Archive, Letters
Pastoral Letter
Pastoral Letter to the Prelature of Tromsø. A Polish version can be found here.
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
A year has passed since the Holy Father appointed me Administrator of the Prelature of Tromsø. Like all of you, I had hoped a new local bishop would be appointed swiftly. Like all of you, I have ascertained that the old proverb still holds: sometimes God’s mills grind slowly.
To wait is a difficult business for us humans. It has always been thus. The circumstances that are ours have made the experience worse. We live in a time of immediacy. We expect, and are constantly promised, that everything we wish for will be delivered quickly. That is why we become restless and frustrated, perhaps even angry, when we have to wait. Let us remind ourselves, then, that a time of waiting can be a time of benediction.
Even if the Sunday liturgy takes precedence, the Church celebrates today, on 8 September, the birthday of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I would like to say a few words about that feast. It concerns the accomplishment of a hope nurtured for hundres of years, yes, even since the beginning of the world. The Fathers didn’t hesitate to recognise a prophetic image of Mary in Scripture’s prophecy about the eternal Word of God — a feminine figure — ‘playing before the face of God’ at the beginning of creation (Proverbs 8.30).
With careful deliberation God prepared his work of salvation, which Mary’s Yes enabled, throughout the generations. Age by age he made mankind ready. The amazing thing is: Man knew it not. This great work happened on the terms Jesus describes in his parable about the astonished husbandman who woke up one fine morning to find his field wonderfully flourishing: ‘The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed upon the ground, and should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should sprout and grow, he knows not how’ (Mark 4.26-27). This, says the Lord, is simply the way it is in affairs concerning the kingdom of God.
When we contemplate the life and vocation of Mary, the ‘seed’ in question is the hope of redemption; it is the gracious assurance that God has a plan for human history that he can and will fulfil. The older I get, the more I am fascinated by the genealogy the Church lets us read on the birthday of Mary. It shows how the promise made to Abraham, the promise that in him all peoples of the earth would be blessed (Genesis 22.18), matures through time.
About some of the women and men mentioned in the genealogy we know quite a lot. The Patriarchs, Ruth, David, and Solomon are intimately familiar to us. About many others we know nothing at all. That is of no importance. They were vehicles of God’s purpose whether they knew it or not. They were a blessing.
It is often the case that we, when we look back over our private or collective lives, discern a kind of necessity in the way things have worked out: this thing had to happen for that to be realised; this person had to meet that person, and so forth. One of the exciting things about growing older is the broader perspective on existence we acquire. It enables us to see patterns, the fingerprints of God’s providence.
When we look ahead, things are different. Then we can often feel anxious and confused. Which choices should we make? What will happen to us? How can we relate to all that makes us afraid, to what appears as the world’s outrageous unpredictability?
We must remember that God has a plan he mysteriously realises without limiting our freedom and without having any illusions about our moral and physical frailty. His outlook exceeds ours. As we read in the Second Letter of Peter: ‘For the Lord one day is alike a thousand years, a thousand years like a single day (3.8). Peter, who had seen God’s glory on Tabor and confronted his own smallness in Caiaphas’s courtyard, knew the abyss that separates God’s reality from ours; at the same time he knew that God in Christ, born of the Virgin Mary, has laid a bridge across the abyss so that we, when we hold his hand and hers, can cross it safely.
Dear brothers and sisters, I am reminding you of these things, already well known to you, to share my conviction that our own wait here and now serves a purpose, that it constitutes a task. There is immense beauty in the Catholic Church in the North of Norway; there is a harvest waiting to be gathered in, of that I am certain. After decades of secularisation, our nation has hit material rock bottom; we could hardly become more materialised. Yet the human being remains human, possessed of a longing for sense, truth, and substance. God’s eternal Word, who is the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1.15), is imprinted on our being. Only in him do we find a remedy for the disquiet that inhabits us.
Let us use this time well to be deeply rooted in Christ, to experience what it means to live in him. Let us, like the Virgin Mary, say Yes to God’s call even when we don’t know where it leads, trusting that God knows, and that that is enough. His purpose is to sanctify our lives, to make us into new men and women, bearers of hope for the world, and joy. He who calls us is faithful. He does not abandon his Church. Be assured that he is working a blessing in your midst.
Thank you for receiving me so warmly thus far. I have been happy to get to know many of you. I look forward to getting to know many more. You are all in my daily prayer.
In the name of Christ!
+fr Erik Varden OCSO
Bishop of Trondheim and Apostolic Administrator of Tromsø
