Here I have put together a selection of homilies. The Word of God is ‘alive and active’ says the Letter to the Hebrews. That is not to say that it lives a hidden organic life we can trace through a microscope, as if it were a virus; but that it is inspired, a bearer of God’s eternal Spirit. Therefore it resounds to this day with quite as much force as when it was first spoken. It ever has something new to say. The preacher’s first task is to listen intently to this Word at once ancient and new, then to make his own, necessarily limited words its vehicles. I have not been able to provide translations of texts in other languages; but if you rummage around a little you will find a fair amount of material in English.

Marian Mystery

13 June 2025 Gut Holthausen
The Church recognises in Mary the new Eve who realises that lovely name: at last, after millennial waiting, the human being is reborn in Christ as truly a living being, not just someone apt to survive for a while in this world, but capable of eternal life. Continue reading

Pentecost

8 June 2025 Trondheim
At Lauds this morning the Church let us pray, 'Lord, destroy sin in the world!' Now, that's what I call a prayer. Continue reading

Pentecost Vigil

7 June 2025
May the Spirit grant us ability to distinguish between what is true and what is fake. Continue reading

Homilettes

31 May 2025 Silkeborg
Går vi, som Guds folk, fremad mot hans lys for å forvandles, eller søker vi tilflukt i skyggefulle gjemmer, for der å bli ved det vante? Dét er spørsmålet vår enhet, vår hensiktsmessighet, og derved vår bestand som Guds folk, hans hellige folk, avhenger av. Continue reading

Visitation

31 May 2025 Silkeborg
If Christ lives in us he himself will, by his presence, accomplish his work of blessing, exhortation, and healing. Reality, meeting him, will constitutionally leap for joy. Continue reading

6. Sunday of Easter

25 May 2025 Confirmation Ålesund
To 'recall' the words of Jesus is about more than learning a few pious phrases by rote. It is about acquiring a true perception of reality, about seeking stable criteria that let us understand, discern, and choose well in order, thus, to contribute to a society founded on rock, not on shifting sands or in the middle of a sinking, fetid swamp. Continue reading

5. Sunday of Easter

18 May 2025 Mount Saint Bernard Abbey
To love as God loves is to nurture the existence and thriving of others while having no truck with death, resisting anger, bitterness, spite, all those mortiferous passions that put out grace’s flame and make us ungracious, causing us to subsist in a kind of living death, for it is quite possible to have a regular pulse and a normal digestion yet to be soul-dead.  Continue reading

The One and the Many

14 May 2025 Pusey House
Often we may feel like the Biblical owl among ruins, hooting watchers in the night perched on the rubble of yesterday’s sureties. We must face an uncomfortable fact amply evidenced in Sacred Scripture - God cares less than we for monuments of reassurance. Continue reading

Good Shepherd Sunday

11 May 2025 Molde
At times we may find that life is like a vast resonant room in which threatening and comforting voices outshout, or outwhisper, one another. We must choose, then, which to follow, we must know how to tell the voices apart. Continue reading

3. Sunday of Easter: Confirmation

4 May 2025 Levanger
I dare say most of us know from experience what we feel like when we know we have acted cowardly. It is damned hard to live with our disappointment in ourselves as we think, Now I have ruined something that can never be rebuilt. Continue reading

Octave of Easter

27 April 2025 Trondheim
The source of Thomas's despair turns out to be a source of hope. The penny drops - Jesus infallibly takes out sins away, if we let him, but he does not necessarily remove our wounds. Continue reading

Easter Mass for Pope Francis RIP

25 April 2025 Trondheim
Pope Francis has challenged us, and constrained us, to seek clarity in diverse circumstances, to work out  what things are really about in order, then, to make responsible choices and to live credibly as Christians. Continue reading

Easter Day 2025

20 April 2025 Trondheim
How might we celebrate Easter if our heart is tuned in a minor key; if our life does not let itself be ordered by means of bombastic end rhymes; if when we look around, at ourselves and the world, we are fearful? The Gospel helps us - it speaks of perplexity in the face of Christ's resurrection, of uncoordinated reactions, hesitant response. Continue reading

Easter Vigil 2025

19 April 2025 Trondheim
The Word entered the mute silence of death in order to resound there and to let his essential fire burn so that Christ's faithful, when their hour comes, may go forth to encounter physical death in peace, with hope, recognising in it, as St Francis sang, a sister that does not close, but opens.  Continue reading

Good Friday 2025

18 April 2025 Trondheim
The cross touches us; and today we touch it. One by one we kneel before it to kiss it, each of us carrying his or her own burden, often known to no one but ourselves. Continue reading

Maundy Thursday 2025

17 April 2025 Trondheim
The Paschal motif points towards a way of living in this world, so lovely and so brittle. None of us has here an abiding city, we are pilgrims here a while, then called to pass on, to pass by. Continue reading

Chrism Mass 2025

14 April 2025 Trondheim
The longer we are priests, the more lucidly we recognise what it is all about: our own lives must be laid down on the altar, like the hosts we offer daily. God's transforming power, poured out through the Church, can make realities poor in themselves into something infinitely precious and nourishing. Continue reading

Palm Sunday

13 April 2025 Trondheim
It is the drama we now enact liturgically that makes sense of the world's drama. The world has long since lost the plot - it acts without care, frenetically, often enough grotesquely. Continue reading

5. Sunday of Lent

6 April 2025 Columbia University
Oh, how we love situations like these, when we’re confident we’re on the side of right! How we love to invoke high principles in aid of our self-righteousness! Continue reading

Renewal of Vows

29 March 2025 Saint Michel de Kergonan
The foundation of all spiritual life is this: the interaction of God's fidelity with ours. Continue reading

Annunciation

25 March 2025 Saint Michel de Kergonan
This is what the Gospel is about: the possibility of man illumined, not by some tedious faux gnosticism but by divine Fire renewing our flesh and spirit to the core, burning up all dark attachments, all lies, all compromises with evil in order to make us fit to know God. Continue reading

St Joseph

19 March 2025 Kristiansund
Why does God not choose more secure, warrantable procedures? Based on his case history, the Lord would not stand a chance confronted with the terms of a modern insurance agency. Continue reading

2. Sunday of Lent C

16 March 2025 Trondheim
The fact that Moses and Elijah, the Law and the Prophets in person, so to speak, naturally appear within the radius of Jesus's glory proves that death is not a matter of final consequence — death, in fact, is rather overrated. Continue reading

Sign of Jonah

12 March 2025 Maribo - Bishops' Conference
No divine gift, no call, is private. All is grace to be freely received, freely shared. Continue reading

1st Sunday of Lent

9 March 2025 Abtei Mariendonk
Must we prevail on the Lord to conduct a little aggiornamento in order to fall into line with current pastoral guidelines? In fact, God’s primary concern is not to keep us comfortable and undisturbed - he wants us to know the truth, which alone liberates. Continue reading