Words on the Word
Olsok
Wisdom 10.10-14: Wisdom did not desert him.
James 1.2-4.12: So that you may become perfect and whole.
Matthew 16.24-28: He must take up his cross and follow me.
In her last book Marilynne Robinson, a shrewd observer of society, writes that, ‘for us moderns there is a kind of safety in finding a taint of factionalism and self-interest in anything human beings have done’. She contends that our attitude to history, art, and faith is marked by a hermeneutic of suspicion. We take it for granted that when a fellow speaks up for a given cause or maintains an idea, there’s skulduggery involved. And no one, damn it, is to suspect us of being blue-eyed or bother us with tiresome ‘ideals’ that in any case, surely, are superfluous in our enlightened times?
Much woke hysteria is traceable to this tendency. We fancy that out there, beyond our own undoubted decency, there are hostile powers that, by challenging our self-understanding and self-righteousness, are out to deceive us.
The hermeneutic of suspicion finds obvious expression in the way our nation relates to the heritage of St Olav. Not that the majority of our contemporaries walk about thinking of him of their own accord in daily life; but with the approach of our so-called national jubilee, no one can entirely elude this personage from our historic patrimony.
After all, it isn’t Norway than turns a thousand in 2030; it is the legacy of Olav
It has become fashionable to portray Olav as an avaricious, sensual bully who first sailed up and down Europe in search of gold and lovely maidens in order, thereafter, to impose his might on the peace-loving peasants who, up in these parts north of Dovre, reverently worshiped Mother Earth. He is said to have been awful. Even the webpage of Nidarosdomen explains Olav’s death at Stiklestad by saying, quite simply, that ‘his brutality made him unpopular’.
It’s funny: in what has become the received version of the story about Olav, there seems to be nothing attractive about him.
But then we are faced with this inexplicable fact: the cult that promptly arose after his death, as people pilgrimaged to places bound up with his life. Those who turned up were not hard-nosed influencers stuffed with Catholic propaganda, papally indoctrinated to promote a subversive mythology of kingship. No, they were the poor, the lame, the blind, and the mad, that unrhythmic band that tends to appear as pioneers wherever God’s Kingdom, not the might of man is manifest.
Had there not arisen, within the year following Olav’s death, strong, credible rumours that he was a holy man, the Danish king would hardly have permitted Olav’s body to be exhumed in his own august presence and that of his talkative mother, under the direction of Bishop Grimketel, friend to the people, and a host of grandees.
Olav’s incorrupt body, a well-attested phenomenon, was one sign of favour before God. Another aspect is conveyed by popular traditions consistently stressing Olav’s friendliness. Snorre tells us that this trait become more explicit the older Olav got. He was wont to be ‘joyful and talkative’ a ‘source of gladness to those who approached him’. While he was alive people high and low encountered Olav as a friend. One simply doesn’t hear that sort of thing said about Djenghis Kahn or Henry VIII, to whom Norwegian state departements seem to want to compare him. And let us not fall into the trap of thinking people in the eleventh century more gullible than we are today.
Permit me to point out that the category of friendship occurs in the very first paragraph of the code of Norwegian legislation that Olav introduced at Moster in 1024: ‘This is the foundation of our laws, that we are to bow towards the East and pray to Christ, the Holy One, for a good year and for peace, that we may keep our land upbuilt and our king healthy. May he be our friend and we his; and may God be a friend to us all.’ This explicitly Christian code of law was one of Olav’s greatest accomplishments. It enjoined equality before the law, marriage as a covenant of equals, infants’ right to life, the notion of the people, not just one’s kin, as a fellowship of obligations. These were literally revolutionary ideas, turning society upside-down.
And this is where antipathy to Olav has its source. Not that he himself was a ready-made paragon of virtue. Olav was conditioned by the world in which he had grown up. He was possessed of rawness, could be raunchy, arrogant, and proud. All of us have it in us to be those things. We see that if we perform even a half-hearted examination of conscience, or simply take a good look at ourselves in the bathroom mirror. In Olav’s youth, his natural tendencies were given free rein. It was not always a pretty sight. But then he reached the reasoned conviction that Christianity, received in baptism, nurtured through reconciliation and the Eucharist, was real. He came to accept a notion of society as a human expression of the principle of Omnipotence embracing powerlessness in order to give strength to the weary, of a God who says to mankind, ‘I call you friends’, then, ‘Serve and love one another’.
It took a long time for Olav to realise these ideals in his own life. Now and again his pre-Christian nature resurfaced. He did not, 
however, resign himself to this. He did not say, as we are prone to saying, ‘Oh, this is just the way I am’. He measured himself afresh in terms of the ideal, and let himself be converted. That way grace could work. Little by little, Olav became a new man, able to surrender himself to God defenceless, ready to give his life for his friends. This, I suspect, is what irritates our times, our country: Olav reminds us that is is possible to fight against our vices, to form our nature, to overcome conditioning in order to let Christ be formed in us, to make us bearers of his blessing.
‘He who would follow after me’, says the Lord, ‘must renounce what is his own, take up his cross, and follow me’. That which is properly our own, ours alone, is our sin, that in us which is still untransformed by grace; our ‘cross’ is ourselves, above all, the particular burden constituted by our history, our genes, our woundedness and our ability. Christ can change that burden from a heavy thing into a carrying reality, from darkness to life. Olav exemplifies the noble battle of the Christian, which the confrontation at Stiklestad enacted. Remember that when Olav is portrayed in art with a serpent underfoot, the serpent often carries his own features. He remained steadfast in battle against that in himself that was at enmity with Christ.
Thus he became, as we read in Geisli, Einarr Skúlason’s wondrous poem first recited here in this church in 1153, a friend of Christ. When Olav had come to see who Christ is, no other covenant, no other relationship, be it in an ecstasy of eroticism or power, could satisfy him. No other friendship could measure up to this, or be ultimately worthy of him.
When we turn to Olav in prayer as our example, intercessor, and protector, it is in the hope of being grafted into this transformative friendship with Christ that is the goal of existence, of the universe. The story of St Olav shows us that – Alleluia! – this goal can be reached. There is a stanza right towards the end of Geisli that spells out our deep aspiration:
With power the people is
given a share in Olav’s strength,
his Godward desire and honour;
I have made manifest his worth.
Let his compatriots bow low
before this pure member of Christ’s Body,
transported to heaven; blessed is the one
who gains his friendship.
In the name of Christ!
Amen
An icon of St Olav painted by Solrunn Nes, now in Preveza, Greece.