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:
18 Sunday C 
Ecclesiastes 1.2-23: Vanity of vanities!
Colossians 3.1-11: When Christ your life appears you will appear with him in glory.
Luke 12.13-21: This night your life will be demanded of you.
In a curious and fascinating text, the German philosopher Ferdinand Ulrich wrote about Read More
Colossians 3.1-11: When Christ your life appears you will appear with him in glory.
Luke 12.13-21: This night your life will be demanded of you.
In a curious and fascinating text, the German philosopher Ferdinand Ulrich wrote about Read More
About St Olav This year’s homily for the feast of St Olav has attracted attention both in national broadcasting and in a newspaper. It is good to reflect on these matters.
Here is my contribution to a conversation with NRK (the national broadcasting service):
– Read More
Here is my contribution to a conversation with NRK (the national broadcasting service):
– Read More
Desert Fathers 31 You can find this episode in video format here – a dedicated page – and pick it up in audio wherever you listen to podcasts. On YouTube, the full range of episodes can be found here.
A grand personage came from Read More
A grand personage came from Read More
Olsok 2025 This is an English version of the homily. You can find a German one, too, by scrolling down.
Wisdom 10.10-14: Wisdom did not desert him.
James 1.2-4.12: So that you may become perfect and whole.
Matthew 16.24-28: He must take up his cross Read More
Wisdom 10.10-14: Wisdom did not desert him.
James 1.2-4.12: So that you may become perfect and whole.
Matthew 16.24-28: He must take up his cross Read More
Vigil of Olsok You can find a German translation of this homily, preached in Norwegian, by scrolling down.
Joshua 3:14-4:8: What are these stones?
Colossians 1:9-17: He is the image of the unseen God.
Matthew 5:13-20: When salt loses its saltiness, it is useless.
When Jesus meets Read More
Joshua 3:14-4:8: What are these stones?
Colossians 1:9-17: He is the image of the unseen God.
Matthew 5:13-20: When salt loses its saltiness, it is useless.
When Jesus meets Read More
Hearing Truly The disciples approached Jesus and said, “Why do you speak to the crowd in parables?” He said to them in reply, “Because knowledge of the mysteries of the Kingdom of heaven has been granted to you, but to them it Read More
18 Sunday C
Ecclesiastes 1.2-23: Vanity of vanities!
Colossians 3.1-11: When Christ your life appears you will appear with him in glory.
Luke 12.13-21: This night your life will be demanded of you.
In a curious and fascinating text, the German philosopher Ferdinand Ulrich wrote about an insight that came to him in prayer in the early 1990s, when he was about sixty years old. It enabled him to re-experience the circumstances of his birth: the trauma of leaving the womb, the fight for life. It let him touch an overwhelming perception born at that instant, which his mature mind formulated retrospectively as follows: ‘I am alive! I entered deep into myself as into the foundation of my existence; like one who guards a treasure I bent over my life and held it fast.’
He thought of himself as thinking: ‘No one will take this away from me. This is my life; no one will get to it.’ An anxious intuition whispered in his ear that this dear possession could be taken from him, that he would have to surrender it; but he turned away from that fear. As an old man looking back, he reflected: ‘That was my first sin. For years I would revisit in prayer the moment in which I tore my life to myself, […] hunching over it like a robber over stolen treasure.’ He contrasted this infant impulse with what we read of Christ in St Paul’s letter to the Philippians: ‘being in the form of God, [he] thought it not robbery to be equal with God’. Ulrich mused: ‘[Life hoarded] as robbery, yes: that was my sin.’
A biologist hearing this account would think, no doubt: ‘What a lot of rubbish!’ In so far as there is substance to Ulrich’s recollection, it simply reflects a quest for survival that is common to all organic life. Where would we be without it? Think of a chick determinedly making its way out of its shell. Our entry into daylight was not all that unlike it. At such a time there is no room for resignation. Every atom of the newborn’s being calls out in chorus a single refrain: I want to live!
Yet our experience differs from that of other species. A man, a woman just isn’t a battery hen. Endowed with consciousness, we reflect on life. We realise how fragile it is, ‘like changing grass’. The predicaments to which we are subject are legion. What springs up full of promise at dawn, wilts by dusk. It is tempting to moan with Qohelet, ‘Vanity of vanities’. All the more shall we be jealous of the hoard uniquely ours: our existence. We cling to life, thinking: ‘I’ll not let it go.’
Why did Ulrich classify this impulse as sin? Because revelation had taught him what biology cannot: a view of the human condition which does not reduce it to a battle for survival; which sees its finality, rather, in a call from without that invites us to lay down our lives. Note the crux of Jesus’s parable of the rich man set on building bigger barns. The story is cartoonish, showing us how ridiculous it is to accumulate endless stuff in a precarious world. That lesson is valid, but not particularly Christian; it might as well have been taught by a stoic or an Oriental sage. Its Christian specificity transpires in the words addressed to the rich man by the Lord towards the end, when God says: ‘this night your life will be demanded of you’. If you look up the text in Greek, you will find that the demanding is done by a plural subject: ‘they will be asking [ἀπαιτοῦσιν] your life from you’. Immediately we think of other Scriptural sayings: the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, in which a collective cry resounds at midnight, ‘The bridegroom is coming!’ (Mt 25.6); or the call introducing the culmination of the Apocalypse, ‘The Spirit and the bride say, “Come!” Let the one who hears say, “Come!”’ (Ap 22.17).
We are put into this world to thrive. It is right that we should love life, wish to make the most of it; it is precious. We know this by instinct. What we must learn by faith is this: the reality we call ‘life’, or ‘self’, is not self-sufficient; it will only know true flourishing in ecstasy, that is, in going beyond itself in free self-giving to another.
Genesis explains this aspect of our being by telling us we are made in the image of God, for fellowship with him, called, here and now, to foreshadow that communion in human love and friendship. Quite simply: ‘it is not good for man to be alone’ (2.18).
The Gospel refines our self-understanding by unfolding the wonderful mystery of Christ, the ‘Yes’ of God (2 Cor 1.20), who not only did not think it ‘robbery to be equal with God’, but ‘desired with desire’ (Lk 22.15) to pour himself out for the world’s redemption. Christ is more than an exemplar we are asked to imitate. He is, as St Paul teaches us, our life; to be a Christian is to subsist in him, to consecrate all our energies to him with vitality now, then with trustful serenity at the hour of our death.
Our task on earth is to learn to receive life in fullness, with both hands; then to refrain from clutching what is given; keeping instead our hands wide open, raising them up in joyful oblation at morning, noon, and night. If we consent to living thus peace will be given us, and freedom. We’ll no longer need to hoard life as loot. For fear will be no more.
Photograph: Margot Krebs Neale.
Colossians 3.1-11: When Christ your life appears you will appear with him in glory.
Luke 12.13-21: This night your life will be demanded of you.
In a curious and fascinating text, the German philosopher Ferdinand Ulrich wrote about an insight that came to him in prayer in the early 1990s, when he was about sixty years old. It enabled him to re-experience the circumstances of his birth: the trauma of leaving the womb, the fight for life. It let him touch an overwhelming perception born at that instant, which his mature mind formulated retrospectively as follows: ‘I am alive! I entered deep into myself as into the foundation of my existence; like one who guards a treasure I bent over my life and held it fast.’
He thought of himself as thinking: ‘No one will take this away from me. This is my life; no one will get to it.’ An anxious intuition whispered in his ear that this dear possession could be taken from him, that he would have to surrender it; but he turned away from that fear. As an old man looking back, he reflected: ‘That was my first sin. For years I would revisit in prayer the moment in which I tore my life to myself, […] hunching over it like a robber over stolen treasure.’ He contrasted this infant impulse with what we read of Christ in St Paul’s letter to the Philippians: ‘being in the form of God, [he] thought it not robbery to be equal with God’. Ulrich mused: ‘[Life hoarded] as robbery, yes: that was my sin.’
A biologist hearing this account would think, no doubt: ‘What a lot of rubbish!’ In so far as there is substance to Ulrich’s recollection, it simply reflects a quest for survival that is common to all organic life. Where would we be without it? Think of a chick determinedly making its way out of its shell. Our entry into daylight was not all that unlike it. At such a time there is no room for resignation. Every atom of the newborn’s being calls out in chorus a single refrain: I want to live!
Yet our experience differs from that of other species. A man, a woman just isn’t a battery hen. Endowed with consciousness, we reflect on life. We realise how fragile it is, ‘like changing grass’. The predicaments to which we are subject are legion. What springs up full of promise at dawn, wilts by dusk. It is tempting to moan with Qohelet, ‘Vanity of vanities’. All the more shall we be jealous of the hoard uniquely ours: our existence. We cling to life, thinking: ‘I’ll not let it go.’
Why did Ulrich classify this impulse as sin? Because revelation had taught him what biology cannot: a view of the human condition which does not reduce it to a battle for survival; which sees its finality, rather, in a call from without that invites us to lay down our lives. Note the crux of Jesus’s parable of the rich man set on building bigger barns. The story is cartoonish, showing us how ridiculous it is to accumulate endless stuff in a precarious world. That lesson is valid, but not particularly Christian; it might as well have been taught by a stoic or an Oriental sage. Its Christian specificity transpires in the words addressed to the rich man by the Lord towards the end, when God says: ‘this night your life will be demanded of you’. If you look up the text in Greek, you will find that the demanding is done by a plural subject: ‘they will be asking [ἀπαιτοῦσιν] your life from you’. Immediately we think of other Scriptural sayings: the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, in which a collective cry resounds at midnight, ‘The bridegroom is coming!’ (Mt 25.6); or the call introducing the culmination of the Apocalypse, ‘The Spirit and the bride say, “Come!” Let the one who hears say, “Come!”’ (Ap 22.17).
We are put into this world to thrive. It is right that we should love life, wish to make the most of it; it is precious. We know this by instinct. What we must learn by faith is this: the reality we call ‘life’, or ‘self’, is not self-sufficient; it will only know true flourishing in ecstasy, that is, in going beyond itself in free self-giving to another.
Genesis explains this aspect of our being by telling us we are made in the image of God, for fellowship with him, called, here and now, to foreshadow that communion in human love and friendship. Quite simply: ‘it is not good for man to be alone’ (2.18).
The Gospel refines our self-understanding by unfolding the wonderful mystery of Christ, the ‘Yes’ of God (2 Cor 1.20), who not only did not think it ‘robbery to be equal with God’, but ‘desired with desire’ (Lk 22.15) to pour himself out for the world’s redemption. Christ is more than an exemplar we are asked to imitate. He is, as St Paul teaches us, our life; to be a Christian is to subsist in him, to consecrate all our energies to him with vitality now, then with trustful serenity at the hour of our death.
Our task on earth is to learn to receive life in fullness, with both hands; then to refrain from clutching what is given; keeping instead our hands wide open, raising them up in joyful oblation at morning, noon, and night. If we consent to living thus peace will be given us, and freedom. We’ll no longer need to hoard life as loot. For fear will be no more.
Photograph: Margot Krebs Neale.
Chains
Leviticus 2.:1-17: You will proclaim the liberation of all the inhabitants of the land.
Matthew 14.1-12: Herod had chained John up and put him in prison because of Herodias.
We are halfway through a year of jubilee. Leviticus reminds us what it is about. A jubilee spells liberation: slaves are freed, debts are cancelled, even the soil is given respite. So constraints are lifted; at the same time, limitations are imposed. Freedom calls for both. Investors are reminded they don’t possess property. The only one with claims to ownership of land is God; human agents are but stewards for a while. It is good to bear this in mind, else we overrate or overstate our hold on things.
John the Baptist preached liberty to captives. At the same time he told people they could not just do as they pleased. He summoned the devout to righteousness, soldiers not to be extortionate. He told Herod, at great cost, he could not have his brother’s wife.
We celebrate this Mass in honour of Our Lady of Ransom. This devotion was born of one of the medieval Church’s chief works of mercy: the redemption of Christian captives seized by the Moors in Spain or on the seas.
I thought of this chapter of history recently when, visiting Toledo, I stood in front of the church of San Juan de los Reyes and saw the shackles of former slaves that adorn its western wall as votive offerings, recalling how concrete unfreedom can be, and how cruel.
Christ our Redeemer set us free for the sake of freedom. Let us thank him for this gift. Then let us frankly and humbly consider three important, complementary questions. First, do I do my bit to help the oppressed and enlighten those in darkness? Secondly, am I somehow still held by chains of possessiveness, envy, malice, or fear that ought to have been long since broken? Thirdly, do I embrace the freedom won for me graciously, or do I yield to presumption? All of us are prone, alas, to all three temptations.
May Mary, the knot-loosening, unproprietorial Mother of God, help us to steer clear of them, jubilee-minded. Amen.
Matthew 14.1-12: Herod had chained John up and put him in prison because of Herodias.
We are halfway through a year of jubilee. Leviticus reminds us what it is about. A jubilee spells liberation: slaves are freed, debts are cancelled, even the soil is given respite. So constraints are lifted; at the same time, limitations are imposed. Freedom calls for both. Investors are reminded they don’t possess property. The only one with claims to ownership of land is God; human agents are but stewards for a while. It is good to bear this in mind, else we overrate or overstate our hold on things.
John the Baptist preached liberty to captives. At the same time he told people they could not just do as they pleased. He summoned the devout to righteousness, soldiers not to be extortionate. He told Herod, at great cost, he could not have his brother’s wife.
We celebrate this Mass in honour of Our Lady of Ransom. This devotion was born of one of the medieval Church’s chief works of mercy: the redemption of Christian captives seized by the Moors in Spain or on the seas.
I thought of this chapter of history recently when, visiting Toledo, I stood in front of the church of San Juan de los Reyes and saw the shackles of former slaves that adorn its western wall as votive offerings, recalling how concrete unfreedom can be, and how cruel.
Christ our Redeemer set us free for the sake of freedom. Let us thank him for this gift. Then let us frankly and humbly consider three important, complementary questions. First, do I do my bit to help the oppressed and enlighten those in darkness? Secondly, am I somehow still held by chains of possessiveness, envy, malice, or fear that ought to have been long since broken? Thirdly, do I embrace the freedom won for me graciously, or do I yield to presumption? All of us are prone, alas, to all three temptations.
May Mary, the knot-loosening, unproprietorial Mother of God, help us to steer clear of them, jubilee-minded. Amen.
About St Olav
This year’s homily for the feast of St Olav has attracted attention both in national broadcasting and in a newspaper. It is good to reflect on these matters.
Here is my contribution to a conversation with NRK (the national broadcasting service):
– A pretty simplified representation of the Norwegian early Middle Ages has become popular, says Varden referring to films and TV series about the period. It is important, then, for both cultural and religious reasons to relate to the past responsibly and objectively. Varden says it matters to have a right notion of what a saint is and is not, and that this was what his homily was about. If the guides in Nidarosdomen paint an insufficiently nuanced picture of the story of Olav, Varden would see it as a matter of concern. Varden says the version he referred to in the homily has been referred to him by two or three visitors. – That may have been untypical, he says. I don’t know, but one can hope so. If the remarks I made during the high mass contribute to in-depth reflection on this subject, I rejoice, the bishop says.
And here is a comment made to the paper Vårt Land:
Anyone who takes the trouble to actually read what I said at Olsok, will see that it was not about running others down. When I referred to a one-sided reading of history, I said it regarded us, Norwegians of today, as a whole. We must be vigilant. I explicitly pointed out that Olav, the historical character, is many-faced and unidealisable. My point was to emphasise the conversion that is discernible notwithstanding all the human mess, in order to take that as a constructive challenge for us, now: the homily was a call to conversion, a call that concerns me above all. What the Church for nearly a thousand years has recognised in Olav is an example of what God’s mercy can achieve quite undeservedly in a human being who is riven by conflicts, yet is receptive. If I allowed myself to be a little polemical it was to confront the claim that Olav’s canonisation should have been a clerical project driven by church-political calculation. The cult of Olav spread as a popular movement accompanied by people’s concrete experience of the saint’s intercession and protection. That is why I appealed to the discernment of our forebears a millennium ago. They were not more inclined to suffer fools gladly than we are today. The development of popular devotion to St Olav shows the impact Christianity had on medieval Norway in forming a perspective premised on the hope that man’s, and so society’s, essence may be transformed by grace. Anyone who assumes a priori that references to supernatural reality are a nonsense and that the notion ‘holiness’ does not correspond to any kind of objective reality will consider this development meaningless; and will thus have little chance of understanding how people thought, what they feared and what they rejoiced in, how they made vital decisions in the centuries of faith. The legends of Olav, and with time the liturgy composed in his honour, give poetic voice to an inner familiarity with the saint that people recognised. These sources, too, must be approached responsibly and with empathy. That requires a different kind of hermeneutic than the one required for engagement with linear historiography. We have largely lost the habit of reading images these days; perhaps we are not all that good at reading poetry either.
From Olavsantemensalet.
A helpful life of St Olav, written by Fr Olav Müller, can be found here.
Here is my contribution to a conversation with NRK (the national broadcasting service):
– A pretty simplified representation of the Norwegian early Middle Ages has become popular, says Varden referring to films and TV series about the period. It is important, then, for both cultural and religious reasons to relate to the past responsibly and objectively. Varden says it matters to have a right notion of what a saint is and is not, and that this was what his homily was about. If the guides in Nidarosdomen paint an insufficiently nuanced picture of the story of Olav, Varden would see it as a matter of concern. Varden says the version he referred to in the homily has been referred to him by two or three visitors. – That may have been untypical, he says. I don’t know, but one can hope so. If the remarks I made during the high mass contribute to in-depth reflection on this subject, I rejoice, the bishop says.
And here is a comment made to the paper Vårt Land:
Anyone who takes the trouble to actually read what I said at Olsok, will see that it was not about running others down. When I referred to a one-sided reading of history, I said it regarded us, Norwegians of today, as a whole. We must be vigilant. I explicitly pointed out that Olav, the historical character, is many-faced and unidealisable. My point was to emphasise the conversion that is discernible notwithstanding all the human mess, in order to take that as a constructive challenge for us, now: the homily was a call to conversion, a call that concerns me above all. What the Church for nearly a thousand years has recognised in Olav is an example of what God’s mercy can achieve quite undeservedly in a human being who is riven by conflicts, yet is receptive. If I allowed myself to be a little polemical it was to confront the claim that Olav’s canonisation should have been a clerical project driven by church-political calculation. The cult of Olav spread as a popular movement accompanied by people’s concrete experience of the saint’s intercession and protection. That is why I appealed to the discernment of our forebears a millennium ago. They were not more inclined to suffer fools gladly than we are today. The development of popular devotion to St Olav shows the impact Christianity had on medieval Norway in forming a perspective premised on the hope that man’s, and so society’s, essence may be transformed by grace. Anyone who assumes a priori that references to supernatural reality are a nonsense and that the notion ‘holiness’ does not correspond to any kind of objective reality will consider this development meaningless; and will thus have little chance of understanding how people thought, what they feared and what they rejoiced in, how they made vital decisions in the centuries of faith. The legends of Olav, and with time the liturgy composed in his honour, give poetic voice to an inner familiarity with the saint that people recognised. These sources, too, must be approached responsibly and with empathy. That requires a different kind of hermeneutic than the one required for engagement with linear historiography. We have largely lost the habit of reading images these days; perhaps we are not all that good at reading poetry either.
From Olavsantemensalet.
A helpful life of St Olav, written by Fr Olav Müller, can be found here.
Desert Fathers 31
You can find this episode in video format here – a dedicated page – and pick it up in audio wherever you listen to podcasts. On YouTube, the full range of episodes can be found here.
A grand personage came from abroad and brought along a great quantity of gold to Scetis. He asked the priest to give it to the brothers. The priest, however, said: ‘The brothers do not need it.’ But the other man pestered him and placed the basket [full of gold] at the door of the church. The priest said: ‘Let anyone who has need help himself.’ But no one drew close; some monks did not even notice. The priest therefore said to [the rich man]: ‘God has looked kindly on your charity; go now and give it to the poor.’ He left greatly edified.
We have seen that in the Jerusalem Church distribution from the common fund was made to all ‘as any had need’. That principle obtains in monastic life, too. A monastery may be austere; the monks or nuns may live poorly; but it is never an ideal to deprive someone of what is truly necessary. Provision is made for all manner of dispensations in view of sickness or weakness; failure to be kind in such instances is censured. The point of ascesis is to free a woman or man from superficial, needless cravings, not to strip them of essentials. Here, though, we face subtle distinctions. They can be difficult to make. For what do I, and do I not, strictly speaking need? Do I need to go for a run three times a week outside the monastic enclosure, or is that just something I happen to enjoy? Do I need the particular kind of food or drink I always look for at table, getting cross if it is not there, or am I just nurturing a pet obsession? Most of us can easily customise this sort of questioning to our own circumstances.
The question of need becomes specially acute when someone offers us money, gold. Gold is always pretty handy. There are always needs, if not present ones, then tomorrow’s. A wise steward must be mindful of these also. A religious community with many mouths to feed, as well as the poor and guests to look after, is always conscious of resources it lacks. Then there is God’s glory to consider. A gift might permit an extraordinary votive offering: a new pair of candlesticks, a splendid icon, a gilded chalice, a pilgrimage. And are not such things, too, needful if God is God and we owe him choice worship? Throughout monastic history long disputes have revolved around such issues, with wise, sincere, and holy people present on all sides.
Gold, though, calls for vigilance. It has a knack for bringing out the very worst in us. It is not easy to be free before gold, even if we fast, say our prayers, and think of ourselves as jolly spiritual. A passage in the Life of Antony is significant in this respect. It occurs at that crucial turning point when, after years of battle against evil in the cemetery, he goes out into the desert in search of the fortress that would become for him a place of great grace. We are so relieved to see our hero restored after his last, decisive run-in with the devil, when he cried out to God, ‘Where were you?’, only to hear him affirm, ‘I was there, Antony, but waited to see you fight’, that we might miss two little details that follow.
As Antony made his cheerful way into the inner wilderness he saw a silver dish lying in the sand. Would it not be sensible to take it along? A pious pilgrim might have lost it and be glad to have it restored to him. Or it could be given away as alms. Antony, though, smelt a rat. He suspected the dish was some devilish delusion planted there to distract him, so made a resolute prayer to this effect: ‘No way, you evil one! You are not going to hinder my purpose. Let this thing go with you to destruction.’ No sooner had he finished his prayer than the plate vanished ‘like smoke from the face of fire’. That is not all. A little further on Antony found a whole lot of gold scattered about, the real stuff, not a mirage. He marvelled at the quantity of it, unsure of where it came from; this time there was no obvious sign of devilish to-do. He did not pause to consider this mystery. Instead he passed through the area ‘as though he was going over fire’, hurrying on at a run — a run! — ‘in order to lose sight of the place’.
It is a noble image of this spiritual athlete. Having stood firm through spectacular temptations that had racked him in spirit, body, and mind, Antony was exposed to one last trial utterly concrete and mundane, that of filling his pockets with wonga. His resistance shows his stature; for how many gurus, ancient and modern, have not fallen headlong into this trap.
The brothers of Scetis are worthy sons of such a father. I love the fact that some of them quite failed to notice the gold stashed at the church door. Their minds were on higher things. May ours be likewise. There is one last thing to consider: the donor. In a sense his gift was spurned. He left edified, we are told, but perhaps humbled, too? I cannot help thinking of a letter Fr John of Valamo wrote in 1955 to a spiritual directee who by post had sent him a watermelon, a luxury in Finland in those post-war years:
I thank you very much for the watermelon, although the package arrived in battered condition, the watermelon damaged, the paper all wet. The postmistress was displeased; other packages got wet. No doubt you sent it with vanity. It always happens that anyone who acts with vanity can expect disgrace.
Stern words from a true monk. Sometimes we need to hear such, to be freed of our pretension.
A grand personage came from abroad and brought along a great quantity of gold to Scetis. He asked the priest to give it to the brothers. The priest, however, said: ‘The brothers do not need it.’ But the other man pestered him and placed the basket [full of gold] at the door of the church. The priest said: ‘Let anyone who has need help himself.’ But no one drew close; some monks did not even notice. The priest therefore said to [the rich man]: ‘God has looked kindly on your charity; go now and give it to the poor.’ He left greatly edified.
We have seen that in the Jerusalem Church distribution from the common fund was made to all ‘as any had need’. That principle obtains in monastic life, too. A monastery may be austere; the monks or nuns may live poorly; but it is never an ideal to deprive someone of what is truly necessary. Provision is made for all manner of dispensations in view of sickness or weakness; failure to be kind in such instances is censured. The point of ascesis is to free a woman or man from superficial, needless cravings, not to strip them of essentials. Here, though, we face subtle distinctions. They can be difficult to make. For what do I, and do I not, strictly speaking need? Do I need to go for a run three times a week outside the monastic enclosure, or is that just something I happen to enjoy? Do I need the particular kind of food or drink I always look for at table, getting cross if it is not there, or am I just nurturing a pet obsession? Most of us can easily customise this sort of questioning to our own circumstances.
The question of need becomes specially acute when someone offers us money, gold. Gold is always pretty handy. There are always needs, if not present ones, then tomorrow’s. A wise steward must be mindful of these also. A religious community with many mouths to feed, as well as the poor and guests to look after, is always conscious of resources it lacks. Then there is God’s glory to consider. A gift might permit an extraordinary votive offering: a new pair of candlesticks, a splendid icon, a gilded chalice, a pilgrimage. And are not such things, too, needful if God is God and we owe him choice worship? Throughout monastic history long disputes have revolved around such issues, with wise, sincere, and holy people present on all sides.
Gold, though, calls for vigilance. It has a knack for bringing out the very worst in us. It is not easy to be free before gold, even if we fast, say our prayers, and think of ourselves as jolly spiritual. A passage in the Life of Antony is significant in this respect. It occurs at that crucial turning point when, after years of battle against evil in the cemetery, he goes out into the desert in search of the fortress that would become for him a place of great grace. We are so relieved to see our hero restored after his last, decisive run-in with the devil, when he cried out to God, ‘Where were you?’, only to hear him affirm, ‘I was there, Antony, but waited to see you fight’, that we might miss two little details that follow.
As Antony made his cheerful way into the inner wilderness he saw a silver dish lying in the sand. Would it not be sensible to take it along? A pious pilgrim might have lost it and be glad to have it restored to him. Or it could be given away as alms. Antony, though, smelt a rat. He suspected the dish was some devilish delusion planted there to distract him, so made a resolute prayer to this effect: ‘No way, you evil one! You are not going to hinder my purpose. Let this thing go with you to destruction.’ No sooner had he finished his prayer than the plate vanished ‘like smoke from the face of fire’. That is not all. A little further on Antony found a whole lot of gold scattered about, the real stuff, not a mirage. He marvelled at the quantity of it, unsure of where it came from; this time there was no obvious sign of devilish to-do. He did not pause to consider this mystery. Instead he passed through the area ‘as though he was going over fire’, hurrying on at a run — a run! — ‘in order to lose sight of the place’.
It is a noble image of this spiritual athlete. Having stood firm through spectacular temptations that had racked him in spirit, body, and mind, Antony was exposed to one last trial utterly concrete and mundane, that of filling his pockets with wonga. His resistance shows his stature; for how many gurus, ancient and modern, have not fallen headlong into this trap.
The brothers of Scetis are worthy sons of such a father. I love the fact that some of them quite failed to notice the gold stashed at the church door. Their minds were on higher things. May ours be likewise. There is one last thing to consider: the donor. In a sense his gift was spurned. He left edified, we are told, but perhaps humbled, too? I cannot help thinking of a letter Fr John of Valamo wrote in 1955 to a spiritual directee who by post had sent him a watermelon, a luxury in Finland in those post-war years:
I thank you very much for the watermelon, although the package arrived in battered condition, the watermelon damaged, the paper all wet. The postmistress was displeased; other packages got wet. No doubt you sent it with vanity. It always happens that anyone who acts with vanity can expect disgrace.
Stern words from a true monk. Sometimes we need to hear such, to be freed of our pretension.
Olsok 2025
This is an English version of the homily. You can find a German one, too, by scrolling down.
Wisdom 10.10-14: Wisdom did not desert him.
James 1.2-4.12: So that you may become perfect and whole.
Matthew 16.24-28: He must take up his cross and follow me.
The exhortation of Jesus just read to us — ‘whoever wants to come after me, let him deny himself’ — occurs at a cardinal point in the Gospel. It is addressed to his closest disciples, whom he has just put to the test by asking: ‘Who do you say that I am?’ After a few hesitant responses, Peter makes his definitive confession: ‘You are the Christ, Son of the living God.’ Jesus responds with his promise written in gold round the cupola of St Peter’s in Rome. Then this further discourse comes, of cross and sacrifice: ‘He who wants to save his life, will lose it.’ The link between salvation and self-emptying concerns us all: we should think of it often. Yet today this injunction is framed not generically, but specifically. The Church puts it forward as a hermeneutic key to the life and death of Olav Haraldsson. What are we to make of that?
Well, it depends whom you ask. Curiously, it has come to seem seemly even in (non-Catholic) Christian circles, now, to put Olav’s Christian purpose in doubt. It is said — even, I gather, on guided tours here in this cathedral — that Olav was but a power-hungry despot who selfishly lorded it over people to such an extent that they had enough and struck him down at Stiklestad, and that would have been the last anyone heard of him, had not ‘the Church’ contrived to ‘make him’ posthumously ‘a saint’. This narrative just doesn’t make sense. I am led to think: we who, these days, take such care (for good reason) not to treat any societal group unfairly, should be thoroughly ashamed. For what is going on here is retrospective mockery of Norwegians a thousand years ago, on the assumption that they were so stupid they let an awful bully be foisted on them as a national symbol and hypocritically bent their knee before the corpse of a man they loathed. Anyone subscribing to this view is ignorant of people’s temperament back then; further, he or she has forgotten that ‘the Church’ is not reducible to a gang of supposedly ambitious prelates. The Church is made up of ordinary believing women and men. When Bishop Grimkettle on 3 August 1031, a stone’s throw from here, declared Olav a holy man (and Einar Tambarskjelve bade the curmudgeonly Alfiva, an apt patron for the Talk-Olav-Down movement, shut up), it was because the people willed it. They recognised in Olav, even after death, a faithful intercessor, protector, and friend.
Olav was many-faceted, made up of tensions. Humanly speaking, he isn’t idealisable. It is no coincidence that art often shows him treading underfoot a dragon carrying his own features: he knew the Old Adam well; but was all the more fascinated by the New. His Christian maturing displays warfare on the battlefield of conscience. Archbishop Eystein wrote in the twelfth century that Olav arose from the baptistry in Rouen ‘changed into a new man’, but not as if by magic. Baptism sowed in him the seed of immortality. But the seed had to grow; and growth takes time in spiritual as in organic life. Much can be said about the signs of Olav’s growing Christian integrity. Beyond the indications we find in the sagas and songs, we have concrete evidence in the Christian law-code he introduced in 1024. It represented a political wager. To limit the self-governance of people used to rule without accountability is a risky undertaking: we see that in our time. When Olav introduced, in juridically binding form, the notion of an eternal, objective Justice to which all, regardless of status, were held, he mobilised the people of Norway to combat their irrational passions. Revolt resulted, at various levels.
Sigrid Undset paints an intimate picture of such revolt in the first volume of Olav Audunssønn, when Olav, staying as a guest of the Cistercian bishop of Hamar, struck down and killed, for honour’s sake, an enemy. ‘At first he seemed to freeze. Then, rage swelled in him, and defiant, jubilant enjoyment.’ Olav, like Cain, knew the ecstasy of revenge. Conscience did weigh him down. He was a Christian, after all. Considering the faith, he thought, ‘it is somehow beautiful’, but added: ‘Never, though, will all men turn into such saints that they will be content to have justice meted out to them, without imposing their own sense of right.’ It seemed utopian to fancy that all ‘should be minded to hear our Lord’s new speech about the fraternity of all God’s children’. That is how Olav Audunssønn reasoned then, drunk with vengeance. The ‘new speech’ had formed him, however; and would come to enable, as we discover when we read on, a slow bourgeoning of the life of Jesus in the heart of this implacable lover out there face to face with the fierce sea, in Hestviken.
Olav Audunssønn, like Olav Haraldsson, his patron, had to learn from experience what it means to take up one’s own cross. All of us do. Christian life has a number of common denominators; yet must be articulated specifically for each of us. We revere and love St Olav not because he was born a saint, but because he became one through persevering battle against all that was untrue, unworthy, and ugly in himself and in the world; he fought to let Christ’s peace rule in his heart. In our troubled times his example gives us encouragement and blessed consolation. Olav shows us that the Christian calling can be followed even on the basis of the most unpromising conditioning.
Image of St Olav from the church of Värmdö in Uppsala.
Weisheit 10,10–14: In einem harten Kampf verlieh die Gottesfurcht ihm den Siegespreis.
Jakobusbrief 1,2–4.12: Die Geduld aber soll zur Vollendung kommen.
Matthäus 16,24–28: Wer mir folgen will, verleugne sich selbst.
Die Ermahnung Jesu, die wir gerade gehört haben – „Wer mir folgen will, verleugne sich selbst“ – erfolgt an einem Wendepunkt im Evangelium. Die Worte richten sich an seine engsten Freunde, die ihm schon eine zeit lang gefolgt waren. Gerade hatte er sie auf die Probe gestellt mit der Frage: „Für wen haltet ihr mich?“ Nach einigen eher zögerlichen Vorstößen aus der Gruppe kommt Petrus mit seinem wagemutigen, epochalen Bekenntnis: „Du bist der Messias, der Sohn des lebendigen Gottes.“ Jesu Antwort ist das Versprechen an Petrus, das in goldenen Lettern die Kuppel des Petersdoms schmückt. Doch dann wendet sich das Gespräch abrupt dem Thema Kreuz und Opfer zu: „Wer sein Leben zu retten meint, wird es verlieren.“ Die Verbindung zwischen dem Heilsversprechen und dem Ruf zur Aufgabe seiner selbst geht uns alle an; wir sollten oft daran denken. Heute hören wir diese Aufforderung allerdings nicht pauschal, sondern persönlich. Die Kirche gibt sie uns wie einen Schlüssel in die Hand, um Olav Haraldssons Leben und Tod zu erschließen. Was sollen wir nämlich davon halten?
Das kommt ganz darauf an, wen man fragt. Hierzulande gehört es mittlerweile selbst unter Christen zum guten Ton, Olavs christliche Absichten zu diffamieren. Von Leuten, die bei einer Führung dabei waren, habe ich gehört, dass Olav sogar hier im Dom als machtbesessener Despot beschrieben wird: Sein rücksichtsloser Egotrip sei den Leuten irgendwann zu bunt geworden, sodass sie ihn in Stiklestad einen Kopf kürzer gemacht haben – und das wäre das Ende vom Lied gewesen, wäre nicht die Kirche auf die Idee gekommen, ihn posthum zum Heiligen „zu machen“. Hier reimt sich ganz offensichtlich etwas nicht. Wir, die wir heutzutage so genau aufpassen, ja keine Gruppe ungerecht zu behandeln (eigentlich ein ausgezeichneter Vorsatz), wir sollten uns schämen; was hier passiert ist nichts anderes als rückwirkendes Mobbing der Bevölkerung Norwegens im 11. Jahrhundert. Man meint, dass die Leute damals tatsächlich so blöd waren, sich einen grässlichen Grobian als Nationalsymbol verkaufen zu lassen, und sich dazu noch gängeln ließen, vor seinen sterblichen Überresten das Knie zu beugen. Wer glaubt, dass sich so etwas wirklich zugetragen hat, weiß herzlich wenig von der Mentalität des Volkes damals, und hat noch dazu vergessen, dass sich die Kirche nicht auf eine Hierarchie klerikaler Ehrgeizlinge reduzieren lässt. Die Kirche besteht zuallererst aus dem gemeinen Mann, der gemeinen Frau. Bischof Grimkjell sprach am 3. August 1031 wenige Meter von hier entfernt Olav heilig. (Einar Tambarskjelve gebot bei der Gelegenheit der skeptischen Königinmutter Alfiva zu schweigen – sie wäre ein ausgezeichnetes Maskottchen der Olavsskeptiker!) Das geschah, weil das Volk es wollte. Sie erkannten in Olav über den Tod hinaus ihren Fürsprecher, Beschützer und guten Freund.
Olav war ein komplizierter Mann, dem Spannungen nicht fremd waren. Menschlich gesehen taugt er nicht für Idealisierungen. Nicht zufällig zeigen ihn künstlerische Darstellungen oft, wie er eine Schlange – den alten Versucher – zu Boden tritt. Der Versucher trägt jedoch sein eigenes Antlitz. Olav kannte den alten Adam nur zu gut; mehr noch hatte ihn der neue gelockt. Zu seiner christlichen Reifung gehört der Kampf auf dem Schlachtfeld des Gewissens. Erzbischof Eystein schrieb, dass Olav „in einen neuen Mann verwandelt“ aus dem Bad der Taufe in Rouen stieg. Die Verwandlung war aber kein Simsalabim-Trick. Die Taufe säte den Samen der Unsterblichkeit in ihm. Der Same konnte wachsen und reifen; und Wachstum braucht Zeit, im geistlichen wie im organischen Leben. Vieles ließe sich über die Anzeichen von Olavs wachsender christlicher Integrität sagen. Über das hinaus, was sich aus Saga-Literatur und Dichtung beweisen lässt, haben wir in Olavs christlichem Gesetzeswerk ein handfestes Indiz. Es war ein politisches Wagnis. Die Autorität von Menschen zu beschneiden, die gewohnt sind, Macht nach eigenen Prämissen zu verwalten, schafft notwendig Streit; das sehen wir in unserer Zeit auch. Indem er juristisch bindend den Begriff der ewigen Gerechtigkeit einführte, die einmal von allen Rechenschaft fordert, ohne Ansehen von Rang und Stand, führte Olav alle Norweger in die Schlacht – im Streit mit ihren eigenen Leidenschaften. Eine Revolte auf mehreren Ebenen war das Ergebnis.
Sigrid Undset zeichnet ein intimes Bild solch eines inneren Aufruhrs im ersten Band von Olav Audunsson. Olav, zu Gast bei Mönchsbischof Torfinn, erschlägt im Gästehaus der Dominikaner in Hamar einen Mann, der seine Ehre gekränkt hatte. „Sein spontanes Empfinden war ein inneres Gefrieren. Doch dann kochte der Zorn in ihm auf, und mit ihm ein trotzig-freudiges Wohlgefühl.“ Olav fühlte die Ekstase der Rache wie einst Kain. Doch das Gewissen schlug ihn. Er war doch ein Christ. Als er sich auf seinen Glauben besann, dachte er, der sei gewiss „auf die eine oder andere Weise schön“. Doch eilig fügte er hinzu: „Niemals könnten alle Menschen solche Heilige werden, dass sie sich damit begnügten, ihr Recht zu bekommen – und sich niemals ihr Recht zu verschaffen.“ Utopisch erschien es ihm, dass „alle bereitwillig die Neuigkeit unseres Königs von der Bruderschaft aller Kinder Gottes“ hören sollten. So räsonierte Audunsson im Rausch der Rache, und doch hatte jene Neuigkeit ihn geprägt. Lesen wir weiter, entdecken wir, dass diese Prägung eine Neuschaffung ermöglichte. Langsam reifte das Leben Jesu des Herrn in diesem leidenschaftlichen Mann dort am offenen Meer von Hestviken. Wie sein Namenspatron Olav Haraldsson musste Olav Audunsson durch Erfahrung lernen, was es heißt, sein eigenes Kreuz zu tragen. Das müssen wir alle. Das Leben als Christ hat gemeinsame Nenner; doch diese finden in jedem von uns ihren eigenen Ausdruck. Wir verehren, ja lieben Sankt Olav, nicht weil er ein geborener Heiliger war, sondern es durch ausdauernden Kampf gegen das Unwahre, Schofle und Hässliche in der Welt geworden ist; er kämpfte darum, dass der Frieden Christi in seinem Herzen herrsche. In unserer friedlosen Zeit ist das ein Beispiel, das aufmuntert und tröstet. Olav zeigt, dass man diesem Beispiel folgen kann, selbst wenn die Voraussetzungen von außen betrachtet nicht viel versprechen. Im Namen Jesu!
Wisdom 10.10-14: Wisdom did not desert him.
James 1.2-4.12: So that you may become perfect and whole.
Matthew 16.24-28: He must take up his cross and follow me.
The exhortation of Jesus just read to us — ‘whoever wants to come after me, let him deny himself’ — occurs at a cardinal point in the Gospel. It is addressed to his closest disciples, whom he has just put to the test by asking: ‘Who do you say that I am?’ After a few hesitant responses, Peter makes his definitive confession: ‘You are the Christ, Son of the living God.’ Jesus responds with his promise written in gold round the cupola of St Peter’s in Rome. Then this further discourse comes, of cross and sacrifice: ‘He who wants to save his life, will lose it.’ The link between salvation and self-emptying concerns us all: we should think of it often. Yet today this injunction is framed not generically, but specifically. The Church puts it forward as a hermeneutic key to the life and death of Olav Haraldsson. What are we to make of that?
Well, it depends whom you ask. Curiously, it has come to seem seemly even in (non-Catholic) Christian circles, now, to put Olav’s Christian purpose in doubt. It is said — even, I gather, on guided tours here in this cathedral — that Olav was but a power-hungry despot who selfishly lorded it over people to such an extent that they had enough and struck him down at Stiklestad, and that would have been the last anyone heard of him, had not ‘the Church’ contrived to ‘make him’ posthumously ‘a saint’. This narrative just doesn’t make sense. I am led to think: we who, these days, take such care (for good reason) not to treat any societal group unfairly, should be thoroughly ashamed. For what is going on here is retrospective mockery of Norwegians a thousand years ago, on the assumption that they were so stupid they let an awful bully be foisted on them as a national symbol and hypocritically bent their knee before the corpse of a man they loathed. Anyone subscribing to this view is ignorant of people’s temperament back then; further, he or she has forgotten that ‘the Church’ is not reducible to a gang of supposedly ambitious prelates. The Church is made up of ordinary believing women and men. When Bishop Grimkettle on 3 August 1031, a stone’s throw from here, declared Olav a holy man (and Einar Tambarskjelve bade the curmudgeonly Alfiva, an apt patron for the Talk-Olav-Down movement, shut up), it was because the people willed it. They recognised in Olav, even after death, a faithful intercessor, protector, and friend.
Olav was many-faceted, made up of tensions. Humanly speaking, he isn’t idealisable. It is no coincidence that art often shows him treading underfoot a dragon carrying his own features: he knew the Old Adam well; but was all the more fascinated by the New. His Christian maturing displays warfare on the battlefield of conscience. Archbishop Eystein wrote in the twelfth century that Olav arose from the baptistry in Rouen ‘changed into a new man’, but not as if by magic. Baptism sowed in him the seed of immortality. But the seed had to grow; and growth takes time in spiritual as in organic life. Much can be said about the signs of Olav’s growing Christian integrity. Beyond the indications we find in the sagas and songs, we have concrete evidence in the Christian law-code he introduced in 1024. It represented a political wager. To limit the self-governance of people used to rule without accountability is a risky undertaking: we see that in our time. When Olav introduced, in juridically binding form, the notion of an eternal, objective Justice to which all, regardless of status, were held, he mobilised the people of Norway to combat their irrational passions. Revolt resulted, at various levels.
Sigrid Undset paints an intimate picture of such revolt in the first volume of Olav Audunssønn, when Olav, staying as a guest of the Cistercian bishop of Hamar, struck down and killed, for honour’s sake, an enemy. ‘At first he seemed to freeze. Then, rage swelled in him, and defiant, jubilant enjoyment.’ Olav, like Cain, knew the ecstasy of revenge. Conscience did weigh him down. He was a Christian, after all. Considering the faith, he thought, ‘it is somehow beautiful’, but added: ‘Never, though, will all men turn into such saints that they will be content to have justice meted out to them, without imposing their own sense of right.’ It seemed utopian to fancy that all ‘should be minded to hear our Lord’s new speech about the fraternity of all God’s children’. That is how Olav Audunssønn reasoned then, drunk with vengeance. The ‘new speech’ had formed him, however; and would come to enable, as we discover when we read on, a slow bourgeoning of the life of Jesus in the heart of this implacable lover out there face to face with the fierce sea, in Hestviken.
Olav Audunssønn, like Olav Haraldsson, his patron, had to learn from experience what it means to take up one’s own cross. All of us do. Christian life has a number of common denominators; yet must be articulated specifically for each of us. We revere and love St Olav not because he was born a saint, but because he became one through persevering battle against all that was untrue, unworthy, and ugly in himself and in the world; he fought to let Christ’s peace rule in his heart. In our troubled times his example gives us encouragement and blessed consolation. Olav shows us that the Christian calling can be followed even on the basis of the most unpromising conditioning.
Image of St Olav from the church of Värmdö in Uppsala.
Weisheit 10,10–14: In einem harten Kampf verlieh die Gottesfurcht ihm den Siegespreis.
Jakobusbrief 1,2–4.12: Die Geduld aber soll zur Vollendung kommen.
Matthäus 16,24–28: Wer mir folgen will, verleugne sich selbst.
Die Ermahnung Jesu, die wir gerade gehört haben – „Wer mir folgen will, verleugne sich selbst“ – erfolgt an einem Wendepunkt im Evangelium. Die Worte richten sich an seine engsten Freunde, die ihm schon eine zeit lang gefolgt waren. Gerade hatte er sie auf die Probe gestellt mit der Frage: „Für wen haltet ihr mich?“ Nach einigen eher zögerlichen Vorstößen aus der Gruppe kommt Petrus mit seinem wagemutigen, epochalen Bekenntnis: „Du bist der Messias, der Sohn des lebendigen Gottes.“ Jesu Antwort ist das Versprechen an Petrus, das in goldenen Lettern die Kuppel des Petersdoms schmückt. Doch dann wendet sich das Gespräch abrupt dem Thema Kreuz und Opfer zu: „Wer sein Leben zu retten meint, wird es verlieren.“ Die Verbindung zwischen dem Heilsversprechen und dem Ruf zur Aufgabe seiner selbst geht uns alle an; wir sollten oft daran denken. Heute hören wir diese Aufforderung allerdings nicht pauschal, sondern persönlich. Die Kirche gibt sie uns wie einen Schlüssel in die Hand, um Olav Haraldssons Leben und Tod zu erschließen. Was sollen wir nämlich davon halten?
Das kommt ganz darauf an, wen man fragt. Hierzulande gehört es mittlerweile selbst unter Christen zum guten Ton, Olavs christliche Absichten zu diffamieren. Von Leuten, die bei einer Führung dabei waren, habe ich gehört, dass Olav sogar hier im Dom als machtbesessener Despot beschrieben wird: Sein rücksichtsloser Egotrip sei den Leuten irgendwann zu bunt geworden, sodass sie ihn in Stiklestad einen Kopf kürzer gemacht haben – und das wäre das Ende vom Lied gewesen, wäre nicht die Kirche auf die Idee gekommen, ihn posthum zum Heiligen „zu machen“. Hier reimt sich ganz offensichtlich etwas nicht. Wir, die wir heutzutage so genau aufpassen, ja keine Gruppe ungerecht zu behandeln (eigentlich ein ausgezeichneter Vorsatz), wir sollten uns schämen; was hier passiert ist nichts anderes als rückwirkendes Mobbing der Bevölkerung Norwegens im 11. Jahrhundert. Man meint, dass die Leute damals tatsächlich so blöd waren, sich einen grässlichen Grobian als Nationalsymbol verkaufen zu lassen, und sich dazu noch gängeln ließen, vor seinen sterblichen Überresten das Knie zu beugen. Wer glaubt, dass sich so etwas wirklich zugetragen hat, weiß herzlich wenig von der Mentalität des Volkes damals, und hat noch dazu vergessen, dass sich die Kirche nicht auf eine Hierarchie klerikaler Ehrgeizlinge reduzieren lässt. Die Kirche besteht zuallererst aus dem gemeinen Mann, der gemeinen Frau. Bischof Grimkjell sprach am 3. August 1031 wenige Meter von hier entfernt Olav heilig. (Einar Tambarskjelve gebot bei der Gelegenheit der skeptischen Königinmutter Alfiva zu schweigen – sie wäre ein ausgezeichnetes Maskottchen der Olavsskeptiker!) Das geschah, weil das Volk es wollte. Sie erkannten in Olav über den Tod hinaus ihren Fürsprecher, Beschützer und guten Freund.
Olav war ein komplizierter Mann, dem Spannungen nicht fremd waren. Menschlich gesehen taugt er nicht für Idealisierungen. Nicht zufällig zeigen ihn künstlerische Darstellungen oft, wie er eine Schlange – den alten Versucher – zu Boden tritt. Der Versucher trägt jedoch sein eigenes Antlitz. Olav kannte den alten Adam nur zu gut; mehr noch hatte ihn der neue gelockt. Zu seiner christlichen Reifung gehört der Kampf auf dem Schlachtfeld des Gewissens. Erzbischof Eystein schrieb, dass Olav „in einen neuen Mann verwandelt“ aus dem Bad der Taufe in Rouen stieg. Die Verwandlung war aber kein Simsalabim-Trick. Die Taufe säte den Samen der Unsterblichkeit in ihm. Der Same konnte wachsen und reifen; und Wachstum braucht Zeit, im geistlichen wie im organischen Leben. Vieles ließe sich über die Anzeichen von Olavs wachsender christlicher Integrität sagen. Über das hinaus, was sich aus Saga-Literatur und Dichtung beweisen lässt, haben wir in Olavs christlichem Gesetzeswerk ein handfestes Indiz. Es war ein politisches Wagnis. Die Autorität von Menschen zu beschneiden, die gewohnt sind, Macht nach eigenen Prämissen zu verwalten, schafft notwendig Streit; das sehen wir in unserer Zeit auch. Indem er juristisch bindend den Begriff der ewigen Gerechtigkeit einführte, die einmal von allen Rechenschaft fordert, ohne Ansehen von Rang und Stand, führte Olav alle Norweger in die Schlacht – im Streit mit ihren eigenen Leidenschaften. Eine Revolte auf mehreren Ebenen war das Ergebnis.
Sigrid Undset zeichnet ein intimes Bild solch eines inneren Aufruhrs im ersten Band von Olav Audunsson. Olav, zu Gast bei Mönchsbischof Torfinn, erschlägt im Gästehaus der Dominikaner in Hamar einen Mann, der seine Ehre gekränkt hatte. „Sein spontanes Empfinden war ein inneres Gefrieren. Doch dann kochte der Zorn in ihm auf, und mit ihm ein trotzig-freudiges Wohlgefühl.“ Olav fühlte die Ekstase der Rache wie einst Kain. Doch das Gewissen schlug ihn. Er war doch ein Christ. Als er sich auf seinen Glauben besann, dachte er, der sei gewiss „auf die eine oder andere Weise schön“. Doch eilig fügte er hinzu: „Niemals könnten alle Menschen solche Heilige werden, dass sie sich damit begnügten, ihr Recht zu bekommen – und sich niemals ihr Recht zu verschaffen.“ Utopisch erschien es ihm, dass „alle bereitwillig die Neuigkeit unseres Königs von der Bruderschaft aller Kinder Gottes“ hören sollten. So räsonierte Audunsson im Rausch der Rache, und doch hatte jene Neuigkeit ihn geprägt. Lesen wir weiter, entdecken wir, dass diese Prägung eine Neuschaffung ermöglichte. Langsam reifte das Leben Jesu des Herrn in diesem leidenschaftlichen Mann dort am offenen Meer von Hestviken. Wie sein Namenspatron Olav Haraldsson musste Olav Audunsson durch Erfahrung lernen, was es heißt, sein eigenes Kreuz zu tragen. Das müssen wir alle. Das Leben als Christ hat gemeinsame Nenner; doch diese finden in jedem von uns ihren eigenen Ausdruck. Wir verehren, ja lieben Sankt Olav, nicht weil er ein geborener Heiliger war, sondern es durch ausdauernden Kampf gegen das Unwahre, Schofle und Hässliche in der Welt geworden ist; er kämpfte darum, dass der Frieden Christi in seinem Herzen herrsche. In unserer friedlosen Zeit ist das ein Beispiel, das aufmuntert und tröstet. Olav zeigt, dass man diesem Beispiel folgen kann, selbst wenn die Voraussetzungen von außen betrachtet nicht viel versprechen. Im Namen Jesu!
Vigil of Olsok
You can find a German translation of this homily, preached in Norwegian, by scrolling down.
Joshua 3:14-4:8: What are these stones?
Colossians 1:9-17: He is the image of the unseen God.
Matthew 5:13-20: When salt loses its saltiness, it is useless.
When Jesus meets a scribe who says, ‘Master! I will follow you wherever you go!’, he replies: ‘Foxes have holes, the birds of the sky their nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’ Indeed he had not, until he gave himself over to the sleep of death on Calvary, where the cross was his pillow. To this day we beseech the cross on Good Friday: ‘For a while the ancient rigor,/That thy birth bestowed, suspend;/And the King of heavenly beauty/On thy bosom gently tend!’
To think that words 1500 years old can send a shiver down your spine!
Here at Stiklestad, the site of St Olav’s martyrdom, we contemplate the Lord’s Passion in the light of the sacrifice his martyr, Olav, brought. According to a venerable tradition, the church in which we find ourselves was built exactly where Olav fell, struck by the spear of Tore the Dog and fatally wounded by Kalv Arneson’s axe. The high altar was built around the stone on which Olav is said to have rested as he expired. It was that upon which he got to lay his head when it really mattered.
I’d like to reflect a little on this stone.
It stands for the paradox in Olav’s maturing as a man and a Christian. As a youth he was driven by cupidity. He loved money. He knew how to give splendid gifts as when, after the battle of Nesjar, he gave an ally a gold-encrusted sword and a rich property. Not only was he aware of being a Norwegian nobleman; he knew how rulers in other countries lived and related. He was a man of the world, magnificent and munificent. His first decade as king was marked, although he faced resistance here and there, by great ambition politically, spiritually and materially.
Olav, known as ‘large of stature’, corresponded to his role. Greatness seemed tailor-made for him.
When the Danish King Canute, never keen on a strong, united Norway, claimed the country for itself, turning up in Trondheim with an army in 1028, he appealed to the gentry who were tired of Olav’s rule, especially of his code of law, imbued with Christian principles. Local grandees wished to rule their own roost. They preferred a king who lived far away to one who knew too much about local affair. Olav’s project of greatness was idealistic. Canute’s, by contrast, obtained the right to rule by pragmatism and gold. Olav had to flee the country, to turn his back on his life’s work.
Thus he entered upon a crucial stage of his life.
For nearly two years he lived as a guest of Yaroslav, grand prince of Kyivan Rus, and his queen Ingegjerd, the love of Olav’s youth. Fr Olav Müller has written that Olav’s time in exile taught him ‘the mystery of suffering’; he thinks it may have had something in common with the ‘dark night of the mystics’. Everything was taken away from him; everything seemed uncertain.
‘When Olav had arrived in the land of Rus’, we read in Heimskringla, ‘he walked about pondering and wondering what he should do.’ He considered Yaroslav’s offer to make him ruler of Bulgaria. He considered whether ‘he should renounce kingship and set out as a pilgrim for Jerusalem — or join an order of monks.’ Then he entertained the dream in which his royal ancestor Olav Trygvason called him back to Norway, not to conquer, but to die.
Snorre draws a picture of Olav during this time that is telling. It happened one Sunday that ‘the king sat at table so lost in thought that he did not mark the passage of time.’ He sat there absorbed, chopping away with knife on a piece of wood, not noticing that thus he desecrated the Lord’s Day. Thus sits a man in state of depression so deep that it encloses him in himself.
Release came when Olav freely assented to the task that flowed from his vocation, returning home, even though he knew he would not prosper. Were he to die, so be it! Did not God himself pass through death in order to found a kingdom that is not of this world, yet has formed this world more deeply than any temporal might?
The significance of the baptism Olav had received in Rouen ten years earlier must have impressed itself upon him powerfully during this time spent, as if on a kind of retreat, with Yaroslav. I thought of him there when, some time ago, I stood in the church of Sancta Sophia in Kyiv and looked up towards the Pantocrator in the ceiling.
Work on the church was begun in 1011. The building project was dear to Yaroslav, who will surely have taken his Norwegian friend along to inspect progress. So we are entitled to imagine Olav the Great-of-Stature standing upright feeling small underneath the cupola of Sancta Sophia, where the image of Christ-the-Ruler-of-All was emerging. In the final period of Olav’s earthly life, we see his consciousness of a heavenly, eternal perspective manifest in various ways. It showed itself in the dream he dreamt just before the Battle of Stiklestad, when he saw himself climbing up a heavenly ladder. It was embodied when the king, dying, leant ‘upon a stone’, then one under the altar just behind me, threw away his sword and surrendered himself unarmed into God’s hands.
The stone of Stiklestad, like the stones Israel built up as a cairn in Gilgal, testifies to a pascha, a divine passing-through. The selfish, residually heathen aspects of Olav were definitively absorbed by the flame of Christ’s love. His pride became of motor of courageous abandonment. The stone he leant upon was fundamentally Christ himself, present in his Church. In this way Olav became a corner-stone of the Church in this country. His path was singular, but we must all walk one like it away from avarice, greed, and the thirst for status towards a given, trustful, Christlike life.
May God grant us to walk steadily, faithfully. Amen.
Pantocrator in Sancta Sophia, Kyiv.
Josua 3,14–4,8: Was bedeuten diese Steine für euch?
Kolosserbrief 1,9–17: Er ist das Bild des unsichtbaren Gottes
Matthäus 5,13–20: Wenn das Salz seinen Geschmack verliert, taugt es zu nichts mehr.
Als Jesus einen Schriftgelehrten trifft, der zu ihm sagt: „Meister, ich will dir folgen, wohin du auch gehst!“, antwortet er: „Die Füchse haben Höhlen und die Vögel des Himmels Nester; der Menschensohn aber hat keinen Ort, wo er sein Haupt hinlegen kann.“ Nein, bevor er sich auf Golgata dem Schlaf des Todes übergab, mit dem Kreuzesstamm als Ruhekissen, hatte er keinen solchen Ort. Noch immer rufen wir das Kreuz am Karfreitag an mit den Worten: „Beuge, hoher Baum, die Zweige, werde weich an Stamm und Ast, denn dein hartes Holz muss tragen eine königliche Last. Gib den Gliedern deines Schöpfers an dem Stamme linde Rast.“
Dass 1500 Jahre alte Worte einen solch zarten Klang in unseren Ohren haben können!
In Stiklestad betrachten wir das Leiden des Herrn im Lichte des Opfers, das Olav, sein Heiliger, brachte. Eine Tradition, die weit zurückgeht, berichtet davon, dass diese Kirche hier, erbaut im 12. Jahrhundert, genau dort errichtet wurde, wo Olav fiel, getroffen vom Speer Tore Hunds und dem tödlichen Axthieb Kalv Arnesons. Der Hochaltar, heißt es, wurde auf dem Stein errichtet, auf dem Olav im Augenblick seines Todes ruhte. Hier war es, wo er sein Haupt hinlegte im alles entscheidenden Moment. Ich will gerne etwas über die Bedeutung dieses Steins nachdenken.
Er steht für ein Paradox: das Paradox der Reifung Olavs als Mann und als Christ. Ehrgeizig war er gewesen als junger Mann und hinter den Frauen her. Er liebte Reichtum und wusste großzügige Geschenke zu machen, wie zum Beispiel nach der Schlacht von Nesjar, als er Brynjolv Ulvalde ein goldverziertes Schwert und ein herrschaftliches Anwesen schenkte. Olav war sich nicht nur seines Adelsstandes bewusst, er wusste auch, wie sich Herrscher in anderen Ländern gaben. Weltgewandt wie er war, verband er Pracht mit Milde: er war magnificent und munificent. Seine ersten zehn Regierungsjahre waren, von ein paar Anzeichen von Widerstand hier und da abgesehen, von politischen, geistlichen und materiellen Ambitionen geprägt. Olav, genannt der Große, füllte seine Rolle ganz aus. Größe war ihm sozusagen auf den Leib geschneidert.
Als der dänische König Knut – dem ein starkes, geeintes Norwegen immer ein Dorn im Auge war – 1028 mit einem Heer nach Trondheim kam und das Land für sich forderte, appellierte er an Bauern, die Olav und besonders sein christliches Gesetzeswerk leid waren. Die Bauern wollten selbst Herr im Haus sein und zogen einen König, der weit weg residierte, einem König vor, der die Verhältnisse vor Ort im Griff hatte. Olav verfolgte sein Großprojekt mit Idealismus. Am Ende gewann Knut mit Pragmatismus und Gold die Macht. Olav musste fliehen, seinem Lebenswerk in Norwegen den Rücken kehren.
Es folgte eine entscheidende Phase in seinem Leben. Beinahe zwei Jahre lebte er als Gast am Hofe Jaroslaws, des Kiewer Großfürsten, und Ingegjerds, seiner Jugendflamme. Pater Olav Müller schrieb einmal davon, dass Olav in der Ukraine das „Mysterium des Leidens kennenlernte“; ja, er machte parallele Züge aus zwischen der Erfahrung des Königs und der „dunklen Nacht der Mystiker“. Er hatte alles verloren; jede Sicherheit war ihm genommen.
„Nachdem König Olav nach Kiew kam“, lesen wir bei Snorre, dem isländischen Dichter und Historiker, „ging er viel umher, grübelte und dachte darüber nach, was er nun tun sollte.“ Er zog sogar in Betracht, Jaroslaws Angebot anzunehmen und über Bulgarien zu herrschen. Er überlegte, dem Königtum ganz zu entsagen und nach Jerusalem zu wallfahrten oder Mönch zu werden.“ Dann zeigte sich ihm Olav Trygvason ihm im Traum und rief ihn zurück nach Norwegen – nicht um zu siegen, sondern um zu sterben. Snorre zeichnet ein vielsagendes Bild vom Olav dieser Periode. Eines Sonntags geschah es, dass Olav an einem Tisch „so tief in Gedanken versunken dasaß, dass er die Zeit vergaß“. Völlig abwesend schnitzte er an einem Stück Holz herum, ohne daran zu denken, dass er damit gegen die Sonntagsruhe verstieß. So verhält sich ein Mann, dessen Gemüt so bedrückt ist, dass er sich ganz in sich verschließt.
Die Erlösung kommt, als Olav sein freies Ja spricht zur Aufgabe, die vor ihm liegt, auf seine Berufung antwortet und nach Norwegen heimkehrt – obwohl er wusste, dass er kaum Aussicht auf Erfolg hatte. Sollte er sterben, sollte es eben so sein. War nicht Gott selbst durch den Tod gegangen, um ein Reich zu gründen, das nicht von dieser Welt war? Und doch hat sein Reich diese Welt mehr geformt als jede andere, zeitliche Macht. Die tiefste Bedeutung der Taufe, die Olav zehn Jahre zuvor in Rouen empfangen hatte, muss sich ihm mit voller Wucht offenbart haben in der Zeit, die er sozusagen „in Exerzitien“ bei Jaroslaw verbrachte.
Ich musste daran denken, als ich vor einiger Zeit in der Sophienkirche in Kiew stand und zum Pantokrator in der Kuppel emporsah. An der Kirche wurde seit dem Jahr 1011 gebaut. Das Projekt war Jaroslaw wichtig, mit Sicherheit wird er seinem norwegischen Freund den Fortgang des Baus präsentiert haben. Wir dürfen uns ruhig vorstellen, wie Olav, genannt der Große, in der Sophienkirche steht und sich plötzlich ganz klein vorkommt, überwältigt vom Allherrscher Christus, der von der Kuppel auf ihn herabsah.
Tatsächlich sind die letzten Tage im Leben Olavs, auf dem Weg nach Stiklestad, von einer himmlischen, überzeitlichen Perspektive geprägt. Wir finden diese Perspektive beispielsweise im Traum, den er vor der Schlacht hatte: Er stieg die Himmelsleiter hinauf. Die Inkarnation dieses Traumes finden wir in dem Moment, als sich der König im Tode am Stein anlehnt – dem Stein unter unserem Altar hier –, das Schwert von sich wirft und sich Gott anheimgibt. Der Stein von Stiklestad ist wie die Gedenksteine von Gilgal Zeuge eines pascha, eines göttlichen Hinübergangs. Alles Egoistische, Heidnische in Olav geht endgültig auf in der lodernden Flamme von Christi Liebe. Aus seinem Stolz wächst die Kraft zur Hingabe. Der Stein, an dem er sich anlehnt, ist im Letzten Christus, der in seiner Kirche gegenwärtig ist. Auf diese Weise wird Olav selbst zu einem Eckstein der Kirche.
Olavs Weg war einzigartig, aber alle müssen wir einen ähnlichen Weg gehen: von Gier, Habsucht und Streben nach Status zu einem Leben der Hingabe, das Christus ähnlich ist.
Gebe Gott, dass wir diesen Weg in Treue gehen. Amen
Pantocrator in our Catholic chapel at Stiklestad, painted this year by Solrunn Nes.
Joshua 3:14-4:8: What are these stones?
Colossians 1:9-17: He is the image of the unseen God.
Matthew 5:13-20: When salt loses its saltiness, it is useless.
When Jesus meets a scribe who says, ‘Master! I will follow you wherever you go!’, he replies: ‘Foxes have holes, the birds of the sky their nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’ Indeed he had not, until he gave himself over to the sleep of death on Calvary, where the cross was his pillow. To this day we beseech the cross on Good Friday: ‘For a while the ancient rigor,/That thy birth bestowed, suspend;/And the King of heavenly beauty/On thy bosom gently tend!’
To think that words 1500 years old can send a shiver down your spine!
Here at Stiklestad, the site of St Olav’s martyrdom, we contemplate the Lord’s Passion in the light of the sacrifice his martyr, Olav, brought. According to a venerable tradition, the church in which we find ourselves was built exactly where Olav fell, struck by the spear of Tore the Dog and fatally wounded by Kalv Arneson’s axe. The high altar was built around the stone on which Olav is said to have rested as he expired. It was that upon which he got to lay his head when it really mattered.
I’d like to reflect a little on this stone.
It stands for the paradox in Olav’s maturing as a man and a Christian. As a youth he was driven by cupidity. He loved money. He knew how to give splendid gifts as when, after the battle of Nesjar, he gave an ally a gold-encrusted sword and a rich property. Not only was he aware of being a Norwegian nobleman; he knew how rulers in other countries lived and related. He was a man of the world, magnificent and munificent. His first decade as king was marked, although he faced resistance here and there, by great ambition politically, spiritually and materially.
Olav, known as ‘large of stature’, corresponded to his role. Greatness seemed tailor-made for him.
When the Danish King Canute, never keen on a strong, united Norway, claimed the country for itself, turning up in Trondheim with an army in 1028, he appealed to the gentry who were tired of Olav’s rule, especially of his code of law, imbued with Christian principles. Local grandees wished to rule their own roost. They preferred a king who lived far away to one who knew too much about local affair. Olav’s project of greatness was idealistic. Canute’s, by contrast, obtained the right to rule by pragmatism and gold. Olav had to flee the country, to turn his back on his life’s work.
Thus he entered upon a crucial stage of his life.
For nearly two years he lived as a guest of Yaroslav, grand prince of Kyivan Rus, and his queen Ingegjerd, the love of Olav’s youth. Fr Olav Müller has written that Olav’s time in exile taught him ‘the mystery of suffering’; he thinks it may have had something in common with the ‘dark night of the mystics’. Everything was taken away from him; everything seemed uncertain.
‘When Olav had arrived in the land of Rus’, we read in Heimskringla, ‘he walked about pondering and wondering what he should do.’ He considered Yaroslav’s offer to make him ruler of Bulgaria. He considered whether ‘he should renounce kingship and set out as a pilgrim for Jerusalem — or join an order of monks.’ Then he entertained the dream in which his royal ancestor Olav Trygvason called him back to Norway, not to conquer, but to die.
Snorre draws a picture of Olav during this time that is telling. It happened one Sunday that ‘the king sat at table so lost in thought that he did not mark the passage of time.’ He sat there absorbed, chopping away with knife on a piece of wood, not noticing that thus he desecrated the Lord’s Day. Thus sits a man in state of depression so deep that it encloses him in himself.
Release came when Olav freely assented to the task that flowed from his vocation, returning home, even though he knew he would not prosper. Were he to die, so be it! Did not God himself pass through death in order to found a kingdom that is not of this world, yet has formed this world more deeply than any temporal might?
The significance of the baptism Olav had received in Rouen ten years earlier must have impressed itself upon him powerfully during this time spent, as if on a kind of retreat, with Yaroslav. I thought of him there when, some time ago, I stood in the church of Sancta Sophia in Kyiv and looked up towards the Pantocrator in the ceiling.
Work on the church was begun in 1011. The building project was dear to Yaroslav, who will surely have taken his Norwegian friend along to inspect progress. So we are entitled to imagine Olav the Great-of-Stature standing upright feeling small underneath the cupola of Sancta Sophia, where the image of Christ-the-Ruler-of-All was emerging. In the final period of Olav’s earthly life, we see his consciousness of a heavenly, eternal perspective manifest in various ways. It showed itself in the dream he dreamt just before the Battle of Stiklestad, when he saw himself climbing up a heavenly ladder. It was embodied when the king, dying, leant ‘upon a stone’, then one under the altar just behind me, threw away his sword and surrendered himself unarmed into God’s hands.
The stone of Stiklestad, like the stones Israel built up as a cairn in Gilgal, testifies to a pascha, a divine passing-through. The selfish, residually heathen aspects of Olav were definitively absorbed by the flame of Christ’s love. His pride became of motor of courageous abandonment. The stone he leant upon was fundamentally Christ himself, present in his Church. In this way Olav became a corner-stone of the Church in this country. His path was singular, but we must all walk one like it away from avarice, greed, and the thirst for status towards a given, trustful, Christlike life.
May God grant us to walk steadily, faithfully. Amen.
Pantocrator in Sancta Sophia, Kyiv.
Josua 3,14–4,8: Was bedeuten diese Steine für euch?
Kolosserbrief 1,9–17: Er ist das Bild des unsichtbaren Gottes
Matthäus 5,13–20: Wenn das Salz seinen Geschmack verliert, taugt es zu nichts mehr.
Als Jesus einen Schriftgelehrten trifft, der zu ihm sagt: „Meister, ich will dir folgen, wohin du auch gehst!“, antwortet er: „Die Füchse haben Höhlen und die Vögel des Himmels Nester; der Menschensohn aber hat keinen Ort, wo er sein Haupt hinlegen kann.“ Nein, bevor er sich auf Golgata dem Schlaf des Todes übergab, mit dem Kreuzesstamm als Ruhekissen, hatte er keinen solchen Ort. Noch immer rufen wir das Kreuz am Karfreitag an mit den Worten: „Beuge, hoher Baum, die Zweige, werde weich an Stamm und Ast, denn dein hartes Holz muss tragen eine königliche Last. Gib den Gliedern deines Schöpfers an dem Stamme linde Rast.“
Dass 1500 Jahre alte Worte einen solch zarten Klang in unseren Ohren haben können!
In Stiklestad betrachten wir das Leiden des Herrn im Lichte des Opfers, das Olav, sein Heiliger, brachte. Eine Tradition, die weit zurückgeht, berichtet davon, dass diese Kirche hier, erbaut im 12. Jahrhundert, genau dort errichtet wurde, wo Olav fiel, getroffen vom Speer Tore Hunds und dem tödlichen Axthieb Kalv Arnesons. Der Hochaltar, heißt es, wurde auf dem Stein errichtet, auf dem Olav im Augenblick seines Todes ruhte. Hier war es, wo er sein Haupt hinlegte im alles entscheidenden Moment. Ich will gerne etwas über die Bedeutung dieses Steins nachdenken.
Er steht für ein Paradox: das Paradox der Reifung Olavs als Mann und als Christ. Ehrgeizig war er gewesen als junger Mann und hinter den Frauen her. Er liebte Reichtum und wusste großzügige Geschenke zu machen, wie zum Beispiel nach der Schlacht von Nesjar, als er Brynjolv Ulvalde ein goldverziertes Schwert und ein herrschaftliches Anwesen schenkte. Olav war sich nicht nur seines Adelsstandes bewusst, er wusste auch, wie sich Herrscher in anderen Ländern gaben. Weltgewandt wie er war, verband er Pracht mit Milde: er war magnificent und munificent. Seine ersten zehn Regierungsjahre waren, von ein paar Anzeichen von Widerstand hier und da abgesehen, von politischen, geistlichen und materiellen Ambitionen geprägt. Olav, genannt der Große, füllte seine Rolle ganz aus. Größe war ihm sozusagen auf den Leib geschneidert.
Als der dänische König Knut – dem ein starkes, geeintes Norwegen immer ein Dorn im Auge war – 1028 mit einem Heer nach Trondheim kam und das Land für sich forderte, appellierte er an Bauern, die Olav und besonders sein christliches Gesetzeswerk leid waren. Die Bauern wollten selbst Herr im Haus sein und zogen einen König, der weit weg residierte, einem König vor, der die Verhältnisse vor Ort im Griff hatte. Olav verfolgte sein Großprojekt mit Idealismus. Am Ende gewann Knut mit Pragmatismus und Gold die Macht. Olav musste fliehen, seinem Lebenswerk in Norwegen den Rücken kehren.
Es folgte eine entscheidende Phase in seinem Leben. Beinahe zwei Jahre lebte er als Gast am Hofe Jaroslaws, des Kiewer Großfürsten, und Ingegjerds, seiner Jugendflamme. Pater Olav Müller schrieb einmal davon, dass Olav in der Ukraine das „Mysterium des Leidens kennenlernte“; ja, er machte parallele Züge aus zwischen der Erfahrung des Königs und der „dunklen Nacht der Mystiker“. Er hatte alles verloren; jede Sicherheit war ihm genommen.
„Nachdem König Olav nach Kiew kam“, lesen wir bei Snorre, dem isländischen Dichter und Historiker, „ging er viel umher, grübelte und dachte darüber nach, was er nun tun sollte.“ Er zog sogar in Betracht, Jaroslaws Angebot anzunehmen und über Bulgarien zu herrschen. Er überlegte, dem Königtum ganz zu entsagen und nach Jerusalem zu wallfahrten oder Mönch zu werden.“ Dann zeigte sich ihm Olav Trygvason ihm im Traum und rief ihn zurück nach Norwegen – nicht um zu siegen, sondern um zu sterben. Snorre zeichnet ein vielsagendes Bild vom Olav dieser Periode. Eines Sonntags geschah es, dass Olav an einem Tisch „so tief in Gedanken versunken dasaß, dass er die Zeit vergaß“. Völlig abwesend schnitzte er an einem Stück Holz herum, ohne daran zu denken, dass er damit gegen die Sonntagsruhe verstieß. So verhält sich ein Mann, dessen Gemüt so bedrückt ist, dass er sich ganz in sich verschließt.
Die Erlösung kommt, als Olav sein freies Ja spricht zur Aufgabe, die vor ihm liegt, auf seine Berufung antwortet und nach Norwegen heimkehrt – obwohl er wusste, dass er kaum Aussicht auf Erfolg hatte. Sollte er sterben, sollte es eben so sein. War nicht Gott selbst durch den Tod gegangen, um ein Reich zu gründen, das nicht von dieser Welt war? Und doch hat sein Reich diese Welt mehr geformt als jede andere, zeitliche Macht. Die tiefste Bedeutung der Taufe, die Olav zehn Jahre zuvor in Rouen empfangen hatte, muss sich ihm mit voller Wucht offenbart haben in der Zeit, die er sozusagen „in Exerzitien“ bei Jaroslaw verbrachte.
Ich musste daran denken, als ich vor einiger Zeit in der Sophienkirche in Kiew stand und zum Pantokrator in der Kuppel emporsah. An der Kirche wurde seit dem Jahr 1011 gebaut. Das Projekt war Jaroslaw wichtig, mit Sicherheit wird er seinem norwegischen Freund den Fortgang des Baus präsentiert haben. Wir dürfen uns ruhig vorstellen, wie Olav, genannt der Große, in der Sophienkirche steht und sich plötzlich ganz klein vorkommt, überwältigt vom Allherrscher Christus, der von der Kuppel auf ihn herabsah.
Tatsächlich sind die letzten Tage im Leben Olavs, auf dem Weg nach Stiklestad, von einer himmlischen, überzeitlichen Perspektive geprägt. Wir finden diese Perspektive beispielsweise im Traum, den er vor der Schlacht hatte: Er stieg die Himmelsleiter hinauf. Die Inkarnation dieses Traumes finden wir in dem Moment, als sich der König im Tode am Stein anlehnt – dem Stein unter unserem Altar hier –, das Schwert von sich wirft und sich Gott anheimgibt. Der Stein von Stiklestad ist wie die Gedenksteine von Gilgal Zeuge eines pascha, eines göttlichen Hinübergangs. Alles Egoistische, Heidnische in Olav geht endgültig auf in der lodernden Flamme von Christi Liebe. Aus seinem Stolz wächst die Kraft zur Hingabe. Der Stein, an dem er sich anlehnt, ist im Letzten Christus, der in seiner Kirche gegenwärtig ist. Auf diese Weise wird Olav selbst zu einem Eckstein der Kirche.
Olavs Weg war einzigartig, aber alle müssen wir einen ähnlichen Weg gehen: von Gier, Habsucht und Streben nach Status zu einem Leben der Hingabe, das Christus ähnlich ist.
Gebe Gott, dass wir diesen Weg in Treue gehen. Amen
Pantocrator in our Catholic chapel at Stiklestad, painted this year by Solrunn Nes.
What Now?
In a panel conversation moderated this evening by Francis X. Maier, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, Archbishop Paul Coakley, and I were asked ‘to offer our hopes and thoughts about what we need now as a Church in light of the new Leo pontificate, and the main opportunities and challenges the Church now faces.’ I proposed these introductory remarks:
So what do we need now? Like most bishops, I dare say, I am often presented, on trips around the diocese, with long lists of people’s perceived needs. I give these my attention; then try to suggest that the crucial question may not in fact be, ‘What do we need?’, but, ‘What are we needed for?’ A shocking aspect of Biblical faith is God’s preferential option for letting his providence unfold, for all his omnipotence, through fallible, weak, sinful human beings. How can we make ourselves mobilisable for his salvific, blessed purpose? This kind of consideration is what we need above all.
Were I, next, to be more specific, I’d hone in on a need I’d call hermeneutic. Let me explain. As a student of monastic history I have noticed that a predictable crisis occurs in the life of a community when the reins of government pass from the second to the third generation. The founders set about their task with clear purpose and the exhilaration of starting something new. The second generation positions itself in relation to the founders. Some will adulate them, some will be more critical; but the founders’ experience, direction, and vision remain, for better or for worse, a criterion of collective discernment. This dynamic changes at the next generational juncture, by which time the founders will be dead, or quite ancient. All of a sudden the second generation’s search for particular identity seems like much ado about not very much. The truly pressing issues are more fundamental: ‘What are we all about? How can we find our place within a tradition that transcends us? Are we on the right track?’ The third generation is faced with the challenge of continuity. To carry on faithfully it needs more than the history — or myth — of heroic origins. It must at once integrate and relativise its specific heritage, looking forward as well as back, up, not down.
This dynamic touches the universal Church, I believe, with regard to a modern event that may be called foundational, so deeply has it formed Catholic experience. I refer, of course, to the Second Vatican Council. What the council represented to those who knew a before and an after has been documented amply and polyphonically. Afterwards came the labours of those who were, or saw themselves as, the council’s legitimate heirs. There were splendid initiatives; but we know no less what quarrels emerged, locking Catholic discourse in confrontations between so-called ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ positions, unedifying clashes — and almost invariably dull.
Something of the climate of the second generation found symbolic expression in a teacup storm not all that long ago when it was still a subject of debate whether Vatican II might best be approached through a hermeneutic of rupture or one of continuity. I confess I found this querelle perplexing. I cannot see how any Catholic might adopt anything but a hermeneutic of continuity. This perspective is inherent in our faith in a God who acts in history, who exhorts us, ‘Remember!’, whose incarnate Son is the principle by which and for which all things exist, whose Spirit sanctifies, in Christ, by ‘calling to mind’.
The collective remembrance of what the council and its aftermath felt like has faded. That notably reduces the emotional heat of hermeneutic exercise, enabling lucid reflection. Today’s young Catholics are not ungrateful for the council’s great gifts, but unable to proceed with their grandparents’ mindsets, uninclined to flog dead horses, unenthused by fossilised projects of aggiornamento when the sun has set on the giorno by which they were defined. What they long for is to awaken the dawn, to know the saving power of Christ, the same today, yesterday, and always, yet making all things new, often enough by exploding time-bound dichotomies.
The pontificate of Leo XIV will guide us peacefully, I expect, into this new era, full of promise. There is a joy in the air. It gives me confidence; for joy, the genuine stuff, not the counterfeit, is a sign that something goes on in us not of our making, something enabling us to seek wholeness in the midst of apparent fragmentation. I think of something the Holy Father said recently, in a catechesis on Saint Irenaeus:
The doctrinal divisions [Irenaeus] encountered within the Christian community, the internal conflicts and external persecutions, did not discourage him. On the contrary, in a fragmented world he learned how to think better, bringing his attention ever more deeply to Jesus. He became a cantor of his person, indeed of his flesh. He recognised that in [Jesus], what seems to conflict is reconciled in unity. Jesus is not a wall that separates, but a door that unites us. We have to remain in him and distinguish reality from ideologies.
I am drawn by this papal challenge to ‘think better’ and by the counsel that so to think is to think ‘in Christ’, who is Truth, thereby to distinguish the real from the unreal. Surrounded as we are more than ever by illusions, that is a further thing we do need now.
Thank God that Peter, rock-firm, is there to confirm us, his brethren.
So what do we need now? Like most bishops, I dare say, I am often presented, on trips around the diocese, with long lists of people’s perceived needs. I give these my attention; then try to suggest that the crucial question may not in fact be, ‘What do we need?’, but, ‘What are we needed for?’ A shocking aspect of Biblical faith is God’s preferential option for letting his providence unfold, for all his omnipotence, through fallible, weak, sinful human beings. How can we make ourselves mobilisable for his salvific, blessed purpose? This kind of consideration is what we need above all.
Were I, next, to be more specific, I’d hone in on a need I’d call hermeneutic. Let me explain. As a student of monastic history I have noticed that a predictable crisis occurs in the life of a community when the reins of government pass from the second to the third generation. The founders set about their task with clear purpose and the exhilaration of starting something new. The second generation positions itself in relation to the founders. Some will adulate them, some will be more critical; but the founders’ experience, direction, and vision remain, for better or for worse, a criterion of collective discernment. This dynamic changes at the next generational juncture, by which time the founders will be dead, or quite ancient. All of a sudden the second generation’s search for particular identity seems like much ado about not very much. The truly pressing issues are more fundamental: ‘What are we all about? How can we find our place within a tradition that transcends us? Are we on the right track?’ The third generation is faced with the challenge of continuity. To carry on faithfully it needs more than the history — or myth — of heroic origins. It must at once integrate and relativise its specific heritage, looking forward as well as back, up, not down.
This dynamic touches the universal Church, I believe, with regard to a modern event that may be called foundational, so deeply has it formed Catholic experience. I refer, of course, to the Second Vatican Council. What the council represented to those who knew a before and an after has been documented amply and polyphonically. Afterwards came the labours of those who were, or saw themselves as, the council’s legitimate heirs. There were splendid initiatives; but we know no less what quarrels emerged, locking Catholic discourse in confrontations between so-called ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ positions, unedifying clashes — and almost invariably dull.
Something of the climate of the second generation found symbolic expression in a teacup storm not all that long ago when it was still a subject of debate whether Vatican II might best be approached through a hermeneutic of rupture or one of continuity. I confess I found this querelle perplexing. I cannot see how any Catholic might adopt anything but a hermeneutic of continuity. This perspective is inherent in our faith in a God who acts in history, who exhorts us, ‘Remember!’, whose incarnate Son is the principle by which and for which all things exist, whose Spirit sanctifies, in Christ, by ‘calling to mind’.
The collective remembrance of what the council and its aftermath felt like has faded. That notably reduces the emotional heat of hermeneutic exercise, enabling lucid reflection. Today’s young Catholics are not ungrateful for the council’s great gifts, but unable to proceed with their grandparents’ mindsets, uninclined to flog dead horses, unenthused by fossilised projects of aggiornamento when the sun has set on the giorno by which they were defined. What they long for is to awaken the dawn, to know the saving power of Christ, the same today, yesterday, and always, yet making all things new, often enough by exploding time-bound dichotomies.
The pontificate of Leo XIV will guide us peacefully, I expect, into this new era, full of promise. There is a joy in the air. It gives me confidence; for joy, the genuine stuff, not the counterfeit, is a sign that something goes on in us not of our making, something enabling us to seek wholeness in the midst of apparent fragmentation. I think of something the Holy Father said recently, in a catechesis on Saint Irenaeus:
The doctrinal divisions [Irenaeus] encountered within the Christian community, the internal conflicts and external persecutions, did not discourage him. On the contrary, in a fragmented world he learned how to think better, bringing his attention ever more deeply to Jesus. He became a cantor of his person, indeed of his flesh. He recognised that in [Jesus], what seems to conflict is reconciled in unity. Jesus is not a wall that separates, but a door that unites us. We have to remain in him and distinguish reality from ideologies.
I am drawn by this papal challenge to ‘think better’ and by the counsel that so to think is to think ‘in Christ’, who is Truth, thereby to distinguish the real from the unreal. Surrounded as we are more than ever by illusions, that is a further thing we do need now.
Thank God that Peter, rock-firm, is there to confirm us, his brethren.
Hearing Truly
The disciples approached Jesus and said, “Why do you speak to the crowd in parables?” He said to them in reply, “Because knowledge of the mysteries of the Kingdom of heaven has been granted to you, but to them it has not been granted. To anyone who has, more will be given and he will grow rich; from anyone who has not, even what he has will be taken away. This is why I speak to them in parables, because they look but do not see and hear but do not listen or understand. Isaiah’s prophecy is fulfilled in them.
Matthew 13:10-17
At first sight this Gospel disconcerts. It would appear that God purposely speaks in riddles, complicating utterances in order that we should not understand them. Does God then not desire to be known? Does he, perish the thought, have a cruel streak? Does he take pleasure in tripping us up? There are a few things, here, to untangle.
First, please note this: Jesus speaks, like a good Rabbi, on the basis of a Biblical text. He cites Isaiah, a passage that occurs at a crucial juncture in the book, just as the prophet, in chapter 6, has his vision of God’s transcendent glory, beholding the Lord of Hosts enthroned on the six-winged seraphim who cry, ‘Holy, holy, holy’, a call we make ours in each Mass as we prepare for the Lord’s descent upon his altar.
Aware of his insufficiency before this overwhelming sight, Isaiah at first thinks he will die. Had God not told Moses, ‘No man shall see me and live’ (Ex 33.20)? A seraph, though, approaches. It touches Isaiah’s mouth with burning coal from God’s altar, then proclaims: ‘Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, your sin is forgiven.’ Suddenly the Lord’s voice is heard: ‘Whom shall I send, who will go for us?’ Isaiah, to his amazement, responds: ‘Here am I! Send me.’ At this point the Lord entrusts him with the oracle Jesus cites: ‘Go, and say to this people: Hear, hear, but do not understand; see, see, but do not perceive’, and so forth.
What the prophecy teaches is this: to hear God’s word and receive it in truth, our perception must first be cleansed. If we take in God’s word as if it were any other word, on a par with the words we hear on the news, in the street, in self-interested gossip, we may pick up the sound of it, but we will still have no idea of what it says. It would be as if someone were to serve us a glass of exquisite Chablis after we had spent the day quaffing sugary pop. The wine would have no taste. Our palate would need to be purified first.
Jesus asks us not to take divine revelation lightly; not to assume that we have, just like that, what it takes to plumb its depth and interpret its message. If we do, assuming our often sin-twisted minds to be straight, we are liable to huge misconceptions with potentially disastrous results for ourselves and others.
Jesus’s warning occurs in the context of the parable of the sower. It is wedged between the telling of it and its explanation. We are asked to become fruitful ground, to till the soil of our heart in such a way that it may receive the blessed seed Christ sows, to let it gestate in secret all the while it takes to bear forth, at the opportune time, a harvest of plenty for others. We are to devote ourselves fully to this work of responsible husbandry, that the word of Christ may dwell in us richly, renewing our minds, ordering our discernment.
In an ancient rubric set for Mass, the priest is instructed to pray silently before he reads the Gospel: ‘Almighty God, cleanse my heart, cleanse my lips even as you cleansed Isaiah’s lips with burning coal.’ The touch of that coal is searing; but its wound heals. Distorting impurities must go. Only thus shall we speak the word entrusted to us into the world for what it is: a new, other word, a divine word of life renewed. Our humble awareness of the word’s gratuity and glorious strangeness may alert others, previously deaf, to it, too, calling them out of the valley of the shadow of death into God’s gladsome light, truly to live.
Matthew 13:10-17
At first sight this Gospel disconcerts. It would appear that God purposely speaks in riddles, complicating utterances in order that we should not understand them. Does God then not desire to be known? Does he, perish the thought, have a cruel streak? Does he take pleasure in tripping us up? There are a few things, here, to untangle.
First, please note this: Jesus speaks, like a good Rabbi, on the basis of a Biblical text. He cites Isaiah, a passage that occurs at a crucial juncture in the book, just as the prophet, in chapter 6, has his vision of God’s transcendent glory, beholding the Lord of Hosts enthroned on the six-winged seraphim who cry, ‘Holy, holy, holy’, a call we make ours in each Mass as we prepare for the Lord’s descent upon his altar.
Aware of his insufficiency before this overwhelming sight, Isaiah at first thinks he will die. Had God not told Moses, ‘No man shall see me and live’ (Ex 33.20)? A seraph, though, approaches. It touches Isaiah’s mouth with burning coal from God’s altar, then proclaims: ‘Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, your sin is forgiven.’ Suddenly the Lord’s voice is heard: ‘Whom shall I send, who will go for us?’ Isaiah, to his amazement, responds: ‘Here am I! Send me.’ At this point the Lord entrusts him with the oracle Jesus cites: ‘Go, and say to this people: Hear, hear, but do not understand; see, see, but do not perceive’, and so forth.
What the prophecy teaches is this: to hear God’s word and receive it in truth, our perception must first be cleansed. If we take in God’s word as if it were any other word, on a par with the words we hear on the news, in the street, in self-interested gossip, we may pick up the sound of it, but we will still have no idea of what it says. It would be as if someone were to serve us a glass of exquisite Chablis after we had spent the day quaffing sugary pop. The wine would have no taste. Our palate would need to be purified first.
Jesus asks us not to take divine revelation lightly; not to assume that we have, just like that, what it takes to plumb its depth and interpret its message. If we do, assuming our often sin-twisted minds to be straight, we are liable to huge misconceptions with potentially disastrous results for ourselves and others.
Jesus’s warning occurs in the context of the parable of the sower. It is wedged between the telling of it and its explanation. We are asked to become fruitful ground, to till the soil of our heart in such a way that it may receive the blessed seed Christ sows, to let it gestate in secret all the while it takes to bear forth, at the opportune time, a harvest of plenty for others. We are to devote ourselves fully to this work of responsible husbandry, that the word of Christ may dwell in us richly, renewing our minds, ordering our discernment.
In an ancient rubric set for Mass, the priest is instructed to pray silently before he reads the Gospel: ‘Almighty God, cleanse my heart, cleanse my lips even as you cleansed Isaiah’s lips with burning coal.’ The touch of that coal is searing; but its wound heals. Distorting impurities must go. Only thus shall we speak the word entrusted to us into the world for what it is: a new, other word, a divine word of life renewed. Our humble awareness of the word’s gratuity and glorious strangeness may alert others, previously deaf, to it, too, calling them out of the valley of the shadow of death into God’s gladsome light, truly to live.