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:
Bread Grows in Winter 
I’ve just received in the mail Jennifer Bryson’s translation of Ida Görres’s seminal book Bread Grows in Winter, handsomely published by Ignatius Press. I was honoured to be asked to contribute a preface. Here it is:
I picked up a battered German Read More
I picked up a battered German Read More
Desert Fathers 48 You can find this episode in video format here – a dedicated page – and pick it up in audio wherever you listen to podcasts. On YouTube, the full range of episodes can be found here.
Abba Ammoes asked [Abba Poemen] Read More
Abba Ammoes asked [Abba Poemen] Read More
Irresistible Among the many things that struck me in Tordis Ørjasæter‘s ‘personal history of the handicapped child in literature’, We Are Not Alone, was this description of Sigrid Undset, which passes on a childhood remembrance of Tordis’s husband Jo, whose father, the Read More
Bl Niels Steensen “By your endurance you will gain your souls”, says our Lord. Many of us will have ascertained that the times in our lives that have deeply formed us were not necessarily times at which we did lots of stuff, but times during Read More
Christ the King C 2 Samuel 5.1-3: You shall be shepherd of my people Israel.
Colossians 1.12-20: He gave us a place in the kingdom of the Son.
Luke 23.35-43: Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom!
David’s anointing as Israel’s king in Hebron Read More
Colossians 1.12-20: He gave us a place in the kingdom of the Son.
Luke 23.35-43: Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom!
David’s anointing as Israel’s king in Hebron Read More
Erasmus Lecture ‘Transhumance, an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity since 2023, is by definition constant drifting across borders. If you are caught up in transhumance you do not stay behind a wall trying to work, or shut, out what people say and Read More
Sr Anne-Lise RIP Sister Anne-Lise Strøm was buried today. We are many who will miss her deeply. She was a fully given person. In a book of conversations she published with Brita Rosenberg in 1997, she described her departure from Oslo in 1961, Read More
Desert Fathers 47 You can find this episode in video format here – a dedicated page – and pick it up in audio wherever you listen to podcasts. On YouTube, the full range of episodes can be found here.
About Abba Netras, the disciple Read More
About Abba Netras, the disciple Read More
Bread Grows in Winter
I’ve just received in the mail Jennifer Bryson’s translation of Ida Görres’s seminal book Bread Grows in Winter, handsomely published by Ignatius Press. I was honoured to be asked to contribute a preface. Here it is:
I picked up a battered German copy of Ida Görres’s Bread Grows in Winter from a junk shop years ago. This book, first published in 1970, has been a source of inspiration to me. During my first few years of episcopacy I often took it with me on journeys, as a travel companion. Trying to work out how to exercise the ministry, I found in Görres a sure guide unfailingly summoning me to focus on essentials.
Ida Görres was a woman of acute intelligence, able to fathom in herself great tensions. Her bicultural background kept her from simplifying questions of identity, cultural or ecclesiastical. When the Second Vatican Council began, she followed it enthusiastically. She remained committed to the Council’s teaching, but was increasingly appalled by the crassness with which it was instrumentalised, here and there, as an excuse for mere deconstruction. She saw spiritual and intellectual treasures being thrown overboard as the bark of the Church made its way through choppy waters. This made her grieve both on her own behalf and on that of others.
Of course, she had read enough Church history to know that such losses are never final. There will always be pearl-divers ready to descend to the bottom of the sea to fetch treasures up again, patiently removing strings of algae as they rejoice in sharing their finds. But why go to such trouble when a peaceful handing-on (in Latin, a traditio) in view of present mission and future growth remains an option?
It would be a mistake to present Ida Görres as just an antiquarian. Her concern was theological. She insisted, as had the Council Fathers in their constitution Lumen Gentium, that the Church must be understood as a sacramental, personal reality. Görres regretted the eclipse of theology in much that was said about the Church, and done to her in consequence, in the heady years of the late 60s, with the West caught up in a cultural revolution that unfolded, often enough, as a targeted assault on institutions. The Church, she kept repeating, can neither be rightly understood nor truly loved by one who regards her in institutional terms while failing to recognise her as ‘the strangest creation of God, so unique in kind, so large, so contradictory, so colourful that no single person can take stock of her and figure her out, and certainly no outsider can ever take her all in, let alone understand her and judge her’.
For much too long, the theology of Ida Görres has been a minority interest passed on among initiates who recognise each other, as it were, by way of secret handshakes or knowing looks. I rejoice that these boundaries are bursting. The publication of Görres’s work in English is a major event full of promise for the Church’s mission, at once ancient and ever new, ‘to carry forward the work of Christ under the lead of the befriending Spirit’.
I picked up a battered German copy of Ida Görres’s Bread Grows in Winter from a junk shop years ago. This book, first published in 1970, has been a source of inspiration to me. During my first few years of episcopacy I often took it with me on journeys, as a travel companion. Trying to work out how to exercise the ministry, I found in Görres a sure guide unfailingly summoning me to focus on essentials.
Ida Görres was a woman of acute intelligence, able to fathom in herself great tensions. Her bicultural background kept her from simplifying questions of identity, cultural or ecclesiastical. When the Second Vatican Council began, she followed it enthusiastically. She remained committed to the Council’s teaching, but was increasingly appalled by the crassness with which it was instrumentalised, here and there, as an excuse for mere deconstruction. She saw spiritual and intellectual treasures being thrown overboard as the bark of the Church made its way through choppy waters. This made her grieve both on her own behalf and on that of others.
Of course, she had read enough Church history to know that such losses are never final. There will always be pearl-divers ready to descend to the bottom of the sea to fetch treasures up again, patiently removing strings of algae as they rejoice in sharing their finds. But why go to such trouble when a peaceful handing-on (in Latin, a traditio) in view of present mission and future growth remains an option?
It would be a mistake to present Ida Görres as just an antiquarian. Her concern was theological. She insisted, as had the Council Fathers in their constitution Lumen Gentium, that the Church must be understood as a sacramental, personal reality. Görres regretted the eclipse of theology in much that was said about the Church, and done to her in consequence, in the heady years of the late 60s, with the West caught up in a cultural revolution that unfolded, often enough, as a targeted assault on institutions. The Church, she kept repeating, can neither be rightly understood nor truly loved by one who regards her in institutional terms while failing to recognise her as ‘the strangest creation of God, so unique in kind, so large, so contradictory, so colourful that no single person can take stock of her and figure her out, and certainly no outsider can ever take her all in, let alone understand her and judge her’.
For much too long, the theology of Ida Görres has been a minority interest passed on among initiates who recognise each other, as it were, by way of secret handshakes or knowing looks. I rejoice that these boundaries are bursting. The publication of Görres’s work in English is a major event full of promise for the Church’s mission, at once ancient and ever new, ‘to carry forward the work of Christ under the lead of the befriending Spirit’.
Desert Fathers 48
You can find this episode in video format here – a dedicated page – and pick it up in audio wherever you listen to podcasts. On YouTube, the full range of episodes can be found here.
Abba Ammoes asked [Abba Poemen] about certain impure thoughts that the human heart conceives and about fruitless desires. Abba Poemen said to him: ‘Shall the axe be vaunted over him who hews with it?’ You, likewise: do not give [your thoughts] a hand and take no pleasure in them, and they will be ineffectual. Abba Isaiah asked the same question. Abba Poemen said: ‘If somebody abandons a chest full of clothes, they will decay over time. When it comes to thoughts, the same process applies: as long as we do not put them into concrete action they will over time decay and be gone.
The battle of the heart of which we have heard Antony speak plays out to a large extent in the mind. It is unhelpful to envisage the two as categorically distinct. We are inclined nowadays to think that thinking goes on in our brain whereas our heart is the seat of feelings. At the same time, we recognise the truth of what Christ says: ‘out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks’. The heart has, Biblically speaking, intellective faculties. Affectivity and intelligence are intertwined. It follows that if we are serious about desiring a pure heart, we must first of all labour to purify our minds. But what a cesspit our mind sometimes seems to be! We dream, then, of fumigating it, seeking an instant remedy that might eliminate all noxious content.
Poemen tells us that this is an illusory dream. Once we have allowed a thought or desire into our heart and mind, it settles and makes itself comfortable. We are not built as computers: there is no ‘delete’ function that will, when a button is pressed, get rid of undesirable content. Poemen’s message to both enquirers, Isaiah and Ammoes, is the same. He assures them impure thoughts can be excised, but only over time, through a process of slow starvation. Patience is called for, and endurance.
The saying about the axe, which Poemen cites, is from Isaiah, part of an oracle about causality. A tool is only effective when someone wields it. It is not an autonomous agent. Isaiah invokes a range of examples. His point is ethical, even political: human institutions may not glory in themselves when used as instruments for purposes intended by God. The Lord enables and moves them then, none other.
We are asked, similarly, to consider where our bad thoughts come from, then to cut them off at the source. If we do, they will sooner or later lose their power and leave us in peace. For a thought or desire has no more autonomy than any old tool we may have lying about in our garden shed. Thoughts can impersonate autonomy. The Enemy of good may manipulate them in such a way. But it is by callous deceit. As long as we do not nurture the poisoned content of our mind, it will wither. We shall need to build up sticking-power to sit tight while this process takes place.
To speak concretely, we may take as an example a battle many people fight: that of pornographic addiction. A cynical industry engenders this unfreedom by playing on registers that touch our deepest desires and darkest fears, all within a miasma of vulnerability. A person may be seduced by pornographic propositions for a while, thinking perhaps they are coming to terms with sexual frustration, telling themselves this is freeing. Then the moment comes when they see that content they have watched does not stay in the ether, but lodges itself in the mind, conditioning relationships, disabling innocence.
Such a person may wake up desperate one day and think, ‘For God’s sake, get this stuff out of my head!’, only to find that no such immediate option exists. The temptation will be great to burrow more deeply into the source of impurity, to give in to its proffered promise of comfort and satisfaction. One may see through the lie of it, perhaps, yet feel there is nowhere else to go, all the while being plagued by an ever more all-encompassing unhappiness and shame.
To such a one Poemen says: despair not!
He assures him or her there is a way out of captivity. He gives them a twofold piece of advice. First they must turn off the tap of unhealthy stimuli, seeking whatever help they need to do so. Then they must take responsibility for mental, affective baggage acquired. They must learn to say, in the first person: These impulses do live in me, for I have let them in, but now I stop; when a thought or image from my hoard comes to me, I will not pick up and fondle it, but give it to the Lord with a prayer for mercy: ‘Lord, this thought was mine, but now I offer it to you; it will no longer have power over me; create a new heart in me; teach me to love beautifully’. Over time this procedure can work transformation. Of course, it applies to other addictive thought-processes, too, like wounds to our pride.
The Fathers tell of an elder who lamented in his cell: ‘On account of a single word, all this gone!’ Asked to explain, he said: ‘I know 14 books of the Bible by heart, yet a single complaint against me obsessed me for the whole of today’s liturgy!’ It can be upsetting to realise what scorpions lurk in my heart. After all, I would like it to be a pure temple to the Lord. But once I know the blighters are there, I can take action, putting a tumbler over them to curtail their movement, making sure they are not fed.
Initial D: The Fool with Two Demons (detail) in a psalter, illuminations by the Master of the Ingeborg Psalter, after 1205. Tempera colors, gold leaf, and ink on parchment bound between pasteboard covered with brown calf, each leaf 12 3/16 x 8 5/8 in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. 66, fol. 56.
Abba Ammoes asked [Abba Poemen] about certain impure thoughts that the human heart conceives and about fruitless desires. Abba Poemen said to him: ‘Shall the axe be vaunted over him who hews with it?’ You, likewise: do not give [your thoughts] a hand and take no pleasure in them, and they will be ineffectual. Abba Isaiah asked the same question. Abba Poemen said: ‘If somebody abandons a chest full of clothes, they will decay over time. When it comes to thoughts, the same process applies: as long as we do not put them into concrete action they will over time decay and be gone.
The battle of the heart of which we have heard Antony speak plays out to a large extent in the mind. It is unhelpful to envisage the two as categorically distinct. We are inclined nowadays to think that thinking goes on in our brain whereas our heart is the seat of feelings. At the same time, we recognise the truth of what Christ says: ‘out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks’. The heart has, Biblically speaking, intellective faculties. Affectivity and intelligence are intertwined. It follows that if we are serious about desiring a pure heart, we must first of all labour to purify our minds. But what a cesspit our mind sometimes seems to be! We dream, then, of fumigating it, seeking an instant remedy that might eliminate all noxious content.
Poemen tells us that this is an illusory dream. Once we have allowed a thought or desire into our heart and mind, it settles and makes itself comfortable. We are not built as computers: there is no ‘delete’ function that will, when a button is pressed, get rid of undesirable content. Poemen’s message to both enquirers, Isaiah and Ammoes, is the same. He assures them impure thoughts can be excised, but only over time, through a process of slow starvation. Patience is called for, and endurance.
The saying about the axe, which Poemen cites, is from Isaiah, part of an oracle about causality. A tool is only effective when someone wields it. It is not an autonomous agent. Isaiah invokes a range of examples. His point is ethical, even political: human institutions may not glory in themselves when used as instruments for purposes intended by God. The Lord enables and moves them then, none other.
We are asked, similarly, to consider where our bad thoughts come from, then to cut them off at the source. If we do, they will sooner or later lose their power and leave us in peace. For a thought or desire has no more autonomy than any old tool we may have lying about in our garden shed. Thoughts can impersonate autonomy. The Enemy of good may manipulate them in such a way. But it is by callous deceit. As long as we do not nurture the poisoned content of our mind, it will wither. We shall need to build up sticking-power to sit tight while this process takes place.
To speak concretely, we may take as an example a battle many people fight: that of pornographic addiction. A cynical industry engenders this unfreedom by playing on registers that touch our deepest desires and darkest fears, all within a miasma of vulnerability. A person may be seduced by pornographic propositions for a while, thinking perhaps they are coming to terms with sexual frustration, telling themselves this is freeing. Then the moment comes when they see that content they have watched does not stay in the ether, but lodges itself in the mind, conditioning relationships, disabling innocence.
Such a person may wake up desperate one day and think, ‘For God’s sake, get this stuff out of my head!’, only to find that no such immediate option exists. The temptation will be great to burrow more deeply into the source of impurity, to give in to its proffered promise of comfort and satisfaction. One may see through the lie of it, perhaps, yet feel there is nowhere else to go, all the while being plagued by an ever more all-encompassing unhappiness and shame.
To such a one Poemen says: despair not!
He assures him or her there is a way out of captivity. He gives them a twofold piece of advice. First they must turn off the tap of unhealthy stimuli, seeking whatever help they need to do so. Then they must take responsibility for mental, affective baggage acquired. They must learn to say, in the first person: These impulses do live in me, for I have let them in, but now I stop; when a thought or image from my hoard comes to me, I will not pick up and fondle it, but give it to the Lord with a prayer for mercy: ‘Lord, this thought was mine, but now I offer it to you; it will no longer have power over me; create a new heart in me; teach me to love beautifully’. Over time this procedure can work transformation. Of course, it applies to other addictive thought-processes, too, like wounds to our pride.
The Fathers tell of an elder who lamented in his cell: ‘On account of a single word, all this gone!’ Asked to explain, he said: ‘I know 14 books of the Bible by heart, yet a single complaint against me obsessed me for the whole of today’s liturgy!’ It can be upsetting to realise what scorpions lurk in my heart. After all, I would like it to be a pure temple to the Lord. But once I know the blighters are there, I can take action, putting a tumbler over them to curtail their movement, making sure they are not fed.
Initial D: The Fool with Two Demons (detail) in a psalter, illuminations by the Master of the Ingeborg Psalter, after 1205. Tempera colors, gold leaf, and ink on parchment bound between pasteboard covered with brown calf, each leaf 12 3/16 x 8 5/8 in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. 66, fol. 56.
Irresistible
Among the many things that struck me in Tordis Ørjasæter‘s ‘personal history of the handicapped child in literature’, We Are Not Alone, was this description of Sigrid Undset, which passes on a childhood remembrance of Tordis’s husband Jo, whose father, the poet Tore Ørjasæter, was a close friend of Undset’s: ‘My husband Jo remembers how as a little boy he was lifted up by a very large, very adult person impossible to contradict, but not dangerous, to be placed in an armchair with a picture-book or some toy. Sigrid Undset was not one to crawl around to play with children or to utter baby-talk. In contrast she gave him, each Christmas, well-chosen sports equipment or books.’ Undset, wholly convinced that ‘maternity is life itself’, was unsentimental with regard to the task it represented. Thereby she has something weighty and original to say to our time.
Bl Niels Steensen
“By your endurance you will gain your souls”, says our Lord. Many of us will have ascertained that the times in our lives that have deeply formed us were not necessarily times at which we did lots of stuff, but times during which we endured through something difficult or hard: tensions or conflicts or uncertainty or whatever. Christ uses the melting pot as an image of salvation. It takes patience for all dross to be smelted away. But what remains is durable. The saint we commemorate examples this process. Niels Steensen, born in Copenhagen in 1638, was an internationally renowned physician. Having become a Catholic, he left his career to become a priest, later a bishop. Since for a while he was in charge of the archdiocese of Hamburg, with was then entrusted with the care of Catholics in Denmark and Norway, he was our bishop, too. His health was poor. He travelled ceaselessly without, for that reason, lessening his asceticism. His vision just became brighter. When he died at the age of 48 he was like a ripe pear, ready for picking. The scientist Steensen was sensitive to the beauty of creation. It touches me that he should have written: ‘Lovely is what we see; lovelier still is what we hold as true; loveliest of all is what we cannot comprehend.’
Christ the King C
2 Samuel 5.1-3: You shall be shepherd of my people Israel.
Colossians 1.12-20: He gave us a place in the kingdom of the Son.
Luke 23.35-43: Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom!
David’s anointing as Israel’s king in Hebron marked the end of a long, tough search for realistic government once the people was home again after 430 years in Egyptian exile, then 40 years’ wandering in the wilderness.
There was no historical precedent. Before the exile, ‘Israel’ had been the name of a person. Jacob received that name from the nocturnal angel that fought him at Jabbok and struck his hip out of joint (Genesis 32.22-30). ‘You have striven with God and with men’, the angel said. The name ‘Israel’ was bestowed as an honorific title. It means something like ‘God’s Champion’. God is subject in that name. Jacob is his honoured vassal.
The point matters.
So before the exile, ‘Israel’ was the name of a patriarch; then it was transferred to the patriarch’s nation. The concept of a nation is linked, historically and linguistically [natio > nasci], to blood ties. When Moses was called by God to his work of liberation, it was because God had ‘looked upon the sons of Israel’ (Exodus 2.25). It was his kin Moses referred to when he told Pharaoh, ‘Let my people go!‘ There were many of them: six hundred thousand men on foot, not counting the children. Then, in addition, a huge mixed crowd of all sorts of people (Exodus 12.37f.).
An assembly of such dimensions needed to be led, somehow. The Lord himself was their leader. When Israel had made it through the Red Sea and saw the chariots of Pharaoh sink ‘like a stone’, Miriam, Moses’s sister, sang a song we still sing at each Paschal Vigil. ‘The Lord‘, sings the song, will be king for ever and ever’ (Exodus 15.18). This was the basis of Israelite nationhood. The people was to be ruled by God.
The Law, revealed on Sinai, was the basis for the society that emerged. God called elect men, and some women, to implement it. The first was Moses, followed by Joshua. Then came Gideon, Debora, Samson, and other judges.
As Israel, now a people, settled, however, they felt like having a more concrete style of leadership. Round about them kings reigned. Some were magnificent. Royal might had advantages, that much was clear. A king could readily mobilise resources. As long as he had sons, there was a succession; one didn’t have the kerfuffle of finding new judges. In addition a king could reflect a degree of glory on his people. Israel’s judges lived modestly on the whole. They remained nomadic shepherds, following their flocks. Now the time had come, many people thought, for a bit of pomp and circumstance.
When Israel first demanded a king, the Lord God was wrathful. He explained that political might easily corrupts, that institutions tend to acquire tyrannical traits (1 Samuel 8.10-18). The people were unimpressed, and held their ground. ‘We want to be like other nations’, they exclaimed, ‘that our king may govern us and go before us’ (1 Samuel 8.20).
Then God said – I paraphrase only slightly – ‘Have it your way!’ (cf. 1 Samuel 8.22).
Saul, Israel’s first king, stands as an example of everything a ruler should not be: authoritarian, fearful, increasingly irrational. David had a dark side, too. Think of Bathsheba and poor Uriah! David learnt from his mistakes, however. He turned into something very rare: a devout and humble king. ‘Remember David and all his meekness‘, we sing in Psalm 132, which follows another Psalm, attributed to David, starting with the words: ‘O Lord, my heart is not exalted, my eyes are not raised high; I do not busy myself with things too great and too marvellous for me’ (Psalm 131.1).
By experience and grace, David turned into a king in God’s image, an instrument of God’s cause. As I said, such a phenomenon is rare. The kings in Judah’s and Israel’s lines who followed David’s example can be counted on one hand, even with an amputated finger or two.
This background is needed to see what it means to celebrate the feast of Christ the King, of whom it is said, in one of the antiphons for vespers tonight: ‘He will sit on the throne of David’.
The feast is not about political potency. When Jesus, at a certain point, realised that people ‘were about to come and take him by force to make him king’ in the worldly sense, he beat it. He ‘withdrew to the mountain by himself’ (John 6.15). He only accepted the royal title when he was about to be raised up on the cross. By pouring himself out he showed his glory.
God, who is almighty, does not suffer from jealousy. He has no status to defend before rivals, for he has none. His wish is to set us free from servitude so that we, freely serving him, may learn what freedom is. We are called now, as Israel was called then, to sing: ‘God is king for ever and ever!’ Thereby we ourselves are clothed, by grace, in royal dignity.
Pope Pius XI inaugurated the feast of Christ the King exactly a century ago, in the jubilee year 1925. What was then still called The Great War had been brought to an end seven years before, but peace was uneasy. Sabres were being rattled on all sides. Arms were being restocked. Ultra-nationalism made Europe tense. Pius XI did note, it is true, certain signs ‘of a more widespread and keener interest evinced in Christ and his Church’; but he recognised the risk that such interest could be held hostage by worldly pretension. So he bade the Church, and the world, raise their eyes towards Christ, the King, who reigns from the Tree and there displays his love, the criterion for the kingdom he founded, into which he calls us.
To honour Christ as king, wrote Pius XI, is above all to ensure that he may reign freely in my heart. That way my life is formed by his commandments, his presence. This is the sense of the solemnity we keep today. If Christ, the Prince of Peace, rules in us, we may be bearers and sources of his peace.
What the world needs now, more than any amount of talk, is an effective, clear-sighted, peace-bearing, truly Christian presence at its core.
Amen.
Mosaic from the cathedral in Monreale: William II is crowned by Christ. Christ alone is ‘King for ever’. Any exercise of earthly might is by delegation and for a while – that’s what earthly potentates so easily forget.
Colossians 1.12-20: He gave us a place in the kingdom of the Son.
Luke 23.35-43: Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom!
David’s anointing as Israel’s king in Hebron marked the end of a long, tough search for realistic government once the people was home again after 430 years in Egyptian exile, then 40 years’ wandering in the wilderness.
There was no historical precedent. Before the exile, ‘Israel’ had been the name of a person. Jacob received that name from the nocturnal angel that fought him at Jabbok and struck his hip out of joint (Genesis 32.22-30). ‘You have striven with God and with men’, the angel said. The name ‘Israel’ was bestowed as an honorific title. It means something like ‘God’s Champion’. God is subject in that name. Jacob is his honoured vassal.
The point matters.
So before the exile, ‘Israel’ was the name of a patriarch; then it was transferred to the patriarch’s nation. The concept of a nation is linked, historically and linguistically [natio > nasci], to blood ties. When Moses was called by God to his work of liberation, it was because God had ‘looked upon the sons of Israel’ (Exodus 2.25). It was his kin Moses referred to when he told Pharaoh, ‘Let my people go!‘ There were many of them: six hundred thousand men on foot, not counting the children. Then, in addition, a huge mixed crowd of all sorts of people (Exodus 12.37f.).
An assembly of such dimensions needed to be led, somehow. The Lord himself was their leader. When Israel had made it through the Red Sea and saw the chariots of Pharaoh sink ‘like a stone’, Miriam, Moses’s sister, sang a song we still sing at each Paschal Vigil. ‘The Lord‘, sings the song, will be king for ever and ever’ (Exodus 15.18). This was the basis of Israelite nationhood. The people was to be ruled by God.
The Law, revealed on Sinai, was the basis for the society that emerged. God called elect men, and some women, to implement it. The first was Moses, followed by Joshua. Then came Gideon, Debora, Samson, and other judges.
As Israel, now a people, settled, however, they felt like having a more concrete style of leadership. Round about them kings reigned. Some were magnificent. Royal might had advantages, that much was clear. A king could readily mobilise resources. As long as he had sons, there was a succession; one didn’t have the kerfuffle of finding new judges. In addition a king could reflect a degree of glory on his people. Israel’s judges lived modestly on the whole. They remained nomadic shepherds, following their flocks. Now the time had come, many people thought, for a bit of pomp and circumstance.
When Israel first demanded a king, the Lord God was wrathful. He explained that political might easily corrupts, that institutions tend to acquire tyrannical traits (1 Samuel 8.10-18). The people were unimpressed, and held their ground. ‘We want to be like other nations’, they exclaimed, ‘that our king may govern us and go before us’ (1 Samuel 8.20).
Then God said – I paraphrase only slightly – ‘Have it your way!’ (cf. 1 Samuel 8.22).
Saul, Israel’s first king, stands as an example of everything a ruler should not be: authoritarian, fearful, increasingly irrational. David had a dark side, too. Think of Bathsheba and poor Uriah! David learnt from his mistakes, however. He turned into something very rare: a devout and humble king. ‘Remember David and all his meekness‘, we sing in Psalm 132, which follows another Psalm, attributed to David, starting with the words: ‘O Lord, my heart is not exalted, my eyes are not raised high; I do not busy myself with things too great and too marvellous for me’ (Psalm 131.1).
By experience and grace, David turned into a king in God’s image, an instrument of God’s cause. As I said, such a phenomenon is rare. The kings in Judah’s and Israel’s lines who followed David’s example can be counted on one hand, even with an amputated finger or two.
This background is needed to see what it means to celebrate the feast of Christ the King, of whom it is said, in one of the antiphons for vespers tonight: ‘He will sit on the throne of David’.
The feast is not about political potency. When Jesus, at a certain point, realised that people ‘were about to come and take him by force to make him king’ in the worldly sense, he beat it. He ‘withdrew to the mountain by himself’ (John 6.15). He only accepted the royal title when he was about to be raised up on the cross. By pouring himself out he showed his glory.
God, who is almighty, does not suffer from jealousy. He has no status to defend before rivals, for he has none. His wish is to set us free from servitude so that we, freely serving him, may learn what freedom is. We are called now, as Israel was called then, to sing: ‘God is king for ever and ever!’ Thereby we ourselves are clothed, by grace, in royal dignity.
Pope Pius XI inaugurated the feast of Christ the King exactly a century ago, in the jubilee year 1925. What was then still called The Great War had been brought to an end seven years before, but peace was uneasy. Sabres were being rattled on all sides. Arms were being restocked. Ultra-nationalism made Europe tense. Pius XI did note, it is true, certain signs ‘of a more widespread and keener interest evinced in Christ and his Church’; but he recognised the risk that such interest could be held hostage by worldly pretension. So he bade the Church, and the world, raise their eyes towards Christ, the King, who reigns from the Tree and there displays his love, the criterion for the kingdom he founded, into which he calls us.
To honour Christ as king, wrote Pius XI, is above all to ensure that he may reign freely in my heart. That way my life is formed by his commandments, his presence. This is the sense of the solemnity we keep today. If Christ, the Prince of Peace, rules in us, we may be bearers and sources of his peace.
What the world needs now, more than any amount of talk, is an effective, clear-sighted, peace-bearing, truly Christian presence at its core.
Amen.
Mosaic from the cathedral in Monreale: William II is crowned by Christ. Christ alone is ‘King for ever’. Any exercise of earthly might is by delegation and for a while – that’s what earthly potentates so easily forget.
Erasmus Lecture
‘Transhumance, an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity since 2023, is by definition constant drifting across borders. If you are caught up in transhumance you do not stay behind a wall trying to work, or shut, out what people say and do on the other side; you move back-and-forth seeking sustenance in changing landscapes for yourself and your flock. Mireille Gansel develops the metaphor of transhumance in a twofold way. On the one hand, languages constitute pastures. Shepherded from one to the other is significant content — in a poem, novel, treatise, or confessional statement seeking new form. On the other hand, language itself can be thought of as a flock led from winter to summer grazing with the translator as its shepherd. Language, in this account, is a nomad reconciled to the transient nature of any ‘home’.’
From this year’s Erasmus Lecture, now available on YouTube.
From this year’s Erasmus Lecture, now available on YouTube.
Sr Anne-Lise RIP
Sister Anne-Lise Strøm was buried today. We are many who will miss her deeply. She was a fully given person. In a book of conversations she published with Brita Rosenberg in 1997, she described her departure from Oslo in 1961, when she set out for Lourdes to join the convent of enclosed Dominican nuns there, on a hill overlooking the sanctuary: ‘The train started moving. Her father ran alongside it crying out, ‘Anne! Write!’ He was weeping.’ It seemed as if this intelligent, enthusiastic young woman full of joie de vivre was lost to the world. Little did one know. Through her long, faithful monastic life, Sr Anne-Lise became the Catholic Church’s best known (and probably best loved) ambassador in Norway. She directed, taught, consoled, and encouraged countless people with her characteristic mixture of lucid realism and unshakable trust in the transforming power of God’s mercy. She was funny, full of self-irony; at the same time inscrutable, with her mind set on eternity. Grace and experience made her wise. She was a thoroughly loveable human being. May God grant her the hundredfold she herself so credibly embodied.
Desert Fathers 47
You can find this episode in video format here – a dedicated page – and pick it up in audio wherever you listen to podcasts. On YouTube, the full range of episodes can be found here.
About Abba Netras, the disciple of Abba Silvanos, it was said that he, as long as he lived in his cell on Mount Sinai, paced himself reasonably on account of the needs of the body. But when he became bishop of Pharan, he began to drive himself very hard. So his disciple said to him: ‘Abba, when we were in the desert, you did not practise this kind of asceticism.’ The elder said to him: ‘There we had the desert, and peace [hesychia], and poverty. I wished to manage my body in such a way that I would not fall ill and start looking for what I had not. Now, though, we have come into the world and are surrounded by many temptations. For that reason I chastise my body in order not to put to death the monk [in me]. And should I fall ill here, there will be somebody at hand to assist me.’
When illness came their way, the Fathers received it as a welcome guest, even as they opened their heart’s door hospitably to Sister Death, the pasch by which they would enter eternal life and know the fulfilment of their earthly striving. They believed in divine providence. It would not occur to them, if they were true to their habit, to murmur at any trial that came their way as gift. They would, however, remonstrate with anyone who, for want of prudence, brought harm upon himself or herself.
To visit the sick is a corporate work of mercy, a Gospel commandment. St Benedict prescribes it in his Rule as a monastic observance. If a monk in the Desert fell ill, his neighbours would be obliged to care for him. Abba Netras, for as long as he lived on Sinai, an inaccessible place, would spare his brethren such inconvenience. He lived therefore with moderation and did not take austerities too far, to spare himself worry and others trouble, thus to be able to live peacefully, offering up a constant sacrifice of praise in the very place where God had deigned to make his presence felt to the people of Israel. The hardships and graces of Sinai were sufficient to keep him, there, on the straight and narrow. There was no chance of indulging in luxury: life was materially poor. Spiritually, it was rich by virtue of the incomparable stillness the desert offers, teaching a man to become a hesychast.
Netras was not permitted to remain in this blessed state. Not in the form of sickness did providence visit him, but through a call, administered through holy Church, to a different state of life. Netras was made bishop of Pharan, the main urban centre of the Sinai peninsula in Roman times — the Wadi Feiran of modern Arabic. Compelled to descend from the mountain into the plain, he was obliged to tear himself away from the embrace of Rachel, a symbol of the contemplative life since Origen, to enter the fray that constitutes a bishop’s ministry, made up of countless daily demands and distractions, and necessarily exposed to a degree of worldliness.
In the context of this shift, Bishop Netras chose to organise life differently. He, who had been a paragon of reasonableness, started to practise strict fasts and vigils. One might have expected him to the opposite, assuming a grand public persona. Many would have expected him to do so. But instead of relaxing, he got tougher on himself. This is what caused the brother who lived with him in the bishop’s palace, even as he had shared his life on Sinai, to be thoughtful. He could not see the logic of Netras’s comportment, so asked: What, Father, is this new observance about?
Netras’s answer springs from both realism and self-knowledge. As long as his context of life rendered extravagance impossible, he did not need to look for supplementary mortification. The desert, in its poverty and quiet, had served as guarantor of monastic probity. His removal to the city changed all that. There was no longer a regular life to ensure an equilibrium of activity and prayer. Local grandees, such as they were, would invite him to parties. Some people would flatter him, others would deplore him. Staying spiritually on an even course, which on Sinai had felt almost automatic, was no longer easy. Netras experienced the need for props he had not required before. Consequently he took measures, keeping outward temptations in check by greater inward rigour. Explaining this to his brother, he said he did not wish to put to death the monk in himself. It was as a monk that he had been called to serve as bishop; for him to serve well, the monk must keep alive.
Netras does not moan about the part entrusted to him. He would no doubt have thought as Archbishop Cyril of Alexandria did when an abbot asked him: ‘Who is greater in his state of life, the likes of us, who have lots of brothers placed under our care whom we lead, each according to his need, towards salvation, or those who in desert places work out their own salvation?’ Cyril answered: ‘Why wedge apart Elijah and Moses, seeing that they were both well-pleasing to God?’ This exemplifies discernment of the kind the Fathers counselled: an ability to see things and situations as they are, without illusions but also without melodrama, trusting that God’s provident grace can draw blessings out of everything as long as we take right measures to stay faithful and attentive where we happen to be, keeping alive our deepest, truest self, the one that grows and blossoms out of God’s call.
The landscape around Mount Sinai. Wikimedia Commons.
About Abba Netras, the disciple of Abba Silvanos, it was said that he, as long as he lived in his cell on Mount Sinai, paced himself reasonably on account of the needs of the body. But when he became bishop of Pharan, he began to drive himself very hard. So his disciple said to him: ‘Abba, when we were in the desert, you did not practise this kind of asceticism.’ The elder said to him: ‘There we had the desert, and peace [hesychia], and poverty. I wished to manage my body in such a way that I would not fall ill and start looking for what I had not. Now, though, we have come into the world and are surrounded by many temptations. For that reason I chastise my body in order not to put to death the monk [in me]. And should I fall ill here, there will be somebody at hand to assist me.’
When illness came their way, the Fathers received it as a welcome guest, even as they opened their heart’s door hospitably to Sister Death, the pasch by which they would enter eternal life and know the fulfilment of their earthly striving. They believed in divine providence. It would not occur to them, if they were true to their habit, to murmur at any trial that came their way as gift. They would, however, remonstrate with anyone who, for want of prudence, brought harm upon himself or herself.
To visit the sick is a corporate work of mercy, a Gospel commandment. St Benedict prescribes it in his Rule as a monastic observance. If a monk in the Desert fell ill, his neighbours would be obliged to care for him. Abba Netras, for as long as he lived on Sinai, an inaccessible place, would spare his brethren such inconvenience. He lived therefore with moderation and did not take austerities too far, to spare himself worry and others trouble, thus to be able to live peacefully, offering up a constant sacrifice of praise in the very place where God had deigned to make his presence felt to the people of Israel. The hardships and graces of Sinai were sufficient to keep him, there, on the straight and narrow. There was no chance of indulging in luxury: life was materially poor. Spiritually, it was rich by virtue of the incomparable stillness the desert offers, teaching a man to become a hesychast.
Netras was not permitted to remain in this blessed state. Not in the form of sickness did providence visit him, but through a call, administered through holy Church, to a different state of life. Netras was made bishop of Pharan, the main urban centre of the Sinai peninsula in Roman times — the Wadi Feiran of modern Arabic. Compelled to descend from the mountain into the plain, he was obliged to tear himself away from the embrace of Rachel, a symbol of the contemplative life since Origen, to enter the fray that constitutes a bishop’s ministry, made up of countless daily demands and distractions, and necessarily exposed to a degree of worldliness.
In the context of this shift, Bishop Netras chose to organise life differently. He, who had been a paragon of reasonableness, started to practise strict fasts and vigils. One might have expected him to the opposite, assuming a grand public persona. Many would have expected him to do so. But instead of relaxing, he got tougher on himself. This is what caused the brother who lived with him in the bishop’s palace, even as he had shared his life on Sinai, to be thoughtful. He could not see the logic of Netras’s comportment, so asked: What, Father, is this new observance about?
Netras’s answer springs from both realism and self-knowledge. As long as his context of life rendered extravagance impossible, he did not need to look for supplementary mortification. The desert, in its poverty and quiet, had served as guarantor of monastic probity. His removal to the city changed all that. There was no longer a regular life to ensure an equilibrium of activity and prayer. Local grandees, such as they were, would invite him to parties. Some people would flatter him, others would deplore him. Staying spiritually on an even course, which on Sinai had felt almost automatic, was no longer easy. Netras experienced the need for props he had not required before. Consequently he took measures, keeping outward temptations in check by greater inward rigour. Explaining this to his brother, he said he did not wish to put to death the monk in himself. It was as a monk that he had been called to serve as bishop; for him to serve well, the monk must keep alive.
Netras does not moan about the part entrusted to him. He would no doubt have thought as Archbishop Cyril of Alexandria did when an abbot asked him: ‘Who is greater in his state of life, the likes of us, who have lots of brothers placed under our care whom we lead, each according to his need, towards salvation, or those who in desert places work out their own salvation?’ Cyril answered: ‘Why wedge apart Elijah and Moses, seeing that they were both well-pleasing to God?’ This exemplifies discernment of the kind the Fathers counselled: an ability to see things and situations as they are, without illusions but also without melodrama, trusting that God’s provident grace can draw blessings out of everything as long as we take right measures to stay faithful and attentive where we happen to be, keeping alive our deepest, truest self, the one that grows and blossoms out of God’s call.
The landscape around Mount Sinai. Wikimedia Commons.