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:
Isaian Advent 
A meditation given at an Advent service.
The prophet Isaiah is the mainstay of our Advent liturgy, which lets us hear a range of hopeful texts from his treasury.
Many motifs of Advent and Christmas iconography come from Isaiah, like the chief Read More
The prophet Isaiah is the mainstay of our Advent liturgy, which lets us hear a range of hopeful texts from his treasury.
Many motifs of Advent and Christmas iconography come from Isaiah, like the chief Read More
2. Sunday of Advent Baruch 5:1-9: Wrap the cloak of integrity around you.
Philippians 1:4-6, 8-11: Never stop improving your knowledge and deepening your perception of what is best.
Luke 3:1-6: In the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar’s reign.
The word of God has been present in Read More
Philippians 1:4-6, 8-11: Never stop improving your knowledge and deepening your perception of what is best.
Luke 3:1-6: In the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar’s reign.
The word of God has been present in Read More
Tenderness I was sitting on the airport shuttle early this morning when I read the second reading of vigils, astounded by the immediacy of words written nearly a thousand years ago by that great man and monk, Anselm of Canterbury. How Read More
Healing Wounds ‘There is a tendency in Christian devotion to prettify, even to idealise, wounds. This tendency is perverse. Human nature, created in the image of God to be like God, is made for wholeness. Here and now we inhabit a world Read More
Iron Age Words I recently learned that Fr Paul Mankowski would advise people to pray the Divine Office by giving them this recommendation: ‘It’s good to have Iron Age words in your mouth every day.’ His phrase has been ringing in my ears, Read More
Iubilaeum MMXXV The text below is a Pastoral Letter from the Nordic Bishops’ Conference on the Jubilee Year. It will be read att all Masses throughout the Nordic countries on the First Sunday of Advent.
Our Holy Father Pope Francis has proclaimed the Read More
Our Holy Father Pope Francis has proclaimed the Read More
Oneself in a Word I am charmed and inspired by the answer Einar Økland gives an interviewer in last week’s Dag og Tid:
– If you were to sum yourself up in a word, which would it be?
– Colon [:].
–???
–A colon has something on either side Read More
– If you were to sum yourself up in a word, which would it be?
– Colon [:].
–???
–A colon has something on either side Read More
Isaian Advent
A meditation given at an Advent service.
The prophet Isaiah is the mainstay of our Advent liturgy, which lets us hear a range of hopeful texts from his treasury.
Many motifs of Advent and Christmas iconography come from Isaiah, like the chief motifs of the O Antiphons. Isaiah gives us the ox and the ass. From him we have the promise: ‘A Virgin shall conceive.’ Isaiah calls, ‘Comfort ye!’ He heralds those who ‘bring a gospel of peace’, by which swords will be beaten into ploughshares. ‘Emmanuel’, the beloved name, is revealed by Isaiah, who paints a picture of lion and lamb lying down together, every impulse of strife removed from earth.
Not for nothing did Paul Claudel speak of ‘the Gospel of Isaiah’. How near Christ seems in his prophecy!
The light that shines in Isaiah, though, shines in darkness. His luminous visions are offset by a backdrop of chaos, violence, fear. We hear this context set out, too, each Advent. We hear, but do we listen? Isaiah is an unsettling book. It presents mankind corrupted by vice, idolatry, and selfishness, wanting political integrity. Jerusalem, the city on the hilltop, appears as a pit. There is no credible authority. People spend their best efforts on vanities and pleasure. When disaster strikes, there is nothing to unite them: ‘People will oppress one another, every man his fellow, every man his neighbour; the youth will be insolent to the elder, and the base fellow to the honourable.’ How could such misery befall? ‘For want of knowledge’, Isaiah tells us. Absence of reflection caused a breakdown of understanding. For too long, no one had bothered to discern what was really going on. Categories of truth and falsehood had eroded, with everyone ready ‘to call evil good and good evil’, putting ‘bitter for sweet’.
‘Woe’, cries Isaiah: ‘Woe!’
Social order in Jerusalem collapsed because it lacked consistency, true. But there is more to the story. Jerusalem fell because the Lord caused it to fall — the Lord, who ‘dwells in Jerusalem’! This is the scandal of Isaiah. He proclaims that God is behind the destruction of the city known as his. He takes away from Jerusalem ‘stay and staff’. He smites its daughters with scab. To the clergy who try to appease him with liturgies, he says: ‘I have had enough.’ The Lord stands to judge, pulling down what once he had built up. He fells Zion’s mighty oak. Why?
So that a stump might remain. The Lord is not concerned with imposing growth. What matters to him is to preserve the ‘holy seed’, the principle of Israel’s vocation. The people had forgotten that seed and where it came from, seduced by what they thought was a life, and a strength, of their own. Self-confidence had blinded them. It had, one way or another, to be punctured. It couldn’t but be painful. When the prophet asks, ‘How long?’, God replies: ‘Until the land is desolate.’ Clutching their ‘headbands, anklets, perfume boxes, amulets, and handbags’, the people are fearful. So frightened are they that their hearts shake ‘as the trees of the forest shake before the wind’. That’s quite some shaking. These are the hearts to which the sign of Emmanuel is given. The fact is worth remembering.
For this build-up to the Christmas Gospel seems strangely familiar now. Our world is anxious. War rages in Europe. Governments collapse one after the other. In the Middle East anything could happen. Extreme weathers remind us that we are at the mercy of processes beyond our control. What John Paul II called ‘the culture of death’ encroaches, getting itself enshrined in legislation. And of course, Europe hasn’t reproduced itself for years. It seems to have lost its will to live, all the while listening out for the footfall of the foe. Who is he? And where? We do not know: that’s what disturbs.
The trauma searing Europe today feels more like sickness than war. And is it not true that our continent is sick? Is the drama now unfolding not the visible symptom on the body politic of a virus that has long raged invisibly within?
You may ask what this has to do with Isaiah’s theology? A lot, I’d say. We see, like he saw, the birth pangs of a world reconfiguring itself. They are fearful. Birth pangs are. But who is to say that the Lord is not in this somehow, he ‘who creates weal and makes woe’. Is the collapse of an old order his way, now, of making something new? Our God, after all, is Lord of history. He, who has given us his Word, bids us, too, read the signs of the times. We mustn’t be like the Jerusalemites of old, ‘without understanding’.
Let’s listen, pray, and respond to God’s call with our lives.
When we cry out, ‘Come, Emmanuel’, it is no casual mantra. The promise of God-with-us is no fairytale. Jesus Christ, eternal Son of the Father, is with us now. He lives, stronger than all evil. He reigns as Prince of Peace. Faced with perplexity and pain, we can stand upright in him.
Advent asks us to believe profoundly in Christ’s promise, to show ourselves worthy of it, to love Christ with all our hearts. Then our hope will be more than sentiment; it will have substance. The morning star will arise, then, in our hearts. Night will flee.
Isaiah said, centuries ago:
Do not call conspiracy all that this people call conspiracy, do not fear what they fear, nor be in dread. But the Lord of hosts, him you shall regard as holy; let him be your fear, let him be your dread. And he will become a sanctuary.
Come, Lord Jesus!
Grant us wisdom to see and understand!
Keep us faithful, trustful, peaceful!
Hallowed be your name!
Amen.
Marc Chagall, Le Prophète Isaie (1968): Musée national Marc Chagall.
The prophet Isaiah is the mainstay of our Advent liturgy, which lets us hear a range of hopeful texts from his treasury.
Many motifs of Advent and Christmas iconography come from Isaiah, like the chief motifs of the O Antiphons. Isaiah gives us the ox and the ass. From him we have the promise: ‘A Virgin shall conceive.’ Isaiah calls, ‘Comfort ye!’ He heralds those who ‘bring a gospel of peace’, by which swords will be beaten into ploughshares. ‘Emmanuel’, the beloved name, is revealed by Isaiah, who paints a picture of lion and lamb lying down together, every impulse of strife removed from earth.
Not for nothing did Paul Claudel speak of ‘the Gospel of Isaiah’. How near Christ seems in his prophecy!
The light that shines in Isaiah, though, shines in darkness. His luminous visions are offset by a backdrop of chaos, violence, fear. We hear this context set out, too, each Advent. We hear, but do we listen? Isaiah is an unsettling book. It presents mankind corrupted by vice, idolatry, and selfishness, wanting political integrity. Jerusalem, the city on the hilltop, appears as a pit. There is no credible authority. People spend their best efforts on vanities and pleasure. When disaster strikes, there is nothing to unite them: ‘People will oppress one another, every man his fellow, every man his neighbour; the youth will be insolent to the elder, and the base fellow to the honourable.’ How could such misery befall? ‘For want of knowledge’, Isaiah tells us. Absence of reflection caused a breakdown of understanding. For too long, no one had bothered to discern what was really going on. Categories of truth and falsehood had eroded, with everyone ready ‘to call evil good and good evil’, putting ‘bitter for sweet’.
‘Woe’, cries Isaiah: ‘Woe!’
Social order in Jerusalem collapsed because it lacked consistency, true. But there is more to the story. Jerusalem fell because the Lord caused it to fall — the Lord, who ‘dwells in Jerusalem’! This is the scandal of Isaiah. He proclaims that God is behind the destruction of the city known as his. He takes away from Jerusalem ‘stay and staff’. He smites its daughters with scab. To the clergy who try to appease him with liturgies, he says: ‘I have had enough.’ The Lord stands to judge, pulling down what once he had built up. He fells Zion’s mighty oak. Why?
So that a stump might remain. The Lord is not concerned with imposing growth. What matters to him is to preserve the ‘holy seed’, the principle of Israel’s vocation. The people had forgotten that seed and where it came from, seduced by what they thought was a life, and a strength, of their own. Self-confidence had blinded them. It had, one way or another, to be punctured. It couldn’t but be painful. When the prophet asks, ‘How long?’, God replies: ‘Until the land is desolate.’ Clutching their ‘headbands, anklets, perfume boxes, amulets, and handbags’, the people are fearful. So frightened are they that their hearts shake ‘as the trees of the forest shake before the wind’. That’s quite some shaking. These are the hearts to which the sign of Emmanuel is given. The fact is worth remembering.
For this build-up to the Christmas Gospel seems strangely familiar now. Our world is anxious. War rages in Europe. Governments collapse one after the other. In the Middle East anything could happen. Extreme weathers remind us that we are at the mercy of processes beyond our control. What John Paul II called ‘the culture of death’ encroaches, getting itself enshrined in legislation. And of course, Europe hasn’t reproduced itself for years. It seems to have lost its will to live, all the while listening out for the footfall of the foe. Who is he? And where? We do not know: that’s what disturbs.
The trauma searing Europe today feels more like sickness than war. And is it not true that our continent is sick? Is the drama now unfolding not the visible symptom on the body politic of a virus that has long raged invisibly within?
You may ask what this has to do with Isaiah’s theology? A lot, I’d say. We see, like he saw, the birth pangs of a world reconfiguring itself. They are fearful. Birth pangs are. But who is to say that the Lord is not in this somehow, he ‘who creates weal and makes woe’. Is the collapse of an old order his way, now, of making something new? Our God, after all, is Lord of history. He, who has given us his Word, bids us, too, read the signs of the times. We mustn’t be like the Jerusalemites of old, ‘without understanding’.
Let’s listen, pray, and respond to God’s call with our lives.
When we cry out, ‘Come, Emmanuel’, it is no casual mantra. The promise of God-with-us is no fairytale. Jesus Christ, eternal Son of the Father, is with us now. He lives, stronger than all evil. He reigns as Prince of Peace. Faced with perplexity and pain, we can stand upright in him.
Advent asks us to believe profoundly in Christ’s promise, to show ourselves worthy of it, to love Christ with all our hearts. Then our hope will be more than sentiment; it will have substance. The morning star will arise, then, in our hearts. Night will flee.
Isaiah said, centuries ago:
Do not call conspiracy all that this people call conspiracy, do not fear what they fear, nor be in dread. But the Lord of hosts, him you shall regard as holy; let him be your fear, let him be your dread. And he will become a sanctuary.
Come, Lord Jesus!
Grant us wisdom to see and understand!
Keep us faithful, trustful, peaceful!
Hallowed be your name!
Amen.
Marc Chagall, Le Prophète Isaie (1968): Musée national Marc Chagall.
2. Sunday of Advent
Baruch 5:1-9: Wrap the cloak of integrity around you.
Philippians 1:4-6, 8-11: Never stop improving your knowledge and deepening your perception of what is best.
Luke 3:1-6: In the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar’s reign.
The word of God has been present in creation from the beginning. By God’s word all things came into being. By God’s word all things are sustained. In earlier times, this principle sounded somewhat abstract. You had to have something of a philosophical bent of mind to grasp what it stood for. We are better favoured.
Divine providence and human ingenuity have given us a striking illustration. Think of a WiFi signal. For almost all of us, now, life now seems unliveable without it. Where Mount Saint Bernard is, out in the sticks, the signal is scarce and sporadic. It is fascinating to watch how guests, ostensibly come to withdraw from the world, are appalled, almost prone to despair, when they find that the guesthouse is internetless. One sees them wandering around outside looking lost, their iPhones and Pads held high, like the sticks of water diviners, on a quest to pick up a virtual signal.
What WiFi is to our gadgets, God’s word is to the world as such. Should it cease, the world would collapse. In a way, then, God’s word is almost banal. It surrounds us everywhere, even though we don’t hear or see it any more than we see or hear a mobile network, be it 5G. We ought to think about this more. The fact that we exist is a constant gift from God. Even our breath becomes prayer if we are conscious of what it represents. ‘Let Christ be the air you breathe!’, said Saint Anthony. Yes!
The Word of God also resounds more particularly, though. Thus it ‘came’ to John in the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius, while Pilate was governor, etc., etc. This list of dates and names can seem like dull pedantry – but no: these details bear a message. They tell us that God’s action erupts in history measurably. God’s word doesn’t just surround us like a vague atmosphere. It speaks to us personally, expecting a response.
The call to John was preceded by a long prophetic silence. People had long asked: Has God forgotten us? Why doesn’t he speak?
In our days, it is tempting to ask similarly. The life of the Church is marked by crises, compromised trust, broken promises. We live with sadness and worry. We might wonder: What has happened to the promises that were in the air not so long ago, full of sweetness and strength? Where is God now?
It’s a stupid question, of course. God is eternal, unchangeable. He is where he has always been: everywhere. The problem is not that he is far from us, but that we are far from him. I often think of a letter Pierre de Bérulle wrote to a French Carmelite he accompanied in the early 17th century. The nun moaned (as we are all inclined to moan) that her spiritual life had dried up, somehow. ‘Why’, she asked, ‘oh, why has God abandoned me?’ Bérulle answered sternly. ‘Why do you expect God to run after you as if he were your nanny? Are you not a grown-up?’ We shouldn’t, he went on, expect to be given gifts all the time. What matters is to make use of the grace we have been given, to let it bear fruit.
This counsel chimes in with the Lord’s own teaching. Think of the images from agriculture strewn throughout the parables. One process must follow another, in order. The seed must be sown. It must be given time to develop, while we tend and water it.
The message of John the Baptist points towards something that has already been given. To indicate the new that is to come, he has recourse to old words. ‘Remember Isaiah!’, he cries. ‘The Lord asked us long ago to make what is crooked straight, to fill in valleys and level mountains. Have we done it?’
What about you and me? Do we prepare a way for the Lord in our lives, churches, and communities? Are our eyes fixed on him in expectant longing? Or do we really seek comfort and prosperity for ourselves. Meletios of Nikopolis, a bishop of our times, once wrote: ‘The Church is not of man. The Church is of God. And whenever God is present, the human element ought to recede. When it doesn’t, when instead it is validated, the Church does not do well. Anthropocentrism kills the Church and its life.’
As far as I can see, these are words we need to hear in our times, in our circumstances. ‘Do you seek God?’ This was the only question St Benedict asked candidates who turned up, wishing to embrace monastic life. It was his only criterion of discernment, but one that reached far.
Do we seek God? Do we surrender ourselves to him humbly and obey his commandments? Are we able and willing, as St Paul would have us be, to ‘never stop improving [our] knowledge and deepening [our] perception of what is best’, so as to be found blameless and pure on the day of Christ Jesus – not according to our will, but according to his?
If the Church, which at present is living through a kind of winter, is to ready itself for spring, we must learn anew to live on God’s terms. Monasteries have a crucial role to play in this respect. Indeed, they have a sacred obligation to live prophetically, as Pope Francis likes to remind us. By the grace conferred through profession and consecration, monks and nuns are to show the world that it is possible to live entirely for God, and that such a life is a source of reconciled, sanctified communion in joy and peace.
May the life lived here in Carmel, dear sisters, be marked by a profound faith in God, by love of his holy will and by readiness to follow it unconditionally. The Church needs holy nuns and monks, wrapped in the cloak of integrity, to remind us all that God’s promise carries; that his fidelity is unfailing if only we enable it to operate by being faithful ourselves.
Be faithful! Become holy! That is my exhortation to you today, even as I likewise exhort myself and all of us. Amen.
Pigeons on the roof at Mount Saint Bernard, blissfully unaware of WiFi.
Philippians 1:4-6, 8-11: Never stop improving your knowledge and deepening your perception of what is best.
Luke 3:1-6: In the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar’s reign.
The word of God has been present in creation from the beginning. By God’s word all things came into being. By God’s word all things are sustained. In earlier times, this principle sounded somewhat abstract. You had to have something of a philosophical bent of mind to grasp what it stood for. We are better favoured.
Divine providence and human ingenuity have given us a striking illustration. Think of a WiFi signal. For almost all of us, now, life now seems unliveable without it. Where Mount Saint Bernard is, out in the sticks, the signal is scarce and sporadic. It is fascinating to watch how guests, ostensibly come to withdraw from the world, are appalled, almost prone to despair, when they find that the guesthouse is internetless. One sees them wandering around outside looking lost, their iPhones and Pads held high, like the sticks of water diviners, on a quest to pick up a virtual signal.
What WiFi is to our gadgets, God’s word is to the world as such. Should it cease, the world would collapse. In a way, then, God’s word is almost banal. It surrounds us everywhere, even though we don’t hear or see it any more than we see or hear a mobile network, be it 5G. We ought to think about this more. The fact that we exist is a constant gift from God. Even our breath becomes prayer if we are conscious of what it represents. ‘Let Christ be the air you breathe!’, said Saint Anthony. Yes!
The Word of God also resounds more particularly, though. Thus it ‘came’ to John in the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius, while Pilate was governor, etc., etc. This list of dates and names can seem like dull pedantry – but no: these details bear a message. They tell us that God’s action erupts in history measurably. God’s word doesn’t just surround us like a vague atmosphere. It speaks to us personally, expecting a response.
The call to John was preceded by a long prophetic silence. People had long asked: Has God forgotten us? Why doesn’t he speak?
In our days, it is tempting to ask similarly. The life of the Church is marked by crises, compromised trust, broken promises. We live with sadness and worry. We might wonder: What has happened to the promises that were in the air not so long ago, full of sweetness and strength? Where is God now?
It’s a stupid question, of course. God is eternal, unchangeable. He is where he has always been: everywhere. The problem is not that he is far from us, but that we are far from him. I often think of a letter Pierre de Bérulle wrote to a French Carmelite he accompanied in the early 17th century. The nun moaned (as we are all inclined to moan) that her spiritual life had dried up, somehow. ‘Why’, she asked, ‘oh, why has God abandoned me?’ Bérulle answered sternly. ‘Why do you expect God to run after you as if he were your nanny? Are you not a grown-up?’ We shouldn’t, he went on, expect to be given gifts all the time. What matters is to make use of the grace we have been given, to let it bear fruit.
This counsel chimes in with the Lord’s own teaching. Think of the images from agriculture strewn throughout the parables. One process must follow another, in order. The seed must be sown. It must be given time to develop, while we tend and water it.
The message of John the Baptist points towards something that has already been given. To indicate the new that is to come, he has recourse to old words. ‘Remember Isaiah!’, he cries. ‘The Lord asked us long ago to make what is crooked straight, to fill in valleys and level mountains. Have we done it?’
What about you and me? Do we prepare a way for the Lord in our lives, churches, and communities? Are our eyes fixed on him in expectant longing? Or do we really seek comfort and prosperity for ourselves. Meletios of Nikopolis, a bishop of our times, once wrote: ‘The Church is not of man. The Church is of God. And whenever God is present, the human element ought to recede. When it doesn’t, when instead it is validated, the Church does not do well. Anthropocentrism kills the Church and its life.’
As far as I can see, these are words we need to hear in our times, in our circumstances. ‘Do you seek God?’ This was the only question St Benedict asked candidates who turned up, wishing to embrace monastic life. It was his only criterion of discernment, but one that reached far.
Do we seek God? Do we surrender ourselves to him humbly and obey his commandments? Are we able and willing, as St Paul would have us be, to ‘never stop improving [our] knowledge and deepening [our] perception of what is best’, so as to be found blameless and pure on the day of Christ Jesus – not according to our will, but according to his?
If the Church, which at present is living through a kind of winter, is to ready itself for spring, we must learn anew to live on God’s terms. Monasteries have a crucial role to play in this respect. Indeed, they have a sacred obligation to live prophetically, as Pope Francis likes to remind us. By the grace conferred through profession and consecration, monks and nuns are to show the world that it is possible to live entirely for God, and that such a life is a source of reconciled, sanctified communion in joy and peace.
May the life lived here in Carmel, dear sisters, be marked by a profound faith in God, by love of his holy will and by readiness to follow it unconditionally. The Church needs holy nuns and monks, wrapped in the cloak of integrity, to remind us all that God’s promise carries; that his fidelity is unfailing if only we enable it to operate by being faithful ourselves.
Be faithful! Become holy! That is my exhortation to you today, even as I likewise exhort myself and all of us. Amen.
Pigeons on the roof at Mount Saint Bernard, blissfully unaware of WiFi.
Tenderness
I was sitting on the airport shuttle early this morning when I read the second reading of vigils, astounded by the immediacy of words written nearly a thousand years ago by that great man and monk, Anselm of Canterbury. How tenderness carries across the centuries! The vocative diminutive ‘homuncio’ and twice repeated ‘aliquantulum’ are eloquently encouraging. ‘Come, little fellow, rise up! Flee your preoccupations for a little while. Hide yourself for a time from your turbulent thoughts. Cast aside, now, your heavy responsibilities. Put off your burdensome business. Make a little space free for God; and rest for a little time in him. Enter the inner chamber of your mind; shut out all thoughts. Keep only thought of God, and thoughts that can aid you in seeking him. Close your door and seek him. Speak now, my whole heart! Speak now to God, saying, I seek your face; your face, Lord, will I seek. And come you now, O Lord my God, teach my heart where and how it may seek you, where and how it may find you.’
https://coramfratribus.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Anselm-Proslogion.m4a
https://coramfratribus.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Anselm-Proslogion.m4a
Healing Wounds
‘There is a tendency in Christian devotion to prettify, even to idealise, wounds. This tendency is perverse. Human nature, created in the image of God to be like God, is made for wholeness. Here and now we inhabit a world that is wounded, groaning in pangs of deliverance. We are wounded, subject to the anomaly which Scripture calls ‘sin’, an existential wasting-sickness. Sin leaves its mark on our spirit and on our body. It can paralyse our will or lead it astray. To be fully human is to own this state of affairs. It is to be reconciled to loss and the inevitability of death. But it is no less to remember that our woundedness is of time, and that time will pass. The Christian Gospel envisages the passage from a frank acknowledgement of wounds to the prospect of definitive healing. It proposes a vista of transformation, ‘a new heaven and a new earth’ where ‘death will be no more, mourning and crying and pain will be no more.’ There, the first things will have passed. The first things, though, must happen first.’ From Healing Wounds, published today.
Die Manns
The docudrama is a tricky genre. The dramatic component easily comes across as a series of ornamental vignettes jarring with or romanticising the documentary. Life is mostly duller than drama; so we are left feeling cheated, confronted with something that is neither quite real nor quite satisfying our thirst for fantasy. Heinrich Breloer’s Die Manns is an exception to this rule. True, Thomas Mann and his gifted entourage were not a ‘normal’ family: in their case realism was fantastic. There is at the same time a narrative rigour to the drama that presents a credible portrait, not only of a clan, but of a world before, during, and after World War II subject to cataclysmic change. It is an unsettling and appropriate film to watch again now, with so much coming undone. The serene commentary of Elisabeth Mann Borgese adds a note of paradoxical hopefulness. Marcel Reich-Ranicki called Die Manns a high point of German cinema. I’d say that is no exaggeration.
Iron Age Words
I recently learned that Fr Paul Mankowski would advise people to pray the Divine Office by giving them this recommendation: ‘It’s good to have Iron Age words in your mouth every day.’ His phrase has been ringing in my ears, echoing with truth. There’s something about the taste of substantial ancient utterance that trains one’s palate to appreciate excellence and identify bosh, an exercise which, practised daily, may actually train me to swallow the latter before I am tempted to articulate it. This morning at Lauds, I savoured the phrase: Ego et anima mea regi cæli lætationes dicimus. Literally: ‘My soul and I speak rejoicings to the king of heaven’ (Tobit 13.7). There’s no dualism here, but recognition that I’m often enough at odds with myself. Am I where my soul is? To let myself be challenged by that question is, I think, an excellent way to prepare for Christmas.
Iubilaeum MMXXV
The text below is a Pastoral Letter from the Nordic Bishops’ Conference on the Jubilee Year. It will be read att all Masses throughout the Nordic countries on the First Sunday of Advent.
Our Holy Father Pope Francis has proclaimed the year 2025 a year of Jubilee. It is a wonderful gift to the Church, indeed to the whole world. The Jubilee is a Biblical institution. We read of it first in Leviticus — not perhaps the book we most readily turn to for spiritual reading. So let us remind ourselves of what the Lord told Moses on Mount Sinai regarding the year of Jubilee.
The Jubilee was to take place every fiftieth year, after ‘seven weeks of years’. Its function was to give all people resident in the Land a regular, predictable chance to redress balances, release captives, cancel debts, and have a corporate rest. It was to be a year of homecoming: ‘In this year of Jubilee you shall return, every one of you, to your property’ (Leviticus 25.12). This point regards more than just a sentimental attachment to the old camp fire. It regards the nature of property and our claim to it. Leviticus recognises the complex dynamics of human communities. It may happen through various transactions that territories pass from hand to hand. Someone lives on the land for a while, then sells it, or is driven off; somebody else redeems or occupies it. Conflicts arise. Someone cries from the left: ‘This land is mine!’ Somebody else cries from the right, ‘No way! It is mine!’ This is the sort of situation the Biblical text addresses. It does so by short-circuiting the discourse of rights and entitlement. ‘The land’, says the Lord, ‘shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants’ (Leviticus 25.23).
Given the parlous state of our world right now, this perspective is important. A durable society worthy of free women and men, corresponding to God’s will for humanity, cannot be built simply on claims to possession. For a society to thrive, individuals within it must first become a people, bound together by a covenant of justice consonant with natural and divinely inspired law. Ultimately we are all, like Abraham, our father in faith, strangers and aliens in the land (cf. Genesis 23.4). We must learn, then, to be worthy sojourners, committed at once to righteousness and to hospitality, mindful that the land, wherever on the globe we may happen to live, remains the Lord’s, and that we shall be called to account for our political, religious, and ecological stewardship of it.
Having established the principle about ownership of land, Leviticus applies the logic of Jubilee more intimately to human relationships. The Bible has no illusions about these. It sings of ‘how good and pleasant it is when brothers live in unity’ (Psalm 133.1) while recognising that such unity does not come cheap. It must be striven for, sometimes at the cost of great suffering. Let us not forget that the history of our race outside Eden begins with a fratricide (Genesis 4.1-8). It is not natural for us human beings, as long as our nature is wounded and blinded by sin, to live peacefully together. That is why peace, in Scripture, is presented as dynamic, a living reality we must pursue by departing from evil and by doing good (cf. Psalm 34.14). On account of life’s vicissitudes it may occur that one human being falls subject to another — say, on account of debt or imprisonment. The one who holds in his hand the bill of debt or the gaoler’s key may feel, then, an intoxicating rush of power, as if his dependents belonged to him and were his to deal with as he pleases. Leviticus reminds us that this is a perverse illusion. Even ‘if your brother becomes poor beside you, and sells himself to you’, we are told, ‘you shall not make him serve as a slave’ (Leviticus 25.39). No human being can, on any terms, pretend to own another. Men and women sometimes do stupid, even wicked things. They may need to be constrained by just means to pay what they owe; they may need to be chastised or restrained. But they remain sovereign. What is more, they are by virtue of their simple humanity, made in God’s image, bearers of an immense potential dignity we owe it to them to recognise and to call forth. Leviticus undermines the idea that some people are naturally others’ subjects by decreeing that all bondsmen are to be set free in the year of Jubilee. ‘For they are my servants’, says the Lord, ‘whom I brought out of the land of Egypt’ and redeemed (Leviticus 25.42). Only God can rightly say to us, ‘You are mine’ (cf. Isaiah 43.1). Only he, who is almighty and merciful, can let us experience total dependence as perfect freedom.
The ideal put before us by the Bible is not upheld in the world we inhabit. This is a state of affairs we must, as Christians, confront and strive by every means to change. Just think: human trafficking is soaring, a terrible and demeaning trade; whole nations are crippled by debt and ruthlessly exploited; commercial agencies (above and below board) promote and foster addiction to drugs and games, pornography and booze for the sole purpose of gain, devising ways of keeping people shackled. And what are we to say of the erosion of the rights of the unborn, increasingly denied any form of humane, legal protection under law? When our countries were evangelised a millennium or so ago, a major civilisational step forward was the recognition of each person’s sovereign dignity, which was seen to begin in the womb. Belief in an incarnate God, made ‘a man like us in all things but sin’ (Fourth Eucharistic Prayer), had a profound impact on our collective understanding of what it is to be human. The further this belief recedes from public life, the more humanity is under threat. An individual can then once again consider another individual his or her chattel. This is a tendency we are morally obliged to counter constructively as we uphold an anthropology worthy of our nature.
It is a wonderful providence that next year’s Jubilee, summoning us to construct a more just world, coincides with the seventeenth centenary of the Council of Nicaea, held in 325. At Nicaea the creed was defined that we still profess each Sunday, when we affirm our belief in the Blessed Trinity, one God in three Persons; in the incarnation of God’s Son, ‘Light from Light, true God from true God’; in Jesus Christ’s redeeming and sanctifying work through his birth, teaching, death, resurrection, and ascension into heaven; and in the transforming presence among and within us of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, who spoke through the prophets and speaks to us still through Holy Church.
As your bishops we pray that the Jubilee year may see an effective, cordial, and intelligent deepening of faith in our countries. We invite you to return to the sources of our creed by studying the Scriptures and our wonderful Catholic Catechism in order thereby to be rooted more deeply in the mystery of faith, to experience what it means to live ‘in Christ’ (cf. Galatians 2.20), better placed to ‘give an account of the hope that is in you’ (1 Peter 3.15). Thus prepared we shall find the strength and means to be agents of Jubilee, so that the Lord may, through us, as we pray each Good Friday, ‘cleanse the world of all errors, banish disease, drive out hunger, unlock prisons, loosen fetters, granting to travellers safety, to pilgrims return, health to the sick, and salvation to the dying’. We will support you in this holy endeavour with all our strength, grateful for the witness of fidelity, charity, and generosity we find in the dioceses it is our privilege to serve. In his letter announcing the Jubilee, published on the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes 2022, the Holy Father expressed hope that this forthcoming year may build up the Church ‘so that it can press forward in its mission of bringing the joyful proclamation of the Gospel to all’. To this intention we say wholeheartedly: ‘Amen!’ The Jubilee motto is ‘Peregrinantes in spem’. We are, that is, to be pilgrims moving out of hopelessness into hope. As we embark on another Advent, we marvel at the grace given us in the Word’s incarnation, which renews the world. May we credibly witness to this newness as Christ’s disciples through generous charity, firm communion and brave justice, illumined by the splendour of Truth.
Given on the First Sunday of Advent 2024,
+ Anders Cardinal Arborelius OCD (bishop of Stockholm), +Peter Bürcher (emeritus bishop of Reykjavik), +Bernt Eidsvig, Can.Reg. (bishop of Oslo), +Raimo Goyarrola, (bishop of Helsinki, Vice President), + Berislav Grgić (emeritus bishop of Tromsø), +Czeslaw Kozon (bishop of Copenhagen), +Teemu Sippo SCJ (emeritus bishop of Helsinki), +David Tencer OFM (bishop of Reykjavik), +Erik Varden OCSO (bishop prelate of Trondheim and apostolic administrator of Tromsø, President)
Our Holy Father Pope Francis has proclaimed the year 2025 a year of Jubilee. It is a wonderful gift to the Church, indeed to the whole world. The Jubilee is a Biblical institution. We read of it first in Leviticus — not perhaps the book we most readily turn to for spiritual reading. So let us remind ourselves of what the Lord told Moses on Mount Sinai regarding the year of Jubilee.
The Jubilee was to take place every fiftieth year, after ‘seven weeks of years’. Its function was to give all people resident in the Land a regular, predictable chance to redress balances, release captives, cancel debts, and have a corporate rest. It was to be a year of homecoming: ‘In this year of Jubilee you shall return, every one of you, to your property’ (Leviticus 25.12). This point regards more than just a sentimental attachment to the old camp fire. It regards the nature of property and our claim to it. Leviticus recognises the complex dynamics of human communities. It may happen through various transactions that territories pass from hand to hand. Someone lives on the land for a while, then sells it, or is driven off; somebody else redeems or occupies it. Conflicts arise. Someone cries from the left: ‘This land is mine!’ Somebody else cries from the right, ‘No way! It is mine!’ This is the sort of situation the Biblical text addresses. It does so by short-circuiting the discourse of rights and entitlement. ‘The land’, says the Lord, ‘shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants’ (Leviticus 25.23).
Given the parlous state of our world right now, this perspective is important. A durable society worthy of free women and men, corresponding to God’s will for humanity, cannot be built simply on claims to possession. For a society to thrive, individuals within it must first become a people, bound together by a covenant of justice consonant with natural and divinely inspired law. Ultimately we are all, like Abraham, our father in faith, strangers and aliens in the land (cf. Genesis 23.4). We must learn, then, to be worthy sojourners, committed at once to righteousness and to hospitality, mindful that the land, wherever on the globe we may happen to live, remains the Lord’s, and that we shall be called to account for our political, religious, and ecological stewardship of it.
Having established the principle about ownership of land, Leviticus applies the logic of Jubilee more intimately to human relationships. The Bible has no illusions about these. It sings of ‘how good and pleasant it is when brothers live in unity’ (Psalm 133.1) while recognising that such unity does not come cheap. It must be striven for, sometimes at the cost of great suffering. Let us not forget that the history of our race outside Eden begins with a fratricide (Genesis 4.1-8). It is not natural for us human beings, as long as our nature is wounded and blinded by sin, to live peacefully together. That is why peace, in Scripture, is presented as dynamic, a living reality we must pursue by departing from evil and by doing good (cf. Psalm 34.14). On account of life’s vicissitudes it may occur that one human being falls subject to another — say, on account of debt or imprisonment. The one who holds in his hand the bill of debt or the gaoler’s key may feel, then, an intoxicating rush of power, as if his dependents belonged to him and were his to deal with as he pleases. Leviticus reminds us that this is a perverse illusion. Even ‘if your brother becomes poor beside you, and sells himself to you’, we are told, ‘you shall not make him serve as a slave’ (Leviticus 25.39). No human being can, on any terms, pretend to own another. Men and women sometimes do stupid, even wicked things. They may need to be constrained by just means to pay what they owe; they may need to be chastised or restrained. But they remain sovereign. What is more, they are by virtue of their simple humanity, made in God’s image, bearers of an immense potential dignity we owe it to them to recognise and to call forth. Leviticus undermines the idea that some people are naturally others’ subjects by decreeing that all bondsmen are to be set free in the year of Jubilee. ‘For they are my servants’, says the Lord, ‘whom I brought out of the land of Egypt’ and redeemed (Leviticus 25.42). Only God can rightly say to us, ‘You are mine’ (cf. Isaiah 43.1). Only he, who is almighty and merciful, can let us experience total dependence as perfect freedom.
The ideal put before us by the Bible is not upheld in the world we inhabit. This is a state of affairs we must, as Christians, confront and strive by every means to change. Just think: human trafficking is soaring, a terrible and demeaning trade; whole nations are crippled by debt and ruthlessly exploited; commercial agencies (above and below board) promote and foster addiction to drugs and games, pornography and booze for the sole purpose of gain, devising ways of keeping people shackled. And what are we to say of the erosion of the rights of the unborn, increasingly denied any form of humane, legal protection under law? When our countries were evangelised a millennium or so ago, a major civilisational step forward was the recognition of each person’s sovereign dignity, which was seen to begin in the womb. Belief in an incarnate God, made ‘a man like us in all things but sin’ (Fourth Eucharistic Prayer), had a profound impact on our collective understanding of what it is to be human. The further this belief recedes from public life, the more humanity is under threat. An individual can then once again consider another individual his or her chattel. This is a tendency we are morally obliged to counter constructively as we uphold an anthropology worthy of our nature.
It is a wonderful providence that next year’s Jubilee, summoning us to construct a more just world, coincides with the seventeenth centenary of the Council of Nicaea, held in 325. At Nicaea the creed was defined that we still profess each Sunday, when we affirm our belief in the Blessed Trinity, one God in three Persons; in the incarnation of God’s Son, ‘Light from Light, true God from true God’; in Jesus Christ’s redeeming and sanctifying work through his birth, teaching, death, resurrection, and ascension into heaven; and in the transforming presence among and within us of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, who spoke through the prophets and speaks to us still through Holy Church.
As your bishops we pray that the Jubilee year may see an effective, cordial, and intelligent deepening of faith in our countries. We invite you to return to the sources of our creed by studying the Scriptures and our wonderful Catholic Catechism in order thereby to be rooted more deeply in the mystery of faith, to experience what it means to live ‘in Christ’ (cf. Galatians 2.20), better placed to ‘give an account of the hope that is in you’ (1 Peter 3.15). Thus prepared we shall find the strength and means to be agents of Jubilee, so that the Lord may, through us, as we pray each Good Friday, ‘cleanse the world of all errors, banish disease, drive out hunger, unlock prisons, loosen fetters, granting to travellers safety, to pilgrims return, health to the sick, and salvation to the dying’. We will support you in this holy endeavour with all our strength, grateful for the witness of fidelity, charity, and generosity we find in the dioceses it is our privilege to serve. In his letter announcing the Jubilee, published on the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes 2022, the Holy Father expressed hope that this forthcoming year may build up the Church ‘so that it can press forward in its mission of bringing the joyful proclamation of the Gospel to all’. To this intention we say wholeheartedly: ‘Amen!’ The Jubilee motto is ‘Peregrinantes in spem’. We are, that is, to be pilgrims moving out of hopelessness into hope. As we embark on another Advent, we marvel at the grace given us in the Word’s incarnation, which renews the world. May we credibly witness to this newness as Christ’s disciples through generous charity, firm communion and brave justice, illumined by the splendour of Truth.
Given on the First Sunday of Advent 2024,
+ Anders Cardinal Arborelius OCD (bishop of Stockholm), +Peter Bürcher (emeritus bishop of Reykjavik), +Bernt Eidsvig, Can.Reg. (bishop of Oslo), +Raimo Goyarrola, (bishop of Helsinki, Vice President), + Berislav Grgić (emeritus bishop of Tromsø), +Czeslaw Kozon (bishop of Copenhagen), +Teemu Sippo SCJ (emeritus bishop of Helsinki), +David Tencer OFM (bishop of Reykjavik), +Erik Varden OCSO (bishop prelate of Trondheim and apostolic administrator of Tromsø, President)
Oneself in a Word
I am charmed and inspired by the answer Einar Økland gives an interviewer in last week’s Dag og Tid:
– If you were to sum yourself up in a word, which would it be?
– Colon [:].
–???
–A colon has something on either side of it, open to what comes in and what goes out. But it is an articulation made in retrospect. One doesn’t know what one takes in until one releases it, until afterwards. An alternative answer could have been ‘full stop’. A full stop has no extension and can be both a beginning and an end.
– If you were to sum yourself up in a word, which would it be?
– Colon [:].
–???
–A colon has something on either side of it, open to what comes in and what goes out. But it is an articulation made in retrospect. One doesn’t know what one takes in until one releases it, until afterwards. An alternative answer could have been ‘full stop’. A full stop has no extension and can be both a beginning and an end.