Continuities
This morning I offered Mass in the church of Trondenes, work on which was begun at about the time when Saint Louis was king of France. The church is established near the lake in which the first Christians in these parts (near modern Harstad) are said to have been baptised in 999 AD by the English Bishop Sigurd, who attended King Olav Tryggvason.
The exquisite high-altar retable is the work of a fifteenth-century Lübeck master. It shows the Mother of God flanked by female relatives, underpinned by male ones. This work not only remained undisturbed through the sixteenth-century reformation; it continued to form the cherished focal point of a church that since the 1530s has belonged to a Lutheran establishment.
Sometimes it takes a trip to the periphery to perceive lines of continuity lost in epicentres of controversy – and so to get help to find one’s bearings.
