Dennoch
In yesterday’s keynote introduction to the Dennoch conference in Hannover – a collaborative undertaking – Dr Thomas Arnold addressed features of western modernity that pose challenges to the Church’s proclamation. Challenges are not necessarily obstacles. Though he pointed out that a rhetoric of deficit will not take us far. (I had occasion to reflect on this on my way home last night, when a man approached me on the tram and told me: ‘Religion is psychiatric illness!’) To go around proclaiming that contemporaries, for whom the question of the divine seems irrelevant, are missing out on something is unlikely to engage them. Furthermore, it plays into an attitude of condescension which the Holy Father often condemns. In Lisbon he reminded us: ‘the only valid reason I have for looking down on someone is if I am helping him or her up’. Christian evangelisation, today as in antiquity, must testify to a superabundance of life, to a plus ultra. This something is not of human making. It must stem from an encounter with God through the Church that results in a transformed life. Ultimately, the only thing that will truly impact on our self-sufficient world is the testimony of sanctity (Cf. Notebook of 11 October 2022). The illustration is El Greco’s Saint Martin and the Beggar (1597/99).
Celebrating Sorrow?
In a quirkily insightful and personal introduction to The Pillar’s weekly news summary on the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, Ed. Condon writes: ‘“Celebrating sorrow” is one of those quasi-oxymoronic formulations the practice of our faith can sometimes seem to throw up. But really I don’t think it’s so. Love is always, I think, bound up with a measure of sorrow […]. In many ways, at least this side of heaven, to love is to suffer, at least some of the time. But we celebrate in our sorrow, and celebrate the sorrowful love of Mary at the foot of the cross for Christ and for us, because our love is grounded in the sure hope in the resurrection.’ I agree. One of the magnificent things about Christianity is that it legitimises grief, for which secular society has no vocabulary. The only possible response to grief in a perspective void of the supernatural is outrage, easily morphed into bitterness. On 15 September each year, the Church proposes a conceptual framework for grief imbued with hope. Pergolesi set an essential text of the day’s liturgy to music. In my opinion, no interpretation of it surpasses this one.
Bronze Serpent
In one of the emblematic rebellions of Israel during the exodus from Egypt, the people were beset by serpents which bit and poisoned them. ‘And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a pole; and every one who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.’ So Moses made a bronze serpent, and set it on a pole; and if a serpent bit any man, he would look at the bronze serpent and live’ (Num 21.8-9). The Church tells this story today, on the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross; for in Moses’s bronze serpents, the Fathers saw an image of Christ’s Passion. The story has an immediate, pragmatic meaning for each of us. What is wounding me, troubling me, perhaps robbing me of life? If I can name that thing and expose it to the light – set it on a pole – it will lose its power. This makes plain psychological sense. Within the mystery of faith, another dimension opens. On the cross, Christ brought light out of darkness, as at the beginning of creation; ‘and everything the light shines on becomes light’ (Eph 5.13). Even the darkness most intimate to me.
Nature
The tendency of our time is to idealize nature, with its impulses and appetites, not to transcend it. While anthropological discourse since antiquity has dwelt on what sets man apart from other species, there is a strange determination abroad, these days, to evidence that we are no more than animals. This does not mean, though, that our age is impervious to the Spirit. The claims of the soul are evident for being often expressed negatively, a function of pain. While moderns are loath to speak of God, they readily admit to feeling trapped in creaturely limitation. While giving no explicit credence to doctrines of the afterlife, they are consumed with a yearning for more. While determined to assume their incarnate humanity, they vaguely know that our body points beyond itself, since every apparent satisfaction is but achingly provisional.
From my forthcoming Chastity: Reconciliation of the Senses
Letting Grief Go
Thanks to a good tip, I have discovered Rainer Kaufmann’s powerful film Running about tackling grief in terrible circumstances: an abyss of incomprehension in the wake of a suicide. Juliane has lost her partner Johann. She is caught in a web spun of different threads, some self-justifying, others self-condemning. At one level she is determined to be honest. At another, she surrenders to delusion. But when one’s world collapses, how can one know what is real? The film’s strength is its portrayal of Juliane’s gradual easing back into reality, enabled by determined friends prepared to comfort and hold, but also to speak a word of truth. At one point Juliane is told: ‘You are feeding your grief like a pet to make it stay next to you lazy and fat – for it’s the one thing still connecting you with what you have lost.’ One cannot live on loss indefinitely, even loss that seems to have taken a part of oneself away. (FAZ review here)
Baraniak
Visiting the cathedral in Poznań with the Nordic Bishops’ Conference, I paused before the tomb of Antoni Baraniak, archbishop of Poznań 1957-77. He was among the prominent Polish clerics sequestered by the Communist regime, submitted to solitary confinement, refined humiliations, and various forms of torture. The authorities’ concern was to cause a split in the Polish episcopate, mobilising Baraniak against the country’s primate, Cardinal Wyszyński. They failed. Braniak’s endurance was heroic. In the eulogy at his funeral, the cardinal spoke of the ‘remarkably strong bond’ that had formed between them, two churchmen of exceptional stature. One wonders how they would have regarded today’s ecclesiastical tussles.
You can find a Polish documentary about Baraniak here.
Weighing Up Options
The Office of Readings provides a passage (3,3) from Thomas à Kempis‘s Imitation, once upon a time a book countless Christians kept in their pocket. The challenge posed speaks powerfully right now:
‘Many listen more gladly to the world than to God; they follow more easily their physical appetite than the things that are pleasing to God. What the world offers is temporal and circumscribed, yet people serve it avidly; what I promise [says the Lord] is great and eternal, yet the hearts of mortals yield to numbness. Who serves and obeys me in all things with the sort of care that goes into service of this world and its masters?’ A little later we are told: ‘I tend to visit my elect in two ways: by temptation and by consolation.’ Is that a perspective we sufficiently consider, that our temptations might be customised, providential opportunities to grow in grace?
Irony
I’m not sufficiently a curmudgeon to miss the intended comedy of this scene from the centre of Oslo, within view of the royal palace: three public toilets painted blue, white, and red, named after the Republican virtues. At a certain level it is funny, not least because ‘Liberté’ carries a yellow notice saying ‘Not Working’.
At a deeper level, though, the scene leaves me thoughtful, sad. It seems representative of a cultural trend ever more in evidence betraying inability to relate to any exalted ideal except by means of irony. Is this because we’ve seen too much double-dealing, too little coherence in proponents of ideals? Perhaps. That’s no reason, though, to pull in the oars and let ourselves drift. No, we should take ourselves in hand, examine our lives, prepare to change them. A society – secular or sacred – without revered intelligent ideals does not just become uncreative and boring; it leaves itself open to bogusness.
The End?
Given the importance of the event we commemorate, we cannot fail to be struck by the squalor of its circumstances. We know King Herod from several passages in the Gospel, also from Josephus and other historians. We know him to be a weak ruler, conceited and unprincipled. How gladly he listened to John! How cavalierly he ignored what he heard! Over and beyond such spinelessness, today’s account presents him in a light that is positively lurid. Reclining at an executive luncheon, he is so enthralled by the suggestive charms of his stepdaughter that he promises to give her anything — well, almost anything — to show his appreciation. The gruesome request that followed shook him, yet Herod was bound by his word, his vain and presumptuous word. John was executed forthwith, with the guests still at table. A lecherous king, a jealous queen, a fickle child: should these bring the Old Testament to a close?
Pitiless Pietism
A trend much talked about in our time concerns what we might call secularist religion. People put forward very high ethical demands on the basis of a standard often recently acquired; at the same the threshold is low to thrown somebody out and say: ‘You are no longer allowed to have a voice in this assembly’. Is it a kind of pietism without grace?
Yes, and pietism shorn of grace becomes cruel.
From a conversation (in Norwegian) with the journalist Tore Hjalmar Sævik about the longing for God, human dignity, and brewing.
Ardent Shadow
I have just re-read Elisabeth de Miribel‘s life of Prince Vladimir Ghika, a remarkable man and priest, now beatified. He remained steadfast and true, ‘a teacher of hope’ as he liked to call himself, in the most diverse circumstances, from the salons of royalty to the squalid prison cell in which he died. Other, better studies have appeared since Miribel’s, yet it remains a valuable resource, not least for the extracts it contains of Ghika’s writings. This passage from one of his letters is alive within me, challenging me: ‘We suffer in proportion to our love. The capacity for suffering is within us the same as our capacity for love. It is in a way like its ardent and terrible shadow — a shadow of the same dimension, except when evening falls and shadows lengthen. A revelatory shadow that discloses us.’
Bridge-Building
‘A bishop’s ministry is ‘pontifical’. To be a pontifex is to build bridges. Given the amnesia to which the West has succumbed regarding its Christian patrimony, a chasm extends between ‘secular’ society and the Church’s sacred shore. When attempts are made to holler across, we risk misunderstanding: for even when the same words are used on either side, they have acquired different meanings. What poses as ‘dialogue’ easily ends up being a dialogue de sourds. Bridges are needed to enable encounter. Christians must present their faith integrally, without temporizing compromise; at the same time, they must express it in ways comprehensible to those ill-informed about formal dogma. They will often do this most effectively by appealing to universal experience, then trying to read such experience in the light of revelation.’
From my forthcoming book Chastity: Reconciliation of the Senses
Conquered
Cinema can never have the immediacy of theatre, yet some performances are marked by such a grace of empathy that they leave the spectator with an awed sense of presence notwithstanding the screen’s mediation. To see Max von Sydow in Bille August’s Pelle the Conqueror is to see a humiliated father who has long since relinquished a sense of dignity for his own sake yet tries to maintain a semblance for the sake of his son. It makes you ache. Hal Hinson wrote: ‘This is a performance that comes from the joints and ligaments; it’s conceived in marrow. […] Von Sydow’s style has the essence of poetic compression’. Hinson is rather dismissive of the rest of the cast. I do not agree. I was stunned by this film when I first saw it 35 years ago. I find myself stunned now, having seen it again. For being an historic drama it speaks timelessly of degradation, of dreams nurtured and lost, of the complex relationship of fathers and sons, and of the startling tenderness that stirs in the human heart despite all.
Magnus
The CoramFratribus owl on a beer bottle? Indeed. The first official invitation I received qua bishop of Trondheim was to a private tour of the city’s flagship brewery, E.C. Dahl. The brewmaster had heard of my vague credentials in the world of brewing. A friendship evolved. It later extended to the brewmasters of Alstadberg and Tautra, leading to the idea of creating a new beer rooted in the rich history of our region. In the Middle Ages Trondheim (then called Nidaros) was truly a European city. The archbishopric was the centre of a vast ecclesiastical province extending to Iceland, Greenland, the Orkneys and Man. Cultural exchanges were frequent, carried by the waves of the see suggested on the beer’s label, with a red wave symbolising the legacy of the martyrs – Trondheim’s significance derived from the cult of St Olav. Inspiration, though, came also from abroad. We have named the beer after the patron of the Orkneys, a kinsman of Olav, St Magnus, who died a martyr’s death in 1117 (a story told in this hymn). It is said he visited Trondheim in 1098, the year Cîteaux was founded. The beer is to be enjoyed with moderation.
Appeasement?
Appeasement! Is that all Christianity has to offer a wounded heart crying out to love and be loved, to know and be known? Must the Christian just wait and burn while fire within spends itself and live coals turn into ashes? Has he or she no other response to love’s passion than resignation, eyes mournfully raised heavenward?
Often it has seemed thus. It is a blessing that the cultural shift of recent decades has exposed how harmful a rhetoric of appeasement, drenched in piety, can be when used to silence the voracious hunger of the human heart. Instead of bringing healing, anaesthetics of devout abstraction are prone to cause sickness in the form of arrested tenderness, of vulnerability soured into spite, of unmet affective need seeking satisfaction in addiction or cruelty, or in gradual petrification.
From my forthcoming Chastity: Reconciliation of the Senses
Assumption
‘The dogma of the Assumption of the Mother of God into heaven was defined by Pius XII on 1 November 1950. Outside the Catholic Church, and in some circles within, the pope’s constitution Munificentissimus Deus was greeted with incredulity. What was going on? The year 1950 saw the first TV remote control. It was the year of Annie Get Your Gun, of Sunset Boulevard. The credit card was born in 1950, as was Stevie Wonder. And here was the Church making statements about things purported to have happened mystically to the Blessed Virgin Mary 1,900 years ago? Protestant critics thought the dogma a hodgepodge of fairy-tales, not just unbiblical but anti-biblical. Established thinkers like Barth and Niebuhr decried what they saw as papal arrogance. Fears were voiced that Catholics worldwide were lapsing into mother-goddess paganism. Everyone’s worst suspicions seemed to be confirmed. Catholics concerned about Christian unity – a growing number – experienced trepidation. I can’t help thinking that the dogma’s hysterical critics didn’t in fact read Munificentissimus Deus. If you do, you will find it breathes serenity, is responsibly argued, and bears the imprint of profound humility.’ From Entering the Twofold Mystery.
Dom Godefroy
At the end of the Mass presided by the Holy Father that concluded World Youth Day a French bishop approached me in the sacristy to present his condolences on the death of Dom Godefroy Raguenet de Saint Albin, abbot of Acey. I reacted with disbelief. Dom Godefroy had just concluded the regular visitation in my own community of Mount Saint Bernard. He had emailed while he was there. And now this prodigiously strong, athletic man, an ex-navy seal, had died in a mountaineering accident? I couldn’t believe it. And still can’t quite believe it. Three strong testimonies have helped me: one by the Abbot General of the OCSO, one by the Abbot General of the OCist, and one by the Abbot of Hauterive. They summon up the mystery of Dom Godefroy’s life and vocation with affection and fraternal realism, helping us see the action of God’s grace in this singular life, whose abrupt end, mysteriously, was preceded by the unselfconsciously erupting joy of a heart become broad, very broad. Requiescat.
Impertinence
The memoirs of Alice Habsburg have been put into my hands. This distinguished Swede, a woman of legendary beauty, married into the epicentre of Old-World European nobility and eventually operated valiantly as a member of the Polish resistance. Her fortitude may be gauged from an account of her visit early on in WWII to Galicia, where she hoped to pick up a few things from her mansion of Busk: ‘When I reached Lvov I had someone ask the Bolshevik chief of police who resided at Busk if he would mind my coming briefly to collect some letters and other possessions I had had sent there from Zywiec. His answer was: ‘She is welcome to come, but will not return to Lvov with her head still on her shoulders.’ Having received such an impertinent reply to my courteous request, I had no choice except to travel straight to Busk.’ Alice obtained what she wanted and brought her head safely back with her, to be reunited with her husband and children. Her eldest son, the revered Dominican Fr Joachim Badeni, fought alongside Norwegian troops in the Battle of Narvik.
Aglais io
Opened
it lay before me on the path:
earth’s lightest book —
it has but two pages.
Filled with wonder I read its magic signs.
Then it ascended into the air.
No apocalypse.
Only a couple of words from summer’s
secret revelation:
Aglais io, peacock butterfly.
Christine Busta (1915–1987)
Todos, todos, todos
In Lisbon, Pope Francis insisted that the Church is ‘para todos, todos, todos’. His words are illuminated by a passage in today’s breviary from a sermon by St Augustine on the martyrdom of St Lawrence. Having celebrated Lawrence’s path to sanctity, the bishop of Hippo reminds his hearers that it is not the only path. ‘The garden of the Lord, brethren, includes – yes, it truly includes – includes not only the roses of martyrs but also the lilies of virgins, and the ivy of married people, and the violets of widows. There is absolutely no kind of human beings, my dearly beloved, who will need to despair of their vocation; Christ suffered for all. It was truly written about him that he wishes all to be saved, and to come to acknowledge the truth.’ Note the same rhetorical device: the threefold ‘includes’ which renders the threefold ‘habet’ of Augustine’s Latin. So no kind of person is excluded; but all are called to transformation in truth. The Lord’s concern is to realise our God-given potential, to make us whole and holy; not to leave us in a state of fragmentation and self-satisfied mediocrity.
Unexpected Bach
Alice Babs, born in 1924, sang in nightclubs from her teenage years. She became that most unlikely thing, a Scandinavian jazz legend. Duke Ellington said of her that her voice contained ‘all the warmth, joy of life, rhythm and tragedy that make up the inner secret of jazz’. Alice and Duke worked closely together, not least in producing their joint Serenade to Sweden.
It is surprising to find this familiar voice in a totally different register, singing an aria by Bach. Yet when you hear her perform Jesu, Jesu, Du bist mein, one of Bach’s spiritual songs, her voice seems made for it, at once limpid and intense, sincere. One genre of music can illuminate another. I dare say the same holds for much discourse.
Chastity
Was it fear of nature that impelled me towards the supernatural? Such can the strength of conjecture be that it seems more real than reality. I aspired to live chastely, but regarded the endeavour as sheer mortification. It did not occur to me, I think, to see chastity as possessing an intrinsic, never mind life-giving attraction. I thought of it in negative terms, as not being, not doing what lay at the heart of the contemporary image of masculinity. Hence a further complex arose. In a culture glorifying sexual expression, was chastity not somehow unmanly?
If only I had thought of reading Cicero! He could have let me discover that, in the ancient world, the goddess of chastity, Diana, was known not only as lucifera, ‘light-bearing’, but as omnivaga, ‘roaming everywhere’, so sovereign and free.
From my forthcoming Chastity: Reconciliation of the Senses
Resolution
A friend sends me this image. It sums up the experience of World Youth Day.
It needs no commentary. But a few verses from Psalm 51 come to mind:
But you delight in sincerity of heart, and in secret you teach me wisdom.
Let me hear the sound of joy and gladness, and the bones you have crushed will dance.
God, create in me a clean heart, renew within me a resolute spirit.
The message has been heard and acted upon. One can only give thanks.
Peaceful Effervescence
It is hard to describe what has been going on in Lisbon this week. I have never known anything like it. There have been people everywhere, almost all of them young, tending to gather in large clusters while waving national flags and loudly singing. Crowds have sometimes been overwhelming, filling tube trains and narrow streets. In a different setting one might have felt anxious, conscious of the risk of confrontation. Remarkable here has been the utter lack of aggressivity. Instead of closing in on themselves, groups have reached out to other groups, inviting encounter, exchanging little gifts. I had the sense that Lisbon had been turned into a sacrament of friendship, sweeping up the locals, too, in a peaceful effervescence. The experience, of course, has been brief and intense, not set to last. It does not pretend to manifest a political model of society. Yet what it confers is intensely real, authentic, leading one to ascertain that a world established on terms of fraternity is possible. To have seen this even in the twinkling of an eye is a blessing, a blessing that can alter lives. The fact that a million and a half young people choose to gather like this, for a purely idealistic purpose, without prizes to win, simply for the sake of sharing what is essential to them, is tremendous. It is news that should be on the front page of every paper.
Via Crucis
Tonight’s Stations of the Cross in the Parque Eduardo VII, led by Pope Francis, were an audacious spectacle. It is a risky business to plan liturgies audaciously. They can easily turn into mere display. That risk was averted. The ensemble was infused with creative intelligence, rooted in the mystery of Calvary and addressing the immense crowd of youth from (literally) every nation. The dancers enacted meditations on each station. They were remarkable, carried by strong choreography and beautiful music. They showed us that it is possible, without banal compromise, to represent and bear suffering with dignity, beautifully. It is a crucial lesson. For centuries Christians have communicated it through painting, sculpture, music. Many of these works are immortal. Yet it is wonderful to see the same message transmitted in a radically modern artistic idiom. Our world needs to hear it.
You can see the stations here, starting at ’45.
