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:
Intermission Coram Fratribus will take an Epiphanytide break. I thank you for your companionship through the site. May 2026 be blessed for you, truly an annus Domini. A good thing to read this season is Nathaniel Peter’s essay on Christmas joy, Read More
In Conversation During Christmastide we meditate on the fact that the Word has become flesh. It is a good time to think about what words are. Bishop Daniel Flores helps us to do this, and to think about translating words, in a Read More
The Really Real In a Christmas reflection, Nina Tarpley writes about dance as a way of knowing and expressing the Real: ‘Ballet, like all art, is able to represent reality, to express the true nature of our lives. In that aspect, it is Read More
Desert Fathers: Coda 
This last video of the Desert Fathers series is a conversation in which Jamie and I discuss some of the insight gained, some of the delight found in our shared exploration of a remarkable patrimony.
In the first episode I said:
My Read More
In the first episode I said:
My Read More
2. Sunday of Christmas Ecclesiasticus 24:1-2, 8-12: In Jerusalem I wield my authority.
Ephesians 1:3-6, 15-18: What rich glories he has promised.
John 1:1-18: We have seen his glory.
This is the third time since Christmas that we have heard this Gospel at Mass. If the Church Read More
Ephesians 1:3-6, 15-18: What rich glories he has promised.
John 1:1-18: We have seen his glory.
This is the third time since Christmas that we have heard this Gospel at Mass. If the Church Read More
Time’s Paces A friend sent this poem inscribed on a clock case in Chester Cathedral, a text attributed to Henry Twells. It gives food for thought on this first day of the annus Domini 2026.
When as a child I laughed and wept,
Time Read More
When as a child I laughed and wept,
Time Read More
Mary the Mother of God Numbers 6.22-27: May the Lord let his face shine on you!
Galatians 4.4-7: God sent his Son born of a Woman.
Luke 2.16-21: Mary pondered these things in her heart.
The liturgical year gives us several thematic feasts dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Read More
Galatians 4.4-7: God sent his Son born of a Woman.
Luke 2.16-21: Mary pondered these things in her heart.
The liturgical year gives us several thematic feasts dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Read More
Intermission
Coram Fratribus will take an Epiphanytide break. I thank you for your companionship through the site. May 2026 be blessed for you, truly an annus Domini. A good thing to read this season is Nathaniel Peter’s essay on Christmas joy, which also takes you to some wonderful music. Nathaniel cites Pieper: ‘For man cannot have the experience of receiving what is loved, unless the world and existence as a whole represent something good and therefore beloved to him.’ There is a task for all of us in that observation. Below you can hear the Carmelites of Tromsø sing a wonderful carol. ‘Sic nos Amantem, quis non redamaret?’
Happy new year!
+fr Erik Varden
https://coramfratribus.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/01-A-kom-alle-kristne.mp3
Happy new year!
+fr Erik Varden
https://coramfratribus.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/01-A-kom-alle-kristne.mp3
Epiphany
The protagonists of today’s feast are the wise men from the East and the Child in the manger. Their encounter has been so amply developed in poetry and art that it seems to us deeply familiar. The Magi’s oriental majesty, their splendid capes and headgear and precious gifts, lend extravagance to Christmas. We are right to rejoice in all this loveliness. God has assumed our nature. He takes it seriously, also in its sensuous and imaginative aspects. Everything kan become praise.
The scene from Bethlehem fulfils the vision of Isaiah: ‘The nations come to your light and kings to your dawning brightness.’ This promise is realised before our eyes. It is wonderful: God prepares our salvation by means of a scenography conceived in minute detail so as to give us reliable signs by which we may ascertain its accomplishment. Now the hour has come.
We rejoice in the radiance that issues from the manger. Full daylight, however, is more than we can bear. John says it categorically: ‘The light came into the world, but men preferred darkness to the light.’ That remains the case to this day. Through the gentleness and sweetness of Christmas blows a cold wind of rejection.
God knew it would be like this. The same Isaiah who prophesied Christ’s epiphany foresaw all that the Lord’s Suffering Servant would have to endure to enact his mission: ‘He was rejected, despised by people, a man of sorrows; one before whom people hide their faces, despised. And we counted him for nothing.’ The Child in the Manger is the Lamb of God. Above the stable roof we see the outline of a Cross.
It is a noble tradition that the Church, on this thirteenth day of Christmas, proclaims the date of Easter. We are reminded that God became man, not to create an atmosphere, but to engage, on our behalf, in battle against sin and death. We know what it cost him. Let’s be mindful of that when we kneel, alongside Melchior, Balthasar and Casper, before Mary’s Child. In the gifts offered by the three, the Church recognises mystical signs of Jesus’s passion and death.
In a hymn by Thomas Kingo we sing of ‘Joy and grief proceeding hand in hand‘. In the face of Jesus the two are one. We are reminded that life is like this. We needn’t fear the admixture. We needn’t rebel against it. What matters is to know that all has been born by our loving Saviour in order, next, to assume our part in his bearing, each of us according to our own special call.
The dawn Isaiah foresaw points towards the day. Let us choose what is of the day, putting behind us all that belongs to the night. God, who is Light, has come to make us light. That, too, is part of what Isaiah saw.
After worshipping the Son of God, the Magi returned to their homeland ‘by another way’. Their choice was pragmatically motivated: the angel had warned them of Herod’s plots. However, there is also deep symbolic truth in their new itinerary. An encounter with Jesus is transformative. One isn’t the same afterwards; it no long seems right to keep on walking the way one walked before. We yearn for something else on which we may struggle to put our finger.
To be a Christian is to live in this state of otherness, constantly looking for the right way. The Way, of course, has a name, a face. It reveals itself to us to us on Mary’s lap and here on this altar. Let us follow the Way with joy, faithfully, grateful for the fellowship we have in one another.
Gentile da Fabriano, Adoration of the Magi.
The scene from Bethlehem fulfils the vision of Isaiah: ‘The nations come to your light and kings to your dawning brightness.’ This promise is realised before our eyes. It is wonderful: God prepares our salvation by means of a scenography conceived in minute detail so as to give us reliable signs by which we may ascertain its accomplishment. Now the hour has come.
We rejoice in the radiance that issues from the manger. Full daylight, however, is more than we can bear. John says it categorically: ‘The light came into the world, but men preferred darkness to the light.’ That remains the case to this day. Through the gentleness and sweetness of Christmas blows a cold wind of rejection.
God knew it would be like this. The same Isaiah who prophesied Christ’s epiphany foresaw all that the Lord’s Suffering Servant would have to endure to enact his mission: ‘He was rejected, despised by people, a man of sorrows; one before whom people hide their faces, despised. And we counted him for nothing.’ The Child in the Manger is the Lamb of God. Above the stable roof we see the outline of a Cross.
It is a noble tradition that the Church, on this thirteenth day of Christmas, proclaims the date of Easter. We are reminded that God became man, not to create an atmosphere, but to engage, on our behalf, in battle against sin and death. We know what it cost him. Let’s be mindful of that when we kneel, alongside Melchior, Balthasar and Casper, before Mary’s Child. In the gifts offered by the three, the Church recognises mystical signs of Jesus’s passion and death.
In a hymn by Thomas Kingo we sing of ‘Joy and grief proceeding hand in hand‘. In the face of Jesus the two are one. We are reminded that life is like this. We needn’t fear the admixture. We needn’t rebel against it. What matters is to know that all has been born by our loving Saviour in order, next, to assume our part in his bearing, each of us according to our own special call.
The dawn Isaiah foresaw points towards the day. Let us choose what is of the day, putting behind us all that belongs to the night. God, who is Light, has come to make us light. That, too, is part of what Isaiah saw.
After worshipping the Son of God, the Magi returned to their homeland ‘by another way’. Their choice was pragmatically motivated: the angel had warned them of Herod’s plots. However, there is also deep symbolic truth in their new itinerary. An encounter with Jesus is transformative. One isn’t the same afterwards; it no long seems right to keep on walking the way one walked before. We yearn for something else on which we may struggle to put our finger.
To be a Christian is to live in this state of otherness, constantly looking for the right way. The Way, of course, has a name, a face. It reveals itself to us to us on Mary’s lap and here on this altar. Let us follow the Way with joy, faithfully, grateful for the fellowship we have in one another.
Gentile da Fabriano, Adoration of the Magi.
In Conversation
During Christmastide we meditate on the fact that the Word has become flesh. It is a good time to think about what words are. Bishop Daniel Flores helps us to do this, and to think about translating words, in a recent lecture. He envisages the incarnation as the Eternal Word’s self-translation. ‘The clarity of the sign that is Christ’s flesh is at the same time inherently enigmatic. This is so not because he could be more explicicitly present to us, but because humans can only perceive direct presence through the senses. We see who someone is and what they are about through how they present themselves to us. The Incarnation is thus an invitation to see through the expressive manifestation and rightly interpret the truth shown us through his flesh. There is no getting around this need for true interpretation of Christ; nor should we hope there were. This is the human way.’ You can read the full text here.
The Really Real
In a Christmas reflection, Nina Tarpley writes about dance as a way of knowing and expressing the Real: ‘Ballet, like all art, is able to represent reality, to express the true nature of our lives. In that aspect, it is profoundly theological. It makes visible the invisible and reminds us that the other world is not at all far from our own.’ She adds that it is all the more important to distinguish between good and bad art. Epistemological categories are at stake, not just aesthetic snobbery: ‘In a world that increasingly conforms itself to a false image of reality, beautiful art has become more precious than perhaps ever before. It is a reminder, in the deepest sense, of what is real, what story we are a part of, who we are, where we are going.’ I think of a poem by Dylan Thomas that someone sent me recently, having thought of it on reading this text by Emil Boyson in Chastity:
https://coramfratribus.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Dylan-Thomas-Danseuse.mp3
https://coramfratribus.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Dylan-Thomas-Danseuse.mp3
Desert Fathers: Coda
This last video of the Desert Fathers series is a conversation in which Jamie and I discuss some of the insight gained, some of the delight found in our shared exploration of a remarkable patrimony.
In the first episode I said:
My concern is not the scrutiny of ages past just for their own sake. My concern is with urgently personal, present issues: What is it to be a man and a Christian? Where is freedom? How can I fight my inner demons responsibly? How to be happy and a source of happiness to others? The Desert Fathers have precious advice, born of experience, to give us. They are not just ‘the fathers’ in a general sense; they can become our fathers, if we attend to them carefully, trustingly, as sons and daughters.
That claim has been borne out by the experience of thousands of women and men who have journeyed alongside us.
Below is a transcript provided by an ever generous Canadian Benedictine, who also transcribed our Q&A sessions throughout the year. Many thanks to him for his kindness!
***
Jamie Baxter: We’ve come a long way.
Bishop Varden: It’s been a long way in a short time.
Jamie Baxter: In a short time. I thought I’d start out by telling you a story about the day we first had our video conversation that ended up becoming this year-long series. I just moved into a new office in central Indiana and I was a little puzzled because outside of my window there was this very large picture of a hare, of a rabbit, that just stares at my new office window. I thought to myself that this rabbit meant something but I had no idea what it meant. And years later, not just the year we kind of discerned the series, but then the year doing the series together, it finally occurred to me in the chapter on Fortitude what the rabbit meant and it’s one of my favorite sayings from the episode on hunting dogs . It goes like this:
A hermit was asked how a watchful monk could prevent himself from being shocked if he saw others returning to the world. He replied a monk should remember hounds when they’re hunting a hare. One of them glimpses the hare and gives chase. The others merely see a running dog and run some way with him but then they get tired and go back to their tracks. Only the leading hound keeps up the chase until he catches the hare. He is not deterred by the others who give up and he thinks nothing of the cliffs or thickets or brambles. He’s often pricked and scratched by thorns but he keeps on until he catches the hare. So the man who runs after Jesus aims unceasingly at the cross and leaps over every obstacle in his way until he comes to the crucified.
Bishop Varden: That’s one of my favorite sayings as well.
Jamie Baxter: It took me a few years before I realized, oh this is what this hare meant and this is what the connection with Bishop Erik would become. I just thought I’d share that.
Bishop Varden: That’s a great framework and a very appropriate one. What’s this been like for you? I’ve been living with these texts for 25 years and more. I know you had read quite a lot of them already but you’ve read them with a different concentration and at a different depth this year. What’s been the personal impact?
Jamie Baxter: The Desert Fathers have had a loose impact upon everything that we’ve done at Exodus 90 over the last 10 years and upon its formation even originally in the seminary. But obviously a year-long study with you week by week has definitely deepened the encounter with these persons, these saints, these holy men and women of the desert. I think for me, I had an awakening to the faith at 14 or 15 that really changed my life, definitely through the influence of my father.
And so at the age of 34 now, I’ve been at it for about half my life and I’ve been at it for almost 20 years and I think it’s easy to think that you have the tradition, the scriptures and putting it into practice in your life kind of figured out after a time. And I think the thing that’s been so humbling encountering these spiritual giants of the desert is that so many of them towards the end of their life would say things like “I’ve only just begun.” And so I guess to put it succinctly, I found reading them to be not only challenging but so humbling because as far as perhaps we’ve come, there’s still so much farther to go from here.
Bishop Varden: I am struck by what you say about encountering them as persons because that’s something I’m touched by and inspired by – the immediacy of human presence that you can feel. Even though the stories are extremely succinct and extremely restrained when it comes to giving biographical detail, because the fathers just weren’t like that, they still stand before you, don’t they, as distinct personalities with characteristics and quirks and a sense of humor?
Jamie Baxter: Yeah, it’s so true. I think by the end of the year it felt like I could almost imagine a situation and put Moses or Arsenius, Antony, or Syncletica there and conjecture what they might say based on the personalities you observe. But there are other times where it can be very surprising how they challenge you.
I think about the humor you mentioned – Abba John going out to be an angel so that he can praise God unceasingly. He leaves his elder brother, goes out to the wilderness, returns after only a week, knocks on the door and his older brother says, “Who are you?” And what does he say?
“Oh, my brother John, he’s not here, he’s become an angel.” He says, “No, let me in, I’m back.”
The elder brother leaves him overnight and then confronts him the next morning and says, “Well, you are just a man and now it’s time to return to your work,” and he asks for forgiveness.
Bishop Varden: And at other times, you would expect them to be stern and censorious and they turn out to be extremely gentle, like that story of Abbot Poemen when he’s asked how he deals with a brother who falls asleep during the divine office and he says, “Well, I put his head on my knee so that he can rest better.”
Jamie Baxter: It’s so different from college seminary when you were up at 6 a.m. all together, a bunch of 18-year-olds trying to figure it out. Half of us were falling asleep every morning and it was a rule – hit the guy next to you if he starts to nod off.
Bishop Varden: Even in monastic choir, as I’ve known them, there have been a few elbows in sight.
Jamie Baxter: One of the things that just fascinated me is this distinction of personalities in the desert. I thought towards the beginning of the series, the way that you set it up after our exploration of Anthony, Arsenius and Moses and their differences is just something so noteworthy because I think when you think of the ascetic tradition, you can almost think wrongly that acts of asceticism are stereotypical and they’re rigid, rigidly applied to all without sensitivity to the uniqueness of the person and their own needs of their hearts and formation at that time. That’s something that really struck me – just how different the invitations from God were to these giants and how their responses to Him in trying to become faithful to their own callings were so different.
Bishop Varden: It is fascinating, and I was keen to – that’s why I suggested the framework that we were beginning and ending with a particular biography, the study of a life – to make that point precisely: that we’re not just talking about abstract principles, but the forming, like dough in the hands of a baker, of concrete lives in view of a transformation, which is a personal transformation. That’s not just about becoming a better human being, but about becoming a Christ-like human being and about living in an intimate union with Christ and in order to share that union with others.
But that’s an aspect of the Fathers I think it’s very important to keep stressing: although they withdrew from the world, they had a great care for the world. There is an apostolic intensity to their motivation and to their work. We see it in their hospitality. We see it also in their care for the church and in their alertness to human beings. They flee from people who seek them out just as curiosities, and as we’ve seen, they get up to all sorts of antics in order to just drive the curious away.
But when there is a person in need, they drop everything.
Jamie Baxter: And it’s summed up so well in just that simple phrase: to gain your brother is to gain God. And so, far from just being feats of great strenuous ascetic activity, all of it is oriented to the neighbour, and it’s a growth in holiness, supporting his own journey with where he is, and the word that he actually needs now, and learning to discern what he doesn’t need at different points.
But then also, there’s so much expansive room in experiencing the sayings. I’m not going to remember the particular Father, but he’s confronted with the challenge of all the feasts that would be thrown after the Lord’s day celebration, as it relates to the management of ascetic practice and fasting, and he says, “Ah, that’s a difficult thing. There’s no hard and fast rule.”
Discretion and discernment have to be applied personally. And there’s probably a lot of room for trial and error and adjustment to circumstances. I thought that was so perfectly demonstrated in that.
Bishop Varden: And constantly that great care not to hurt anyone, and not to let your own high principles be carried through at the expense of somebody else’s kindness or good intention.
Jamie Baxter: Yeah, letting down your own plan before hospitality, love shown from others. Even within our work at Exodus 90, I shared with you recently that that was a kind of new emphasis for us. I don’t think we’ve got it quite right to this point, but we applied it through the course of this year.
Ascetic practice matters. Pulling from your book Shattering of Loneliness, I’ve been thinking so much about that example of Seraphim of Sarov and the young man that approaches him, just not understanding the point of all the prayers, all the fasts, all the vigils, all the practice. What’s all this for?
And he anticipates his question and says, “My son, these are just means, indispensable means of something far more important, which is the acquisition of the Holy Ghost within you.” And as a result, it really helps situate the ascetic life as important as it is, as a means, but not as an end.
Bishop Varden: Any Christian life is always pursued in view of communion. It is not about cutting oneself off. If you withdraw for a while, it’s for the purpose of being more apt for communion.
And that’s what we’ve seen in the examples of Antony and Benedict particularly, but both of them withdrew from the world for a long time – Antony for about 20 years, Benedict for three, and then another bit. But it wasn’t because they despised the world or rejected it. It was because they had a preparation to go through and a maturing to experience and a hollowing out of their own heart and soul. And then when that work was done and they were ready, they are revealed.
And in either case, and this is very significant, it’s not the monk himself who says, “All right, I’ve made it now, I’m ready to face the world.” It’s providence, acting through circumstances and through human beings, that pulls them out of their seclusion and says, “Right, the time has come for a kind of epiphany,” a word that in its root sense means “a making visible”. What I find very striking in both cases, and their biographers make this explicit, is that the main result of their times of seclusion is a capacity to become life-giving to others.
Both enter their seclusion as young men and emerge from seclusion as fathers, as people apt to be fathers, to generate life in others. That’s always the point, because all of us are called to be life-giving and to live life-giving lives. I think I’ve cited this somewhere, but I don’t mind saying it again.
When I was considering monastic life, I had long conversations with an old, wise English Benedictine monk. He said to me so emphatically once, “You just have not got the right to live a sterile existence.” And he made that point very explicitly that consecrated celibacy is not about sterility. It is one way of surrendering yourself to become an instrument of God’s fruitfulness and fecundity and joy in creating things and creating relationships.
Jamie Baxter: The similarities between Antony and Benedict – I was so struck by how when they emerge, there is this sense of, as you said of Antony, he’s altogether equal to himself, one with the divinizing logos. And of Benedict, St. Gregory the Great, his biographer writes that Benedict emerged one with himself before his heavenly father. And that’s such an interesting way to sum up these periods of preparation and solitude.
Bishop Varden: And it speaks so powerfully to our time in which most of us most of the time feel deeply fragmented.
Jamie Baxter: We feel apart from ourselves, and if that’s where they were afterwards, I imagine they probably felt the same way as they approached their own solitudes.
Bishop Varden: Our circumstances are different, and I think we’re more exposed than they were. But the experience itself is a basically human one and unchanging. That’s why they’re not just antiquarian examples. They’re really prophetic and amiably fraternal, friendly and paternal voices for today.
Jamie Baxter: And Benedict too, despite all of his preparation and solitude coming together inside, he goes off to a community and it doesn’t go very well for him.
Bishop Varden: No, it’s a disaster to begin with.
Jamie Baxter: And so I think there’s something even in that for us, as we seek to live more integrated, whole lives, if we seek to bring together our dimensions before the Lord – that doesn’t just lead to this tranquil existence without care, worry or suffering.
Bishop Varden: But there’s another lesson to be drawn from that experience of Benedict when he spent three years at Subiaco in the cave where we were, and some hunters discover him and tell other people about him. And he’s known and there’s a monastery just up the hill and they think, “Oh, we have this aspiring, buddingly famous young fellow. He would be a distinguished superior for us.”
So they ask him to come, but then discover that Benedict sets a standard which isn’t quite the one they’re used to. And so after a while, they just want to get rid of him. And the situation resolves itself peacefully.
Benedict withdraws, the community has acted iniquitously, but certainly that experience will also have made Benedict think. And I think that’s interesting because it makes me think of an analogous example in the life of St Bernard. When Bernard became the abbot of Clairvaux as a very young man, he was extremely strict with his brothers and with himself.
In fact, he was so strict that he had to take a sort of sabbatical year to withdraw into a cottage near the property, just to get his health right, because he’d been driving himself too far and he suffered the consequences for the rest of his life. He had a ruined digestion. But he also realized that, in fact, he had been a bit ruthless with regard to the brothers: he’d been so keen on principles.
And that experience of weakness and an ability also to hear the stories of the brothers and how they had found him, made him adjust his own way of being a superior, being a teacher, being a father, and made him more humane. And I think that’s another thing that the fathers teach us – that it’s all very well to have high and exalted ideals, but they must be communicable. So we must find a way of transmitting them that other people can actually understand, be enthused by and helped by.
And that will call for a degree of discretion, which is not a matter of compromising ideals, but admitting that growth in virtue and spirituality and Christian living, life in the Holy Spirit, takes time. And the fathers, and we’ve seen lots of examples of that, teach us that again and again. And that’s another lesson which is really important for today, I think.
Jamie Baxter: That’s right. And just how attractive seeing people like that is. And that’s why Antony, despite being all alone, these deserts become cities and why Benedict continues to draw followers to himself, or even in his solitude, visitors both sent from God and those who stumble upon him, the shepherds who find in him a servant of God.
So there’s something about this kind of transformation, this arrival at oneself and who you’re created to be, that is so attractive to others who want to be like that, not as a clone, but in their own way. And that’s where the discretion is certainly required. So a question I had for you, Bishop Erik, is you’ve lived these sayings seriously, obviously.
Bishop Varden: Well, not necessarily very well! Confronting them, I’m just so conscious of the sheer mediocrity of my own response. But that’s why it’s important to keep confronting them.
Jamie Baxter: I wanted to ask what this time through the sayings stood out to you. Was there a saying or a theme that struck you differently than in past readings?
Bishop Varden: Obviously, I’ve read these texts for myself. I’ve read them as material for teaching in the monastery. But this time it’s been, thanks to your invitation and thanks to this new setting – first for the Exodus community, which was what we originally envisaged, and then it turned out that the project actually had a broader appeal than we first thought.
And so we widened it up. But it’s been exciting and very joyful for me to try and communicate the sayings in a way that will speak concretely and succinctly to a Christian endeavor outside a monastic context. And I think one thing that has struck me with particular force during these months has been just the universal applicability of the desert wisdom.
And that it isn’t just a niche existence, but what they show us is really an engagement with the fundamental terms of human and Christian life that everyone’s got to deal with.
Jamie Baxter: We visited together in person before we began the series at a Cistercian abbey in Dallas, and it was there that you asked, “Hey, pick a saying and I’ll give you a sample teaching, and we’ll just see if we’re on the right track.” And at the time, we had committed to reading the systematic collection. I bought the wrong book.
I bought the alphabetical collection. For any listeners who may have made that mistake, I made the same one. But right at the beginning was a saying from Abba Anthony about a man in the city that was revealed to him to be his equal, who gave everything he had beyond his needs to the poor, and sang the Sanctus every day with the angels.
And that was something that just captivated me. And I asked you to do the sample teaching, which made its way into the series as well – that these ideals are not to be relegated to times past, and they’re not monopolized by those in religious life. There is so much to receive and to learn and to commit to in our affairs in the world for those of us who are lay people in the world.
So just seeing that in the sayings was the permission I needed – okay, there’s so much for me here. I need to take this very seriously. This isn’t just for others.
Bishop Varden: And another thing that I’ve been struck by is the energy. When I was in my early 20s, I was visiting a monastery in France where there was an old monk dying. I never met him, but I’d heard stories about him.
He’d lived an exemplary monastic life for a long, long time. And one of the brothers in the novitiate had gone to see him in the infirmary to ask, quite like the young monks in the desert, for a word. Here is this monk about to leave this life with the perspective that entails on his earthly existence, and to ask, “What do I need to be a true monk?” And this monk had been quite an austere fellow, so he was prepared for anything and for counsels on mortification.
So he went to him in the infirmary and asked, “Father, what do I need to become a real monk?” And this old man rose up a little bit from his pillow and looked him in the eye and said, “Enthusiasm,” which is just such a great answer. And I think that really is the spirit that infuses these sayings.
And I’d like to acknowledge a reference that I’ve made explicitly two or three times in the series, but I’ve been helped to reread the sayings by the penetrating insights of Helen Waddell, whose writings have really accompanied me very closely over the past couple of years. She was an Irish textual scholar, not a Catholic, she was a Presbyterian, but she’d read and lived with this particular patrimony and the entire patristic and medieval patrimony.
She worked as a translator and a historian of texts, and she had read all of the Patrologia Latina, and she just took it for granted that in order to say anything about anyone, one would do that. But her little book on The Desert Fathers is really very precious. And she has a knack for bringing out the joyfulness and the zest and the desire to share good things that really permeates this tradition and makes it so attractive.
And my hope is that through the work we’ve done in our conversations, other people will also find it attractive and consider this way of life, because it’s a great life. And the monastic life is not something that just pertains to ages past, but it’s alive and of essential importance now to the mission and to the equilibrium of the Church. And that’s why I’m also delighted that we’re able to make some of our recordings in active monastic communities to communicate visually the continuation of this tradition and to show people that, hey, this is an option you should consider.
Jamie Baxter: Before we had met in person, I had heard you referred to as a Benedictine, as a Cistercian, and as a Trappist, all three. So when we finally met in person, I was like, okay, who is he? And I realized all of these traditions obviously unite.
Obviously, the Cistercians being a reform of the Benedictines, the Trappists being a reform of the Cistercians. But one of the things you’ve made really clear is how these traditions are in continuity with the spirit of the desert. And like you just said, many are called today to take that step into discernment.
As someone who spent six years in formation and ultimately discerned that I had a task that was different and in the world, I just want to so strongly encourage others to take a step. And as you said it so beautifully in one episode, the providence of God is infallible, and you don’t quite know what you’re stepping into when you make a step into a formation process. But I know for me, I look back on those six years as something that I cherish, true treasures that have shaped everything about how I live my life now as a husband, as a father, certainly the work that we do with men all around the world.
And I just want to be an encouragement to venture a bit if that’s been stirred up listening to this series. Bishop Erik, I was wondering if you could say a little bit more for our listeners on why not only we chose Antony, but why we chose to end with Saint Benedict as a figure and the places that we journeyed to, which were very important and significant sites in his life.
Bishop Varden: Well, something I’ve been very keen to communicate is the continuity between the Eastern monastic tradition and its Western form. Because we can so easily drive a wedge between East and West, that is not necessarily helpful. One of the reasons I’ve often referred to the Rule of Benedict and sometimes to his life in expanding the sayings from the desert collections is to show their applicability within this regular framework.
Well, to begin with, it just seemed like a bit of a dream to go to the foundational sites and record. But then it ended up being possible. And I’m so happy that we could go to Subiaco and Monte Cassino and see the concrete examples of what a desert might look like, because a desert isn’t necessarily made up of sand.
You made the point right at the beginning of the series that the modern city is in many ways a desert. But also the way Benedict descends almost into the bowels of the earth and encloses himself in this cave to get ready. And then when he is called forth from it, takes his first disciples and goes where?
Well, up on the mountain. And we could see that view from Monte Cassino and have that sense – even though the hill itself isn’t very tall, because the Campania is pretty much at sea level, it is extremely imposing and you can see Monte Cassino from miles away.
So I was keen to show that this tradition is alive and it’s alive in a monastery near you.
Jamie Baxter: And you can go there. Maybe enter there.
Bishop Varden: Exactly.
Jamie Baxter: For me, I had honestly never been either to Subiaco or Monte Cassino before, despite a couple of trips to Italy over the years. And I got to experience firsthand on a first impression the different geographies of these places, which made the significance of them for Benedict obvious to the senses, even. And it was a great privilege.
Bishop Varden: And I think it’s so important and I’m delighted that we could go, as we did, straight from Subiaco to Monte Cassino, because the topography says so much about the spiritual journey.
Jamie Baxter: I wanted to ask a little bit about your preparation for our series, but also month by month, just what went behind the scenes into making these teachings come to life.
Bishop Varden: Well, I would first reread the texts and think about them and I would mark a few possible examples for elaboration. Then I would just let them rest in the back of my mind, pray over them and then choose one, translate it and expand it. So typically I would set aside a day or two and I would translate the saying in the evening, sleep on it, get up in the morning, rework the translation and then expand it.
One of the quite enjoyable challenges of this particular task is that the episodes need to be more or less the same length. So my texts needed to be the same length. So it was a journalistic task in some ways, because I knew I had – you will have noticed this on the text that I sent you – I’d set the text format on my computer in such a way that two pages amounted to about 850, 860 words. I would not permit myself to exceed that limit.
So whatever I wanted to say would need to fit into two pages in the format I defined. I would write that, then rework that first section, then go on to the next one. As we worked through those 10 chapters, my endeavor was not to repeat themes I had dealt with explicitly elsewhere.
Some of my choices would be conditioned by other texts already chosen. But my aim was to present a fairly coherent whole that would give a responsible sample of each chapter and give a sense of what the fathers had to say about that, and at the same time provide just a continuous pedagogy. We share the hope that this project will also be available in book form.
I tried to maintain an authorial attention and structure my choices and my developments in such a way that the ensemble will fit together in the end as a readable book.
Jamie Baxter: And that’s something our listeners can hopefully look forward to. I know that’s been a common email I’ve gotten. Will this be a book?
Yeah, we hope so. At least for me, as short as my little introductions and outros are in the episodes, it took a lot more work than you might think to prepare those and get ready for them. Receiving your teachings month by month was easily my favorite work, every single time.
Bishop Varden: What about you? How did you prepare?
Jamie Baxter: Sleep is also a really important part of my preparation because the first month I tried to just read all this stuff in one sitting and get it all done – both the sayings themselves, the broader chapter, then the selections, and then your teachings upon them. They needed a lot more time.
So what I would do is typically read a chapter on a Monday, sleep on it, read your teachings and your translations of the sayings on a Tuesday, and then on Wednesday – okay, I’ve had two nights to kind of sink into this. I have my thoughts turning upon them and what they mean for me, and then do my best to set them up, but not in a way that gets ahead of them, but then also to try to summarize as well as I can. One gift I just wanted to tell you was, after my time in formation, I’d say one of the wounds that I had was that that was the time where I read philosophy and theology very seriously, and now that I’m out in the world, it’s time for me to build something that works.
It was something that I thought to myself, and that’s not all wrong, but we have a theologian on our team, and we work with priests and religious around the world to do our own writing for our formation, but I haven’t done much of that myself, and your series forced me to do two things. One, seriously consider these texts and apply them, remembering my passion honestly in some ways for theology in general and writing as well. But then also I’ve stayed so far behind the scenes at Exodus. Most guys have no idea who I am, and the series was like, “Hey, I need somebody to introduce this and to lead it out.”
I was like, “Oh, well, I guess that has to be me,” and those were two, I would say honestly, healing graces that came from this for me personally.
Bishop Varden: It’s your emerging from the fortress.
Jamie Baxter: Well, hopefully a little equal to myself. Maybe a little – I need to gain a little bit more weight with some listeners, but those are just two gifts I wanted to share. And then I also just wanted to wrap up and say, in the beginning we envisaged this as you and us, for the guys, the Exodus men around the world. I’m just so grateful for EWTN who came and elevated this whole experience.
Bishop Varden: They really have been wonderful.
Jamie Baxter: Well It really would have been just a shadow of what it has been, had it not been for Paul from EWTN Norway, but also Anthony Johnson at EWTN Rome, who is such a master craftsman. My heart goes out to them, and it’s just filled with gratitude for those men among others who have helped at different stages for this to become what it has.
Bishop Varden: Absolutely. It’s been a true collaboration. And that has added something crucial, because the teachings of the Fathers are all dialectic in the sense of being conversational, and because we’ve had this collaboration between basically three different agencies, there has been exchange upon exchange as a structural part of the preparation for each episode and a sense of the whole. And that dialogical nature of our proceedings has added something really precious to the way in which it’s developed.
Jamie Baxter: And it’s been so simple too. And it’s been nice and enjoyable. Bishop Erik, thank you so much.
I just – one image that has been seared into me, and it was from early on, but I’ve come back to it time and again, is the themes and images of light and fire in the Sayings. And just from one of your books where you talk about the incandescence to which we’re called. I can’t help but just reflect upon Arsenius, who’s stumbled upon by a neighbour who finds him in his cell all alone appearing as though a flame, and he knocks on the door. Arsenius tries to hide the grace that he has, but for me it’s been this call to more, that we’re called to become flames, places in which God’s glory dwells, on fire and fruitful.
That’s a lasting image that I’ll take from this time together.
Bishop Varden: I think that’s a pretty good summing up, actually. Remember you’re called to more.
Jamie Baxter: Still more.
Bishop Varden: Still more. Absolutely, and that’s been the great joy of this work we’ve done together. The opportunity just to share precious things, in the hope that they will nourish and delight others.
So, thank you for the opportunity.
Jamie Baxter: It has been such a gift for me personally, for our whole team, for so many listeners who we have the great fortune of being in touch with, to journey with you as a teacher. And in many ways for me, I always felt like I got to be the first listener, disciple of your teaching, and I’m so grateful for the time, the prayer, and all the experience you’ve offered and applied to us, and I know it’s blessed so many people, and I pray for them, and I just wanted to thank you.
Bishop Varden: It’s been a privilege for me! And the journey continues.
Jamie Baxter: The journey continues.
In the first episode I said:
My concern is not the scrutiny of ages past just for their own sake. My concern is with urgently personal, present issues: What is it to be a man and a Christian? Where is freedom? How can I fight my inner demons responsibly? How to be happy and a source of happiness to others? The Desert Fathers have precious advice, born of experience, to give us. They are not just ‘the fathers’ in a general sense; they can become our fathers, if we attend to them carefully, trustingly, as sons and daughters.
That claim has been borne out by the experience of thousands of women and men who have journeyed alongside us.
Below is a transcript provided by an ever generous Canadian Benedictine, who also transcribed our Q&A sessions throughout the year. Many thanks to him for his kindness!
***
Jamie Baxter: We’ve come a long way.
Bishop Varden: It’s been a long way in a short time.
Jamie Baxter: In a short time. I thought I’d start out by telling you a story about the day we first had our video conversation that ended up becoming this year-long series. I just moved into a new office in central Indiana and I was a little puzzled because outside of my window there was this very large picture of a hare, of a rabbit, that just stares at my new office window. I thought to myself that this rabbit meant something but I had no idea what it meant. And years later, not just the year we kind of discerned the series, but then the year doing the series together, it finally occurred to me in the chapter on Fortitude what the rabbit meant and it’s one of my favorite sayings from the episode on hunting dogs . It goes like this:
A hermit was asked how a watchful monk could prevent himself from being shocked if he saw others returning to the world. He replied a monk should remember hounds when they’re hunting a hare. One of them glimpses the hare and gives chase. The others merely see a running dog and run some way with him but then they get tired and go back to their tracks. Only the leading hound keeps up the chase until he catches the hare. He is not deterred by the others who give up and he thinks nothing of the cliffs or thickets or brambles. He’s often pricked and scratched by thorns but he keeps on until he catches the hare. So the man who runs after Jesus aims unceasingly at the cross and leaps over every obstacle in his way until he comes to the crucified.
Bishop Varden: That’s one of my favorite sayings as well.
Jamie Baxter: It took me a few years before I realized, oh this is what this hare meant and this is what the connection with Bishop Erik would become. I just thought I’d share that.
Bishop Varden: That’s a great framework and a very appropriate one. What’s this been like for you? I’ve been living with these texts for 25 years and more. I know you had read quite a lot of them already but you’ve read them with a different concentration and at a different depth this year. What’s been the personal impact?
Jamie Baxter: The Desert Fathers have had a loose impact upon everything that we’ve done at Exodus 90 over the last 10 years and upon its formation even originally in the seminary. But obviously a year-long study with you week by week has definitely deepened the encounter with these persons, these saints, these holy men and women of the desert. I think for me, I had an awakening to the faith at 14 or 15 that really changed my life, definitely through the influence of my father.
And so at the age of 34 now, I’ve been at it for about half my life and I’ve been at it for almost 20 years and I think it’s easy to think that you have the tradition, the scriptures and putting it into practice in your life kind of figured out after a time. And I think the thing that’s been so humbling encountering these spiritual giants of the desert is that so many of them towards the end of their life would say things like “I’ve only just begun.” And so I guess to put it succinctly, I found reading them to be not only challenging but so humbling because as far as perhaps we’ve come, there’s still so much farther to go from here.
Bishop Varden: I am struck by what you say about encountering them as persons because that’s something I’m touched by and inspired by – the immediacy of human presence that you can feel. Even though the stories are extremely succinct and extremely restrained when it comes to giving biographical detail, because the fathers just weren’t like that, they still stand before you, don’t they, as distinct personalities with characteristics and quirks and a sense of humor?
Jamie Baxter: Yeah, it’s so true. I think by the end of the year it felt like I could almost imagine a situation and put Moses or Arsenius, Antony, or Syncletica there and conjecture what they might say based on the personalities you observe. But there are other times where it can be very surprising how they challenge you.
I think about the humor you mentioned – Abba John going out to be an angel so that he can praise God unceasingly. He leaves his elder brother, goes out to the wilderness, returns after only a week, knocks on the door and his older brother says, “Who are you?” And what does he say?
“Oh, my brother John, he’s not here, he’s become an angel.” He says, “No, let me in, I’m back.”
The elder brother leaves him overnight and then confronts him the next morning and says, “Well, you are just a man and now it’s time to return to your work,” and he asks for forgiveness.
Bishop Varden: And at other times, you would expect them to be stern and censorious and they turn out to be extremely gentle, like that story of Abbot Poemen when he’s asked how he deals with a brother who falls asleep during the divine office and he says, “Well, I put his head on my knee so that he can rest better.”
Jamie Baxter: It’s so different from college seminary when you were up at 6 a.m. all together, a bunch of 18-year-olds trying to figure it out. Half of us were falling asleep every morning and it was a rule – hit the guy next to you if he starts to nod off.
Bishop Varden: Even in monastic choir, as I’ve known them, there have been a few elbows in sight.
Jamie Baxter: One of the things that just fascinated me is this distinction of personalities in the desert. I thought towards the beginning of the series, the way that you set it up after our exploration of Anthony, Arsenius and Moses and their differences is just something so noteworthy because I think when you think of the ascetic tradition, you can almost think wrongly that acts of asceticism are stereotypical and they’re rigid, rigidly applied to all without sensitivity to the uniqueness of the person and their own needs of their hearts and formation at that time. That’s something that really struck me – just how different the invitations from God were to these giants and how their responses to Him in trying to become faithful to their own callings were so different.
Bishop Varden: It is fascinating, and I was keen to – that’s why I suggested the framework that we were beginning and ending with a particular biography, the study of a life – to make that point precisely: that we’re not just talking about abstract principles, but the forming, like dough in the hands of a baker, of concrete lives in view of a transformation, which is a personal transformation. That’s not just about becoming a better human being, but about becoming a Christ-like human being and about living in an intimate union with Christ and in order to share that union with others.
But that’s an aspect of the Fathers I think it’s very important to keep stressing: although they withdrew from the world, they had a great care for the world. There is an apostolic intensity to their motivation and to their work. We see it in their hospitality. We see it also in their care for the church and in their alertness to human beings. They flee from people who seek them out just as curiosities, and as we’ve seen, they get up to all sorts of antics in order to just drive the curious away.
But when there is a person in need, they drop everything.
Jamie Baxter: And it’s summed up so well in just that simple phrase: to gain your brother is to gain God. And so, far from just being feats of great strenuous ascetic activity, all of it is oriented to the neighbour, and it’s a growth in holiness, supporting his own journey with where he is, and the word that he actually needs now, and learning to discern what he doesn’t need at different points.
But then also, there’s so much expansive room in experiencing the sayings. I’m not going to remember the particular Father, but he’s confronted with the challenge of all the feasts that would be thrown after the Lord’s day celebration, as it relates to the management of ascetic practice and fasting, and he says, “Ah, that’s a difficult thing. There’s no hard and fast rule.”
Discretion and discernment have to be applied personally. And there’s probably a lot of room for trial and error and adjustment to circumstances. I thought that was so perfectly demonstrated in that.
Bishop Varden: And constantly that great care not to hurt anyone, and not to let your own high principles be carried through at the expense of somebody else’s kindness or good intention.
Jamie Baxter: Yeah, letting down your own plan before hospitality, love shown from others. Even within our work at Exodus 90, I shared with you recently that that was a kind of new emphasis for us. I don’t think we’ve got it quite right to this point, but we applied it through the course of this year.
Ascetic practice matters. Pulling from your book Shattering of Loneliness, I’ve been thinking so much about that example of Seraphim of Sarov and the young man that approaches him, just not understanding the point of all the prayers, all the fasts, all the vigils, all the practice. What’s all this for?
And he anticipates his question and says, “My son, these are just means, indispensable means of something far more important, which is the acquisition of the Holy Ghost within you.” And as a result, it really helps situate the ascetic life as important as it is, as a means, but not as an end.
Bishop Varden: Any Christian life is always pursued in view of communion. It is not about cutting oneself off. If you withdraw for a while, it’s for the purpose of being more apt for communion.
And that’s what we’ve seen in the examples of Antony and Benedict particularly, but both of them withdrew from the world for a long time – Antony for about 20 years, Benedict for three, and then another bit. But it wasn’t because they despised the world or rejected it. It was because they had a preparation to go through and a maturing to experience and a hollowing out of their own heart and soul. And then when that work was done and they were ready, they are revealed.
And in either case, and this is very significant, it’s not the monk himself who says, “All right, I’ve made it now, I’m ready to face the world.” It’s providence, acting through circumstances and through human beings, that pulls them out of their seclusion and says, “Right, the time has come for a kind of epiphany,” a word that in its root sense means “a making visible”. What I find very striking in both cases, and their biographers make this explicit, is that the main result of their times of seclusion is a capacity to become life-giving to others.
Both enter their seclusion as young men and emerge from seclusion as fathers, as people apt to be fathers, to generate life in others. That’s always the point, because all of us are called to be life-giving and to live life-giving lives. I think I’ve cited this somewhere, but I don’t mind saying it again.
When I was considering monastic life, I had long conversations with an old, wise English Benedictine monk. He said to me so emphatically once, “You just have not got the right to live a sterile existence.” And he made that point very explicitly that consecrated celibacy is not about sterility. It is one way of surrendering yourself to become an instrument of God’s fruitfulness and fecundity and joy in creating things and creating relationships.
Jamie Baxter: The similarities between Antony and Benedict – I was so struck by how when they emerge, there is this sense of, as you said of Antony, he’s altogether equal to himself, one with the divinizing logos. And of Benedict, St. Gregory the Great, his biographer writes that Benedict emerged one with himself before his heavenly father. And that’s such an interesting way to sum up these periods of preparation and solitude.
Bishop Varden: And it speaks so powerfully to our time in which most of us most of the time feel deeply fragmented.
Jamie Baxter: We feel apart from ourselves, and if that’s where they were afterwards, I imagine they probably felt the same way as they approached their own solitudes.
Bishop Varden: Our circumstances are different, and I think we’re more exposed than they were. But the experience itself is a basically human one and unchanging. That’s why they’re not just antiquarian examples. They’re really prophetic and amiably fraternal, friendly and paternal voices for today.
Jamie Baxter: And Benedict too, despite all of his preparation and solitude coming together inside, he goes off to a community and it doesn’t go very well for him.
Bishop Varden: No, it’s a disaster to begin with.
Jamie Baxter: And so I think there’s something even in that for us, as we seek to live more integrated, whole lives, if we seek to bring together our dimensions before the Lord – that doesn’t just lead to this tranquil existence without care, worry or suffering.
Bishop Varden: But there’s another lesson to be drawn from that experience of Benedict when he spent three years at Subiaco in the cave where we were, and some hunters discover him and tell other people about him. And he’s known and there’s a monastery just up the hill and they think, “Oh, we have this aspiring, buddingly famous young fellow. He would be a distinguished superior for us.”
So they ask him to come, but then discover that Benedict sets a standard which isn’t quite the one they’re used to. And so after a while, they just want to get rid of him. And the situation resolves itself peacefully.
Benedict withdraws, the community has acted iniquitously, but certainly that experience will also have made Benedict think. And I think that’s interesting because it makes me think of an analogous example in the life of St Bernard. When Bernard became the abbot of Clairvaux as a very young man, he was extremely strict with his brothers and with himself.
In fact, he was so strict that he had to take a sort of sabbatical year to withdraw into a cottage near the property, just to get his health right, because he’d been driving himself too far and he suffered the consequences for the rest of his life. He had a ruined digestion. But he also realized that, in fact, he had been a bit ruthless with regard to the brothers: he’d been so keen on principles.
And that experience of weakness and an ability also to hear the stories of the brothers and how they had found him, made him adjust his own way of being a superior, being a teacher, being a father, and made him more humane. And I think that’s another thing that the fathers teach us – that it’s all very well to have high and exalted ideals, but they must be communicable. So we must find a way of transmitting them that other people can actually understand, be enthused by and helped by.
And that will call for a degree of discretion, which is not a matter of compromising ideals, but admitting that growth in virtue and spirituality and Christian living, life in the Holy Spirit, takes time. And the fathers, and we’ve seen lots of examples of that, teach us that again and again. And that’s another lesson which is really important for today, I think.
Jamie Baxter: That’s right. And just how attractive seeing people like that is. And that’s why Antony, despite being all alone, these deserts become cities and why Benedict continues to draw followers to himself, or even in his solitude, visitors both sent from God and those who stumble upon him, the shepherds who find in him a servant of God.
So there’s something about this kind of transformation, this arrival at oneself and who you’re created to be, that is so attractive to others who want to be like that, not as a clone, but in their own way. And that’s where the discretion is certainly required. So a question I had for you, Bishop Erik, is you’ve lived these sayings seriously, obviously.
Bishop Varden: Well, not necessarily very well! Confronting them, I’m just so conscious of the sheer mediocrity of my own response. But that’s why it’s important to keep confronting them.
Jamie Baxter: I wanted to ask what this time through the sayings stood out to you. Was there a saying or a theme that struck you differently than in past readings?
Bishop Varden: Obviously, I’ve read these texts for myself. I’ve read them as material for teaching in the monastery. But this time it’s been, thanks to your invitation and thanks to this new setting – first for the Exodus community, which was what we originally envisaged, and then it turned out that the project actually had a broader appeal than we first thought.
And so we widened it up. But it’s been exciting and very joyful for me to try and communicate the sayings in a way that will speak concretely and succinctly to a Christian endeavor outside a monastic context. And I think one thing that has struck me with particular force during these months has been just the universal applicability of the desert wisdom.
And that it isn’t just a niche existence, but what they show us is really an engagement with the fundamental terms of human and Christian life that everyone’s got to deal with.
Jamie Baxter: We visited together in person before we began the series at a Cistercian abbey in Dallas, and it was there that you asked, “Hey, pick a saying and I’ll give you a sample teaching, and we’ll just see if we’re on the right track.” And at the time, we had committed to reading the systematic collection. I bought the wrong book.
I bought the alphabetical collection. For any listeners who may have made that mistake, I made the same one. But right at the beginning was a saying from Abba Anthony about a man in the city that was revealed to him to be his equal, who gave everything he had beyond his needs to the poor, and sang the Sanctus every day with the angels.
And that was something that just captivated me. And I asked you to do the sample teaching, which made its way into the series as well – that these ideals are not to be relegated to times past, and they’re not monopolized by those in religious life. There is so much to receive and to learn and to commit to in our affairs in the world for those of us who are lay people in the world.
So just seeing that in the sayings was the permission I needed – okay, there’s so much for me here. I need to take this very seriously. This isn’t just for others.
Bishop Varden: And another thing that I’ve been struck by is the energy. When I was in my early 20s, I was visiting a monastery in France where there was an old monk dying. I never met him, but I’d heard stories about him.
He’d lived an exemplary monastic life for a long, long time. And one of the brothers in the novitiate had gone to see him in the infirmary to ask, quite like the young monks in the desert, for a word. Here is this monk about to leave this life with the perspective that entails on his earthly existence, and to ask, “What do I need to be a true monk?” And this monk had been quite an austere fellow, so he was prepared for anything and for counsels on mortification.
So he went to him in the infirmary and asked, “Father, what do I need to become a real monk?” And this old man rose up a little bit from his pillow and looked him in the eye and said, “Enthusiasm,” which is just such a great answer. And I think that really is the spirit that infuses these sayings.
And I’d like to acknowledge a reference that I’ve made explicitly two or three times in the series, but I’ve been helped to reread the sayings by the penetrating insights of Helen Waddell, whose writings have really accompanied me very closely over the past couple of years. She was an Irish textual scholar, not a Catholic, she was a Presbyterian, but she’d read and lived with this particular patrimony and the entire patristic and medieval patrimony.
She worked as a translator and a historian of texts, and she had read all of the Patrologia Latina, and she just took it for granted that in order to say anything about anyone, one would do that. But her little book on The Desert Fathers is really very precious. And she has a knack for bringing out the joyfulness and the zest and the desire to share good things that really permeates this tradition and makes it so attractive.
And my hope is that through the work we’ve done in our conversations, other people will also find it attractive and consider this way of life, because it’s a great life. And the monastic life is not something that just pertains to ages past, but it’s alive and of essential importance now to the mission and to the equilibrium of the Church. And that’s why I’m also delighted that we’re able to make some of our recordings in active monastic communities to communicate visually the continuation of this tradition and to show people that, hey, this is an option you should consider.
Jamie Baxter: Before we had met in person, I had heard you referred to as a Benedictine, as a Cistercian, and as a Trappist, all three. So when we finally met in person, I was like, okay, who is he? And I realized all of these traditions obviously unite.
Obviously, the Cistercians being a reform of the Benedictines, the Trappists being a reform of the Cistercians. But one of the things you’ve made really clear is how these traditions are in continuity with the spirit of the desert. And like you just said, many are called today to take that step into discernment.
As someone who spent six years in formation and ultimately discerned that I had a task that was different and in the world, I just want to so strongly encourage others to take a step. And as you said it so beautifully in one episode, the providence of God is infallible, and you don’t quite know what you’re stepping into when you make a step into a formation process. But I know for me, I look back on those six years as something that I cherish, true treasures that have shaped everything about how I live my life now as a husband, as a father, certainly the work that we do with men all around the world.
And I just want to be an encouragement to venture a bit if that’s been stirred up listening to this series. Bishop Erik, I was wondering if you could say a little bit more for our listeners on why not only we chose Antony, but why we chose to end with Saint Benedict as a figure and the places that we journeyed to, which were very important and significant sites in his life.
Bishop Varden: Well, something I’ve been very keen to communicate is the continuity between the Eastern monastic tradition and its Western form. Because we can so easily drive a wedge between East and West, that is not necessarily helpful. One of the reasons I’ve often referred to the Rule of Benedict and sometimes to his life in expanding the sayings from the desert collections is to show their applicability within this regular framework.
Well, to begin with, it just seemed like a bit of a dream to go to the foundational sites and record. But then it ended up being possible. And I’m so happy that we could go to Subiaco and Monte Cassino and see the concrete examples of what a desert might look like, because a desert isn’t necessarily made up of sand.
You made the point right at the beginning of the series that the modern city is in many ways a desert. But also the way Benedict descends almost into the bowels of the earth and encloses himself in this cave to get ready. And then when he is called forth from it, takes his first disciples and goes where?
Well, up on the mountain. And we could see that view from Monte Cassino and have that sense – even though the hill itself isn’t very tall, because the Campania is pretty much at sea level, it is extremely imposing and you can see Monte Cassino from miles away.
So I was keen to show that this tradition is alive and it’s alive in a monastery near you.
Jamie Baxter: And you can go there. Maybe enter there.
Bishop Varden: Exactly.
Jamie Baxter: For me, I had honestly never been either to Subiaco or Monte Cassino before, despite a couple of trips to Italy over the years. And I got to experience firsthand on a first impression the different geographies of these places, which made the significance of them for Benedict obvious to the senses, even. And it was a great privilege.
Bishop Varden: And I think it’s so important and I’m delighted that we could go, as we did, straight from Subiaco to Monte Cassino, because the topography says so much about the spiritual journey.
Jamie Baxter: I wanted to ask a little bit about your preparation for our series, but also month by month, just what went behind the scenes into making these teachings come to life.
Bishop Varden: Well, I would first reread the texts and think about them and I would mark a few possible examples for elaboration. Then I would just let them rest in the back of my mind, pray over them and then choose one, translate it and expand it. So typically I would set aside a day or two and I would translate the saying in the evening, sleep on it, get up in the morning, rework the translation and then expand it.
One of the quite enjoyable challenges of this particular task is that the episodes need to be more or less the same length. So my texts needed to be the same length. So it was a journalistic task in some ways, because I knew I had – you will have noticed this on the text that I sent you – I’d set the text format on my computer in such a way that two pages amounted to about 850, 860 words. I would not permit myself to exceed that limit.
So whatever I wanted to say would need to fit into two pages in the format I defined. I would write that, then rework that first section, then go on to the next one. As we worked through those 10 chapters, my endeavor was not to repeat themes I had dealt with explicitly elsewhere.
Some of my choices would be conditioned by other texts already chosen. But my aim was to present a fairly coherent whole that would give a responsible sample of each chapter and give a sense of what the fathers had to say about that, and at the same time provide just a continuous pedagogy. We share the hope that this project will also be available in book form.
I tried to maintain an authorial attention and structure my choices and my developments in such a way that the ensemble will fit together in the end as a readable book.
Jamie Baxter: And that’s something our listeners can hopefully look forward to. I know that’s been a common email I’ve gotten. Will this be a book?
Yeah, we hope so. At least for me, as short as my little introductions and outros are in the episodes, it took a lot more work than you might think to prepare those and get ready for them. Receiving your teachings month by month was easily my favorite work, every single time.
Bishop Varden: What about you? How did you prepare?
Jamie Baxter: Sleep is also a really important part of my preparation because the first month I tried to just read all this stuff in one sitting and get it all done – both the sayings themselves, the broader chapter, then the selections, and then your teachings upon them. They needed a lot more time.
So what I would do is typically read a chapter on a Monday, sleep on it, read your teachings and your translations of the sayings on a Tuesday, and then on Wednesday – okay, I’ve had two nights to kind of sink into this. I have my thoughts turning upon them and what they mean for me, and then do my best to set them up, but not in a way that gets ahead of them, but then also to try to summarize as well as I can. One gift I just wanted to tell you was, after my time in formation, I’d say one of the wounds that I had was that that was the time where I read philosophy and theology very seriously, and now that I’m out in the world, it’s time for me to build something that works.
It was something that I thought to myself, and that’s not all wrong, but we have a theologian on our team, and we work with priests and religious around the world to do our own writing for our formation, but I haven’t done much of that myself, and your series forced me to do two things. One, seriously consider these texts and apply them, remembering my passion honestly in some ways for theology in general and writing as well. But then also I’ve stayed so far behind the scenes at Exodus. Most guys have no idea who I am, and the series was like, “Hey, I need somebody to introduce this and to lead it out.”
I was like, “Oh, well, I guess that has to be me,” and those were two, I would say honestly, healing graces that came from this for me personally.
Bishop Varden: It’s your emerging from the fortress.
Jamie Baxter: Well, hopefully a little equal to myself. Maybe a little – I need to gain a little bit more weight with some listeners, but those are just two gifts I wanted to share. And then I also just wanted to wrap up and say, in the beginning we envisaged this as you and us, for the guys, the Exodus men around the world. I’m just so grateful for EWTN who came and elevated this whole experience.
Bishop Varden: They really have been wonderful.
Jamie Baxter: Well It really would have been just a shadow of what it has been, had it not been for Paul from EWTN Norway, but also Anthony Johnson at EWTN Rome, who is such a master craftsman. My heart goes out to them, and it’s just filled with gratitude for those men among others who have helped at different stages for this to become what it has.
Bishop Varden: Absolutely. It’s been a true collaboration. And that has added something crucial, because the teachings of the Fathers are all dialectic in the sense of being conversational, and because we’ve had this collaboration between basically three different agencies, there has been exchange upon exchange as a structural part of the preparation for each episode and a sense of the whole. And that dialogical nature of our proceedings has added something really precious to the way in which it’s developed.
Jamie Baxter: And it’s been so simple too. And it’s been nice and enjoyable. Bishop Erik, thank you so much.
I just – one image that has been seared into me, and it was from early on, but I’ve come back to it time and again, is the themes and images of light and fire in the Sayings. And just from one of your books where you talk about the incandescence to which we’re called. I can’t help but just reflect upon Arsenius, who’s stumbled upon by a neighbour who finds him in his cell all alone appearing as though a flame, and he knocks on the door. Arsenius tries to hide the grace that he has, but for me it’s been this call to more, that we’re called to become flames, places in which God’s glory dwells, on fire and fruitful.
That’s a lasting image that I’ll take from this time together.
Bishop Varden: I think that’s a pretty good summing up, actually. Remember you’re called to more.
Jamie Baxter: Still more.
Bishop Varden: Still more. Absolutely, and that’s been the great joy of this work we’ve done together. The opportunity just to share precious things, in the hope that they will nourish and delight others.
So, thank you for the opportunity.
Jamie Baxter: It has been such a gift for me personally, for our whole team, for so many listeners who we have the great fortune of being in touch with, to journey with you as a teacher. And in many ways for me, I always felt like I got to be the first listener, disciple of your teaching, and I’m so grateful for the time, the prayer, and all the experience you’ve offered and applied to us, and I know it’s blessed so many people, and I pray for them, and I just wanted to thank you.
Bishop Varden: It’s been a privilege for me! And the journey continues.
Jamie Baxter: The journey continues.
2. Sunday of Christmas
Ecclesiasticus 24:1-2, 8-12: In Jerusalem I wield my authority.
Ephesians 1:3-6, 15-18: What rich glories he has promised.
John 1:1-18: We have seen his glory.
This is the third time since Christmas that we have heard this Gospel at Mass. If the Church keeps putting it before us, it must have something vital to say. Indeed, for centuries the Prologue of St John was read at the end of every Mass, to put what had happened at the altar in context, as it were. St John tells us who it is who assumes human nature in the Blessed Virgin Mary: the Father’s eternal Word.
What’s a word?
We speak and write words to communicate ourselves; to make ourselves known to others. God’s Word is likewise his way of making himself known. God is eternal. The word ‘eternal’ trips easily off our tongue but its sense befuddles us. Our experience is so conditioned by beginnings and ends, especially by ends, that we can hardly conceive of a state of being unoriginated and boundless.
As Christians we must open our minds and hearts to this perspective. We must learn to think beyond categories of births and deaths, to the carrying force that enables life in the first place. To confront ourselves with this mystery is already a form of prayer.
At a given point, our eternal God resolved to mark time. In the language of Scripture, he ‘spoke’. An utterance leaves traces. Physicists point to the waves created by travelling sound. More essentially, a thing said makes an impact on hearers. Naturally, we hear countless sounds each day of which we do not have the faintest memory. Thank God for that: life would have been insufferable otherwise.
I am convinced, though, that each of us here can think of things we have heard said that have shaped our lives decisively. To hear someone say, ‘I love you’, transforms a life. It makes a narrow existence broad; indeed, to hear those words, ‘I love you’, is our best way, perhaps, of getting an inkling of what ‘eternity’ means.
Well, when God spoke his Word, it was to speak his love. Love was made manifest as light: ‘Let there be light’. And there was light. God had no need to let the light shine; not was he obliged to go on with creation. He made all there is because he wanted to, for the delight of it. He made it gratuitously, as a gift. You and I are now the gift’s recipients, tiny links in a long chain of human fellowship. It was the agent of this loving gift, the Word making it explicit, that became flesh and dwelt among us. He has a name, a face. We know him. Though we have not seen him, we love him. At Christmas we re-immerse ourselves in this exchange of love.
It’s wonderful!
I said a moment ago that St John’s Prologue, which establishes the terms of Christ’s incarnation, was read, earlier, at the end of every Mass. This is because each Mass is Christmas in miniature. The Lord becomes truly present. I’ve been asked more than once, as perhaps have you: ‘Surely you can’t believe this to be true?!’ Well, I can. And I rejoice to construct my life on this belief.
It is entirely reasonable. If the Word that was in the beginning made all things; and if that Word chose, at a precisely datable moment, to make himself present in human history, it was not by way of an excursion, just to see what it was like; it was to remain in our midst, and by means of that presence, to bring the work of creation to fulfilment. When we celebrate Christ’s birth, we do not merely remember something that took place long ago. We affirm something going on now, with immense repercussions for our lives.
The Church, who is our Mother, is also a great teacher. At this Mass, alongside the Prologue of St John, she gives us the prologue of Ephesians to read. St Paul can be hard to get to grips with. He has such a reputation for being difficult that we may switch off when we hear him read, letting his endless sentences wash over us as a peal of bells. That is understandable. Still, Paul is worth persevering with. If you want to further your acquaintance, Ephesians is a good place to begin. No single text of the New Testament, perhaps, makes the Christian calling so explicit. To discover it is at once fearful and enthralling. For we’re called, St Paul reminds us, to be ‘holy and spotless’.
Holiness isn’t the prerogative of people who lived long ago and far away; it is an imperative for you and me today. What’s it about? Basically about opening our lives so that Christ may live in us. When, on receiving Holy Communion, we respond to the affirmation, ‘The Body of Christ’, with a clear ‘Amen’, it is in recognition of the Real Presence. But it is also because we are resolved to offer our bodies as a tabernacle in which the Lord may live. We enter a covenant. We pledge to live our lives according to Christ’s teaching and example; to walk as he walked. The King of Glory comes to make us glorious. If that seems like an off-the-wall statement, just re-read the texts of this Mass, when you get home, and look for ‘glory’. You will find it is a recurring motif, referring both to Christ and to us. The two are called to be one.
Glory is present in the Church’s prayers, too. Our collect today begins: ‘God, splendour of faithful souls, graciously be pleased to fill the world with your glory’. That mission begins with you and me, here at this altar.
Believe in it! You’ve been created beautiful. You’re called to become splendid. Your great task is to enable God’s radiance to spread ‘to all peoples’. A freeing task. A joyful task. A glorious task. Amen.
Ephesians 1:3-6, 15-18: What rich glories he has promised.
John 1:1-18: We have seen his glory.
This is the third time since Christmas that we have heard this Gospel at Mass. If the Church keeps putting it before us, it must have something vital to say. Indeed, for centuries the Prologue of St John was read at the end of every Mass, to put what had happened at the altar in context, as it were. St John tells us who it is who assumes human nature in the Blessed Virgin Mary: the Father’s eternal Word.
What’s a word?
We speak and write words to communicate ourselves; to make ourselves known to others. God’s Word is likewise his way of making himself known. God is eternal. The word ‘eternal’ trips easily off our tongue but its sense befuddles us. Our experience is so conditioned by beginnings and ends, especially by ends, that we can hardly conceive of a state of being unoriginated and boundless.
As Christians we must open our minds and hearts to this perspective. We must learn to think beyond categories of births and deaths, to the carrying force that enables life in the first place. To confront ourselves with this mystery is already a form of prayer.
At a given point, our eternal God resolved to mark time. In the language of Scripture, he ‘spoke’. An utterance leaves traces. Physicists point to the waves created by travelling sound. More essentially, a thing said makes an impact on hearers. Naturally, we hear countless sounds each day of which we do not have the faintest memory. Thank God for that: life would have been insufferable otherwise.
I am convinced, though, that each of us here can think of things we have heard said that have shaped our lives decisively. To hear someone say, ‘I love you’, transforms a life. It makes a narrow existence broad; indeed, to hear those words, ‘I love you’, is our best way, perhaps, of getting an inkling of what ‘eternity’ means.
Well, when God spoke his Word, it was to speak his love. Love was made manifest as light: ‘Let there be light’. And there was light. God had no need to let the light shine; not was he obliged to go on with creation. He made all there is because he wanted to, for the delight of it. He made it gratuitously, as a gift. You and I are now the gift’s recipients, tiny links in a long chain of human fellowship. It was the agent of this loving gift, the Word making it explicit, that became flesh and dwelt among us. He has a name, a face. We know him. Though we have not seen him, we love him. At Christmas we re-immerse ourselves in this exchange of love.
It’s wonderful!
I said a moment ago that St John’s Prologue, which establishes the terms of Christ’s incarnation, was read, earlier, at the end of every Mass. This is because each Mass is Christmas in miniature. The Lord becomes truly present. I’ve been asked more than once, as perhaps have you: ‘Surely you can’t believe this to be true?!’ Well, I can. And I rejoice to construct my life on this belief.
It is entirely reasonable. If the Word that was in the beginning made all things; and if that Word chose, at a precisely datable moment, to make himself present in human history, it was not by way of an excursion, just to see what it was like; it was to remain in our midst, and by means of that presence, to bring the work of creation to fulfilment. When we celebrate Christ’s birth, we do not merely remember something that took place long ago. We affirm something going on now, with immense repercussions for our lives.
The Church, who is our Mother, is also a great teacher. At this Mass, alongside the Prologue of St John, she gives us the prologue of Ephesians to read. St Paul can be hard to get to grips with. He has such a reputation for being difficult that we may switch off when we hear him read, letting his endless sentences wash over us as a peal of bells. That is understandable. Still, Paul is worth persevering with. If you want to further your acquaintance, Ephesians is a good place to begin. No single text of the New Testament, perhaps, makes the Christian calling so explicit. To discover it is at once fearful and enthralling. For we’re called, St Paul reminds us, to be ‘holy and spotless’.
Holiness isn’t the prerogative of people who lived long ago and far away; it is an imperative for you and me today. What’s it about? Basically about opening our lives so that Christ may live in us. When, on receiving Holy Communion, we respond to the affirmation, ‘The Body of Christ’, with a clear ‘Amen’, it is in recognition of the Real Presence. But it is also because we are resolved to offer our bodies as a tabernacle in which the Lord may live. We enter a covenant. We pledge to live our lives according to Christ’s teaching and example; to walk as he walked. The King of Glory comes to make us glorious. If that seems like an off-the-wall statement, just re-read the texts of this Mass, when you get home, and look for ‘glory’. You will find it is a recurring motif, referring both to Christ and to us. The two are called to be one.
Glory is present in the Church’s prayers, too. Our collect today begins: ‘God, splendour of faithful souls, graciously be pleased to fill the world with your glory’. That mission begins with you and me, here at this altar.
Believe in it! You’ve been created beautiful. You’re called to become splendid. Your great task is to enable God’s radiance to spread ‘to all peoples’. A freeing task. A joyful task. A glorious task. Amen.
Time’s Paces
A friend sent this poem inscribed on a clock case in Chester Cathedral, a text attributed to Henry Twells. It gives food for thought on this first day of the annus Domini 2026.
When as a child I laughed and wept,
Time crept.
When as a youth I waxed more bold,
Time strolled.
When I became a full grown man,
Time ran.
When older still I daily grew,
Time flew.
Soon I shall find, in passing on,
Time gone.
O Christ! wilt Thou have saved me then?
Amen.
When as a child I laughed and wept,
Time crept.
When as a youth I waxed more bold,
Time strolled.
When I became a full grown man,
Time ran.
When older still I daily grew,
Time flew.
Soon I shall find, in passing on,
Time gone.
O Christ! wilt Thou have saved me then?
Amen.
Mary the Mother of God
Numbers 6.22-27: May the Lord let his face shine on you!
Galatians 4.4-7: God sent his Son born of a Woman.
Luke 2.16-21: Mary pondered these things in her heart.
The liturgical year gives us several thematic feasts dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Today we honour her simply as the ‘Mother of God’. The title was ascribed to her at the Council of Ephesus in 431. It soon found expression in theology, liturgical poetry, and the arts.
It is not uncommon, in the Christian basilicas of Antiquity, to find a mosaic of the Mother of God in the apse, above the altar, as the visual focus of the building. Uninitiated visitors (especially if they are Norwegian, conditioned by the rhetoric of Reformation debates) easily misunderstand these. They may think that believers of old practised a Marian pity that somehow put Christ in the shade.
The opposite is the case. When the Council Fathers at Ephesus solemnly called the Virgin Mary Theotokos, ‘Godbearer’, it was to put a seal on the Church’s christology. For more than a hundred years, since Nicaea, a battle had gone on to find responsible expression for the truth about Jesus Christ. Then as now, there was a tendency to conceive of him in too horizontal terms, as an exceedingly graced, attractive, lovable brother.
A truly Biblical belief in Christ – a belief like the one St Paul expresses when he asserts that in Christ ‘the fullness of Godhead dwells bodily’ (Col 2:9) – is more than our thinking can sustain. Is he a man like us and still ‘Light from Light’? How can the Father’s eternal Word be subject to the limitations of time and space that define our existence and often weigh us down?
To think theologically is demanding. We don’t much like thoughts that make demands. Instead we cook up our own notions of Christ. They’re frequently dull, but possess the advantage of being instantly accessible. The question is: Do we not end up worshiping an image of own making, the fabrication of our limited ideas?
It says a lot that worship is a dimension very often absent from our life of prayer and from our liturgies. People like to talk, these days, about the Church’s various crises. To my mind, there is only one fundamental crisis of importance, given that all the rest spring from it – I mean the widespread loss of faith in Christ as the Son of God.
Our attitude to the Virgin Mary is a good indication of where we stand in this respect. It reveals what we believe to be true about Christ, what we believe to be true about ourselves. If we believe in Christ with the faith of the Church, not with a faith of our own making, the Marian mystery will open itself before us. The call to bear the Eternal into time, the Immortal into corruptibility, the Holy One into a nature scarred by sin is a call so immense that it necessarily transforms the one to whom it is entrusted. The Mother of God shows us what human being is capable of, as the embodied image of God, in its highest potential.
When she does this, it is not primarily so that we can venerate her high up on the walls of churches. She does it in order to manifest what we, by grace, are also called to become. The mystery of the incarnation continues in the Church: that is the most astonishing thing about life.
Leo the Great once said: God has given to the waters of baptism what he bestowed on his Mother (‘dedit aquae quod dedit Matri’, Sermo XXV). By baptism, we have been enabled to be bearers of divine life, to partake of divine nature (2. Peter 1:4). Today’s feast honours the Virgin Mary, of course. But it also makes our own vocation explicit.
Do we believe in that vocation? Will we say yes to it and give ourselves wholly over to it? Do we desire to become, in Christ, an inspired ‘new creation’ (2 Cor 5:17) — or are we in fact well satisfied with the old and worn one?
The ninth-century apse mosaic from Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.
Galatians 4.4-7: God sent his Son born of a Woman.
Luke 2.16-21: Mary pondered these things in her heart.
The liturgical year gives us several thematic feasts dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Today we honour her simply as the ‘Mother of God’. The title was ascribed to her at the Council of Ephesus in 431. It soon found expression in theology, liturgical poetry, and the arts.
It is not uncommon, in the Christian basilicas of Antiquity, to find a mosaic of the Mother of God in the apse, above the altar, as the visual focus of the building. Uninitiated visitors (especially if they are Norwegian, conditioned by the rhetoric of Reformation debates) easily misunderstand these. They may think that believers of old practised a Marian pity that somehow put Christ in the shade.
The opposite is the case. When the Council Fathers at Ephesus solemnly called the Virgin Mary Theotokos, ‘Godbearer’, it was to put a seal on the Church’s christology. For more than a hundred years, since Nicaea, a battle had gone on to find responsible expression for the truth about Jesus Christ. Then as now, there was a tendency to conceive of him in too horizontal terms, as an exceedingly graced, attractive, lovable brother.
A truly Biblical belief in Christ – a belief like the one St Paul expresses when he asserts that in Christ ‘the fullness of Godhead dwells bodily’ (Col 2:9) – is more than our thinking can sustain. Is he a man like us and still ‘Light from Light’? How can the Father’s eternal Word be subject to the limitations of time and space that define our existence and often weigh us down?
To think theologically is demanding. We don’t much like thoughts that make demands. Instead we cook up our own notions of Christ. They’re frequently dull, but possess the advantage of being instantly accessible. The question is: Do we not end up worshiping an image of own making, the fabrication of our limited ideas?
It says a lot that worship is a dimension very often absent from our life of prayer and from our liturgies. People like to talk, these days, about the Church’s various crises. To my mind, there is only one fundamental crisis of importance, given that all the rest spring from it – I mean the widespread loss of faith in Christ as the Son of God.
Our attitude to the Virgin Mary is a good indication of where we stand in this respect. It reveals what we believe to be true about Christ, what we believe to be true about ourselves. If we believe in Christ with the faith of the Church, not with a faith of our own making, the Marian mystery will open itself before us. The call to bear the Eternal into time, the Immortal into corruptibility, the Holy One into a nature scarred by sin is a call so immense that it necessarily transforms the one to whom it is entrusted. The Mother of God shows us what human being is capable of, as the embodied image of God, in its highest potential.
When she does this, it is not primarily so that we can venerate her high up on the walls of churches. She does it in order to manifest what we, by grace, are also called to become. The mystery of the incarnation continues in the Church: that is the most astonishing thing about life.
Leo the Great once said: God has given to the waters of baptism what he bestowed on his Mother (‘dedit aquae quod dedit Matri’, Sermo XXV). By baptism, we have been enabled to be bearers of divine life, to partake of divine nature (2. Peter 1:4). Today’s feast honours the Virgin Mary, of course. But it also makes our own vocation explicit.
Do we believe in that vocation? Will we say yes to it and give ourselves wholly over to it? Do we desire to become, in Christ, an inspired ‘new creation’ (2 Cor 5:17) — or are we in fact well satisfied with the old and worn one?
The ninth-century apse mosaic from Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.