Archive, Readings
Desert Fathers 27
Once again, Jamie and I gather to address questions raised by people who follow the series, questions that impress us by their insight and sincerity. Some of the matters we consider are these:
Why may anger be a more fundamental sin than lust?
What does it mean to speak of redemption as somehow communal?
How might one endure persistent temptation without despair?
How can a life of radical prayer be at one with solidarity for all mankind?
You can watch the episode here, or find it as a podcast where you like to listen to such things.
Photograph: Mateusz Opila, EWTN Norge.
And once again a kind Canadian Benedictine has provided a transcript of the session. Here it is:
Jamie Baxter: Come Holy Spirit, come through Mary. Hello and welcome back. My name is Jamie Baxter from Exodus 90, and I’m so grateful today to be joined by Bishop Erik Varden for our Q&A with the questions we’ve received from our listeners.
Bishop Varden, it’s good to see you. How are you? What’s new?
Erik Varden: I’m pretty well, thank you. Well, it’s considerably cooler here than in most of the rest of Europe, so we’re enjoying that.
Jamie Baxter: Yeah, well, for our listeners, I’m actually on my way to see you in Norway immediately after this recording. I was just about to walk out the door when I checked the weather, and it’s about 20 to 30 degrees cooler than it is here. I had to repack.
But I’m so excited for that time together and for our recording for the next couple of months. Okay, well, since our last Q&A, Bishop, we’ve covered two chapters from the Systematic Collection on self-mastery and lust.
I’m so grateful to our listeners who have submitted questions. There were so many more that came in for this Q&A. Both the Bishop and I are so grateful for these notes, which are little glimpses into our listeners’ lives that we cherish and are grateful for.
I’m excited to share the questions with the time that we have with Bishop Varden for his response as we can today. Before we dive in and start with prayer, though, we have just a couple of announcements.
The first is that we are halfway through our series—our year-long journey into the wisdom of the Desert Fathers. So first, I want to continue to express our gratitude, Bishop Varden, for the time, the effort, and the prayer that you put into this series, which is truly exceptional. I was talking with a priest, trying to get him to agree to a month-long project, and he asked me to tell him about the other people I was working with. I said, “Well, Bishop Varden’s helping us with a weekly episode for a whole year.” He said, “What? A bishop? How’s he doing this?” So it’s really something special and exceptional, Bishop Varden. We’re grateful to you.
Erik Varden: It’s a privilege.
Jamie Baxter: We’re grateful to you for your time. A couple of practical things: We’ve decided to simplify the name of our series. We’re just going to go with “Desert Fathers with Bishop Erik Varden” moving forward. We’re also going to reduce our roundtables from weekly to monthly and change up the format a little bit for greater variety, hopefully with some guests who are also listeners of this show for their perspectives on these topics.
The last thing I want to say is, if you didn’t get a question in for our Q&A today, we are going to have at least one more of these in the future. Please continue to submit your questions by sending us an email at hello@desertfathers.com. I read every one of those, and I look forward to them. We’d love to take your question for our next one.
All right, with all of that table setting, Bishop Varden, would you lead us in a prayer?
Erik Varden: In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Come, Holy Spirit, fill our hearts, our minds, our bodies, our lives, and teach us to seek the Lord Jesus Christ in purity and truth and to live by the life that he has given us and taught us. Through him, Christ our Lord. Amen.
Our Lady, Seat of Wisdom, pray for us. Saint Anthony the Great, pray for us.
Jamie Baxter: Wonderful. Thank you. Okay, so I’ve broken up our questions into a couple of sections. The first are just a couple of practical questions that have come in. The second section really gets into our topics—self-mastery and lust. And the last are, as we’ve done with our previous Q&As, folks seeking a word from a father in the desert, so more personal in nature. We’ll bring those up at the end.
So the first comes from Brother Joe. He’s been a religious for 46 years, he mentions to us. We’re really grateful for Brother Joe and just delighted that there’s been fruit for him in the series. He had a really simple question about the poem that referred to Adam’s lament after the fall. This was actually within the compunction chapter, but he was just wondering about that source and anything you might share about that really moving story.
Erik Varden: Well, I’m delighted to share it. I have the book right here. It’s The Penguin Book of Greek Verse, a bilingual edition with translations by Konstantin Trypanis. I was given this book for my birthday about 30 years ago, and I delved into it from time to time. I found that text there and was just bowled over by it. I’ve lived with it since. That’s a nice prose translation.
There used to be on the internet a really nice poetic translation by Archimandrite Ephrem Lash, who, when he was alive, kept a webpage with a lot of his translations. He was a very, very learned man. That webpage seems to have died with him, so I don’t know what’s happened to that. But if anyone’s able to lay their hands on that translation by Ephrem Lash of “The Lament of Adam,” it’s worth looking for. [An attentive listener has pointed out that the text is available in the show notes of this recording.]
Jamie Baxter: Okay, wonderful. If anyone does find that, send it in, and we can share that out as well.
Our next question—and we receive many like this—basically asks to go deeper. But I love the context they set beforehand, which is that this series has been so much more than they could have imagined. They’ve been touched and inspired by the lives of these early believers who were searching for meaning and closer walking with Christ. They said, “We tend to imagine that our modern world is troubled by distractions, confusion, and aimlessness, yet these men and women felt the same 1,600 years ago too.” And then they asked simply: What more introductory reading would you recommend if you want to go deeper into your journey with the Desert Fathers and Mothers?
Erik Varden: Well, in some ways, I’m tempted to just advise you to skip the introductory reading and just go and read the texts themselves—the sayings and the lives of the Desert Fathers. You will find both of those in convenient editions published by Cistercian Publications/Liturgical Press, in translations by Benedicta Ward. That’s following the alphabetic collection of the sayings rather than the systematic collection that we’re using, but most of the material is the same.
Otherwise, there’s a wonderful little book by Rowan Williams called Silence and Honeycakes. That’s a very good introduction. And then there are two really lovely books—they’re quite ancient now—by Helen Waddell, who is one of the most interesting writers and most brilliant translators of theological texts that I know. One of them is simply called The Desert Fathers, and it’s got a collection of translated texts as well as some of Helen Waddell’s essays. And then there’s another one called Beasts and Saints, which focuses on the Desert Fathers and mothers’ interaction with animals. Both of those are learned books, very beautifully written books, and books that sometimes make you laugh.
Jamie Baxter: Wow, wonderful. Thank you. I had not heard of Helen Waddell up to this point, so thank you for sharing those. What comes to mind is my son, who’s five—Joseph—is obsessed with animals right now. We can’t get a word in edgewise without a mention of animals, so maybe this is a way to bring the Desert Fathers into his universe a little bit.
Erik Varden: I would have loved to have that book when I was—well, perhaps not five, but perhaps seven.
Jamie Baxter: Perfect.
Okay, so we have a listener who’s going to be in Cairo, Bishop Varden—the place of the desert. He just asked simply: Are there any places that you’ve visited personally that have struck you? (He quotes Doyle and me, who say “struck” a lot in our roundtables, poking some fun at us, which I thought was beautiful.) But yeah, any recommendations on sites?
Erik Varden: I’m a very bad person to ask because I’ve never been to Egypt, nor anywhere in the Middle East. So I know those places only from books and from the communion of saints. In terms of Egyptian sites, no, alas, not.
As for places that have struck me, I think I would refer to the first visit I ever made to a significant monastic site that we’ll touch on a bit later in the series, which is Subiaco, south of Rome, where Saint Benedict began his life of solitude. I went there when I was 19, I think, or 20. It’s an extraordinary site, and you can really get some sense of why Saint Benedict chose it.
I remember I went with a friend, and we bumped into a monk who was kind enough to offer us a tour. He took us out on a little balcony that overlooked the valley with a river running through it. The sound was just the way it was when Saint Benedict was there. We were standing out on that balcony, and then he looked at us and said, “Shh.” We stood in absolute silence for a while. Then he said, “This is paradise.”
Jamie Baxter: Wow. What a story.
Erik Varden: So I hope the Egyptian traveler will find something like that also in the sands of Egypt.
Jamie Baxter: Beautiful.
The last quick question, Bishop Varden, was a simple question from a listener who was wondering—obviously these conferences, which he appreciates and has listened to, take a really broad approach to the life of the Desert Fathers. But the question, which is rather open, is: Why not ask young men to take the whole deal, to go live this life today?
Erik Varden: Well, I get the sense that people are doing that. Not everyone is called to the monastic life, but everyone is called to a radical Christian life. But that presupposes taking a first step and sticking to that first step.
I think that’s exactly what the pedagogy of the Fathers is teaching us. One of my criteria for selecting sayings to comment on is precisely whether or not they might be useful as guidance to set out. I aim to choose them in such a way that they will correspond to different needs, different aspirations, different weaknesses, different temptations.
The monastic tradition has always insisted on not being too ambitious at the start. We should be ambitious in terms of the finality, because what we’re setting out for and what we’re longing to attain is nothing less than communion in divine being—the vision of God on his holy mountain. But I must set out from where I am now: curbing this particular anger, holding this particular destructive appetite, holding my tongue in these particular circumstances when I’m tempted to say something vicious or sarcastic or belittling.
So I don’t think we should underestimate the significance of the small steps, as long as we keep making them.
Jamie Baxter: And keep going. Wonderful. Okay, so we’re going to transition to the questions that really directly relate to our recent topics. The story of the two brothers in, I believe it was episode 26, “Sympathy”—where they go out to the city, one has a fall, and the other realizes he’s downcast and takes on his state for himself. Then they go do penance together before the revelation to the elders that makes this story what it becomes.
So the questions are twofold. The first one is a question I also had, and many of our listeners perhaps have had: I’m concerned that the second monk tells a lie in his efforts to show sympathy to the monk who fell into lust. So could you clarify this as the first question?
And then the second one is from someone who’s not so much concerned with that, but is just profoundly moved by the mercy and solidarity that’s shown in the face of a failure. They ask: What does this teach us about the communal nature of redemption and how we can truly bear one another’s burdens, especially in matters of sexual failure and healing?
Erik Varden: Well, as to the first one, it is perplexing, but I think I touched on that a little bit in the episode itself. Yes, objectively, the second monk seems to be telling an untruth in that he says he has also fallen when he hasn’t, in fact. He says that to encourage his brother.
But if we take a sacramental view of these things and really believe in the truth of what Antony said—that life and death is with my brother—or what St. Silouan of Athos said—”my brother is my life”—then, insofar as my brother has sinned, I am also touched by that sin. Not personally culpable, but somehow responsible for it. So, in the communion of saints, there is truth in what he’s saying, because insofar as my brother has fallen into sin and into despair, well, that also touches me, and that means that my carrying can also be efficacious.
But it presupposes that radically sacramental view and a very strong understanding of communion. And that is the point of the story: to show that the Lord says to Adam at the beginning of creation—it is to Adam and about Adam—”It is not good for man to be alone.” And then he creates Eve, but that statement doesn’t only concern the marital covenant. It concerns life as such.
Isn’t it extraordinary when you read Scripture and when you read the lives of the saints, how God, who in his omnipotence and omniscience is perfectly capable of intervening directly in people’s lives, almost invariably chooses providentially to act through intermediaries? To let one person be a source and a channel of grace for another, teaching us thereby to receive such grace with gratitude, but also teaching us, even more crucially, to be alert to his call addressed to us to be ready vehicles of his goodness for others.
So I think so many of these stories tell us that we’re called to assist one another. The early Cistercians loved to cite a verse from the book of Ecclesiasticus, which says, “Woe to him who is alone when he falls, who has no one to raise him up.” And so many of our sayings illuminate that principle.
I always find it very touching that you find this repeated emphasis on the necessity and the beauty of communal growth in an outward setting of radical solitude.
Jamie Baxter: Yeah, what comes to mind is: when one rises, we all rise. When one falls, we all fall. In Christ we are one—one body.
We probably received the most succinct question. There was no “Hey, how are you?” or “The series has been great.” We just received two—really three—succinct questions from a religious that I love: What did the Desert Fathers consider the greatest sin, anger or lust, and why?
Erik Varden: I think they would be cautious about generalizing and cautious too about perhaps setting a scale of magnitude. What they were more interested in were questions of origin. And I think most of the fathers would say that anger is a more original sin than lust.
We’ve touched on that a little bit already in some of the texts we’ve considered, and I think we’ll come back to it. The fathers often are keen to teach us that impulses of lust often enough can spring from anger, and that we will fail to deal with them if we only approach them sensibly, without following them through to the root.
When you look at the account of human origins in Scripture, we also find that the root sin that causes human tragedy outside of the garden is anger. It’s Cain being angry at Abel for producing a more well-pleasing offering than him. It’s fraternal jealousy, it’s strife.
Therefore, the fathers are often—I mean, they’re uncompromising about sins of lust, but they’re very understanding of them. But they are harsh when it comes to sins of anger.
Dorothy L. Sayers, whom I’ve already referred to, in one of her essays speaks about—I think in the context of Dante’s Inferno, which she translated—the contrast between the hot sins and the cold sins. The hot-blooded sins, which are passionate sins, which can be spectacular sometimes and very destructive, but nonetheless spring from some sort of pursuit of love. She speaks of how, in a Dantean perspective, in fact, the cold sins—the calculating sins that are solitary and based on just bitter resentment—are in fact the more destructive. So in those terms, I think it would be anger that would tip the scale.
Jamie Baxter: What a response. Thank you. That distinction between hot and cold—I’ve not heard that before.
Erik Varden: It’s a very useful one.
Jamie Baxter: Our next questions touch on chastity, and I’m going to ask them together. I’m going to flip them from what I had shared with you previously, if that’s okay, Bishop Varden.
The first is: How do you want to see the conversation around chastity change in the church? Your book on chastity has been so helpful, they say. So often, earnest attempts to speak about the virtue seem to have isolated it from other virtues and made it the only thing that purity of heart consists of. I was raised in a way that led me to feel shame around attraction to a point that it seems like I could be capable of objectifying people—not as objects of desire, but as objects of fear. (I thought that was such a self-aware assessment.) And in a way that rejects the gift of interpersonal communion. So how can we find greater balance—not to be permissive, but at the same time, not to wall ourselves off from one another?
And then the other one is shorter but touches the same question: How can the church more effectively communicate that its teaching on sexuality is fundamentally about human dignity and freedom in Christ, rather than repression or judgment?
Erik Varden: Really good questions and important ones. We could speak about those things the whole evening. I’m delighted, first of all, if that particular reader has found something useful in my book on chastity.
The point of writing that book was really to try to precisely enrich a discourse that had so often become very sterile and repetitive and boring and too much marked by facile categories. So my point in trying to repristinate and even perhaps redeem the notion of chastity was to try and throw this semantic construct into the public forum in the hope that people might be interrogated by it and perhaps play with it a bit and certainly consider it and ask whether the category of chastity might in fact be not just some sort of simplifying judgmental term—a predetermined response to complexities a church establishment refuses to face.
I think that would correspond to a caricature that one often has about the church’s way of dealing with these things. Rather, I wanted to find in chastity actually a constructive, life-giving and joyful term pointing towards something aspirational. Because I think that’s basically the key to any kind of maturing and any kind of growth in purity and prudence and strength.
We affect such growth when we not only try to root out and fight the destructive elements in us, but when we seek and strive for a desirable good. That’s where I think it’s really important to put the whole question of affective and sexual maturity into a wider perspective.
I think one of the things we easily do in our times—and as believers we must be careful not just to be pulled into the secular take on these things—is to work on the hypothesis that the sexual aspect of the human being is, as it were, an entirely autonomous and separate drive having nothing to do with anything else.
What theology helps us to do is precisely to understand ourselves as embodied beings—embodied beings called to holiness, called to transfiguration, and called to manifest the life of God in our souls, in our minds, but also in our flesh. And thereby to read the signals and the hungers of the flesh in a perspective that is by all means radically and truthfully incarnational, but at the same time spiritual and intellectual.
I think if we can help ourselves and each other and the world to proceed in that direction, we might be doing it quite a significant favor.
Jamie Baxter: That’s for sure. I personally was so enriched reading your book Chastity: Reconciliation of the Senses alongside our exploration of the chapter on lust. There were so many elements that were profoundly refreshing and insightful for me.
I just wanted to quote a passage—can I read you your own book over a Q&A like this? Because I think this is helpful and speaks to a new emphasis in refreshing terms. It occurs immediately after you mention the throwaway line in the book Breath from Tim Winton’s novel. Can I ask: How old were you and where were you when you read that? You mention how much this struck you—this image of the beauty of surfing and the line from the book: “I couldn’t have put words to it as a boy, but later I understood what seized my imagination that day: how strange it was to see men do something beautiful. Something pointless and elegant, as though nobody saw or cared.”
You launch off from that to talk about how perhaps this is an image of what it might look like to live chastely in the world. Where were you when you encountered that?
Erik Varden: I was an undergraduate university student, and I think I’d read a review of that book in a newspaper. Somehow it intrigued me, so I went to the bookshop and bought it. The funny thing is, I didn’t actually like the book very much, and it’s not a book I’m keen to reread because there is a side to it which is actually quite perverse. In many ways it’s not a pleasant book to read, but it’s extremely cleverly constructed, and the unpleasantness of it is part of the author’s intention because it helps us to recognize certain things.
But it’s against this really quite suffocating atmosphere of the book that this image appears and thereby gets its signal strength and attractiveness. It was just such a liberating image, and it struck me as a young man because I thought, “Gosh, that’s what I want.” I mean, I want to live beautifully. I want to do something beautiful for its own sake. I don’t want to live an existence which is just interested, which is always pursuing some sort of immediate goal. I want to experience what it is to live and love gratuitously.
So that image really spoke to me then. Something that’s been very touching and that I’m very grateful for is that in some of the letters and emails I’ve received from readers of the book, there’s been a disproportionate number of echoes of that passage from Tim Winton’s novel. People say, “Yeah, I felt exactly the same, and this has been helpful.” I read that bit, and there was a nice email I got from a young man who sent a picture of himself on a skateboard doing a jump, and he said, “This is what I went out and did after I’d read that page of your book.”
Jamie Baxter: Oh, what a delight, that is beautiful! That is beautiful. What a perfect image. I’m glad I’m not the only one. I just read that and found my mind turning that image over so many times, especially in light of the topic. Thank you for sharing that.
Erik Varden: There’s something about the image, because the man on the beach—he’s a young fellow, a boy on his way into adulthood—and he sees these men out there, and he thinks, “Gosh, it’s possible to live even like that.” I think if we can be carriers of something of that message, that’d be wonderful.
Jamie Baxter: So true. Our last question before we go to the more personal ones in nature is really about temptation. This has been a theme really from the very beginning—actually from our first month—highlighting Antony’s journey and his series of intensifications of discipline, isolation, but the very nature of temptation. Admittedly, this is one of the many ways I’ve been affected by our series too—to view our temptations differently. So the listener asks: You write that temptation, while dangerous, can be a tool for maturity and purification. How can we learn to endure our temptations without falling into despair, discouragement, or self-condemnation? So kind of a practical [question]: How do we do that when we face serious temptations?
Erik Varden: Well, I think first of all by learning what it is to live on trust. When a temptation comes, to recognize it honestly and to evaluate it—see what sort of response is needed—but even if it makes me frightened or even terrified, to remember that it doesn’t have the last word. Also, that this particular temptation, even if it may haunt me, doesn’t define me, and that I’m called and enabled by nature and grace to pass beyond it.
Because temptations only become really mortiferous when I fall for the illusion—I fall for the temptation to think that, “Gosh, this is it. This is reality now—this temptation.” And that’s where despair raises its ugly head.
So one of the things the Fathers do is to help us recognize temptations, and they do that forensically with great specificity. At the same time, they help us to despise them, and sometimes they will laugh at temptations. They will say, “Ha ha, you think I’m going to fall into that trap again?” And often enough, at that, the devilish plot just dissolves into thin air or the demons take flight.
So the number one thing is to heed Christ’s commandment: “Do not be afraid.” And then to remember that we can use temptations for good. Perseverance is a great virtue, and holding out in temptation is a way of growing in inward and outward courage, because courage isn’t just something that falls from the sky or can be downloaded from the internet. It’s something that’s got to be practiced.
And then a third thing is that temptations can help us to grow in self-knowledge, because if a particular temptation haunts me, the chances are that it may correspond to some deep need, thirst, absence, wound in me. I may be reluctant to follow the temptation to its source because what I may find there may be too humiliating or too painful or just too unmanageable. So we’ve got to do this prudently, but I think we can do that as long as we remember that God’s purpose in our lives is always healing. If he reveals our infirmities to us, it is not to lock us within them but to show what needs to be healed and to help us expose our wounds to a healing power.
So those would be some aspects of temptation. And of course, a further aspect which the Fathers are keen to remind us of is that it’s always good to share our temptations with somebody—to speak them to somebody who’s wise, somebody who may have gone through the same territory, someone who knows what it is to fight and persevere, and someone who can help us to see this particular scenario in a more realistic perspective.
Jamie Baxter: I’m reminded immediately of the saying about the brother who stole the rusk—I believe is what they were called, right? Who reveals—he thought that his sin had been revealed to his father, but he ends up revealing it and provides an overwhelming sense of freedom before his spiritual father.
Erik Varden: And that’s always the thing: that acknowledgment of our chains helps us to wish to be set free. As long as we keep that clearly in mind, we have nothing to be frightened of, really.
Jamie Baxter: Slightly related to temptation: we received a note from a listener who’s just really discouraged by their own sin. They express a kind of tiredness and fear of confessing the same sins over and over again for more than a decade. So what word would you offer to someone just in this state, who has fallen into a sense of discouragement before their sin?
Erik Varden: Well, first of all, I would express compassion and understanding, because that sense of being locked within a complex of a given weakness or a given temptation can be painful and a hard thing to bear.
I would then remind that person that the greatest temptation of all—and the one that the hater of good is most anxious to trap us in—is the temptation of discouragement. So not to afford him that satisfaction of taking up residence within it.
And then, to take a given temptation, a given pattern of falling, to confession is an excellent thing. But there may also be patterns in our lives that could do with working through in a different forum—perhaps a more discursive forum—because to acknowledge our sins is good and freeing, but there may also be a case to be made for a more careful analysis of a situation which isn’t focused on the sin and forgiveness aspect that predominates necessarily and rightly in confession.
So to look at somebody—whether a priest or a wise psychologist who has empirical and professional and possibly personal experience of a similar sort of thing—and with their help, pursue an understanding of why this pattern is so difficult to break. Because, as we talked about just a moment ago, sometimes we may think that, “Oh, I’m stuck in this and I’m stuck in this,” and we can get so fixated on a particular sort of stuckness, whereas the chain that holds me may in fact be about something else. What I think is the cause and the root may in fact be a symptom. It’s only by finding my way to the cause and the root that I shall in fact alleviate the symptom and be freed from it.
So those would be my responses: first of all, to be assured of the Lord’s and the Church’s compassion; then just to give the temptation of despair a good kick in the backside; and then to seek perhaps more clear counsel to try and understand why a given pattern is so hard to break and then to try and find the appropriate means to deal with the root cause—all this within an atmosphere of trusting prayer.
Jamie Baxter: We received a couple of questions about the application of the spirit of the Fathers to marriage and family life and just a little bit of tension on how to do that well in a way that brings you together with your spouse and doesn’t isolate you. So the particular instance that I wanted to bring up mentions the episode about spitting the blood—that was just such a striking image. This husband’s fear is: if I don’t communicate the tensions or unease in our marriage, will this pull me away from my spouse and lead us to not actually address the issues that we need to in our marriage? Feel free to enter into that question or take that more broadly before I wrap up with our final question for today, Bishop Varden.
Erik Varden: Well, I think that listener’s response is precisely the right one. What the saying talks about isn’t the revelation of the thought. In the desert setting, he’s not saying, “Don’t go and tell your spiritual father about this; just keep it in your mouth and then spit it out.” The fathers always encourage that openness of heart that lays a given temptation before another with due simplicity, and that would apply exactly the same in marriage.
What this particular father in the saying is retaining is a hurtful word. He has been hurt, and he’s tempted to hurt someone else in response to that as a way of explacating his humiliation and woundedness. That’s the heroism of the story: that rather than uttering a hurtful, spiteful word that simply utters his woundedness, he chooses to endure the suffering himself until he can just be rid of it.
Because it’s one thing to speak a word in openness, in the hope of being understood, in the expectation perhaps of being helped, in the desire simply to be honest—that’s one thing. It’s quite another thing to say something to someone else just to evacuate the pus within a particular wound of mine, because not only does that not heal me, but it will risk contaminating and doing harm to another.
Jamie Baxter: Our final question for today is from a pastor in Denmark, and I just want to read this as is because I thought it was beautifully written and asked. He says: “Dear Father Erik, I have this desire within me for a radical commitment to God. At the same time, I feel that every step I take towards God on the vertical axis of faith compromises my sense of solidarity with the world and the common project of all people—the horizontal axis, if you will. This tension is haunting me, and I feel I will find no rest until I have found a way to attain both of these at the same time: a complete surrender to the Christian way and a full solidarity with all mankind. Please help.”
Erik Varden: Well, thank you for that question. All of us are called to both, and I think the school of monastic wisdom presupposes a Pauline understanding of the Church as one body with many members. Not everyone is called to be the same sort of member, so not everyone is called to go out into the desert. But for those who are called and who are given the grace to do it, there will be no contradiction between that separation from the world and a growing compassion with humankind. There will be—that’s the topos in so many of the sayings—on the contrary, an ever-growing sense of being there as an ambassador, as a representative, as someone carrying others’ burdens.
Others will be called to engage very concretely with the misery and pain of the world here and now in concrete instances. We have the wonderful and much-loved example of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who was constantly there in the middle of the noise and the stink and the crying and the tears, and who helped by sitting there, holding people’s hands and wiping their sweat and giving them to drink. In that circumstance, she practiced and exemplified a supreme communion—a contemplative communion with God.
So the task and challenge before each of us is simply to occupy the place in which God chooses to plant us and to grow where we are planted, and there to bear fruit for the kingdom of God and for the consolation of mankind—and hopefully, perhaps to our astonishment, discovering over time that they’re not two different kinds of fruit. They’re in fact the same fruit.
Jamie Baxter: Wonderful.
Closing
Jamie Baxter: Well, thank you, Bishop, so much for your time today and for speaking into some of these questions for our listeners.
Erik Varden: Thank you to everyone who has submitted such intelligent and personal and well-considered questions, which will be helpful, I’ve no doubt at all, to many others.
Jamie Baxter: Absolutely. No, that is so true, and I absolutely echo that gratitude to all of our listeners who have submitted questions. I am sorry for those that we couldn’t get to. There’s a couple that I’ll reach out to directly, and I would just continue to open the floor for other questions to come in for our next Q&A. And those that I didn’t get to, we’ll do our best to surface for our next one. With that, well, I’m off to Norway for the recording of our next couple of months’ episodes. Bishop Varden, do you want to give a little bit of a teaser on what’s coming?
Erik Varden: Well, more of the same, really, and more of something entirely different because, you know, the abiding fascination of these texts is that they are constantly new. And even if you’ve read and re-read and re-read them, you find that they address and challenge and comfort you differently at different stages of your life. So we’re going on now to consider the systematic chapter that speaks of freedom from possessions and, well, more essentially, freedom from possessiveness. And I dare say that that’s a consideration of universal relevance in our Western world as it is now. So I hope there’ll be material there for nourishment and enlightenment. I’m certainly being nourished and enlightened and challenged as I’m working on them.
Jamie Baxter: As we all are, no doubt. With that, Bishop, would you close us in a prayer and give us your blessing?
Erik Varden: Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. The Lord be with you, and may the blessing of Almighty God—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—come down upon you and remain with you always.