that has lost all hope of rescue. Its feasting is a mockery of fate. It is a burp in the face of the gods.
Blamed for this breakdown of morale is the city’s steward Shebna. His name is synonymous with vanity. While the nation collapsed round about him, Shebna made monuments to himself: a magnificent carved tomb; a splendid habitation. He thought he could buy immortality for money. He thought his status would make him immune to existential threat. Not so. Isaiah reveals his future: ‘The Lord will hurl you away, O strong man. He will seize hold of you, whirl you round and round, and throw you like a ball into a wide land.’ I am citing from the RSV. The Hebrew is more graphic. The word rendered ‘ball’ is literally a ‘dumpling’. So much for Shebna’s airs! The Lord will pick him up like a handful of dough, squeeze him into a compact, greasy little lump, then – plop! – chuck him out of the kitchen window. His place will be taken by another, one worthy of the steward’s robe and girdle. This man, Eliakim, will be ‘a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem’. He will care for them and take charge of their welfare. ‘And I will place on his shoulder’, the oracle continues, ‘the key of the house of David; he shall open, and none shall shut; he shall shut, and none shall open.’ O Key of David!
The desperate feasting of the Jerusalemites happens because they think they are caught in a trap. They can’t conceive of a way out. Into this despair, the Lord sends hope. He assures them that there is in fact a key, a key that both opens and shuts. There is no deadlock. There’s potentially a future. But will they want it? Will we? Our world today is in many ways like beleaguered Jerusalem. When we look at the cruel wars that are raging, at the movement of peoples, at climate change, at the state of the Church, can’t we ourselves feel tempted at times to draw the blinds, pour another large drink, and just wait for it all to end? May we always have Christian courage to resist this moral defeat, this abandonment of hope! There is no state of affairs so arrested that the Key of David can’t unlock it. It is a master key in the absolute sense. ‘Come’, we sing in today’s O Antiphon ‘come and lead forth the captive from prison, come and release those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death.’ That holds for every prison, every darkness, every death, even the most intimate. There is an exit.
Our readings for this Sunday provide rich illustration of God’s intervention in apparently hopeless situations. Our Gospel portrays the embrace of two women great with child: one of them elderly, thought to be barren, the other a virgin. Who would have thought?! The prophet Micah, a contemporary of Isaiah, affirms that the lost sons of Israel, seemingly lost to hope, will come back; that they who are fearful now ‘shall dwell secure’. A ‘new’ ruler, whose origin is ‘of old’, will make it all happen. Again, who would have thought?! The greatest paradox, though, is contained in our reading from Hebrews. It speaks daring words, placed in our Saviour’s mouth when he ‘came into this world’. His task was to redeem it, to renew creation, to destroy death and forgive sins. What sort of vast dispensation would that require, what armies of angels? Let us listen again to Christ’s declaration of the arms he takes for this battle: ‘A body thou hast prepared for me. Then I said, Lo, I have come to do thy will, O God!’ This is the key that opens and none can shut, shuts and none can open: a complete surrender to God’s will and a firm resolve to put it into practice in the body – that is, in the concrete reality of life. It is Israel’s key, Mary’s key, the key of Christ, the Son of David. Will it be our key, too, yours and mine? Christmas, brothers and sisters, is not, in essence, a cosy affair. It presents us with an offer of new life, new resolution. It calls on us to make a choice. Will we let the key of obedience and faith turn in our creaking locks? If we do, what joy, what freedom we shall know – what peace! He whom we await ‘is our peace’. Let’s not waste time seeking it anywhere or in anyone else. Amen.
Tromsø in Advent
EWTN’s Colm Flynn has paid a pre-Christmas visit to Tromsø, producing a lovely reportage broadcast today. You can find it here. The strong invocations of the final days of Advent, ‘Let your light shine upon us!’, ‘Come, do not delay!’, resound with special force in the Polar Night, which can occasionally reveal displays of spectacular colour. Holy Writ speaks of a playfulness embedded in the structure of creation: ‘When he fixed the foundations of earth, then was I beside him as artisan; I was his delight day by day, playing before him all the while, playing over the whole of his earth’. Sometimes, it takes the darkness of night to awaken to this, to learn anticipation – and rejoicing.
Utopias
It is fascinating and uncanny to re-read an essay Joseph Needham wrote for Scrutiny in 1932. It begins like this: ‘‘Utopias’ writes Prof. Berdiaev, in a passage which Mr. Huxley chooses for his motto ‘appear to be much more realisable than we used to think. We are finding ourselves face to face with a far more awful question, how can we avoid their actualisation? For they can be made actual. Life is marching towards them. And perhaps a new period is beginning, a period when intelligent men will be wondering how they can avoid these utopias, and return to a society non-utopian, less perfect, but more free.’ Mr. Huxley’s book is indeed a brilliant commentary on this dismally true remark. It is as if a number of passages from Mr. Bertrand Russell’s recent book The Scientific Outlook had burst into flower, and had rearranged themselves in patches of shining colour like man-eating orchids in a tropical forest. Paul planted, Apollos watered, but who gave the increase in this case, we may well ask, for a more diabolical picture of society (as some would say) can never have been painted.’
Conversation with Iben Tranholm
This interview was published in the Danish paper Udfordringen on 6. December 2024.
Now that even ordinary grocery stores keep sex toys on their shelves, it may be difficult to imagine why anyone should be interested in living chastely. Yet the Catholic bishop of Trondheim, Erik Varden, swims against the current by means of his new book Chastity: Reconciliation of the Senses, which has just been published in Norwegian translation.
In the book he reflects on the value of chastity and defines its place in our modern world. He stresses that chastity is not about a suppression of sexuality; it is about channeling it towards a higher end. He contends that sexuality needs a structure to grow on in order to flourish. From the bishop’s point of view it seems, paradoxically, that chastity can lead to greater joy and wholeness in sexual being. Udfordringen has talked to the bishop, asking why chastity may be relevant in a world obsessed with sex.
What motivated you to write a book about chastity, which hardly anyone now practises?
– I don’t agree with the contention that chastity is not practiced. On the contrary, it seems to me that it is undergoing a kind of renaissance. Think, for example of Jason and Crystallina Evert’s Chastity Project in the US, that has a great following. At World Youth Day in Lisbon, Jason was welcomed as if he were a rock star. Or take Exodus90, followed by thousands of young men worldwide, also in Scandinavia: this programme proposes Christian exercise in self-control and purity, offering a kind of manual for a healthy negotiation of the senses. So something’s going on. That said, my chief motivation for writing the book was the superficial tone one often encounters in discussions about sexuality and affectivity. It irritates me that the Catholic Church is mostly caricatured as either a stern moral judge standing in a posture of perpetual admonition, saying ‘No!’ to everything, or as an institution that simply floats along with the currents of our times. For it has an infinitely more nuance and profound contribution to make.
Where does the ideal of chastity come from? Was it introduced by Christianity?
– The chaste ideal has roots that reach back to the beginning of our civilisation. At first it was not principally associated with sexual morality. The old Romans used ‘castus’, which gives us the English ‘chaste’, as a synonym for the word ‘integer’, from which we derive ‘integrity’. To live chastely, then, is to strive for wholeness; it is to try to gather the various parts of one’s personality, temperament, history, and vocation into a harmonious, life-giving whole. The process is many-faceted, of course; relationships are important to it. The moral theology of the Middle Ages focused on the relationship between man and woman. Increasingly chastity was understood as a feminine virtue. And so the notion of chastity grew narrower. That is why I have set myself the task of shedding new life on the potential of chastity, not just as a moral term, but as a way of being human, a way of helping us live and thrive more fully.
How do you think sexual liberation has affected us? Do you consider sexual liberation somehing that has in fact damaged our attitude to sex?
– Above all, I think we should try to step outside a mindset that sees reality in terms of black and white, where we either loudly condemn or clap our hands with abandon. Human experience rarely fits into simple pigeon holes. That holds not least for sexual experience, which is complex. Freud has helped us to greater insight here, had we not realised it already. Speaking of ‘sexual liberation’ we slap a problematic label onto a complex cultural development. In fact, the term rather undermines itself. For it is striking that the same cultural context that strove for ‘sexual liberation’ also speaks of ‘sexual addiction’. It was doubtless positive that some of the taboos attaching to sexuality were lifted; that we came to realise how important sexuality is in human life; that we reached a better understanding of the instincts behind it. At the same time something was lost. Today we have almost entirely lost the sense of the mystery of sexuality, its sacred dimension. This duality was central in Antiquity and in the Middle Ages. We find it in Scripture, too. I think we would benefit from rediscovering it.
Is chastity the same as sexual abstinence? Or is it about the maturing of character?
– It is astonishing how many assume that chastity and celibacy are synonymous. They are not. Celibacy is a special vocation; whereas chastity is a universal human virtue. To live chastely is to pursue a responsible approach to sensuality and sexuality.
Does chastity only concern singles, or can it also be practised in marriage?
– Absolutely. The goal is to be freed from the tendency to see other human beings, be it one’s spouse, as an object or a possession, to let go of the illusion that I am the only subject of consequence in my universe and that other people exist purely to satisfy my needs and desires. To become chase is to learn to look upon the world with respect, cured of possessiveness. That presupposes an effort to see my own cravings in perspective, not to let them govern everything.
Denmark was the first country in the world to legalise porn in 1969. Our is a nation renowned for its sexual liberation. This aura attaches to all of Scandinavia. What is your chief message to a culture such as ours? And how do you think it might be heard in a culture that considers free sex an untouchable and ‘holy’ principle?
– I think the culture we live in is transmitting its own message to itself. Has all this sexual liberation made us happier, freer, rid of complexes? Through the internet, pornography has become an ever-present part of everyday life. Many women and men, young and old (not to mention children), experience pornography as a net that keeps them trapped. Any pastor, any psychologist knows that. Can we, then, honestly refer to it as an expression of ‘freedom’? As for ‘free sex’ as a sacred cow: what are we to say about the increasing number of people who declare themselves ‘asexual’, fed up with libido? Miranda France wrote not so long ago in the TLS: ‘More and more young people are opting for sexit. Where centuries of prohibition failed, society has finally found the way to dampen teenage appetite: sexual saturation.’ Now, doesn’t that give food for thought? France’s observation indicates that it is in fact highly relevant to speak of chastity as a dynamically affirmative reality.
May it also strengthen society more broadly if more people practise chastity? If so, how?
– Absolutely. I said that chastity principally stands for integrity. Looking at the world we live in, who would doubt that a greater proportion of women and men embodying real, intelligent, fearless integrity would be a much-needed good?
Gwen John, Young Woman in a Red Shawl, York Art Gallery
Now that even ordinary grocery stores keep sex toys on their shelves, it may be difficult to imagine why anyone should be interested in living chastely. Yet the Catholic bishop of Trondheim, Erik Varden, swims against the current by means of his new book Chastity: Reconciliation of the Senses, which has just been published in Norwegian translation.
In the book he reflects on the value of chastity and defines its place in our modern world. He stresses that chastity is not about a suppression of sexuality; it is about channeling it towards a higher end. He contends that sexuality needs a structure to grow on in order to flourish. From the bishop’s point of view it seems, paradoxically, that chastity can lead to greater joy and wholeness in sexual being. Udfordringen has talked to the bishop, asking why chastity may be relevant in a world obsessed with sex.
What motivated you to write a book about chastity, which hardly anyone now practises?
– I don’t agree with the contention that chastity is not practiced. On the contrary, it seems to me that it is undergoing a kind of renaissance. Think, for example of Jason and Crystallina Evert’s Chastity Project in the US, that has a great following. At World Youth Day in Lisbon, Jason was welcomed as if he were a rock star. Or take Exodus90, followed by thousands of young men worldwide, also in Scandinavia: this programme proposes Christian exercise in self-control and purity, offering a kind of manual for a healthy negotiation of the senses. So something’s going on. That said, my chief motivation for writing the book was the superficial tone one often encounters in discussions about sexuality and affectivity. It irritates me that the Catholic Church is mostly caricatured as either a stern moral judge standing in a posture of perpetual admonition, saying ‘No!’ to everything, or as an institution that simply floats along with the currents of our times. For it has an infinitely more nuance and profound contribution to make.
Where does the ideal of chastity come from? Was it introduced by Christianity?
– The chaste ideal has roots that reach back to the beginning of our civilisation. At first it was not principally associated with sexual morality. The old Romans used ‘castus’, which gives us the English ‘chaste’, as a synonym for the word ‘integer’, from which we derive ‘integrity’. To live chastely, then, is to strive for wholeness; it is to try to gather the various parts of one’s personality, temperament, history, and vocation into a harmonious, life-giving whole. The process is many-faceted, of course; relationships are important to it. The moral theology of the Middle Ages focused on the relationship between man and woman. Increasingly chastity was understood as a feminine virtue. And so the notion of chastity grew narrower. That is why I have set myself the task of shedding new life on the potential of chastity, not just as a moral term, but as a way of being human, a way of helping us live and thrive more fully.
How do you think sexual liberation has affected us? Do you consider sexual liberation somehing that has in fact damaged our attitude to sex?
– Above all, I think we should try to step outside a mindset that sees reality in terms of black and white, where we either loudly condemn or clap our hands with abandon. Human experience rarely fits into simple pigeon holes. That holds not least for sexual experience, which is complex. Freud has helped us to greater insight here, had we not realised it already. Speaking of ‘sexual liberation’ we slap a problematic label onto a complex cultural development. In fact, the term rather undermines itself. For it is striking that the same cultural context that strove for ‘sexual liberation’ also speaks of ‘sexual addiction’. It was doubtless positive that some of the taboos attaching to sexuality were lifted; that we came to realise how important sexuality is in human life; that we reached a better understanding of the instincts behind it. At the same time something was lost. Today we have almost entirely lost the sense of the mystery of sexuality, its sacred dimension. This duality was central in Antiquity and in the Middle Ages. We find it in Scripture, too. I think we would benefit from rediscovering it.
Is chastity the same as sexual abstinence? Or is it about the maturing of character?
– It is astonishing how many assume that chastity and celibacy are synonymous. They are not. Celibacy is a special vocation; whereas chastity is a universal human virtue. To live chastely is to pursue a responsible approach to sensuality and sexuality.
Does chastity only concern singles, or can it also be practised in marriage?
– Absolutely. The goal is to be freed from the tendency to see other human beings, be it one’s spouse, as an object or a possession, to let go of the illusion that I am the only subject of consequence in my universe and that other people exist purely to satisfy my needs and desires. To become chase is to learn to look upon the world with respect, cured of possessiveness. That presupposes an effort to see my own cravings in perspective, not to let them govern everything.
Denmark was the first country in the world to legalise porn in 1969. Our is a nation renowned for its sexual liberation. This aura attaches to all of Scandinavia. What is your chief message to a culture such as ours? And how do you think it might be heard in a culture that considers free sex an untouchable and ‘holy’ principle?
– I think the culture we live in is transmitting its own message to itself. Has all this sexual liberation made us happier, freer, rid of complexes? Through the internet, pornography has become an ever-present part of everyday life. Many women and men, young and old (not to mention children), experience pornography as a net that keeps them trapped. Any pastor, any psychologist knows that. Can we, then, honestly refer to it as an expression of ‘freedom’? As for ‘free sex’ as a sacred cow: what are we to say about the increasing number of people who declare themselves ‘asexual’, fed up with libido? Miranda France wrote not so long ago in the TLS: ‘More and more young people are opting for sexit. Where centuries of prohibition failed, society has finally found the way to dampen teenage appetite: sexual saturation.’ Now, doesn’t that give food for thought? France’s observation indicates that it is in fact highly relevant to speak of chastity as a dynamically affirmative reality.
May it also strengthen society more broadly if more people practise chastity? If so, how?
– Absolutely. I said that chastity principally stands for integrity. Looking at the world we live in, who would doubt that a greater proportion of women and men embodying real, intelligent, fearless integrity would be a much-needed good?
Gwen John, Young Woman in a Red Shawl, York Art Gallery
Challenge and Scandal of Sanctity
This lecture was given as this year’s St William of York Lecture in Theology at the University of York.
‘Be Holy!’ (1 Peter 1.16): The Challenge and Scandal of Sanctity in Anxious Times
Holiness is a notion we struggle to make sense of now. Confronted with claims to holiness, we instinctively seek to discredit them. The assumption of counterfeit runs deep. To be ‘holier-than-thou’ is to bask in a self-assigned, self-satisfied sense of superiority that reeks sourly of hypocrisy. If we exclaim of someone, ‘What a saint!’, it is usually to point out some variety of blatant and absurd pharisaical display.
I have occasion to observe popular responses to ‘holiness’ close at hand. Norway’s patron saint, St Olav, was killed in 1030. The millennium of his martyrdom draws near inexorably. The government has announced a ‘national jubilee’ cast as a grand hoorah for our nation, abstracting the protagonist as far as possible. That a modern, secular, multi-cultural state struggles to frame a response to a Catholic saint is understandable. What is striking, though, is that in so far as Olav is mentioned at all, it is almost always disapprovingly. He is painted in the grim palette of a Netflix viking series, rapacious, with horns on his hat, and with an uncontrolled libido.
The fact that Olav was of royal stock, moving easily in princely courts; that we have gracious poems from his hand, songs of swift horses and blushing maidens; that his baptism shows every sign of having been sincere; that he implemented a Christian code of law that raised up the lowly and cast down the proud; that he was known for cheerful kindness; that his cult, upon his defeat in battle, spread fast worldwide; that Christians pilgrimaged secretly to his shrines for centuries after the Reformers had sternly outlawed such practice: all this is pooh-poohed as irrelevant.
At stake is not the relative attractiveness or merit of a particular human destiny. I believe it is the category of ‘holiness’ as such that causes scandal. That it should be so makes sense. Nowadays we like to project an image of ourselves to the world on the basis of self-affirmation, expecting others to greet it with a Halleluja chorus. If I admit ‘holiness’ into my conceptual vocabulary — that is, if I admit the possibility that a human life can be profoundly and durably transformed — who is to say I couldn’t, and shouldn’t, change my life? The thought is uncomfortable.
Have we lost the very ability to portray uncommon goodness? It could seem so. It is damned hard, now, to write up the lives of saints credibly. To label a biography ‘hagiography’ is to condemn it as idealised drivel. Even sympathetic accounts fall flat. I think of Shusako Endo’s novel A Wonderful Fool from 1959, an attempt to describe the irruption of holiness into a modern, secular setting. The fool in question, a Frenchman named Gaston, steps off a ship in Yokohama one day to visit his Japanese penpal Takamori. Gaston is like a visitor from another planet. He is kind and generous, yes, but hopelessly unrealistic; a misfit even in his unruly physiognomy. Endo, who was a Catholic and wrote as one, sought, it would seem, to create a character in the mould of the yurodivy or holy fool canonised in Russian literature. The result, though, reads like a two-dimensional, rather tedious cartoon.
I thought of Endo’s novel recently while watching Alice Rohrwacher’s movie from 2018, Lazzaro Felice. I love the work of Rohrwacher, who, with a keen eye for societal dysfunction and human quirks, makes work that is at the same time critical and uncynical — a delicate balance to tread. There is poetry in all her films; there is mirth, tenderness, intimations of greatness. Lazzaro, meanwhile, stands apart among her dramatis personae, for he is wholly good, moving in shabby society as an unlikely incarnation of prelapsarian bliss, happy to let himself be taunted, used, exploited. By narrative and cinematographic means, Rohrwacher lets us see that Lazzaro transcends common human limitations; for one thing, he stands, unageing, beyond chronology. It also becomes clear that he is one for whom the world as it is has neither space nor time. He is shot dead in a high place of pragmatic transaction, a bank, where people around him fatally misread his pure intentions. Poor, naive, foolish Lazzaro! His bright happiness was too much for crepuscular mankind.
The works I have cited, representative of trends, are secular in form. Whatever their authors’ beliefs, they do not set out to be explicitly religious. They are certainly not evangelising. What, then, about the Church? Surely she must be an expert on sanctity? Does she have any luck in portraying the inward essence of holy women and men? Thank God, she has the liturgy whose texts, poetry, and forms carry a timeless treasury that does convey, to those with eyes to see, ears to hear, compelling testimonies. When it comes to contemporary expression, though, even she struggles. To see what I mean, try putting an altarpiece by Fra Angelico or Cimambue, works that take our breath away by probingly displaying humanity imbued with an otherworldliness that does not estrange but perfect it, next to one of the inexplicably ubiquitous mosaics of Marko Rupnik, the former Jesuit, whose serialised saints have teletubby bodies and empty, lightless eyes. An observation will impose itself: even officially commissioned and sanctioned representations of holiness tend, now, to presuppose dissimilarity from actual, lifelike women and men. Sanctity has come to seem corny, somehow, even slightly sinister.
One of the reasons we are in a rut is this: we have come to think of holiness as behavioural perfectibility. We imagine saints as flawless super-persons, nice to all, always patient, not slurping soup, never uttering invective, never crossing the street on a red light. The mere thought of such a person is intolerable. When we see a life projected according to such criteria, it seems unreal. Sniffing fake news, we are only relieved when revelations are made of embarrassing weaknesses or peccadilloes that cause the house of cards, precarious from the start, to come tumbling down.
A glance at the Church’s catalogue of canonised saints will explode such a limited view of holiness, of course. To list just a few examples: St Jerome, patron saint of Biblical scholars, was famous for his prickly temperament and salty tongue; St Maria Skobtsova, murdered at Ravensbrück, would in Paris throw back her veiled head and put up her feet puffing cigarettes; St John Henry Newman descended into doldrums of self-pity; St Catherine of Siena spoke her mind to princes in ways that left crowned and tiaraed heads spinning. The saint is no exsanguine transhuman. No, a true saint shows forth what a human being is with luminous intensity. We honour the saints not as pupils in life’s school who, by swotting, have learnt at last to recite by rote and follow all the rules; we venerate them as graced, gracious human beings in whom the mystery of God flares up like substantial fire.
Likening holiness to fire I am not just picking a simile out of thin air. When holiness emerges as a Biblical category, it is in connection with fire. The setting is Egyptian, likely in the fifteenth century BC. Moses, the Hebrew adopted son of Pharaoh’s daughter, ostensibly an orphan, though nursed by his mother, must flee from Pharaoh. His innate instinct for justice had made him commit deeds that drew the establishment’s wrath, setting him explicitly apart as the outsider he always, in his heart of hearts, knew he was. Moses, grown up within the known world’s stablest structure of power, had become a nomad, erring in the wilderness while seeking pasture for the flocks of Jethro, his father-in-law, priest of Midian. Out there,
the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush; and he looked, and lo, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. And Moses said, ‘I will turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.’ When the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, ‘Moses, Moses!’ And he said, ‘Here am I.’ Then he said, ‘Do not come near; put off your shoes from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.’ And he said, ‘I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.
There is much going on in this passage. Moses, thinking himself alone in the desert, is surprised by an angelic presence. The angel is not to be identified with God: he is a messenger, carrying God’s word; but thereby he does carry something of God’s presence, for God is what he speaks. The angel, we might say, is a being made to cross the ontological gap between eternity and time, charged to be a vehicle of God’s self-revelation. What is God? An answer to that question cannot be spoken; but is tentatively shown in the figure of fire that burns without consuming. This fire visits the thorn bush like a guest, beautifully seated within it. The thorn bush sustains this visitation. The meeting of super-substantial fire and matter draws Moses’s attention, making him turn aside from his itinerary, wanting and needing to see.
Set on the pursuit of sight, he hears. ‘God called to him out of the bush’. He called him by name. The twofold, ‘Moses, Moses!’, recalls the ‘Abraham, Abraham!’ by which God called out on Mount Moriah, having tested Abraham by seeing his willingness to sacrifice Isaac, the son whom he loved, as a burnt offering. It further makes us think of the call, ‘Jacob, Jacob!’, resounding in visions of the night when the father of Israel’s tribes had learnt that Joseph, thought dead, was alive and expecting him in Egypt. There is a note at once of affection and emphasis in the repetition of the name. It is God’s way of saying, ‘I know you’. He, the maker of all, boundless in his absolute being, knows his creatures particularly and intimately.
It is when Moses responds to this call and says, ‘Here I am’, that he receives the instruction: ‘Do not come near; put off your shoes from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground [אַדְמַת-קֹדֶשׁ].’ Holiness is introduced into Biblical vocabulary as a way of expressing the impact of Uncreated Being on creation. The place in which the Lord through his angel appears is transformed; it is no longer a patch of ground like any other. Something of God’s otherness rubs off on it, eliciting from man extraordinary comportment. To take off one’s shoes is to show reverence. It is also to enable immediacy. Moses is asked to step into the radius of epiphany without a layer between his own self and God’s radiance. He must make himself vulnerable to this encounter in order to be changed by it.
There follows an exchange that explicates the purpose of change. Moses is called into the realm of eternity not just as a reward for private virtue; he is to be an instrument in God’s hands for the realisation of a providential plan. Having given through fire an inkling of what he is like, God reveals who he is with reference to past revelations: ‘I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ This supra-temporal, burning Godhead makes himself incrementally known in time. Moses is chosen as a link in the chain of revelation lodged in the patriarchal stories. He, the intrepid, responds with fear. Why?
We can propose a philosophical answer. Man is in himself ephemeral: ‘All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of the grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls’. Faced with the source of Reality, which has no beginning, no end, such a fragile thing recoils, unfit to bear the weight of glory. Moses’s fear can be understood as the spontaneous worship later generations would call, precisely, ‘fear of God’, intending the appropriate response of fallen creatures to God’s nearness.
Permit me to propose a further interpretation of Moses’s fear. It complements, without contradicting, the one we have considered. Originating with Rabbi Nachum Rabinovitch, it has been cogently expounded by Jonathan Sacks. Sacks sets out from Moses’s passion for justice. When Moses saw a slave maltreated, or people fighting, or women ill treated, he acted; he did not stand around the corner saying: ‘Tut!’ The sages of Israel tell us that Moses was haunted by the scandal of evil in the world. The thought of innocent suffering, the treading-down of justice and truth, tormented him. Remember the audacity with which he later took the Lord to task when Pharaoh brutalised his Hebrew workforce. Moses told God: ‘Since I first came to Pharaoh so speak in your name, he has mistreated his people, and you have done nothing at all to deliver your people.’ There is righteous passion here, all right.
Such passion is possible, and licit, in a worldview founded on the notion that justice is structural to the way in which the world is made. Such is the Biblical view. Scripture presents the universe as an intelligent kosmos in which each part is attuned elegantly to others, a compositional model intended to apply to human society as well. The ‘way of the Lord’ is ‘righteousness and justice’. This principle has been axiomatic since the days of Abraham. What, then, when it does not work out? What can we say faced with the failure of good and the triumph of wickedness, with the tears of orphans, the rage of the oppressed, the terror of the sick and persecuted?
The Bible allows for this perplexity, tracing it to an immanent wound in humanity’s constitution that caused the chronicle of our race to originate in fratricide. Indeed, not only does Scripture affirm that circumstances of pain may obtain in our life; it tells us that they are sometimes necessary, that at times evil must be borne patiently by those who are not its agents. Thereby an economy of salvation and healing works out in history, shockingly slowly to our perception, yet assuredly in the eyes of the Lord, for whom a thousand years are like a day. In human affairs there are moments, writes Sacks, ‘when we must silence our most human instincts if we are to bring about good in the long run’, accepting that not each deliverance is instantaneous and that suffering, an ill in itself, is sometimes purposeful, requisite.
Rabbi Rabinovitch maintained that it was of this that Moses was afraid. Was looking at the face of God not tantamount to seeing history as God sees it? And was this not a proposition whose price was too high? How could Moses ‘still be moved by the cry of slaves, the anguish of the oppressed, if he understood its place in the scheme of things, if he knew that it was necessary in the long run?’
Such knowledge is divine, not human – and to have it means saying goodbye to our most human instincts: compassion, sympathy, identification with the plight of the innocent, the wronged, the afflicted and oppressed. If to look at the face of God is to understand why suffering is sometimes necessary, then Moses was afraid to look – afraid that it would rob him of the one thing he felt in his very bones, the thing that made him the leader he was: his anger at the sight of evil which drove him […] to intervene in the name of justice.
The God whom Moses met in the bush is called Elohim, a name the rabbis associate with God’s justice. It took Moses years to integrate the further name revealed in that epiphany: the ineffable Tetragrammaton Jewish tradition transcribes as Hashem, ‘the Name’, a manifestation of divine compassion. When, later in the story, on and after Sinai, Moses looks fearlessly at God, it is Hashem he sees. Whereas God’s justice can unsettle our minds, even appear to us cruel, his compassion illumines us in ways that supersede reason, letting us intuit his salvific grace where we cannot grasp it.
To step into the orbit of holiness, to risk sanctification, requires assent to phenomenal tension as we resolve to construct our lives justly while agreeing to be formed by compassion in unsettlingly palpable experiences of, precisely, ‘suffering with’. For while the world is sick, afflicted with iniquity, there will be pangs of healing to sustain; and humankind is so composed that a part can effectively carry out work on behalf of the whole. In Israel’s mature reflection, holiness is an attribute of God. The vision of Isaiah, in which he saw the Lord on a throne surrounded by angels calling out, ‘Holy, holy, holy [קָדוֹשׁ קָדוֹשׁ קָדוֹשׁ] is the Lord of hosts’, constitutes a paradigm. Human beings perceive holiness in so far as they glimpse something of God’s glory; they are made holy, meanwhile, by configuration to the Holy and Perfect One, ‘full of compassion’, in the midst of realities racked by imperfection. For Christians, this incursion of glory into trauma is crystallised in Christ’s incarnation that renews our nature, opening it to communion with God, letting us hear the cross-shaped call, ‘Be holy!’, as one we can follow without presumption, for it spells a broadening of being and mind intended and worked on divine purpose.
To see this process at work in a human being is to sense something of what Moses sensed at the bush, the bewildering presence of the Holy One in the here-and-now. An example of sanctification which has long haunted me is that of Takashi Nagai, born near Hiroshima in 1908, when Japan, after centuries of isolationism, had catapulted itself into modernity. Takashi was formed in the Japanese classics, whose limpid poetry he loved; at the same time he was drawn to new science. He studied medicine (from German manuals) in Nagasaki, where circumstances of health and chance got him interested in radiology. He would become one of Japan’s best experts in this field in which he practised assiduously as a clinician, exposing himself to rays that would provoke severe leukaemia. He spent two periods of military service in China, first in 1933, then for three years from 1937 during the Second Sino-Japanese War, appalled at the brutality he saw, but strengthened in his humanitarian ethos.
This ethos, at first quite secular, was little by little enlightened from another source. As a youth, Takashi had spurned faith. He reconsidered his position at his mother’s deathbed. A urgent telegram from his father summoned him home in late March 1930. He found his mother Tsune, a descendant of samurai, immobilised and mute after a cerebral haemorrhage. She spent her last strength awaiting Takashi’s arrival. Just minutes after he had come to her, she expired. He later wrote:
I rushed to her bedside. She was still breathing. She looked fixedly at me, and that is how the end came. My mother in that last penetrating gaze knocked down the ideological framework I had constructed. […] Her eyes spoke to mine, and with finality, saying: ‘Your mother now takes leave in death, but her living spirit will be beside her little one, Takashi!’ I who was so sure that there was no such thing as a spirit was now told otherwise; and I could not but believe. My mother’s eyes told me that the human spirit lives on after death. All this was by way of intuition, an intuition carrying conviction.
Many people might be pierced by such intuition for an instant, then let it go. That was no option for Takashi, whose rigorous intellect would not permit him to abandon a loose thread of such import. Picking it up, he began to spool it.
He was given two leads. The first was Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth-century philosopher whom Takashi had discovered while studying literature at school. Pascal’s aphoristic style, familiar to an ear attuned to Japanese poetry, pleased him. He later learnt that Pascal was also a scientist. Takashi procured a copy of his Pensées, a school of metaphysical reasoning and Christian perception. The book confirmed him in his compassion for mankind, but added a challenging dimension by stating: ‘Our wretchedness is that of a dispossessed king’. Takashi might assimilate notions of grace, first innocence, sin, and forgiveness, but his scientist’s mind balked at Pascal’s insistence that faith is a suprarational gift from God, presupposing prayer.
What prayer is he learnt from living persons. The year following his mother’s death, he took lodgings in Nagasaki with a family sprung from the stock of Christians who trace their faith back to St Francis Xavier. From the outset, Japanese authorities had viewed Christianity hostilely. Martin Scorsese’s 2016 film The Silence, based on a book by Endo, has made the ensuing cultural battle well known. It shows how, in the 1630s, while Pascal was an adolescent, European clergy in Japan were crucified and the Church was forced underground, there to become a movement of ‘hidden Christians’. This movement, concentrated in the region of Urakami, just north of Nagasaki, had formed the faith of Takashi’s landlords, the Moriyamas. Several waves of persecution rose during two and a half centuries of Tokugawa rule. A final campaign took place upon the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Takashi knew several survivors of the prison camps that, between 1868 and 1873, produced heroic martyrs. The faith he came to know in person had been purified by fire.
This cursory account enables us to trace four decisive factors in Takashi’s Christian journey: the death of his mother in 1930; immersion in Pascal; exposure to the horrors of war; then, acquaintance with the Urakami Christians. Takashi was baptised in Urakami’s new cathedral in June 1934. Two months later he married the Moriyamas’ daughter Midori, a woman of great inner and outward strength.
During the decade that followed, Takashi’s life assumed adult consistency. It was shaped, like any life, by joy and pain. He and Midori had three children. One died in infancy. Three years of conscription in China taught Takashi to pray. His research in radiology prospered. The more he immersed himself in science he found that, contrary to his first assumption, it confirmed his faith. ‘On one occasion, while studying a kidney case and looking at the brilliant formation of urine crystals, he “felt a great urge to kneel”. He saw “that a laboratory could be the same as the cell of a monk”’. In June 1945, Takashi, long exposed to powerful radiation, was found to be in an advanced stage of blood cancer. He was peacefully reconciled to his mortality, but as unprepared as anyone for the force with which death would sweep over Nagasaki on 9 August, when the A-bomb was dropped on the city.
We know that the bomb was intended for another location, some 200 km to the north. Weather conditions and a technical issue in the carrying plane made this target unreachable. The pilot honed in instead on Urakami. Takashi has described what happened just past 11, when, at work in the hospital, he saw a blinding light:
A giant hand seemed to grab me and hurl me ten feet. Fragments of glass flew about like leaves in a whirlwind. My eyes were open, and I had a glimpse of the outside—planks, beams, clothing were doing a weird dance in the air. […] The giant invisible hand had gone berserk and was smashing everything in the office. Various objects fell on top of me while I listened to strange noises like mountains rumbling back and forth. Then came pitch darkness, as if the reinforced concrete hospital were an express train that had just rushed headlong into a tunnel. I had felt no pain as yet, but panic gripped my heart when I heard crackling flames and sniffed acrid smoke.
Takashi heard himself say, ‘Midori, it’s the end; I’m dying.’ When he came to, what struck him was the silence. He was alive, but the world seemed dead, still, wholly burnt. Then, outside, he noticed pitiful shapes crawling about, their bodies swollen, their skin peeling as they joined in a sepulchral chorus: ‘I am burning! Water!’ With a handful of colleagues, he attended to this scene of devastation, caring for mangled bodies, trying to keep afflicted minds from surrender to madness.
There was evening and morning, evening again, then another morning. On 11 August, Takashi could at last return to what had been his home. There was nothing there but ash. In the midst of it he found a heap of bones. It was Midori, holding in her right hand a melted lump that, by a fragment of the chain and the still visible cross, Takashi identified as her rosary. He has written of how he buried her, asking forgiveness for the ways in which his love had been imperfect; only to hear her voice in his heart saying, ‘No forgive me; I ask for forgiveness’. In a strange sweetness of reconciliation that transcended calculable culpability, Takashi buried his wife.
Sick with cancer, sustaining the impact of the bomb, Takashi’s body gave in. By September, haemorrhaging incurably, he accepted that the end had come. He took leave of his children, who had been absent from Nagasaki on 9 August. While auto-diagnosing the rapid breathing that heralds final agony, an inspiration came to him to pray to Fr Maximilian Kolbe. We think of him now as the martyr of Auschwitz. To Takashi he was an old acquaintance he had x-rayed for tuberculosis. He did pray. To his colleagues’ astonishment his bleeding stopped. Takashi’s mother-in-law, having no idea what was going on in Takashi’s mind and heart, gave him water from a nearby Lourdes grotto, one that Fr Kolbe had built. Again, against the odds, Takashi had been snatched from death’s jaw. He knew it was for a purpose.
His life thenceforth carried a supernatural sheen all the more impressive for shining within resolute attachment to present, material reality. He devoted himself to the rebuilding of Nagasaki. He built a hut where his house had stood, determined to make this wasteland reflourish. He must live right there, he said, to contemplate the meaning of what had taken place. Of this contemplation he had occasion to speak on 23 November 1945, when Nagasaki’s bishop offered an open-air Mass for the dead. Well in advance, he had asked Takashi to speak on behalf of the laity. What could a man possibly say in such conditions, to people who had lost everything?
Three considerations merged in Takashi’s mind. The first was a story he had heard of girls from the convent school of Junshin, where Midori had taught. After the blast, horribly burnt, they were heard singing a hymn learnt at school: ‘Mary, Mother! I offer myself to you, body, soul, and spirit!’ This story conjured up for Takashi the image from Revelation of the Lamb, slaughtered for the world’s redemption, followed by white-robed, chanting virgins. He wrote a poem: ‘Maidens like white lilies/Consumed in the burning flames/As a whole burnt sacrifice/And they were singing.’ A second consideration was this: just as the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, the Supreme Council of War was in session in Tokyo. Many generals opposed surrender. The council was deadlocked. Talks continued throughout the day. At midnight, the emperor cut through, and declared capitulation. At midnight, likewise, Urakami’s smouldering cathedral burst into full flames and was consumed. The third consideration sprang from what Takashi had learnt from the descendants of the ‘hidden Christians’: that Urakami was irrigated by the blood of martyrs.
On that late-November day, at Mass, in the context of Christ’s saving sacrifice, among ruins, Takashi rose unkempt before his fellow citizens and asked:
Is there not a profound relationship between the annihilation of Nagasaki and the end of the war? Was not Nagasaki the chosen victim, the lamb without blemish, slain as a whole burnt offering on an altar of sacrifice, atoning for the sins of all the nations during World War II?
Several in the congregation, appalled to hear the carnage spoken of as providence, responded with anger. Takashi, though, went on, broadening the perspective:
We are inheritors of Adam’s sin, of Cain’s sin. He killed his brother. Yes, we have forgotten we are God’s children. We have turned to idols and forgotten love. Hating one another, killing one another, joyfully killing one another! At last the evil and horrific conflict came to an end, but mere repentance was not enough for peace. We had to offer a stupendous sacrifice. […] Happy are those who weep; they shall be comforted. We must walk the way of reparation, ridiculed, whipped, punished for our crimes, sweaty and bloody. But we can turn our mind’s eyes to Jesus carrying his Cross up the hill to Calvary. The Lord has given, the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Let us be thankful that Nagasaki was chosen for the whole burnt sacrifice. Let us be thankful that through this sacrifice, peace was granted to the world, and religious freedom to Japan.
When he finished, the silence was as deep as after the explosion. People needed time to absorb the mere possibility of such a point of view. Takashi did not loudly canvas for it. But he sought to put it into comprehensible words. He turned to writing. After producing a scientific treatise on the condition of A-bomb victims, he adopted a different genre. This enterprise grew out of a madcap scheme to unearth a bell from the ruins of Urakami’s cathedral. The southern bell-tower had collapsed into itself. There was a chance its bell might still be intact. In Advent 1945, Takashi and a few friends dug for it. They uncovered it on Christmas Eve, set up a tripod of logs, hung the bell, then rang the Angelus at 6 p.m. The Christians of Urakami were amazed to hear this familiar, well-loved bell proclaim: ‘The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.’ Takashi’s first popular book, The Bells of Nagasaki, was born of that sound. It stated that no human devilry can undermine God’s serene, redemptive plan.
First ridiculed as defeatist, Takashi was gradually hailed as an agent in the reconstruction of Japan. By the end of 1948 everyone was reading him. The Bells of Nagasaki was made into a film. He told survivors that they had work to do; that nothing is in vain; that realities impervious to the question, ‘Why?’, may release their secret asked, ‘What for?’ At the requiem in the ruins, he cited Job. Like Job, he had known unconscionable loss. He had looked into the abyss, yet refused to despair, affirming that God is surely present in his apparent absence. Perceiving light in darkness, he acquired a new sense of who God, the righteous and compassionate, is; thereby seeing — ‘my eyes shall see and not another’ — the emergence of a new heaven, a new earth. What Job glimpsed in figures, Takashi scrutinised in the light of the Word’s incarnation, a joyful but unsentimental mystery whose emblem is, and remains, the cross. He would say, ‘Let us climb the Mountain of the Beatitudes’, then remind himself and others that it arises out of the valley of the shadow of death. For unless ‘you’ve looked into the eyes of menacing death and felt its hot breath, you can’t help another rise from the dead and taste anew the joy of being alive.’ Joy, marked by zany humour, radiated from him until he expired on 1 May 1950. Before he died, he used savings to have 1000 cherry-blossom trees planted in Urakami.
Takashi Nagai was no wonderful fool like Gaston or Lazzaro. He was a lucid, observant man. His holiness was not at odds with the world of terror and tears in which he lived; it articulated that world. That makes him an exemplar for our times of menace and wide-spread anguish. Not only do conceptual, cultural, and political structures fall around us like dominoes; we have lost a consensual understanding of what man is, so have trouble sustaining society. To proffer the Biblical vocation to holiness as a response to such a predicament amounts to more than saying that we must do our very best to be very, very good. It calls on us to remove our shoes and step, vulnerable, into the orbit of God’s fiery presence, to be cleansed by it in order to become that fire’s bearers. To respond to this call is risky. It may involve sacrifice. But it will burst barriers that, in a purely pragmatic existence, suffocate us. It will release breath, and joy. Each woman or man will live this process differently, but certain traits will be constant, criteria of authenticity. I think of Pascal’s famous mémorial, his testament to an illumination received after vehement searching, a statement so vital to him that he carried it on him always, having the text of it sewn into his clothes. The mémorial is dated 23 November 1653. That same day 292 years later, Takashi Nagai exegeted the conflagration of Nagasaki in a public address at a requiem. The coincidence will not have been lost on that assiduous reader of Pascal. The mémorial begins with a monosyllabic exclamation: Feu!, ’Fire!’ It goes on:
GOD of Abraham, GOD of Isaac, GOD of Jacob
not of the philosophers and of the learned.
Certitude. Certitude. Affection. Joy. Peace.
GOD of Jesus Christ.
My God and your God.
Your GOD will be my God.
Forgetfulness of the world and of everything, except GOD.
He is only found by the ways taught in the Gospel.
Grandeur of the human soul.
Righteous Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you.
‘I have come’, said our Lord Jesus Christ, ‘to cast fire on the earth, and would that it were already kindled!’ His aspiration concerns us directly. In the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, we find this story of a conversation between two old friends:
Abba Lot went to Abba Joseph and said to him, ‘Abba, as far as I can I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?’ Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, ‘If you will, you can become fire’.
This is the scandal and challenge presented to us, before which we must position ourselves with freedom. Let us be mindful, simply, that the answer we give does not concern ourselves alone. The call to each is given for the sake of all. The wholehearted Yes of one, be it hidden, can bring about the comfort of multitudes.
Takashi Nagai with his children.
‘Be Holy!’ (1 Peter 1.16): The Challenge and Scandal of Sanctity in Anxious Times
Holiness is a notion we struggle to make sense of now. Confronted with claims to holiness, we instinctively seek to discredit them. The assumption of counterfeit runs deep. To be ‘holier-than-thou’ is to bask in a self-assigned, self-satisfied sense of superiority that reeks sourly of hypocrisy. If we exclaim of someone, ‘What a saint!’, it is usually to point out some variety of blatant and absurd pharisaical display.
I have occasion to observe popular responses to ‘holiness’ close at hand. Norway’s patron saint, St Olav, was killed in 1030. The millennium of his martyrdom draws near inexorably. The government has announced a ‘national jubilee’ cast as a grand hoorah for our nation, abstracting the protagonist as far as possible. That a modern, secular, multi-cultural state struggles to frame a response to a Catholic saint is understandable. What is striking, though, is that in so far as Olav is mentioned at all, it is almost always disapprovingly. He is painted in the grim palette of a Netflix viking series, rapacious, with horns on his hat, and with an uncontrolled libido.
The fact that Olav was of royal stock, moving easily in princely courts; that we have gracious poems from his hand, songs of swift horses and blushing maidens; that his baptism shows every sign of having been sincere; that he implemented a Christian code of law that raised up the lowly and cast down the proud; that he was known for cheerful kindness; that his cult, upon his defeat in battle, spread fast worldwide; that Christians pilgrimaged secretly to his shrines for centuries after the Reformers had sternly outlawed such practice: all this is pooh-poohed as irrelevant.
At stake is not the relative attractiveness or merit of a particular human destiny. I believe it is the category of ‘holiness’ as such that causes scandal. That it should be so makes sense. Nowadays we like to project an image of ourselves to the world on the basis of self-affirmation, expecting others to greet it with a Halleluja chorus. If I admit ‘holiness’ into my conceptual vocabulary — that is, if I admit the possibility that a human life can be profoundly and durably transformed — who is to say I couldn’t, and shouldn’t, change my life? The thought is uncomfortable.
Have we lost the very ability to portray uncommon goodness? It could seem so. It is damned hard, now, to write up the lives of saints credibly. To label a biography ‘hagiography’ is to condemn it as idealised drivel. Even sympathetic accounts fall flat. I think of Shusako Endo’s novel A Wonderful Fool from 1959, an attempt to describe the irruption of holiness into a modern, secular setting. The fool in question, a Frenchman named Gaston, steps off a ship in Yokohama one day to visit his Japanese penpal Takamori. Gaston is like a visitor from another planet. He is kind and generous, yes, but hopelessly unrealistic; a misfit even in his unruly physiognomy. Endo, who was a Catholic and wrote as one, sought, it would seem, to create a character in the mould of the yurodivy or holy fool canonised in Russian literature. The result, though, reads like a two-dimensional, rather tedious cartoon.
I thought of Endo’s novel recently while watching Alice Rohrwacher’s movie from 2018, Lazzaro Felice. I love the work of Rohrwacher, who, with a keen eye for societal dysfunction and human quirks, makes work that is at the same time critical and uncynical — a delicate balance to tread. There is poetry in all her films; there is mirth, tenderness, intimations of greatness. Lazzaro, meanwhile, stands apart among her dramatis personae, for he is wholly good, moving in shabby society as an unlikely incarnation of prelapsarian bliss, happy to let himself be taunted, used, exploited. By narrative and cinematographic means, Rohrwacher lets us see that Lazzaro transcends common human limitations; for one thing, he stands, unageing, beyond chronology. It also becomes clear that he is one for whom the world as it is has neither space nor time. He is shot dead in a high place of pragmatic transaction, a bank, where people around him fatally misread his pure intentions. Poor, naive, foolish Lazzaro! His bright happiness was too much for crepuscular mankind.
The works I have cited, representative of trends, are secular in form. Whatever their authors’ beliefs, they do not set out to be explicitly religious. They are certainly not evangelising. What, then, about the Church? Surely she must be an expert on sanctity? Does she have any luck in portraying the inward essence of holy women and men? Thank God, she has the liturgy whose texts, poetry, and forms carry a timeless treasury that does convey, to those with eyes to see, ears to hear, compelling testimonies. When it comes to contemporary expression, though, even she struggles. To see what I mean, try putting an altarpiece by Fra Angelico or Cimambue, works that take our breath away by probingly displaying humanity imbued with an otherworldliness that does not estrange but perfect it, next to one of the inexplicably ubiquitous mosaics of Marko Rupnik, the former Jesuit, whose serialised saints have teletubby bodies and empty, lightless eyes. An observation will impose itself: even officially commissioned and sanctioned representations of holiness tend, now, to presuppose dissimilarity from actual, lifelike women and men. Sanctity has come to seem corny, somehow, even slightly sinister.
One of the reasons we are in a rut is this: we have come to think of holiness as behavioural perfectibility. We imagine saints as flawless super-persons, nice to all, always patient, not slurping soup, never uttering invective, never crossing the street on a red light. The mere thought of such a person is intolerable. When we see a life projected according to such criteria, it seems unreal. Sniffing fake news, we are only relieved when revelations are made of embarrassing weaknesses or peccadilloes that cause the house of cards, precarious from the start, to come tumbling down.
A glance at the Church’s catalogue of canonised saints will explode such a limited view of holiness, of course. To list just a few examples: St Jerome, patron saint of Biblical scholars, was famous for his prickly temperament and salty tongue; St Maria Skobtsova, murdered at Ravensbrück, would in Paris throw back her veiled head and put up her feet puffing cigarettes; St John Henry Newman descended into doldrums of self-pity; St Catherine of Siena spoke her mind to princes in ways that left crowned and tiaraed heads spinning. The saint is no exsanguine transhuman. No, a true saint shows forth what a human being is with luminous intensity. We honour the saints not as pupils in life’s school who, by swotting, have learnt at last to recite by rote and follow all the rules; we venerate them as graced, gracious human beings in whom the mystery of God flares up like substantial fire.
Likening holiness to fire I am not just picking a simile out of thin air. When holiness emerges as a Biblical category, it is in connection with fire. The setting is Egyptian, likely in the fifteenth century BC. Moses, the Hebrew adopted son of Pharaoh’s daughter, ostensibly an orphan, though nursed by his mother, must flee from Pharaoh. His innate instinct for justice had made him commit deeds that drew the establishment’s wrath, setting him explicitly apart as the outsider he always, in his heart of hearts, knew he was. Moses, grown up within the known world’s stablest structure of power, had become a nomad, erring in the wilderness while seeking pasture for the flocks of Jethro, his father-in-law, priest of Midian. Out there,
the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush; and he looked, and lo, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. And Moses said, ‘I will turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.’ When the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, ‘Moses, Moses!’ And he said, ‘Here am I.’ Then he said, ‘Do not come near; put off your shoes from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.’ And he said, ‘I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.
There is much going on in this passage. Moses, thinking himself alone in the desert, is surprised by an angelic presence. The angel is not to be identified with God: he is a messenger, carrying God’s word; but thereby he does carry something of God’s presence, for God is what he speaks. The angel, we might say, is a being made to cross the ontological gap between eternity and time, charged to be a vehicle of God’s self-revelation. What is God? An answer to that question cannot be spoken; but is tentatively shown in the figure of fire that burns without consuming. This fire visits the thorn bush like a guest, beautifully seated within it. The thorn bush sustains this visitation. The meeting of super-substantial fire and matter draws Moses’s attention, making him turn aside from his itinerary, wanting and needing to see.
Set on the pursuit of sight, he hears. ‘God called to him out of the bush’. He called him by name. The twofold, ‘Moses, Moses!’, recalls the ‘Abraham, Abraham!’ by which God called out on Mount Moriah, having tested Abraham by seeing his willingness to sacrifice Isaac, the son whom he loved, as a burnt offering. It further makes us think of the call, ‘Jacob, Jacob!’, resounding in visions of the night when the father of Israel’s tribes had learnt that Joseph, thought dead, was alive and expecting him in Egypt. There is a note at once of affection and emphasis in the repetition of the name. It is God’s way of saying, ‘I know you’. He, the maker of all, boundless in his absolute being, knows his creatures particularly and intimately.
It is when Moses responds to this call and says, ‘Here I am’, that he receives the instruction: ‘Do not come near; put off your shoes from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground [אַדְמַת-קֹדֶשׁ].’ Holiness is introduced into Biblical vocabulary as a way of expressing the impact of Uncreated Being on creation. The place in which the Lord through his angel appears is transformed; it is no longer a patch of ground like any other. Something of God’s otherness rubs off on it, eliciting from man extraordinary comportment. To take off one’s shoes is to show reverence. It is also to enable immediacy. Moses is asked to step into the radius of epiphany without a layer between his own self and God’s radiance. He must make himself vulnerable to this encounter in order to be changed by it.
There follows an exchange that explicates the purpose of change. Moses is called into the realm of eternity not just as a reward for private virtue; he is to be an instrument in God’s hands for the realisation of a providential plan. Having given through fire an inkling of what he is like, God reveals who he is with reference to past revelations: ‘I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ This supra-temporal, burning Godhead makes himself incrementally known in time. Moses is chosen as a link in the chain of revelation lodged in the patriarchal stories. He, the intrepid, responds with fear. Why?
We can propose a philosophical answer. Man is in himself ephemeral: ‘All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of the grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls’. Faced with the source of Reality, which has no beginning, no end, such a fragile thing recoils, unfit to bear the weight of glory. Moses’s fear can be understood as the spontaneous worship later generations would call, precisely, ‘fear of God’, intending the appropriate response of fallen creatures to God’s nearness.
Permit me to propose a further interpretation of Moses’s fear. It complements, without contradicting, the one we have considered. Originating with Rabbi Nachum Rabinovitch, it has been cogently expounded by Jonathan Sacks. Sacks sets out from Moses’s passion for justice. When Moses saw a slave maltreated, or people fighting, or women ill treated, he acted; he did not stand around the corner saying: ‘Tut!’ The sages of Israel tell us that Moses was haunted by the scandal of evil in the world. The thought of innocent suffering, the treading-down of justice and truth, tormented him. Remember the audacity with which he later took the Lord to task when Pharaoh brutalised his Hebrew workforce. Moses told God: ‘Since I first came to Pharaoh so speak in your name, he has mistreated his people, and you have done nothing at all to deliver your people.’ There is righteous passion here, all right.
Such passion is possible, and licit, in a worldview founded on the notion that justice is structural to the way in which the world is made. Such is the Biblical view. Scripture presents the universe as an intelligent kosmos in which each part is attuned elegantly to others, a compositional model intended to apply to human society as well. The ‘way of the Lord’ is ‘righteousness and justice’. This principle has been axiomatic since the days of Abraham. What, then, when it does not work out? What can we say faced with the failure of good and the triumph of wickedness, with the tears of orphans, the rage of the oppressed, the terror of the sick and persecuted?
The Bible allows for this perplexity, tracing it to an immanent wound in humanity’s constitution that caused the chronicle of our race to originate in fratricide. Indeed, not only does Scripture affirm that circumstances of pain may obtain in our life; it tells us that they are sometimes necessary, that at times evil must be borne patiently by those who are not its agents. Thereby an economy of salvation and healing works out in history, shockingly slowly to our perception, yet assuredly in the eyes of the Lord, for whom a thousand years are like a day. In human affairs there are moments, writes Sacks, ‘when we must silence our most human instincts if we are to bring about good in the long run’, accepting that not each deliverance is instantaneous and that suffering, an ill in itself, is sometimes purposeful, requisite.
Rabbi Rabinovitch maintained that it was of this that Moses was afraid. Was looking at the face of God not tantamount to seeing history as God sees it? And was this not a proposition whose price was too high? How could Moses ‘still be moved by the cry of slaves, the anguish of the oppressed, if he understood its place in the scheme of things, if he knew that it was necessary in the long run?’
Such knowledge is divine, not human – and to have it means saying goodbye to our most human instincts: compassion, sympathy, identification with the plight of the innocent, the wronged, the afflicted and oppressed. If to look at the face of God is to understand why suffering is sometimes necessary, then Moses was afraid to look – afraid that it would rob him of the one thing he felt in his very bones, the thing that made him the leader he was: his anger at the sight of evil which drove him […] to intervene in the name of justice.
The God whom Moses met in the bush is called Elohim, a name the rabbis associate with God’s justice. It took Moses years to integrate the further name revealed in that epiphany: the ineffable Tetragrammaton Jewish tradition transcribes as Hashem, ‘the Name’, a manifestation of divine compassion. When, later in the story, on and after Sinai, Moses looks fearlessly at God, it is Hashem he sees. Whereas God’s justice can unsettle our minds, even appear to us cruel, his compassion illumines us in ways that supersede reason, letting us intuit his salvific grace where we cannot grasp it.
To step into the orbit of holiness, to risk sanctification, requires assent to phenomenal tension as we resolve to construct our lives justly while agreeing to be formed by compassion in unsettlingly palpable experiences of, precisely, ‘suffering with’. For while the world is sick, afflicted with iniquity, there will be pangs of healing to sustain; and humankind is so composed that a part can effectively carry out work on behalf of the whole. In Israel’s mature reflection, holiness is an attribute of God. The vision of Isaiah, in which he saw the Lord on a throne surrounded by angels calling out, ‘Holy, holy, holy [קָדוֹשׁ קָדוֹשׁ קָדוֹשׁ] is the Lord of hosts’, constitutes a paradigm. Human beings perceive holiness in so far as they glimpse something of God’s glory; they are made holy, meanwhile, by configuration to the Holy and Perfect One, ‘full of compassion’, in the midst of realities racked by imperfection. For Christians, this incursion of glory into trauma is crystallised in Christ’s incarnation that renews our nature, opening it to communion with God, letting us hear the cross-shaped call, ‘Be holy!’, as one we can follow without presumption, for it spells a broadening of being and mind intended and worked on divine purpose.
To see this process at work in a human being is to sense something of what Moses sensed at the bush, the bewildering presence of the Holy One in the here-and-now. An example of sanctification which has long haunted me is that of Takashi Nagai, born near Hiroshima in 1908, when Japan, after centuries of isolationism, had catapulted itself into modernity. Takashi was formed in the Japanese classics, whose limpid poetry he loved; at the same time he was drawn to new science. He studied medicine (from German manuals) in Nagasaki, where circumstances of health and chance got him interested in radiology. He would become one of Japan’s best experts in this field in which he practised assiduously as a clinician, exposing himself to rays that would provoke severe leukaemia. He spent two periods of military service in China, first in 1933, then for three years from 1937 during the Second Sino-Japanese War, appalled at the brutality he saw, but strengthened in his humanitarian ethos.
This ethos, at first quite secular, was little by little enlightened from another source. As a youth, Takashi had spurned faith. He reconsidered his position at his mother’s deathbed. A urgent telegram from his father summoned him home in late March 1930. He found his mother Tsune, a descendant of samurai, immobilised and mute after a cerebral haemorrhage. She spent her last strength awaiting Takashi’s arrival. Just minutes after he had come to her, she expired. He later wrote:
I rushed to her bedside. She was still breathing. She looked fixedly at me, and that is how the end came. My mother in that last penetrating gaze knocked down the ideological framework I had constructed. […] Her eyes spoke to mine, and with finality, saying: ‘Your mother now takes leave in death, but her living spirit will be beside her little one, Takashi!’ I who was so sure that there was no such thing as a spirit was now told otherwise; and I could not but believe. My mother’s eyes told me that the human spirit lives on after death. All this was by way of intuition, an intuition carrying conviction.
Many people might be pierced by such intuition for an instant, then let it go. That was no option for Takashi, whose rigorous intellect would not permit him to abandon a loose thread of such import. Picking it up, he began to spool it.
He was given two leads. The first was Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth-century philosopher whom Takashi had discovered while studying literature at school. Pascal’s aphoristic style, familiar to an ear attuned to Japanese poetry, pleased him. He later learnt that Pascal was also a scientist. Takashi procured a copy of his Pensées, a school of metaphysical reasoning and Christian perception. The book confirmed him in his compassion for mankind, but added a challenging dimension by stating: ‘Our wretchedness is that of a dispossessed king’. Takashi might assimilate notions of grace, first innocence, sin, and forgiveness, but his scientist’s mind balked at Pascal’s insistence that faith is a suprarational gift from God, presupposing prayer.
What prayer is he learnt from living persons. The year following his mother’s death, he took lodgings in Nagasaki with a family sprung from the stock of Christians who trace their faith back to St Francis Xavier. From the outset, Japanese authorities had viewed Christianity hostilely. Martin Scorsese’s 2016 film The Silence, based on a book by Endo, has made the ensuing cultural battle well known. It shows how, in the 1630s, while Pascal was an adolescent, European clergy in Japan were crucified and the Church was forced underground, there to become a movement of ‘hidden Christians’. This movement, concentrated in the region of Urakami, just north of Nagasaki, had formed the faith of Takashi’s landlords, the Moriyamas. Several waves of persecution rose during two and a half centuries of Tokugawa rule. A final campaign took place upon the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Takashi knew several survivors of the prison camps that, between 1868 and 1873, produced heroic martyrs. The faith he came to know in person had been purified by fire.
This cursory account enables us to trace four decisive factors in Takashi’s Christian journey: the death of his mother in 1930; immersion in Pascal; exposure to the horrors of war; then, acquaintance with the Urakami Christians. Takashi was baptised in Urakami’s new cathedral in June 1934. Two months later he married the Moriyamas’ daughter Midori, a woman of great inner and outward strength.
During the decade that followed, Takashi’s life assumed adult consistency. It was shaped, like any life, by joy and pain. He and Midori had three children. One died in infancy. Three years of conscription in China taught Takashi to pray. His research in radiology prospered. The more he immersed himself in science he found that, contrary to his first assumption, it confirmed his faith. ‘On one occasion, while studying a kidney case and looking at the brilliant formation of urine crystals, he “felt a great urge to kneel”. He saw “that a laboratory could be the same as the cell of a monk”’. In June 1945, Takashi, long exposed to powerful radiation, was found to be in an advanced stage of blood cancer. He was peacefully reconciled to his mortality, but as unprepared as anyone for the force with which death would sweep over Nagasaki on 9 August, when the A-bomb was dropped on the city.
We know that the bomb was intended for another location, some 200 km to the north. Weather conditions and a technical issue in the carrying plane made this target unreachable. The pilot honed in instead on Urakami. Takashi has described what happened just past 11, when, at work in the hospital, he saw a blinding light:
A giant hand seemed to grab me and hurl me ten feet. Fragments of glass flew about like leaves in a whirlwind. My eyes were open, and I had a glimpse of the outside—planks, beams, clothing were doing a weird dance in the air. […] The giant invisible hand had gone berserk and was smashing everything in the office. Various objects fell on top of me while I listened to strange noises like mountains rumbling back and forth. Then came pitch darkness, as if the reinforced concrete hospital were an express train that had just rushed headlong into a tunnel. I had felt no pain as yet, but panic gripped my heart when I heard crackling flames and sniffed acrid smoke.
Takashi heard himself say, ‘Midori, it’s the end; I’m dying.’ When he came to, what struck him was the silence. He was alive, but the world seemed dead, still, wholly burnt. Then, outside, he noticed pitiful shapes crawling about, their bodies swollen, their skin peeling as they joined in a sepulchral chorus: ‘I am burning! Water!’ With a handful of colleagues, he attended to this scene of devastation, caring for mangled bodies, trying to keep afflicted minds from surrender to madness.
There was evening and morning, evening again, then another morning. On 11 August, Takashi could at last return to what had been his home. There was nothing there but ash. In the midst of it he found a heap of bones. It was Midori, holding in her right hand a melted lump that, by a fragment of the chain and the still visible cross, Takashi identified as her rosary. He has written of how he buried her, asking forgiveness for the ways in which his love had been imperfect; only to hear her voice in his heart saying, ‘No forgive me; I ask for forgiveness’. In a strange sweetness of reconciliation that transcended calculable culpability, Takashi buried his wife.
Sick with cancer, sustaining the impact of the bomb, Takashi’s body gave in. By September, haemorrhaging incurably, he accepted that the end had come. He took leave of his children, who had been absent from Nagasaki on 9 August. While auto-diagnosing the rapid breathing that heralds final agony, an inspiration came to him to pray to Fr Maximilian Kolbe. We think of him now as the martyr of Auschwitz. To Takashi he was an old acquaintance he had x-rayed for tuberculosis. He did pray. To his colleagues’ astonishment his bleeding stopped. Takashi’s mother-in-law, having no idea what was going on in Takashi’s mind and heart, gave him water from a nearby Lourdes grotto, one that Fr Kolbe had built. Again, against the odds, Takashi had been snatched from death’s jaw. He knew it was for a purpose.
His life thenceforth carried a supernatural sheen all the more impressive for shining within resolute attachment to present, material reality. He devoted himself to the rebuilding of Nagasaki. He built a hut where his house had stood, determined to make this wasteland reflourish. He must live right there, he said, to contemplate the meaning of what had taken place. Of this contemplation he had occasion to speak on 23 November 1945, when Nagasaki’s bishop offered an open-air Mass for the dead. Well in advance, he had asked Takashi to speak on behalf of the laity. What could a man possibly say in such conditions, to people who had lost everything?
Three considerations merged in Takashi’s mind. The first was a story he had heard of girls from the convent school of Junshin, where Midori had taught. After the blast, horribly burnt, they were heard singing a hymn learnt at school: ‘Mary, Mother! I offer myself to you, body, soul, and spirit!’ This story conjured up for Takashi the image from Revelation of the Lamb, slaughtered for the world’s redemption, followed by white-robed, chanting virgins. He wrote a poem: ‘Maidens like white lilies/Consumed in the burning flames/As a whole burnt sacrifice/And they were singing.’ A second consideration was this: just as the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, the Supreme Council of War was in session in Tokyo. Many generals opposed surrender. The council was deadlocked. Talks continued throughout the day. At midnight, the emperor cut through, and declared capitulation. At midnight, likewise, Urakami’s smouldering cathedral burst into full flames and was consumed. The third consideration sprang from what Takashi had learnt from the descendants of the ‘hidden Christians’: that Urakami was irrigated by the blood of martyrs.
On that late-November day, at Mass, in the context of Christ’s saving sacrifice, among ruins, Takashi rose unkempt before his fellow citizens and asked:
Is there not a profound relationship between the annihilation of Nagasaki and the end of the war? Was not Nagasaki the chosen victim, the lamb without blemish, slain as a whole burnt offering on an altar of sacrifice, atoning for the sins of all the nations during World War II?
Several in the congregation, appalled to hear the carnage spoken of as providence, responded with anger. Takashi, though, went on, broadening the perspective:
We are inheritors of Adam’s sin, of Cain’s sin. He killed his brother. Yes, we have forgotten we are God’s children. We have turned to idols and forgotten love. Hating one another, killing one another, joyfully killing one another! At last the evil and horrific conflict came to an end, but mere repentance was not enough for peace. We had to offer a stupendous sacrifice. […] Happy are those who weep; they shall be comforted. We must walk the way of reparation, ridiculed, whipped, punished for our crimes, sweaty and bloody. But we can turn our mind’s eyes to Jesus carrying his Cross up the hill to Calvary. The Lord has given, the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Let us be thankful that Nagasaki was chosen for the whole burnt sacrifice. Let us be thankful that through this sacrifice, peace was granted to the world, and religious freedom to Japan.
When he finished, the silence was as deep as after the explosion. People needed time to absorb the mere possibility of such a point of view. Takashi did not loudly canvas for it. But he sought to put it into comprehensible words. He turned to writing. After producing a scientific treatise on the condition of A-bomb victims, he adopted a different genre. This enterprise grew out of a madcap scheme to unearth a bell from the ruins of Urakami’s cathedral. The southern bell-tower had collapsed into itself. There was a chance its bell might still be intact. In Advent 1945, Takashi and a few friends dug for it. They uncovered it on Christmas Eve, set up a tripod of logs, hung the bell, then rang the Angelus at 6 p.m. The Christians of Urakami were amazed to hear this familiar, well-loved bell proclaim: ‘The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.’ Takashi’s first popular book, The Bells of Nagasaki, was born of that sound. It stated that no human devilry can undermine God’s serene, redemptive plan.
First ridiculed as defeatist, Takashi was gradually hailed as an agent in the reconstruction of Japan. By the end of 1948 everyone was reading him. The Bells of Nagasaki was made into a film. He told survivors that they had work to do; that nothing is in vain; that realities impervious to the question, ‘Why?’, may release their secret asked, ‘What for?’ At the requiem in the ruins, he cited Job. Like Job, he had known unconscionable loss. He had looked into the abyss, yet refused to despair, affirming that God is surely present in his apparent absence. Perceiving light in darkness, he acquired a new sense of who God, the righteous and compassionate, is; thereby seeing — ‘my eyes shall see and not another’ — the emergence of a new heaven, a new earth. What Job glimpsed in figures, Takashi scrutinised in the light of the Word’s incarnation, a joyful but unsentimental mystery whose emblem is, and remains, the cross. He would say, ‘Let us climb the Mountain of the Beatitudes’, then remind himself and others that it arises out of the valley of the shadow of death. For unless ‘you’ve looked into the eyes of menacing death and felt its hot breath, you can’t help another rise from the dead and taste anew the joy of being alive.’ Joy, marked by zany humour, radiated from him until he expired on 1 May 1950. Before he died, he used savings to have 1000 cherry-blossom trees planted in Urakami.
Takashi Nagai was no wonderful fool like Gaston or Lazzaro. He was a lucid, observant man. His holiness was not at odds with the world of terror and tears in which he lived; it articulated that world. That makes him an exemplar for our times of menace and wide-spread anguish. Not only do conceptual, cultural, and political structures fall around us like dominoes; we have lost a consensual understanding of what man is, so have trouble sustaining society. To proffer the Biblical vocation to holiness as a response to such a predicament amounts to more than saying that we must do our very best to be very, very good. It calls on us to remove our shoes and step, vulnerable, into the orbit of God’s fiery presence, to be cleansed by it in order to become that fire’s bearers. To respond to this call is risky. It may involve sacrifice. But it will burst barriers that, in a purely pragmatic existence, suffocate us. It will release breath, and joy. Each woman or man will live this process differently, but certain traits will be constant, criteria of authenticity. I think of Pascal’s famous mémorial, his testament to an illumination received after vehement searching, a statement so vital to him that he carried it on him always, having the text of it sewn into his clothes. The mémorial is dated 23 November 1653. That same day 292 years later, Takashi Nagai exegeted the conflagration of Nagasaki in a public address at a requiem. The coincidence will not have been lost on that assiduous reader of Pascal. The mémorial begins with a monosyllabic exclamation: Feu!, ’Fire!’ It goes on:
GOD of Abraham, GOD of Isaac, GOD of Jacob
not of the philosophers and of the learned.
Certitude. Certitude. Affection. Joy. Peace.
GOD of Jesus Christ.
My God and your God.
Your GOD will be my God.
Forgetfulness of the world and of everything, except GOD.
He is only found by the ways taught in the Gospel.
Grandeur of the human soul.
Righteous Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you.
‘I have come’, said our Lord Jesus Christ, ‘to cast fire on the earth, and would that it were already kindled!’ His aspiration concerns us directly. In the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, we find this story of a conversation between two old friends:
Abba Lot went to Abba Joseph and said to him, ‘Abba, as far as I can I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?’ Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, ‘If you will, you can become fire’.
This is the scandal and challenge presented to us, before which we must position ourselves with freedom. Let us be mindful, simply, that the answer we give does not concern ourselves alone. The call to each is given for the sake of all. The wholehearted Yes of one, be it hidden, can bring about the comfort of multitudes.
Takashi Nagai with his children.
Conclave
So I did go to see Conclave. As a cultural phenomenon it shows, like Nanni Moretti’s Habemus Papam from 2011 (a much cleverer film), the fascination exercised by Catholic rituals and processes on a world professing indifference to religion. The photography is good. The script is flat. The characters lack depth. The allegiance to stereotypes is heroic. I didn’t find the film offensive; it isn’t interesting enough to offend. If I left the cinema feeling dejected, it was for another reason: Edward Berger’s effort shows how sterile talk of religion becomes when faith is absent from it. Dan Hitchens has suggested, in a thoughtful review, that Conclave points beyond itself. I fear my response is more hopeless. I found the film leaden, with no intimation of flight. It is an implicit exposé of the third commandment, for what happens when the name of the Lord is taken in vain is not necessarily blasphemy but pointlessness.
Holy Globalism
In the curious mishmash that makes up the York Art Gallery, where some very fine pieces hang among some very indifferent pieces, I came upon this portrayal of St Birgitta, one panel of a diptych in which she is flanked by, of all people, St Anthony the Great. The ensemble was produced by Maso di San Friano about 1565 for a church near Florence. A fourteenth-century Swede in the company of a fourth-century Egyptian, removed from Renaissance Italy to post-industrial York. Just behind the Art Gallery stands St Olav’s church, dedicated in 1055. Just 25 years after Olav’s death, his cult had spread to the north of England. The communion of saints presupposes and nurtures a global view of history, and of mankind, that lets us draw lines and see connections across the pedantic boundaries we draw to enclose ourselves reassuringly in too narrow categories of belonging. We need this broader perspective now, when in many places portcullises are lowered, bridges burnt.
Life by Hope
A column in the Advent issue of St Olav Kirkeblad 2024
Current instability worldwide terrifies. The UN Climate Change Conference in Baku began with a call to action no major agent will heed. The US presidential election generates perplexity at many levels. In Ukraine the war of invasion rages on, while we have long since turned our minds to other things. Russian pretensions sneakingly prevail. In Germany a vulnerable coalition has collapsed. France was barely able to scrape a government together to host the Olympics. In London, it’s a full-time job to move PMs in and out of 10 Downing Street. The crisis in the Middle East escalates.
And we are about to light the first candle on our Advent wreath: ‘Today we light the first of four, here to stand alone. We await the infant who, in the manger, was laid on straw.’
What on earth does it mean to perform such an action in a world such as ours?
The first thing we must say is that today’s world isn’t all that unlike the world into which the Father’s eternal Word was born. That world, too, was coming apart.
The first thing we must say is that today’s world isn’t all that unlike the world into which the Father’s eternal Word was born. That world, too, was coming apart. The growth of the Church coincided with the collapse of political structures. Massive migrations, coming from the East, redefined the West, giving birth to ‘Europe’. The soil in which the Gospel’s seed was sown was no peaceful, symmetrically ploughed field. No, the seed was practically thrown into an earthquake. Thus it became constitutional to the new landscape that emerged, free of established expectation. The Church, Christ’s Bride, turned out to be a creative element in a new societal order which in time produced Christian civilisation, one of man’s noblest accomplishments.
How did it come about? It came about because Christians took seriously the call to become new women and men. A Christian’s existence unfolds in the world, but is not of the world. It represents a new humanity set to elevate society. When the Lord, in the Gospel, uses the image of the leaven in the dough, it is with serious intent. Remember what Paul wrote to the Philippians: ‘Do all things without grumbling or questioning, that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast the word of life’ (2.14-16). Indeed, we do live in a ‘perverse’ generation, a generation that has slid off track. Much in it is ‘crooked’, twisted out of shape, struggling to pursue the natural, blessed order that corresponds to God’s creative purpose. In this setting we are to hold fast to ‘the word of life’.
Surrounded by metaphysical and moral darkness, we Christians are to be light, not in the sense that we glimmer self-generatedly, but in as much as Christ shines in us.
Surrounded by metaphysical and moral darkness, we Christians are to be light, not in the sense that we glimmer self-generatedly, but in as much as Christ shines in us, in as much as our lives are grounded and nurtured in Christ. Baptised to become God’s children, incorporated into Christ’s mystical Body, we have received great grace. That should be perceptible, clear in the choices we make. We are not to drift along with a crookedly running current.
In recent debate, the question has been asked: What can we fairly expect of ourselves and each other as Christians? Honesty is needed here; hypocrisy is to be unmasked. And yet, we must not forget that Christian life is a high task; and that grace enables us to act in ways that transcend merely human capability. God became man to renew our nature from within. The call he addresses to us is immense. The Gospel cannot be reduced to a banal, ‘I’m OK, You’re OK’. When it is, it ceases to be Gospel. It becomes, then, just a means to self-deception.
The Gospel cannot be reduced to a banal, ‘I’m OK, You’re OK’. When it is, it ceases to be Gospel. It becomes, then, just a means to self-deception.
We stand on the threshold of a jubilee launched under the motto Peregrinantes in spem. Hope, spes, is in the Accusative. It is a goal to which we pilgrims, peregrinantes, move, called out of petrification into conversion. The Church exhorts us to shed passive resignation, be it self-satisfied or anguished; to place our trust in the Lord of the world who from the dawn of time till the end of history makes all things new. If we follow that call fully, we may by grace carry luminous hope into a world that has forgotten the meaning of the very word.
Everything is possible then. The no destruction is inevitable.
We call ourselves disciples of Jesus, members of his Body. ‘He who says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked’ (1 John 2.6). To construct a life on these terms, certain that for God nothing is impossible, is to walk trustfully into hope. Let us encourage one another as we advance along this path. We all owe one another a good example.
Current instability worldwide terrifies. The UN Climate Change Conference in Baku began with a call to action no major agent will heed. The US presidential election generates perplexity at many levels. In Ukraine the war of invasion rages on, while we have long since turned our minds to other things. Russian pretensions sneakingly prevail. In Germany a vulnerable coalition has collapsed. France was barely able to scrape a government together to host the Olympics. In London, it’s a full-time job to move PMs in and out of 10 Downing Street. The crisis in the Middle East escalates.
And we are about to light the first candle on our Advent wreath: ‘Today we light the first of four, here to stand alone. We await the infant who, in the manger, was laid on straw.’
What on earth does it mean to perform such an action in a world such as ours?
The first thing we must say is that today’s world isn’t all that unlike the world into which the Father’s eternal Word was born. That world, too, was coming apart.
The first thing we must say is that today’s world isn’t all that unlike the world into which the Father’s eternal Word was born. That world, too, was coming apart. The growth of the Church coincided with the collapse of political structures. Massive migrations, coming from the East, redefined the West, giving birth to ‘Europe’. The soil in which the Gospel’s seed was sown was no peaceful, symmetrically ploughed field. No, the seed was practically thrown into an earthquake. Thus it became constitutional to the new landscape that emerged, free of established expectation. The Church, Christ’s Bride, turned out to be a creative element in a new societal order which in time produced Christian civilisation, one of man’s noblest accomplishments.
How did it come about? It came about because Christians took seriously the call to become new women and men. A Christian’s existence unfolds in the world, but is not of the world. It represents a new humanity set to elevate society. When the Lord, in the Gospel, uses the image of the leaven in the dough, it is with serious intent. Remember what Paul wrote to the Philippians: ‘Do all things without grumbling or questioning, that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast the word of life’ (2.14-16). Indeed, we do live in a ‘perverse’ generation, a generation that has slid off track. Much in it is ‘crooked’, twisted out of shape, struggling to pursue the natural, blessed order that corresponds to God’s creative purpose. In this setting we are to hold fast to ‘the word of life’.
Surrounded by metaphysical and moral darkness, we Christians are to be light, not in the sense that we glimmer self-generatedly, but in as much as Christ shines in us.
Surrounded by metaphysical and moral darkness, we Christians are to be light, not in the sense that we glimmer self-generatedly, but in as much as Christ shines in us, in as much as our lives are grounded and nurtured in Christ. Baptised to become God’s children, incorporated into Christ’s mystical Body, we have received great grace. That should be perceptible, clear in the choices we make. We are not to drift along with a crookedly running current.
In recent debate, the question has been asked: What can we fairly expect of ourselves and each other as Christians? Honesty is needed here; hypocrisy is to be unmasked. And yet, we must not forget that Christian life is a high task; and that grace enables us to act in ways that transcend merely human capability. God became man to renew our nature from within. The call he addresses to us is immense. The Gospel cannot be reduced to a banal, ‘I’m OK, You’re OK’. When it is, it ceases to be Gospel. It becomes, then, just a means to self-deception.
The Gospel cannot be reduced to a banal, ‘I’m OK, You’re OK’. When it is, it ceases to be Gospel. It becomes, then, just a means to self-deception.
We stand on the threshold of a jubilee launched under the motto Peregrinantes in spem. Hope, spes, is in the Accusative. It is a goal to which we pilgrims, peregrinantes, move, called out of petrification into conversion. The Church exhorts us to shed passive resignation, be it self-satisfied or anguished; to place our trust in the Lord of the world who from the dawn of time till the end of history makes all things new. If we follow that call fully, we may by grace carry luminous hope into a world that has forgotten the meaning of the very word.
Everything is possible then. The no destruction is inevitable.
We call ourselves disciples of Jesus, members of his Body. ‘He who says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked’ (1 John 2.6). To construct a life on these terms, certain that for God nothing is impossible, is to walk trustfully into hope. Let us encourage one another as we advance along this path. We all owe one another a good example.