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:
Ash Wednesday 
Joel 2.12-18: Let your hearts be broken.
2 Corinthians 5.20-6.2: Be reconciled to God!
Matthew 6.1-18: Your Father sees all that is done in secret.
The ritual after which Ash Wednesday is named has immediate symbolic impact. By receiving the ashes, we own Read More
2 Corinthians 5.20-6.2: Be reconciled to God!
Matthew 6.1-18: Your Father sees all that is done in secret.
The ritual after which Ash Wednesday is named has immediate symbolic impact. By receiving the ashes, we own Read More
Conversation with Paula Gooder I wrote my book Healing Wounds in response to an invitation from my London publishers, Bloomsbury, which each year brings out a Lent Book intended as a help to prepare for Easter. I recently had occasion to discuss my work Read More
Desert Fathers 10 [Abba Antony] also used to say: He who remains in the wilderness practising peace is relieved of three types of battle: that of hearing, that of speaking, and that of seeing. One only remains to him: that of the heart.
When Read More
When Read More
Wintry Hope This morning after Mass at the Carmel in Tromsø, the nuns gave me these three Christmas roses picked from underneath the snow in their enclosure garden. These hardy, stubborn, really quite subversive flowers represent in miniature the astonishing capacity nature Read More
Consecration We normally mark the Day of Consecrated Life at Candlemas, but on that day this year, many of us were in Rome on pilgrimage. So we keep the day today instead, with all our religious gathered in the cathedral. The Read More
A Topical Letter On 27 November George Weigel published an open letter to JD Vance. It is worth re-reading now. Weigel, ‘speaking as one Catholic and one patriot to another’ wrote: ‘If our country is to experience a new birth of freedom rightly Read More
Desert Fathers 9 Below is the text of the eighth episode in the series Desert Fathers in a Year. You can find it in video format here – a dedicated page – and pick it up in audio wherever you listen to podcasts. Read More
Conversation with Roberto de la Iglesia Pérez Recently, my 2022 book Entering the Twofold Mystery came out in Spanish translation. The launch was held in Burgos, where I had the joy of speaking to Dom Roberto de la Iglesia Pérez, abbot of Cardeña.
You can watch our conversation, Read More
You can watch our conversation, Read More
Ash Wednesday
Joel 2.12-18: Let your hearts be broken.
2 Corinthians 5.20-6.2: Be reconciled to God!
Matthew 6.1-18: Your Father sees all that is done in secret.
The ritual after which Ash Wednesday is named has immediate symbolic impact. By receiving the ashes, we own our creaturely fragility. ‘I am but dust and ashes’, Abraham exclaimed, interceding for Sodom, ‘should I presume to address God?’ The ashes stand for repentance, too. The people of Nineveh covered themselves and their cattle with ashes to repair past pretension. And of course the ashes represent our awareness that one day we shall die. Nothing is deader than ashes. Nothing grows in it. It is impressive, a sign of healthy realism, that we all together once a year, in peace, publicly recall that we are dust and shall return to dust. Thereby much else falls into place.
The ashes we use liturgically aren’t just any old ashes. They’re not just raked out of the fireplace. It is a devout tradition that the ashes of Ash Wednesday come from the burning of last year’s palm branches, received on Palm Sunday. Thereby we show that we start afresh. We begin our preparation for Easter as if setting out on this journey for the first time. We do not ape by way of repetition predictable gestures; we participate in a salvific reality that is and remains for ever new, powerfully present.
I’d like to consider more closely a particular aspect of the connection between Palm Sunday and Ash Wednesday. Christ’s entry into Jerusalem appeared a triumph. Great expectation surrounded him. People cheered, even those who hardly knew who he was. Crowds are like that. They let themselves be swept along and don’t think deeply unless they really have to. Daily life is often dull. It is a relief, a welcome distraction, when something extraordinary happens. Who knows? Changes are perchance afoot that will may make my life more comfortable, less monotonous, giving me a sense that I count? In aid of such a cause I will gladly shout hurrah, hosannah, or any other slogan, depending on circumstances. The palm branches express support for today’s promising hero, whatever his name is. People waved them then, no doubt, to hail him of whom it was said that he came ‘in the name of the Lord’, but no less to show that they were on the winning team. When a public figure with a messianic message appears, we like to be on the side of strength. We wish others to see that we are, so acquire the signs of allegiance we need: a palm branch, a flag, a baseball cap, perhaps. Our hosannah must be visible! What’s the point of a retweet or like if no one notices what or whom I acclaim?
But God help us — how brittle such confessions are! Those who on the first day lionised the Son for David turned, on the sixth, into a snarling band with raised clenched fists shouting, ‘Crucify! We have no king but Caesar!’ No one then swung last Sunday’s palms. By burning precisely these branches today, by being signed with their ashes, we ascertain the limits of rhetorical excess. No society, sacred or secular, can endure over time on the basis of slogans. A heated atmosphere my corral people for a while, especially if they have a common enemy, real or imagined, to hate; but in order to unite people durably more is required, especially when support for a cause, or person, calls for sacrifice. Trust is needed, then, and fidelity, pondered conviction and, let’s risk the word, love. No sustaining unity issues from disdain.
Our world right now in many respects appears unhinged. A political and cultural landscape is being reconfigured by bulldozers. It seems that good sense and cultivated ideals belong to a past stage of evolution; that absolute criteria for action or decision no longer exist; that any human or societal contract takes the form of transactions of calculated gain; that what counts is to howl with the wolves; and that rhetoric, even based on untruth, has the last word because all other words are deafeningly silenced. It is thought-provoking, then, to receive the ashes of yesterday’s hosannah while we fix our gaze on the Word made flesh, who did not consider his likeness to God a thing to be grasped but emptied himself. Silently he beheld the crowd’s fickleness with penetrating clarity, yet without anger. His purpose was to pull people out of the deadly swamp of bitterness to inaugurate a new humanity formed in his image, that hell-gate-resistant, blessed, at once so deeply human and patently supernatural fellowship to which we are graced to belong, which with gratitude we call the Church.
Today we embark on spiritual battle in Christ’s name. Resolutely we distance ourselves from illusion and turn towards the Real. We don’t want to build our house of sand, but on rock. We must take God’s commandments seriously: the commandment to call down God’s mercy on all people with weeping, presupposing our capacity for compassion; the commandment to foster justice and truth; to let ourselves be reconciled to God by renouncing self-righteousness, confessing our sins, not or neighbour’s.
There’s much talk at the moment about epochal chance. I think the hypothesis well-founded. Let me, though, stress this: it is not deterministic. Nothing is written in the stars. Whether the epoch on whose threshold we stand will be better or worse, hostile to God or in the service of Christ, depends on us. We are, as Paul says, ‘God’s collaborators’.
We know ourselves, so have reason to reflect: this is a pretty daring move on God’s part. It’s how he works. His faith in us is staggering. Do we show ourselves worthy of it? ‘Turn to me with an undivided heart’, says the Lord — only to add that a heart, to be whole, must first be broken in repentance. ‘Now is the favourable time’. This is the day of salvation, if we let it be. We carry great responsibility. Amen.
2 Corinthians 5.20-6.2: Be reconciled to God!
Matthew 6.1-18: Your Father sees all that is done in secret.
The ritual after which Ash Wednesday is named has immediate symbolic impact. By receiving the ashes, we own our creaturely fragility. ‘I am but dust and ashes’, Abraham exclaimed, interceding for Sodom, ‘should I presume to address God?’ The ashes stand for repentance, too. The people of Nineveh covered themselves and their cattle with ashes to repair past pretension. And of course the ashes represent our awareness that one day we shall die. Nothing is deader than ashes. Nothing grows in it. It is impressive, a sign of healthy realism, that we all together once a year, in peace, publicly recall that we are dust and shall return to dust. Thereby much else falls into place.
The ashes we use liturgically aren’t just any old ashes. They’re not just raked out of the fireplace. It is a devout tradition that the ashes of Ash Wednesday come from the burning of last year’s palm branches, received on Palm Sunday. Thereby we show that we start afresh. We begin our preparation for Easter as if setting out on this journey for the first time. We do not ape by way of repetition predictable gestures; we participate in a salvific reality that is and remains for ever new, powerfully present.
I’d like to consider more closely a particular aspect of the connection between Palm Sunday and Ash Wednesday. Christ’s entry into Jerusalem appeared a triumph. Great expectation surrounded him. People cheered, even those who hardly knew who he was. Crowds are like that. They let themselves be swept along and don’t think deeply unless they really have to. Daily life is often dull. It is a relief, a welcome distraction, when something extraordinary happens. Who knows? Changes are perchance afoot that will may make my life more comfortable, less monotonous, giving me a sense that I count? In aid of such a cause I will gladly shout hurrah, hosannah, or any other slogan, depending on circumstances. The palm branches express support for today’s promising hero, whatever his name is. People waved them then, no doubt, to hail him of whom it was said that he came ‘in the name of the Lord’, but no less to show that they were on the winning team. When a public figure with a messianic message appears, we like to be on the side of strength. We wish others to see that we are, so acquire the signs of allegiance we need: a palm branch, a flag, a baseball cap, perhaps. Our hosannah must be visible! What’s the point of a retweet or like if no one notices what or whom I acclaim?
But God help us — how brittle such confessions are! Those who on the first day lionised the Son for David turned, on the sixth, into a snarling band with raised clenched fists shouting, ‘Crucify! We have no king but Caesar!’ No one then swung last Sunday’s palms. By burning precisely these branches today, by being signed with their ashes, we ascertain the limits of rhetorical excess. No society, sacred or secular, can endure over time on the basis of slogans. A heated atmosphere my corral people for a while, especially if they have a common enemy, real or imagined, to hate; but in order to unite people durably more is required, especially when support for a cause, or person, calls for sacrifice. Trust is needed, then, and fidelity, pondered conviction and, let’s risk the word, love. No sustaining unity issues from disdain.
Our world right now in many respects appears unhinged. A political and cultural landscape is being reconfigured by bulldozers. It seems that good sense and cultivated ideals belong to a past stage of evolution; that absolute criteria for action or decision no longer exist; that any human or societal contract takes the form of transactions of calculated gain; that what counts is to howl with the wolves; and that rhetoric, even based on untruth, has the last word because all other words are deafeningly silenced. It is thought-provoking, then, to receive the ashes of yesterday’s hosannah while we fix our gaze on the Word made flesh, who did not consider his likeness to God a thing to be grasped but emptied himself. Silently he beheld the crowd’s fickleness with penetrating clarity, yet without anger. His purpose was to pull people out of the deadly swamp of bitterness to inaugurate a new humanity formed in his image, that hell-gate-resistant, blessed, at once so deeply human and patently supernatural fellowship to which we are graced to belong, which with gratitude we call the Church.
Today we embark on spiritual battle in Christ’s name. Resolutely we distance ourselves from illusion and turn towards the Real. We don’t want to build our house of sand, but on rock. We must take God’s commandments seriously: the commandment to call down God’s mercy on all people with weeping, presupposing our capacity for compassion; the commandment to foster justice and truth; to let ourselves be reconciled to God by renouncing self-righteousness, confessing our sins, not or neighbour’s.
There’s much talk at the moment about epochal chance. I think the hypothesis well-founded. Let me, though, stress this: it is not deterministic. Nothing is written in the stars. Whether the epoch on whose threshold we stand will be better or worse, hostile to God or in the service of Christ, depends on us. We are, as Paul says, ‘God’s collaborators’.
We know ourselves, so have reason to reflect: this is a pretty daring move on God’s part. It’s how he works. His faith in us is staggering. Do we show ourselves worthy of it? ‘Turn to me with an undivided heart’, says the Lord — only to add that a heart, to be whole, must first be broken in repentance. ‘Now is the favourable time’. This is the day of salvation, if we let it be. We carry great responsibility. Amen.
Conversation with Paula Gooder
I wrote my book Healing Wounds in response to an invitation from my London publishers, Bloomsbury, which each year brings out a Lent Book intended as a help to prepare for Easter. I recently had occasion to discuss my work with Dr Paula Gooder, Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. You can listen to our conversation here.
From Healing Wounds:
Our wounds will finally heal when they have become so one with Christ’s, so fully surrendered, that we no longer know where his passion ends and ours begins. We are caught up, then, in the inexorable victory of his life over our death, of his light over our darkness, of his wholeness over our fragmentation. United with him in death, we are drawn into his life, over which human mortality and sickness have no power. The process takes time. The anguish is real before the prospect of broadness opens. But sooner or later we no longer look into the darkness of the cleft in which the dove hides, but out of it. We see, then, a world infinitely loved, transfigured, worthy to be loved. Peering out from the dove’s nest, we perceive that the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land. The fig tree puts forth its figs, and the vines are in blossom; they give forth fragrance. We hear the Beloved call to us: ‘Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.’ We who sow at times with weeping, at a loss, shall return home with shouts of joy, bearing fragrant golden sheaves.
View from the west-end gallery of the Roman basilica of San Clemente onto the apse mosaic, which plays an important part in the book.
From Healing Wounds:
Our wounds will finally heal when they have become so one with Christ’s, so fully surrendered, that we no longer know where his passion ends and ours begins. We are caught up, then, in the inexorable victory of his life over our death, of his light over our darkness, of his wholeness over our fragmentation. United with him in death, we are drawn into his life, over which human mortality and sickness have no power. The process takes time. The anguish is real before the prospect of broadness opens. But sooner or later we no longer look into the darkness of the cleft in which the dove hides, but out of it. We see, then, a world infinitely loved, transfigured, worthy to be loved. Peering out from the dove’s nest, we perceive that the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land. The fig tree puts forth its figs, and the vines are in blossom; they give forth fragrance. We hear the Beloved call to us: ‘Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.’ We who sow at times with weeping, at a loss, shall return home with shouts of joy, bearing fragrant golden sheaves.
View from the west-end gallery of the Roman basilica of San Clemente onto the apse mosaic, which plays an important part in the book.
Desert Fathers 10
[Abba Antony] also used to say: He who remains in the wilderness practising peace is relieved of three types of battle: that of hearing, that of speaking, and that of seeing. One only remains to him: that of the heart.
When Christ appears to his disciples after rising from the dead, the first thing he says is: ‘Peace’. Emerged from a struggle whose dimensions we are unfit to imagine, his victorious struggle against death’s reign, he comes bearing peace, even as, still in the heyday of his public ministry, he sent his disciples forth two by two to carry abroad his peculiar peace, which the world cannot give. The disciples were to carry no stuff of their own, no second pair of sandals, no purse, not even a staff to ward off mad dogs. The one thing they were to carry was peace, in such abundance that they could make a gift of it wherever they passed, yet be left with undiminished reserves.
Many of us yearn for peace, conscious of being agitated, uncentered, drawn in many different directions at once. I dare say we can recognise ourselves in a poem the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in 1879. It is one of the few poems I know by heart. I memorised it in my twenties. I needed it then. I clung to it.
When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut,
Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I’ll not play hypocrite
To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but
That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?
O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu
Some good! And so he does leave Patience exquisite,
That plumes to Peace thereafter. And when Peace here does house
He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo,
He comes to brood and sit.
The image of the wood-dove is brilliant. Peace can seem quite as elusive, scared by the slightest noise or sudden shadow. We are left thinking, ‘No! Gone again!’, only to cry out, ‘When, Peace?’ Hopkins reminds us, though, that peace so easily perturbed is not yet perfect. Pure peace resists chaos and spreads itself within it, bringing about a loveliness of order where we least expected it. Peace is not reducible to sentiment. It manifests character formed in the hard school of patience, a virtue life gives us ample opportunity to practise. Patience, which broadens us, ‘plumes to peace’ at the opportune time. We shall find the mature dove stable, dependable, brooding like the Spirit on the waters of the first day of creation, sitting on eggs, engendering life.
The second chapter in the systematic collection of the Desert Fathers’ sayings deals with the subject of peace. It bears the overall title, ‘That it is needful to pursue peace with all one’s zeal.’ The Father’s term for ‘peace’ is hesychia. We may associate this word with ‘hesychasm’, a contemplative movement in the Eastern Church; however, it is not specific to the Orient. The Western monastic ideal of ‘pax’, a word inscribed over the gate of countless Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries, a pledge to those who enter whether to visit or to remain, points in the same direction.
The fact that we are urged to ‘pursue’ peace zealously shows that the peace in question is not the tranquility of repose. To be at peace like the Fathers were is not to be lounging in a deckchair in a fragrant garden while angels, fluttering, refill our drinks. Peace is a dynamic reality to be followed determinedly, like the pillar of fire and cloud during Israel’s exodus. Remember Christ’s words, ‘Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you’, words spoken in the Upper Room just before he told the eleven, Judas having slipped into the night, ‘Let us go hence’, to take them to Gethsemane, thence to enter into the wine press.
The peace we seek is not in contrast to the labour of discipleship; it presupposes this labour. Antony says as much in his pithy saying, which deals with peace-pursuit in the setting of eremitical life. One who withdraws from society to practise peace in this way (the text employs the participle hesychazōn — tellingly, the Greek noun for ‘peace’ gives rise to an active verb) is relieved, Antony says, of the battles of hearing, speaking, and seeing. That is the advantage of the desert, or of a monastic enclosure with no WiFi: one is freed from constant extraneous stimulus. There is quiet around. For a moment or two this feels wonderful. Peace at last! Then, though, the rumbling within begins. We realise what masses of noisy junk we carry, what unresolved tensions born of anger, jealousy, desire, anxiety, greed, all those movements of the heart the Fathers referred to as ‘passions’.
It is when the noise round about recedes that the inward work begins. We are faced with a considerable paradox: the ascetic withdraws into a context of outward peace in order to confront the unpeace he carries in his heart. He embarks on the battle to depetrify, purify, and enlarge his heart, to make it a fit abode for God’s love. Peace is not incompatible with this battle, at times very fierce, as long as we stay close to Christ, rejecting all that breaks our communion with him. ‘Christ is our peace’, writes St Paul. As long as we live with him, in him, peace will be our portion even when we do not sensibly perceive it.
Emerald-spotted wood dove (Turtur chalcospilos)
When Christ appears to his disciples after rising from the dead, the first thing he says is: ‘Peace’. Emerged from a struggle whose dimensions we are unfit to imagine, his victorious struggle against death’s reign, he comes bearing peace, even as, still in the heyday of his public ministry, he sent his disciples forth two by two to carry abroad his peculiar peace, which the world cannot give. The disciples were to carry no stuff of their own, no second pair of sandals, no purse, not even a staff to ward off mad dogs. The one thing they were to carry was peace, in such abundance that they could make a gift of it wherever they passed, yet be left with undiminished reserves.
Many of us yearn for peace, conscious of being agitated, uncentered, drawn in many different directions at once. I dare say we can recognise ourselves in a poem the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in 1879. It is one of the few poems I know by heart. I memorised it in my twenties. I needed it then. I clung to it.
When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut,
Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I’ll not play hypocrite
To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but
That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?
O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu
Some good! And so he does leave Patience exquisite,
That plumes to Peace thereafter. And when Peace here does house
He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo,
He comes to brood and sit.
The image of the wood-dove is brilliant. Peace can seem quite as elusive, scared by the slightest noise or sudden shadow. We are left thinking, ‘No! Gone again!’, only to cry out, ‘When, Peace?’ Hopkins reminds us, though, that peace so easily perturbed is not yet perfect. Pure peace resists chaos and spreads itself within it, bringing about a loveliness of order where we least expected it. Peace is not reducible to sentiment. It manifests character formed in the hard school of patience, a virtue life gives us ample opportunity to practise. Patience, which broadens us, ‘plumes to peace’ at the opportune time. We shall find the mature dove stable, dependable, brooding like the Spirit on the waters of the first day of creation, sitting on eggs, engendering life.
The second chapter in the systematic collection of the Desert Fathers’ sayings deals with the subject of peace. It bears the overall title, ‘That it is needful to pursue peace with all one’s zeal.’ The Father’s term for ‘peace’ is hesychia. We may associate this word with ‘hesychasm’, a contemplative movement in the Eastern Church; however, it is not specific to the Orient. The Western monastic ideal of ‘pax’, a word inscribed over the gate of countless Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries, a pledge to those who enter whether to visit or to remain, points in the same direction.
The fact that we are urged to ‘pursue’ peace zealously shows that the peace in question is not the tranquility of repose. To be at peace like the Fathers were is not to be lounging in a deckchair in a fragrant garden while angels, fluttering, refill our drinks. Peace is a dynamic reality to be followed determinedly, like the pillar of fire and cloud during Israel’s exodus. Remember Christ’s words, ‘Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you’, words spoken in the Upper Room just before he told the eleven, Judas having slipped into the night, ‘Let us go hence’, to take them to Gethsemane, thence to enter into the wine press.
The peace we seek is not in contrast to the labour of discipleship; it presupposes this labour. Antony says as much in his pithy saying, which deals with peace-pursuit in the setting of eremitical life. One who withdraws from society to practise peace in this way (the text employs the participle hesychazōn — tellingly, the Greek noun for ‘peace’ gives rise to an active verb) is relieved, Antony says, of the battles of hearing, speaking, and seeing. That is the advantage of the desert, or of a monastic enclosure with no WiFi: one is freed from constant extraneous stimulus. There is quiet around. For a moment or two this feels wonderful. Peace at last! Then, though, the rumbling within begins. We realise what masses of noisy junk we carry, what unresolved tensions born of anger, jealousy, desire, anxiety, greed, all those movements of the heart the Fathers referred to as ‘passions’.
It is when the noise round about recedes that the inward work begins. We are faced with a considerable paradox: the ascetic withdraws into a context of outward peace in order to confront the unpeace he carries in his heart. He embarks on the battle to depetrify, purify, and enlarge his heart, to make it a fit abode for God’s love. Peace is not incompatible with this battle, at times very fierce, as long as we stay close to Christ, rejecting all that breaks our communion with him. ‘Christ is our peace’, writes St Paul. As long as we live with him, in him, peace will be our portion even when we do not sensibly perceive it.
Emerald-spotted wood dove (Turtur chalcospilos)
Wintry Hope
This morning after Mass at the Carmel in Tromsø, the nuns gave me these three Christmas roses picked from underneath the snow in their enclosure garden. These hardy, stubborn, really quite subversive flowers represent in miniature the astonishing capacity nature has to rejuvenate itself, carrying even in hibernation and apparent death the seed of new life that no climatic harshness, no human folly can obliterate. At a time when the world as such seems wintry, this parable nurtures hope and new serenity. In the splendid imagination of Selma Lagerlöf, the Christmas rose is a sign that heavenly graciousness and earthly joy can bud where the naked eye sees only soil drenched in iniquity. May it be so.
Consecration
We normally mark the Day of Consecrated Life at Candlemas, but on that day this year, many of us were in Rome on pilgrimage. So we keep the day today instead, with all our religious gathered in the cathedral. The readings are of the day: the Saturday of Week 7.
Sirach 17.1-14: He gave them a heart to think with.
Mark 10.13-16: Anyone who does not welcome the kingdom of God like a little child.
Dom Gabriel Sortais, abbot general of our order 1951-61, used to say that monks and nuns are exposed to two destructive tendencies. The first is overwork, which causes the purpose of consecrated life to drown in activism, self-realisation, and stress. The second is infantilism. What did he mean by that? Primarily the relinquishing of responsibility that can occur in any form of institutional living. I think of a friend who for some years was superior of his religious community. He once told me: ‘You wouldn’t know how many toasters the brethren are able to ruin in a year!’ Anyone who has lived in community can imagine the scenario: we’re about to have breakfast; we put a slice of bread in the toaster; it gets stuck; we impatiently shake the toaster, and perhaps insert a good, sharp knife; only to discover that the thing has stopped working. We think, ‘Bother!’, put the toaster down, and slap on a post-it sticker with the inscription, ‘Broken’, expecting that somebody else, a grown-up, will ensure that next morning I find a usable toaster in its proper place. For surely no one can expect me to go about my business without toast! Is the toaster not there, I get upset.
The example is banal, a little silly; but it does touch a nerve. We easily assume we deserve to be taken care of. We think that others must get their act together; that I (so busy!) must be provided with what I need, if not on a silver platter, then at least on a platter of tin. This kind of expectation lay at the root of the Israelites’ fundamental sin on their way out of Egypt — the boring, monotonous, childish murmuring St Benedict warns against insistently in his Rule, reminding us that murmuring may poison not merely an individual’s life, but the life of a whole community.
To become an adult is about, first of all, assuming responsibility for oneself; then to take responsibility for the good of others. In the normal course of a life, this happens when we become mothers and fathers. To know oneself able and obliged to pour oneself out that others may live and thrive: this is what makes people, men or women, reach their full measure. We who are consecrated, like other folk not biologically parents, must go through this maturing in our own way. But all of us, without exception, are called to become mothers and fathers, be it spiritually and figuratively.
In a former age, a professed nun was called ‘Mother’, a monk, ‘Father’. Perhaps that wasn’t so daft. That way one was reminded of an expectation, and spurred on to expect something of oneself. It isn’t much of an alternative to remain a child or an adolescent in increasingly worn packaging, embodiments of growth that never happened.
How, then, can we follow the Lord’s exhortation to be like children without becoming infantile?
Note: the Gospel does not ask us to revert to childhood. To be a disciple of Jesus is to heed the commandment, ‘Follow me!’, conscious where it leads: ‘Up to Jerusalem’. That’s no child’s play. Adult resolve and courage are called for. What Jesus says is that we should receive the kingdom of God like children. Receptivity is at stake, so that the kingdom of God can bear fruit in us and, through us, for others.
Thomas Aquinas liked to stress the principle, Quidquid recipitur ad modum recipientis recipitur. Which is to say: Anything at all that is received, is received according to the general state of the recipient. This may sound abstract, so let’s consider a couple of examples. If I am told I have won the lottery while I’ve terrible stomach ache, my joy in such luck will be distracted; if I am fined for speeding on the evening Norway finally wins the Eurovision Song Contest, the penalty is less bitter. If I am an angry, complex-ridden or very ambitious person, the Gospel of God’s kingdom will leave me largely indifferent: I’ll be too shut up in myself. We must, then, practice the ability to receive it like children, in other words, with wonder, open expectation, and clear-sighted trust, qualities we do not acquire once for all. They must constantly be developed anew, at each stage of life, until they are tested definitively in the hour of our death, when we are invited to surrender ourselves freely into the Father’s hands.
These last few days I have been reading a book about Bernadette Soubirous, the visionary of Lourdes. The book is about her adult life as a Sister of Charity. It has reminded me of what it takes to realise a consecrated existence. Let me share with you three aspects. First, Bernadette, a gifted person who had glimpsed God’s kingdom with her eyes of flesh, was supremely free with regard to her own giftedness. When others praised or flattered her, she simply said, ‘Oh, it might just as well have been someone else’. And that was that. As a result it was liberating to be in her presence. Secondly, she peacefully embraced her own limitations. She had poor health, walked with a stick already as a young woman. This bothered her not at all. She saw it as part of her calling. ‘What do you do with a broom’, she once asked a sister, ‘when you have finished sweeping the floor?’ The sister answered, ‘I put it behind the door.’ Bernadette exclaimed, ‘Exactly! The blessed Virgin used me as a broom. When she no longer had use for me, she put me in my place, behind the door. Here I am. And here I shall remain.’ A hidden life can represent an essential task. Thirdly, Bernadette was able to see life in a transcendent perspective. Practically minded, she was illumined by the Light she had seen in the grotto at Massabielle. Quite naturally she lived supernaturally, a contemplative life marked by charity, reverence, the fear of God, and mellow self-irony. In peace she passed from time into eternity, 35 years old. She shows us what it is to live in a way at once mature and child-like, a dignified, fruitful life. May ours be such. Amen.
Sirach 17.1-14: He gave them a heart to think with.
Mark 10.13-16: Anyone who does not welcome the kingdom of God like a little child.
Dom Gabriel Sortais, abbot general of our order 1951-61, used to say that monks and nuns are exposed to two destructive tendencies. The first is overwork, which causes the purpose of consecrated life to drown in activism, self-realisation, and stress. The second is infantilism. What did he mean by that? Primarily the relinquishing of responsibility that can occur in any form of institutional living. I think of a friend who for some years was superior of his religious community. He once told me: ‘You wouldn’t know how many toasters the brethren are able to ruin in a year!’ Anyone who has lived in community can imagine the scenario: we’re about to have breakfast; we put a slice of bread in the toaster; it gets stuck; we impatiently shake the toaster, and perhaps insert a good, sharp knife; only to discover that the thing has stopped working. We think, ‘Bother!’, put the toaster down, and slap on a post-it sticker with the inscription, ‘Broken’, expecting that somebody else, a grown-up, will ensure that next morning I find a usable toaster in its proper place. For surely no one can expect me to go about my business without toast! Is the toaster not there, I get upset.
The example is banal, a little silly; but it does touch a nerve. We easily assume we deserve to be taken care of. We think that others must get their act together; that I (so busy!) must be provided with what I need, if not on a silver platter, then at least on a platter of tin. This kind of expectation lay at the root of the Israelites’ fundamental sin on their way out of Egypt — the boring, monotonous, childish murmuring St Benedict warns against insistently in his Rule, reminding us that murmuring may poison not merely an individual’s life, but the life of a whole community.
To become an adult is about, first of all, assuming responsibility for oneself; then to take responsibility for the good of others. In the normal course of a life, this happens when we become mothers and fathers. To know oneself able and obliged to pour oneself out that others may live and thrive: this is what makes people, men or women, reach their full measure. We who are consecrated, like other folk not biologically parents, must go through this maturing in our own way. But all of us, without exception, are called to become mothers and fathers, be it spiritually and figuratively.
In a former age, a professed nun was called ‘Mother’, a monk, ‘Father’. Perhaps that wasn’t so daft. That way one was reminded of an expectation, and spurred on to expect something of oneself. It isn’t much of an alternative to remain a child or an adolescent in increasingly worn packaging, embodiments of growth that never happened.
How, then, can we follow the Lord’s exhortation to be like children without becoming infantile?
Note: the Gospel does not ask us to revert to childhood. To be a disciple of Jesus is to heed the commandment, ‘Follow me!’, conscious where it leads: ‘Up to Jerusalem’. That’s no child’s play. Adult resolve and courage are called for. What Jesus says is that we should receive the kingdom of God like children. Receptivity is at stake, so that the kingdom of God can bear fruit in us and, through us, for others.
Thomas Aquinas liked to stress the principle, Quidquid recipitur ad modum recipientis recipitur. Which is to say: Anything at all that is received, is received according to the general state of the recipient. This may sound abstract, so let’s consider a couple of examples. If I am told I have won the lottery while I’ve terrible stomach ache, my joy in such luck will be distracted; if I am fined for speeding on the evening Norway finally wins the Eurovision Song Contest, the penalty is less bitter. If I am an angry, complex-ridden or very ambitious person, the Gospel of God’s kingdom will leave me largely indifferent: I’ll be too shut up in myself. We must, then, practice the ability to receive it like children, in other words, with wonder, open expectation, and clear-sighted trust, qualities we do not acquire once for all. They must constantly be developed anew, at each stage of life, until they are tested definitively in the hour of our death, when we are invited to surrender ourselves freely into the Father’s hands.
These last few days I have been reading a book about Bernadette Soubirous, the visionary of Lourdes. The book is about her adult life as a Sister of Charity. It has reminded me of what it takes to realise a consecrated existence. Let me share with you three aspects. First, Bernadette, a gifted person who had glimpsed God’s kingdom with her eyes of flesh, was supremely free with regard to her own giftedness. When others praised or flattered her, she simply said, ‘Oh, it might just as well have been someone else’. And that was that. As a result it was liberating to be in her presence. Secondly, she peacefully embraced her own limitations. She had poor health, walked with a stick already as a young woman. This bothered her not at all. She saw it as part of her calling. ‘What do you do with a broom’, she once asked a sister, ‘when you have finished sweeping the floor?’ The sister answered, ‘I put it behind the door.’ Bernadette exclaimed, ‘Exactly! The blessed Virgin used me as a broom. When she no longer had use for me, she put me in my place, behind the door. Here I am. And here I shall remain.’ A hidden life can represent an essential task. Thirdly, Bernadette was able to see life in a transcendent perspective. Practically minded, she was illumined by the Light she had seen in the grotto at Massabielle. Quite naturally she lived supernaturally, a contemplative life marked by charity, reverence, the fear of God, and mellow self-irony. In peace she passed from time into eternity, 35 years old. She shows us what it is to live in a way at once mature and child-like, a dignified, fruitful life. May ours be such. Amen.
A Topical Letter
On 27 November George Weigel published an open letter to JD Vance. It is worth re-reading now. Weigel, ‘speaking as one Catholic and one patriot to another’ wrote: ‘If our country is to experience a new birth of freedom rightly understood, it will be in part because our leaders remind us of what Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature,” rather than salting the wounds of our animosities.’ He then said: ‘It is unworthy of a serious American public official to say that he or she really doesn’t care what happens to Ukraine. Why? Because crass indifference to injustice and suffering is ignoble. And because what happens in Ukraine is directly related to our national security and to world peace.’
You can find the complete text here.
You can find the complete text here.
Desert Fathers 9
Below is the text of the eighth episode in the series Desert Fathers in a Year. You can find it in video format here – a dedicated page – and pick it up in audio wherever you listen to podcasts. On YouTube, the full range of episodes can be found here.
It was revealed to Abba Antony in his desert that there was one who was his equal in the city. He was a doctor by profession and whatever he had beyond his needs he gave to the poor, and every day he sang the Sanctus with the angels.
For most of us, the single most important impediment to progress in the spiritual and moral life is this: we cling to the conviction that any such progress is sabotaged by our circumstances. We tell ourselves: ‘I cannot pray on account of such and such inescapable commitments; I cannot find silence within because of such and such distractions beyond my control; I cannot give alms because of my limited means, not to mention all my existing obligations to such and such people and causes.’ Each of us has his or her customised version of this universal rite of self-absolution.
We may experience pain on account of the circumstances to which we appeal. We may also be secretly comforted by them. As long as I can point to apparently objective factors that make it, so it seems, impossible for me to change my life or to pull up my socks my conscience stays easy. What is more, I can bask in the satisfying thought that if only things were different, I would of course make heroic choices, live a life of austerity and self-denial, perhaps even become a great saint.
From the beginning of institutional monastic life in the fourth century, we see a tendency in texts, songs, and poems, even in pictures, to idealise monks. Many of the sources come down to us present monks as people utterly apart, as if they were a categorisable subset of humanity, desert-dwelling Martians. By all means, many of the early monks were extraordinary. The patrimony documents credible examples of shining virtue, marvellous perseverance, fervent charity, and mystical graces. In addition, some of these men made life choices so plainly weird that they were beyond the reach of ordinary men — even though, it must be said, it was hardly any easier then than now to define what is ‘ordinary’. Think of the dendrites, who lived in trees, or the stylites, who spent their lives on pillars; think of the great fasters who lived for years on a few dry crusts; or of the staunch watchers who almost never slept. It is tempting to regard the monastic state as the prerogative of the fakir and so to think that the teachings and precepts emerging from the desert tradition have no relevance for anyone else. This is a considerable mistake.
It is a mistake for two reasons. Were monks to entertain it, they would yield to pride, a Luciferian delusion that obscures the purpose of conversion. Christians living in the world, meanwhile, would miss, by excessively idealising monks, the point that the monk is their brother and exemplar whose basic options are those of any disciple, simply magnified and amplified, to make the stakes clearer.
For these reasons we find that the early sources often stress that monks have no monopoly on perfection. They are no better than anyone else, simply more privileged. Often enough they may have much to learn from Christians living in the midst of the bustle of the city yet managing to keep their minds fixed on God, their hearts aflame with charity. This brief story told about Antony is a case in point. We are told that something ‘was revealed’ to Antony ‘in his desert’. Providence enabled him to see this something whether in a dream, in an illumination of the mind or in an intuition of the heart. God’s gentle grace nudges him and says: ‘Do not be seduced by your own spiritual progress or ascetic prowess. You still have a long way to go.’
What Antony saw was a man ‘who was his equal in the city’. This is striking. Antony spent the first part of his life moving further and further away from the haunts of men, seeking solitude. This was his call. Here he is reminded that his is but one of many paths. The man revealed to him, a doctor, embodied the very type of a professional who, in Antiquity as now, is constantly badgered by people who come to him with urgent ailments, some real, some imaginary. A doctor’s attention is constantly pulled in all directions at once. Yet this doctor kept great clarity of Christian purpose. How?
The story singles out two factors. First, ‘whatever he had beyond his needs he gave to the poor’. He was a man who refused to be seduced by his own sense of need, not yielding, as we easily do, to the thought: ‘I need this and that; and of everything I need more’. Instead he kept resolutely fixed on the necessities of others, giving alms in the name of Christ, who emptied himself that we might be filled. Secondly, the doctor daily ‘sang the Sanctus with the angels’. He was conscious of living in the presence of God, whose glory secretly suffuses the world, even hurting bodies of patients assembled in a doctor’s surgery. The man Antony saw made this consciousness explicit in a song of adoration, mindful of his call to become, like the angels, praise. By living on these terms, each of us can by God’s grace reach the heights of a desert saint.
Let us beware of coveting our neighbour’s call. Let us instead wholeheartedly consider, embrace, and be faithful to our own.
Fresco from a house in Pompeii showing Aeneas having a spear head removed from his thigh by the doctor Iapyx
It was revealed to Abba Antony in his desert that there was one who was his equal in the city. He was a doctor by profession and whatever he had beyond his needs he gave to the poor, and every day he sang the Sanctus with the angels.
For most of us, the single most important impediment to progress in the spiritual and moral life is this: we cling to the conviction that any such progress is sabotaged by our circumstances. We tell ourselves: ‘I cannot pray on account of such and such inescapable commitments; I cannot find silence within because of such and such distractions beyond my control; I cannot give alms because of my limited means, not to mention all my existing obligations to such and such people and causes.’ Each of us has his or her customised version of this universal rite of self-absolution.
We may experience pain on account of the circumstances to which we appeal. We may also be secretly comforted by them. As long as I can point to apparently objective factors that make it, so it seems, impossible for me to change my life or to pull up my socks my conscience stays easy. What is more, I can bask in the satisfying thought that if only things were different, I would of course make heroic choices, live a life of austerity and self-denial, perhaps even become a great saint.
From the beginning of institutional monastic life in the fourth century, we see a tendency in texts, songs, and poems, even in pictures, to idealise monks. Many of the sources come down to us present monks as people utterly apart, as if they were a categorisable subset of humanity, desert-dwelling Martians. By all means, many of the early monks were extraordinary. The patrimony documents credible examples of shining virtue, marvellous perseverance, fervent charity, and mystical graces. In addition, some of these men made life choices so plainly weird that they were beyond the reach of ordinary men — even though, it must be said, it was hardly any easier then than now to define what is ‘ordinary’. Think of the dendrites, who lived in trees, or the stylites, who spent their lives on pillars; think of the great fasters who lived for years on a few dry crusts; or of the staunch watchers who almost never slept. It is tempting to regard the monastic state as the prerogative of the fakir and so to think that the teachings and precepts emerging from the desert tradition have no relevance for anyone else. This is a considerable mistake.
It is a mistake for two reasons. Were monks to entertain it, they would yield to pride, a Luciferian delusion that obscures the purpose of conversion. Christians living in the world, meanwhile, would miss, by excessively idealising monks, the point that the monk is their brother and exemplar whose basic options are those of any disciple, simply magnified and amplified, to make the stakes clearer.
For these reasons we find that the early sources often stress that monks have no monopoly on perfection. They are no better than anyone else, simply more privileged. Often enough they may have much to learn from Christians living in the midst of the bustle of the city yet managing to keep their minds fixed on God, their hearts aflame with charity. This brief story told about Antony is a case in point. We are told that something ‘was revealed’ to Antony ‘in his desert’. Providence enabled him to see this something whether in a dream, in an illumination of the mind or in an intuition of the heart. God’s gentle grace nudges him and says: ‘Do not be seduced by your own spiritual progress or ascetic prowess. You still have a long way to go.’
What Antony saw was a man ‘who was his equal in the city’. This is striking. Antony spent the first part of his life moving further and further away from the haunts of men, seeking solitude. This was his call. Here he is reminded that his is but one of many paths. The man revealed to him, a doctor, embodied the very type of a professional who, in Antiquity as now, is constantly badgered by people who come to him with urgent ailments, some real, some imaginary. A doctor’s attention is constantly pulled in all directions at once. Yet this doctor kept great clarity of Christian purpose. How?
The story singles out two factors. First, ‘whatever he had beyond his needs he gave to the poor’. He was a man who refused to be seduced by his own sense of need, not yielding, as we easily do, to the thought: ‘I need this and that; and of everything I need more’. Instead he kept resolutely fixed on the necessities of others, giving alms in the name of Christ, who emptied himself that we might be filled. Secondly, the doctor daily ‘sang the Sanctus with the angels’. He was conscious of living in the presence of God, whose glory secretly suffuses the world, even hurting bodies of patients assembled in a doctor’s surgery. The man Antony saw made this consciousness explicit in a song of adoration, mindful of his call to become, like the angels, praise. By living on these terms, each of us can by God’s grace reach the heights of a desert saint.
Let us beware of coveting our neighbour’s call. Let us instead wholeheartedly consider, embrace, and be faithful to our own.
Fresco from a house in Pompeii showing Aeneas having a spear head removed from his thigh by the doctor Iapyx
Conversation with Roberto de la Iglesia Pérez
Recently, my 2022 book Entering the Twofold Mystery came out in Spanish translation. The launch was held in Burgos, where I had the joy of speaking to Dom Roberto de la Iglesia Pérez, abbot of Cardeña.
You can watch our conversation, in Spanish and English, here.
From Entering the Twofold Mystery:
I felt commissioned there and then to answer for the misery and greatness I had seen. It was clear to me that, somehow, I must respond by devoting my life, poor as it was, to intercession for the world in union with the sacrifice of Christ, by which the weight of our condition is raised up, redeemed, and tinged with glory. I knew my task was, in this way, to breathe hope into our too often hopeless world. Nothing seemed more urgent to me then. To this day, nothing seems more urgent.
Within the mystery of the Church, we dare to believe that a Christian life truly given may, by God’ s providence, be an effective balm on the wounds of the poor of our world, who are given us to carry and nurture. Such oblative living does not substitute for practical assistance; but without this personal, engaged, even mystical dimension, no amount of sandwiches and soup will ever have a truly transformative effect. This insight poses a challenge for all of us.
You can watch our conversation, in Spanish and English, here.
From Entering the Twofold Mystery:
I felt commissioned there and then to answer for the misery and greatness I had seen. It was clear to me that, somehow, I must respond by devoting my life, poor as it was, to intercession for the world in union with the sacrifice of Christ, by which the weight of our condition is raised up, redeemed, and tinged with glory. I knew my task was, in this way, to breathe hope into our too often hopeless world. Nothing seemed more urgent to me then. To this day, nothing seems more urgent.
Within the mystery of the Church, we dare to believe that a Christian life truly given may, by God’ s providence, be an effective balm on the wounds of the poor of our world, who are given us to carry and nurture. Such oblative living does not substitute for practical assistance; but without this personal, engaged, even mystical dimension, no amount of sandwiches and soup will ever have a truly transformative effect. This insight poses a challenge for all of us.