We thought it would be convenient to have all texts of the words of Bishop Erik Varden, OCSO, of Trondheim, Norway, for the Pope's Lenten Retreat in one page, for future historical reference.
They all come from the Bishop's own page (in eleven separate installments) and no words have been altered or edited; links have all been kept active.
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[1.] Entering Lent
From the first conference of this week’s Lenten Retreat.
Lent confronts us with essentials. It takes us, materially and symbolically, into a space stripped of superfluities. Things apt to distract us, even things wholesome in themselves, are removed for a season. We embrace an abstinence of the senses.
Fidelity to Christ’s example and commandments is the hallmark of Christian sincerity. The extent of the peace we embody — that signal peace ‘which the world cannot give’ — indicates Jesus’s abiding presence in us. We must insist on this now, when the Gospel is sometimes deployed as a weapon in culture wars.
Instrumentalisations of Christian language and signs should be challenged, not just by wan outrage, but by teaching the terms of authentic spiritual warfare. For Christian peace is not a promise of ease; it is a condition for transformed society.
It is timely to articulate the radicality of Christian ‘peace’ while we remind ourselves and others of the truth in St John Climacus’s words: ‘There is no greater obstacle to the presence of the Spirit in us than anger.’
The Church instils our Lenten programme with peace. She detracts nothing from her call to do battle against vices and harmful passions — her language is ‘Yes, yes’, ‘No, no’, not ‘sometimes this’, ‘sometimes that’.
She gives us instead, as we start each Lent’s battle, a peaceful melody as a seasonal soundtrack: a tract of great beauty that, for over a thousand years, the Church has sung on the First Sunday of Lent, to introduce the account of Christ’s temptation in the wilderness.
The tract sets the text of Psalm 90, the Qui habitat. This work of melodic exegesis deserves attention. It is not just a relic of ancient aesthetics. It carries a vital message.
St Bernard of Clairvaux was attentive to this message. In the Lent of 1139 he preached a cycle of 17 sermons on the Qui habitat, reflecting on what it means to live by grace as we fight evil, foster good, uphold truth, and follow the exodus path from unfreedom towards the land of promise, veering neither to the right nor to the left, remaining peaceful, conscious that underneath what may at times seem to us a tight-rope walk ‘are the everlasting arms’.
He summons us to loving and clear-headed discipleship.
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[2.] Bernard the Idealist
From the second conference of this week’s Lenten Retreat.
What sort of man was St Bernard? Where did he come from? He towers over the twelfth-century Cistercian movement: such were his charisma and industriousness.
Many people, including some who should know better, suppose he got the order going. He did not, of course; though he did make a splash when he turned up in 1113, aged 23, with a band of thirty companions.
The monastery he joined, Cîteaux, was a project as much of innovation as of reform. The founders, who set it up in 1098, called their house novum monasterium. They were doing something new, not primarily reacting against anything, which is just as well, since projects of reaction sooner or later run into the sand.
On the face of it, the Cistercian project was conservative. Yet its protagonists introduced novelties. This dialectic was fruitful.
Bernard’s confidence in his own judgement could make him flexible in the observance of conventional procedures he otherwise claimed to uphold. His view of the Church’s needs drove him sometimes to adopt rigid positions that involved fierce partisanship.
But he was no hypocrite.
He was a genuinely humble man, fully given to God, capable of tender kindness, a firm friend — indeed, able to befriend former enemies — and a compelling witness to God’s love. He was, and remains, fascinating.
Dom James Fox, entrepreneurial abbot of Gethsemani from 1948 to 67 once wrote in exasperation about his confrère Thomas Merton: ‘His mind is so electrical!’ Merton wound Fox up with his ideas, intuitions, and insistence. Yet Fox knew him to be genuine. He respected him, enjoyed his company (when they were not in the middle of some epic quarrel), and went to Merton for confession for most of his abbacy.
It would be daft to compare Thomas Merton to Bernard of Clairvaux, yet there is temperamental similarity. While Bernard never knew about electricity, his was a quicksilver nature containing and having to equilibrate massive tensions.
Bernard’s teaching on conversion is born of a Biblical culture second to none and of well pondered notions of theology. It is also, and increasingly so with the passage of time, born of personal struggle as he learns not to take it for granted that his course is always the right course, taught by experience, hurts, and provocations to consider his self-righteousness and marvel before God’s merciful justice.
Bernard is a good, wise companion for anyone setting out on a Lenten exodus from selfishness and pride, wishing to pursue authenticity with eyes set on the all-illumining love of God.
[3.] God’s Help
From the third conference of this week’s Lenten Retreat.
Mary Ward, that great Christian educator of the 17th century, used to tell her sisters: ‘Do your best and God will help’.
The notion that God can and will help us in our predicaments is axiomatic to Biblical faith. It sets the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God made compassionate flesh in Christ Jesus, apart from the Unmoved Mover of philosophy.
Psalm 90 begins with the verse: ‘He who dwells within the help of the Most High’. God’s help, says Bernard, may indeed be called a habitat in as much as it forms a sustaining reality within which we can live, move, and have our being. God’s help is not occasional to us; it is not an emergency service we call out now and then, when a house is burning or someone has been hit by a car, the way we might dial 999.
But what about occasions when God-fearing people cry out to heaven but get no perceptible response, hearing only the desolate echo of their own voice?
The Scriptural type of such plight is Job, whose majestic book can be approached as a symphony in three movements, going from a visceral Lament through an exposition of Menace to a wholly surprising experience of Grace.
Job refuses to accept his friends’ rationalisations. He refuses to posit that God is just working out sums in his life as if it were a balance sheet. Unhelped, he is determined to find God present in his affliction, calling out heroically: ‘If it is not he, who then is it?’
As believers we may at some level regard our religion as an insurance policy. Certain of subsisting within God’s help, we may think we are out of harm’s way. A world can seem to collapse if — when — harm strikes. How do I face trials which cause my carefully assembled, customised protective fencing to fall? Is my relationship with God one of barter, disposing me to follow, when things are hard, the counsel of Job’s hard-headed wife to ‘curse God and die’? Or do I live at greater depth?
God can enable a new world to emerge after he has pulled down walls we thought were the world, walls within which we actually suffocated.
To live within God’s help as St Bernard would have us do is not to peddle securities. It is to pass through Lament and Menace in order to live graciously at a deeper level.
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[4.] Becoming Free
From the fourth conference of this week’s Lenten Retreat.
The notion of ‘freedom’ has become contentious in public discourse. Freedom is a good to which we all aspire; we rise up against anything which threatens to curtail or confine our freedom. As a result, the vocabulary of freedom is an effective rhetorical tool.
Suggestions that the freedom of a particular group is at risk will call forth instant responses of outrage on the internet. It may even rally people into the piazza.
A variety of political causes in Europe now harness the jargon of freedom. Tensions result. What one segment of society perceives as ‘liberating’ is found oppressive by others. Opposing fronts are raised, with the banner of ‘freedom’ held high on all sides. Bitter conflicts arise from incompatible agendas of purported liberation.
This state of affairs poses a challenge for Christians. It is essential to qualify what we mean when, in the context of faith, we speak of becoming free. That is what Bernard does when he comments on the verse: ‘For he has freed me from the snare of the hunters and from the bitter word.’
For Bernard it is evident that true freedom is not ‘natural’ to fallen man. What seems natural to us is to have things our way, to satisfy our desires and realise our plans without interference, to flaunt and be vaunted for our own brilliant lights. Bernard, addressing man in this state of delusion, is deliciously sarcastic: ‘What do you fancy yourself as, you smatterer?! You have become a beast for which captors’ snares are laid.’
The fact that we are so easily tripped up, that we keep falling into the same old snares, though we know so well where they lie, is to him proof good enough that we are unfree, unable on our own to make steady progress towards our life’s true goal, delivered instead to all sorts of obstructions and distractions.
Rooting his understanding of freedom in the Son’s Yes! to the Father’s will, Bernard works a revolution in our grasp of what it means to be free. Christian freedom is not about seizing the world with force; it is about loving the world with a crucified love magnanimous enough to make us freely wish, one with Christ, to give our lives for it, that it may be set free.
Caution is called for when freedom, held hostage by force, is manipulated as a means to legitimate the doings of impersonal subjects like ‘the Party’, ‘the Economy’, or even ‘History’. In a Christian way of thinking, no oppressive policy can be redeemed by invocations of ideological ‘freedom’. The only meaningful freedom is personal; and one person’s freedom cannot cancel another’s.
To subscribe to a Christian idea of freedom is to consent to pain. When Christ tells us: ‘Resist not evil’, he does not ask us to countenance injustice. He lets us see that justice’s cause is sometimes best served by suffering for it, refusing to meet force with force.
Our emblem of freedom remains the Son of God who ‘emptied himself’.
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[5.] Splendour of Truth
From the fifth conference of this week’s Lenten Retreat.
Bernard keeps us on our toes. He states: ‘I would have you warned: no one lives on earth without temptation; if one is relieved of one, let him surely expect another’. We must nurture the correct balance between assurance in God’s help and distrust of our frailty, dreading temptations while we accept their inevitability, remembering that God submits us to them because they are useful.
Useful in what sense?
As we resist arrows launched by the Father of Lies, our commitment to the truth will be strengthened. We shall be fit, having turned away from weakening falsehood, to strengthen our brethren.
Ambition represents a particular form of capitulation to untruth. Ambition is a not very subtly sublimated form of cupidity. Describing it Bernard, always eloquent, surpasses himself. Ambition, he says, is ‘a subtle ill, a secret virus, an occult pest, an artisan of deceit; it is the mother of hypocrisy, the parent of envy, the origin of vices; it is kindling for crimes, causing virtues to rust, holiness to rot, hearts to be blinded. Remedies it turns into illnesses. From medicine it extracts apathy’. Ambition springs from an ‘alienation of the mind’. It is a madness that comes about when truth is forgotten. The fact that ambition is a form of insanity makes it ridiculous in any instantiation, but especially so when it occurs in persons given to a state of selfless service. Not for nothing does the figure of the ambitious clergyman haunt literature and cinema as a comic, but not very funny, trope — from the fawning parsons in Jane Austen to the tart courtier priest in Patrice Leconte’s notable film Ridicule.
‘What is truth?’
People of our time ask this question earnestly, often with remarkable good will, notwithstanding their confusion, fear, and the rush they are always in. We cannot let it go unanswered. We have no energy to waste on the silly temptations of fear, vainglory, and ambition. We need our best resources to uphold substantial, essential, freeing truth against more or less plausibly shining, more or less fiendish substitutes.
In our predicament, rich in opportunity, it is imperative to see and articulate the world in Christ’s light. Christ, who is truth, not only shields us; he renews us, impatient to reveal himself through us to a creation increasingly aware of being subject to futility.
It is tempting to think we must keep up with the world’s fashions. It is, I’d say, a dubious procedure. The Church, a slow-moving body, will always run the risk of looking and sounding last-season. But if she speaks her own language well, that of the Scriptures and liturgy, of her past and present fathers, mothers, poets, and saints, she will be original and fresh, ready to express ancient truths in new ways, standing a chance, as she has done before, of orienting culture.
This work has an important intellectual dimension. It also has an existential dimension. As Cardinal Schuster said on his deathbed: ‘It seems that people no longer let themselves be convinced by our preaching, but in the presence of holiness, they still believe, they still kneel and pray.’
Was not the universal call to holiness, the call, that is, to embody truth, the strongest note struck by the Second Vatican Council? It resounded splendidly like a gong throughout its deliberations. The Christian claim to truth becomes compelling when its splendour is made personally evident with sacrificial love in sanctity, cleansed of temptations to temporise.
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[6.] The Fall of Thousands
From the sixth conference of this week’s Lenten Retreat.
Falls can humble us when we are puffed up, showing God’s power to save. They can become milestones on a personal journey of salvation, to be recalled gratefully.
Yet we cannot afford to be gullible. Not every fall ends in exhilaration. There are falls that reek hellishly, bringing destruction to the guilty and carrying ruin in their wake. That wake is often broad and long, pulling in many innocents. We shall need fortitude to approach, with Bernard, the verse of Psalm 90 which begins: ‘A thousand shall fall at your side, ten thousand at your right.’
Nothing has done the Church more tragic harm, and compromised our witness more, than corruption arisen within our own house. The worst crisis of the Church has been brought on, not by secular opposition, but by ecclesiastical corruption. The wounds inflicted will take time to heal. They call out for justice and for tears.
It is tempting, face to face with corruption, especially when we confront abuse, to look for a diseased root. We expect to find early warning signs that were ignored: some failure in screening, an original pattern of deviancy. Sometimes these trails exist and we are right to blame ourselves for not having spotted them in time. We do not, however, find them always.
We can recognise the great and joyful good often manifest in the beginnings of communities now linked with scandal. We cannot presuppose that there was structural hypocrisy from the start, that founders set out as white-washed sepulchres. Sometimes we do find signs of inspiration, even traces of holiness. How can we simultaneously account for these and for warped developments?
A secular mindset will simplify: when it meets calamity, it designates monsters and victims.
Happily the Church possesses, when she remembers to use them, more delicate and more effective tools.
Bernard reminds us that where people pursue noble endeavours, enemy attacks will be fierce. He notes ‘that the spiritual men of the Church are attacked much more terribly than those who are carnal’. He thinks this is what the Psalm Qui habitat intends with its language of ‘left’ and ‘right’: the left stands for our carnal, the right for our spiritual nature. Casualties are more numerous on the right for that is where, on the spiritual battlefield, the most lethal weapons are used.
While he took the demonic realm seriously, this is not to say that he ascribes all spiritual disease to villains with horns and pitchforks. He holds men and women responsible for the way in which they use their sovereign freedom. His point is that human nature is one. If we begin to go deep into our spiritual nature, other depths are perforce laid bare. We shall face existential hunger, vulnerability, a yearning for comfort. Such experiences may arise by way of assault.
Progress in the spiritual life requires a configuring of our physical and affective self attuned to contemplative maturing, else there is danger that spiritual exposure will seek physical or affective release; and that such instances of release are rationalised as if they were, somehow, ‘spiritual’ themselves, more elevated than the misdemeanours of ordinary mortals. The integrity of a spiritual teacher will be attested by his conversation, but not only; it will be evidenced as much by his online habits, his comportment at table or at the bar, his freedom with regard to others’ adulation.
The spiritual life is not adjunct to the remainder of existence. It is its soul. We must beware of all dualism, always remembering that the Word became flesh so that our flesh might be imbued with Logos. We must keep a look-out both to the left and to the right while taking care, Bernard insists on this point, not to mistake the left for the right or the right for the left. We must learn to be equally at ease in our carnal and spiritual nature so that Christ our Master may govern peacefully in both.
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[7.] Glory
From the seventh conference of this week’s Lenten Retreat.
When Jesus spelled out what it means to remain with him, to enter the Kingdom towards which he was pointing, ‘many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him’. They would not put up with his discourses about sacramental realism, the indissolubility of marriage, the necessity of the Cross. When Christ was crucified on Calvary, the synodos that had walked with him six days before was no more. Two followers only remained: his Mother and John, the Beloved Disciple. John gives a stark account of Jesus’s kenosis. It plays out at two levels: that of divine, compassionate love crushed in the wine-press of the Cross; and that of the betrayal of human loyalties. Yet John insists that this scene of dereliction manifests Christ’s glory.
‘Glorification’, says Bernard, ‘happens in the presence of God’s face’ when, our earthly voyage done, we shall at last behold what in this life we have firmly hoped for, putting our trust in Jesus’s name. ‘Spes in nomine, res in facie est’. There is no way of rendering this terse formula except by way of turgid circumscription: ‘Our hope is in the name of the Lord; the reality hoped for will be revealed face to face.’
Yet a ‘hidden glory’ is perceptible even now. Augustine liked to say that we carry the image of glory in an ‘obscure form’. Once we have passed through this life, the form will reveal itself explicit and ‘luminous’. It will be apt to stand before God. Any deformities inflicted by ill-used liberty will be reformed then, so that the form will appear in its intended beauty: as ‘forma formosa’.
Augustine, at once so profoundly humane and trenchantly lucid, stresses that the glory of the image can never be lost; it is imprinted on our being. It can, though, be buried under accumulating layers of darkness, which must be removed.
The Church reminds women and men of the glory secretly alive in them. She shows us that present mediocrity and despair, not least my despair at my own persistent failures, need not be final; that God’s plan for us is infinitely lovely; and that God, through Christ’s Mystical Body, will give us grace and strength, if only we ask.
The Church manifests the radiance of ‘hidden glory’ in her saints. They stand as proofs that even illness and degradation may be means providence uses to realise a glorious purpose, bestowing strength on the feeble and making them radiant. The Church channels ‘hidden glory’ in her sacraments. Any Catholic knows what light can break forth in the confessional, in an anointing, at an ordination or a wedding. Most splendid, and in some ways most veiled, is the glory of the Holy Eucharist. What priest, after offering Mass, has not felt what a great musician once said about an instrument in a bright communication of beauty, healing, and truth: ‘death would really be no tragedy: [for] the best of that which is at the centre of human life has been seen and lived through’, his heart on fire with glorious wonder?
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[8.] God’s Angels
From the eighth conference of this week’s Lenten Retreat.
During Christ’s forty-day sojourn in the desert Satan came to him citing Psalm 90, specifically two verses about the angels. ‘The devil’, we read in St Matthew, ‘took him to the holy city and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple.’ He challenged Christ to prove himself Son of God by throwing himself down, ‘for it is written: “He will command his angels concerning you” and “On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone”’.
God alone may invite us to jump from a pinnacle. His call, however, will be, ‘Jump into my arms’, not, ‘Throw yourself down’.
Angelic interventions are not always reassuring. The angels are not there to humour us in our caprices. In a popular prayer traceable to Bernard’s contemporary Reginald of Canterbury we ask our guardian angel to ‘enlighten, keep, govern, and guide’ us. These are hefty verbs. An angel is a guardian of holiness.
The monastic life was early understood and advertised as angelic on account of its finality of praise; but also in so far as the monk is called to be aflame with God’s love and to be an emissary who brings that love to others.
Christ’s one ‘canticle of praise’ of which Sacrosanctum Concilium speaks in a beautiful paragraph, resounds from the ends of the earth to heaven’s heights through a pulsating chain of mediation. The angels are essential to that chain, as we affirm in the final section of each preface within the canon of the Mass.
Bernard stresses the angels’ role as mediators of God’s providence. Mediation is not always called for. God can touch us immediately, but he delights in letting his creatures be channels of grace to one another.
He admonishes us to look at what an angel does and do likewise: ‘Descend, and show mercy to your neighbour; next, in a second movement, letting the same angel elevate your desires, use all the cupiditas of your soul to rise towards the most high and eternal truth’. Cupid is rarely referred to, these days, in the same breath as ‘most high and eternal truth’. Bernard’s choice of vocabulary is telling. It tells us that all natural human yearnings, including those that are embodied, are drawn towards fulfilment in God, so must be guided towards it.
The angels’ last, most decisive act of charity will happen when, at the hour of our death, they will bear us through this world’s veil into eternity. They will show their characteristics then: ‘They cannot be vanquished or seduced, even less can they seduce’. All pretence will fall in that hour. Rhetoric will fail. Only truth will stand and sound, attuned to mercy.
Bernard preached cautiously about these things in 1139. 726 years later a man of very different temperament but similar intelligence would make his intuitions explicit in an exquisite poem about dying.
John Henry Newman thought a lot about angels. He envisaged the priest’s ministry as angelic. The priest is at home in this world, unafraid to go into dark woods in search of the lost. At the same time he keeps his mind’s eyes raised towards the Father’s face, letting its radiance illumine all present reality. Illumination is ever a twofold process: intellectual and essential, sacramental and pedagogical.
Newman, now a Doctor of the Church, invites us to rediscover the teacher, too, as angelic enlightener. It is a prophetic challenge, given how much so-called ‘education’ is now farmed out to digital, artificial media, while young people yearn to meet teachers who are worthy of trust, who can impart not only skills but wisdom.
An angelic encounter is always personal. It cannot be replaced by a download or a chatbot.
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[9.] Bernard the Realist
From the ninth conference of this week’s Lenten Retreat.
The identity of the Cistercian movement is forged in the interface between the ideal and the concrete, the poetic and the pragmatic. Its protagonists are tested and purified by tensions that result.
I have spoken of Bernard’s high ideals, of his liking for working out a course of action in his mind, then following it a little ruthlessly. Riding a high horse came naturally to him. This fierce, intransigent aspect never left him. But it was sweetened over time. Of this process we must now speak. It turned the idealist into a realist.
The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan said that ‘the real’ is what we butt against. The range of Bernard’s endeavours in Realpolitik made for a great deal of butting. But he became a realist not merely in the sense of accepting things as they are. He learnt above all that the deepest reality of all human affairs is a cry for mercy.
The more he recognised this cry in human hearts, in bitter tears, in worldly conflicts, in madcap campaigns against decency and truth, and in the whisper of the trees of the forest, the more he was conscious of God’s gracious response. He heard it in the holy name of Jesus, which became unspeakably dear to him. In Jesus God reveals his saving purpose, pouring it forth upon mankind as fragrant, healing, cleansing oil.
‘Every food of the mind’, Bernard told his monks, ‘is dry if it is not dipped in that oil; it is tasteless if not seasoned by that salt. Write what you will, I shall not relish it unless it tells of Jesus. Talk or argue about what you will, I shall not relish it if you exclude the name of Jesus. Jesus to me is honey in the mouth, music in the ear, a song in the heart.’
Bernard knew what wonders God’s mercy in Jesus can work. This gave his devotion affective depth. The term affectus is central to him. It has a broad remit, showing that grace moves us as sensate beings. But Bernard considered Jesus, the incarnation of truth, no less a hermeneutic principle. He read situations, persons, and relationships resolutely in Jesus’s light. This outlook has earned him firm admirers from well beyond the Catholic fold, from Martin Luther to John Wesley.
Only when supernaturally illumined will our nature reveal its perfect form, its forma formosa. Only then will the delightfulness of which earthly life is capable be apparent. Only then will the glory hidden within us and about us shine in substantial flashes, teaching us what we, and others, can become, providing a paradigm for a world renewed.
Such is the realism towards which Bernard matured. It enabled him to become not just a high-minded reformer, a matchless rhetorician, a chieftain of the Church. Knowledge of the utter reality of Christ’s love, and of its power to change everything, made Bernard a doctor and saint. And that is why we love and honour him.
‘He was’, the Vita Prima tells us, ‘at freedom with himself’. That is what life had taught him. A man or woman truly free is glorious to behold.
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[10.] On Consideration
From the tenth conference of this week’s Lenten Retreat.
St Bernard wrote a treatise On Consideration. It enjoyed the widest circulation of any of his works. This may seem odd, for the text is in essence a letter addressed to a specific person in a singular predicament. Bernard wrote it for a confrère of his, an Italian monk named Bernardo dei Paganelli who, already a priest of the church of Pisa, had entered Clairvaux in 1138.
In 1145 Paganelli became Pope Eugene III.
While contemplation deals with truths already known, consideration, in Bernard’s vocabulary, seeks truth in contingent human affairs, where it can be difficult to notice. It can be defined as ‘thought searching for truth, or the searching of a mind to discover truth.’
Considering the problems of the Church, Bernard offers no institutional remedies. He rather advises Eugene to surround himself with good people. The better the Church’s central offices are run, the greater the benefit will be for the Church worldwide.
The qualities Bernard asks him to look out for and cultivate are immortal. Needed are collaborators ‘of proven sanctity, ready obedience, and quiet patience; […] catholic in faith, faithful in service; inclined towards peace, and desirous of unity; […] farsighted in counsel, […] industrious in organisation […], modest in speech’.
Such people ‘habitually devote themselves to prayer, and in every undertaking place more confidence in it than in their own industry or labour. Their arrival is peaceful, their departure unassuming.’
In so far as the Church operates in these terms will she reflect the organisation of the angels’ hierarchies. Whoever considers her then will see her principal mission: that of giving God glory.
To consider earthly necessities rightly, we must seek, through them, what is above. This is not, Bernard tells Eugene, somehow to ‘go into exile: to consider in this way is to return to one’s homeland’.
Bernard asks himself: What is God? Omnipotent will, benevolent virtue, unchangeable reason. God is ‘supreme blessedness’ who, for love, wishes to share his divinity with us. He has created us to desire him. He broadens us to receive him, justifies us to merit him. He leads us in justice, moulds us in benevolence, enlightens us with knowledge, preserves us unto immortality.
Whatever else prelates have to think about, and it is much, they must consider these things first. Thereby their consideration of practical matters, too, will be illumined, ordered, blessed.
A prelate must, in Bernard’s view, be principled, holy, and austere. But he should also be the Bridegroom’s friend, delighting in sharing that friendship with others.
Augustine liked to describe episcopal office as a sarcina, a legionary’s bundle. It is a raw image conceived by one who knew the desolation and fear of campaigns in the North African desert. He goes on, though, to improvise on his own set theme. Though the pastoral burden does have a fearful aspect, it is fearful only if we fail to notice who puts the burden on our shoulders. For it is no less a participation in the sweet yoke of Christ, who lets us discover that the cross-bar entrusted to us is luminous and light, that a share in it is joyful.
Augustine once wrote: ‘Perduc sarcinam tuam quia levis est si diligis gravis si odisti‘, that is: ‘Bear your own load to the end. If you love it, it will be light. If you hate it, it will be heavy.’
‘Yours, good Jesus’, wrote Bernard in his Life of St Malachy the Irishman, ‘is the deposit which has been entrusted to us; yours the treasure hidden in our possession, to be given back at the time you shall ordain for its reclaiming.’
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[11.] To Communicate Hope
This is the eleventh and last conference of this week’s Lenten Retreat.
On 11 October 1962 Pope Saint John XXIII solemnly opened the Second Vatican Council. The Council’s ‘greatest concern’, he said, would be ‘that the sacred deposit of Christian doctrine should be guarded and taught more efficaciously. That doctrine embraces the whole of man, composed of body and soul. It bids us, pilgrims on this earth, tend towards our heavenly home.’
Less than a week after the pope’s discourse, the Cuban Missile Crisis broke out. Man looked set to blow himself out of the water of his earthly sojourn, with no thought of an eschatological goal. With the wounds of World War II still raw, our race was generating ghastly new prospects of self-destruction.
A climate of precariousness surrounded the Council; at the same time this period was charged with fervent hopes for a new society founded on human rights, fair trade, and technical advances. The Council wished to speak into the time’s ‘anxious questions about the current trend of the world, the place and role of man in the universe, the meaning of man’s […] strivings, the ultimate destiny of reality and of humanity’. Not only did it address the questions. It pointed towards their resolution, announcing that Christ, crucified and risen, incarnates the future of mankind. The Council set the Church the task of enunciating Christ in such a way that he will appear clearly and compellingly as the answer to the present time’s most urgent issues without compromising for a moment the sacred deposit of doctrine.
We may ask ourselves whether in the sixty years that have passed since the closure of the Council confidence has always and everywhere been kept in the power and efficacy of this deposit. Each Christian generation is bound to consider itself in view of the contrast Paul draws to the Ephesians between the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ made manifest in unity of faith and knowledge, in mature manhood, and a childish state of being tossed to and fro, carried about with winds of doctrine, drawn, now by cunning, now by crafty wiles, now by facile optimism.
Christ calls us to communicate hope to the world. To have Christian hope is not necessarily to be an optimist. A Christian forswears wishful thinking, making a determined option for the real. Demagogues promise that things will get better. They claim demiurgical power to change communities within an electoral term, distracting the masses from felt disappointments by hand-outs of bread, tickets to circuses, and defamations of adversaries. How different are Christ’s words. He tells us, ‘The poor you will always have with you.’ He affirms that nation will rise against nation. Persecutions will come. A man’s enemies will be members of his own household. There is no lame resignation in these statements. The Lord obliges us, his disciples, to labour without respite for a new, healthy humanity formed by charity, in justice. He tells us to ‘cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons’. We are to enact the beatitudes, making the glory hidden within them shine. But as we go about this we are reminded: ‘Without me you can do nothing.’
Christ is the light of the nations, Lumen Gentium. He alone, doing the Father’s will, acting in the Spirit, can renew the face of the earth. In him we put our trust, not in passing stratagems.
He can act through us if we consent to being patient. Lent shows us that God, suffering the wound of his philanthropy, is at his most active in his Passion. The hope he entrusts to us is not hope in a finally modernised, digitised, sanitised Vale of Tears. Our hope is in a new heaven, a new earth, in the resurrection of the dead.
The time in which we live is hungry to hear this hope proclaimed. We have considered some signs surrounding us: new religious awareness among the young; the return of the category of truth to public discourse; a search for roots. Global institutions and alliances are breaking down. We are exposed to strategic, ecological, and ideological peril. It is natural that people of sense and good will should ask what, in the midst of such uncertainty, stands a chance of lasting. Tired of building their lives on sand, they seek solid rock. Meanwhile, their heart is disquieted. The Fathers of the Second Vatican Council affirmed, in Gaudium et spes, that the best aspirations and darkest dread of the present time must raise an echo in the hearts of Christians. For a Christian is no stranger to anything that is ‘genuinely human’.
Permit me to share one such echo that resonates in me.
A year ago, on 8 February 2025, the American singer Gracie Abrams gave a concert in Madrid. She is a young woman with everything going for her. She is beautiful, prosperous, successful. In Madrid she wore a white silk dress. It could have been a wedding dress, a garment of joy, had it not been for its long, black shoulder ribbons, portents of a sorrow that, when she started singing, made up the core of her message.
There is in her texts a piercing sadness that borders on, perhaps touches, despair. Abrams was born in 1999. Her song Camden begins with the line, ‘I never said it, but I know that I can’t picture anything past 25’. The song evokes a need to hide grief, to ‘bury baggage till it’s out of sight’ while outwardly toeing the line, calling it fine, hoping that somebody might ‘notice how I’m trying’. A mantra-like refrain runs: ‘All of me, a wound to close, but I leave the whole thing open.’
Abram’s Madrid performance of Camden was filmed and posted to YouTube by a fan who wrote: ‘Insane. No words. Cried. Died. Dead.’ Thousands attended that concert. They sang along, all of them, knowing the winding text by heart, having made it theirs. Teenage Weltschmerz is nothing new. Each generation finds its way of outing it. There is, though, a singular quality to the lament of our time. We cannot dismiss it as the fetishisation of desolation. Hearing, and watching, Gracie Abrams sing, one does not doubt the depth of experience out of which her cry arises. It is uncanny to hear it picked up, cadence after melancholy cadence, by a packed young crowd: ‘I just wanted you to know, I was never good at coping. […] I really hope that I survive this.’ Is ‘hope’ an appropriate term in the circumstances? In fact, I doubt it. What stands out in the lyrics is hopelessness before an ever-present menace.
Gracie Abram’s fans are mostly girls. A stereotype suggests that lads are different, attracted instead to dour recognition of life’s hardship, set to bear it with bushily bearded, manly fortitude. Anyone who goes out and talks to young people, or spends time in a confessional, knows that the stakes are less clearly distinguished. The consciousness of being wounded permeates our times like a smoky mist.
How striking to live Lent in such a context, to fix our gaze on a wounded, distended body and affirm that here hope is found. For centuries the Church was cautious about displaying the wounds of Christ’s Passion. She was busy framing in words the paradox that constitutes the heart of the Christian proposition: that in Christ divinity and humanity are both integrally present, that this man ‘born of the Virgin Mary’ is likewise ‘God from God, Light from Light’. Only once the Council of Chalcedon had refined the conceptual framework required to safeguard this equilibrium was the Christian spirit free to envisage, not only in words but in art, graphically, the freely assumed humiliation of God-made-man. The crucifix emerged as the supreme Christian emblem. It came to take centre stage in cultic practice, at least in the West, where representations of a wounded God became the focal point of churches and other edifices, gradually forming public consciousness.
Reminding the Christians in Corinth of his coming among them, Paul wrote: ‘I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or in wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.’ The categorical centrality of Jesus’s saving Passion suffused the doctrine of this peerless preacher of reconciliation, mercy, graced transformation, joy, and eternal life. Courage is required to follow his example in a culture that tempts us to market a happier Gospel prognosticable in terms of fixed processes and set results. Around us, the cross-overshadowed naves of ancient cathedrals are handed over to mini-golf. Sanctuaries are used for secular skits designed, in desperation, to display ‘relevance’. Meanwhile, a stone’s throw away, in the secular arena, the young disconsolately sway, softly singing that life is an open wound and that there is no balm in Gilead.
Two contradictory tendencies mark contemporary efforts to deal with wounds. On the one hand, people readily display acquired, inherited, or imagined wounds as markers of identity. They may have good reasons, causes based on calls for justice. But as we have heard Bernard explain, motivational prospect is lost to us if we root our sense of self in attachment to a wound. We risk being mired in anger, a passion that displaces aspirations to healing with affirmations of self-righteousness. Anger and its reflection, bitterness, can lock us in perversely self-satisfied despair.
On the other hand there are efforts to airbrush wounds. We hear it insinuated that wounds should not exist and that, if they do, sick limbs should be removed. In societies become transactional, unproductive or unlovely elements have no place. They are seen as freak occurrences, met with harshness. This attitude is evident in ongoing controversies about abortion and euthanasia, as in recurrent talk about eugenics. It is seen in dystopic dreams of relieving societies of undesirables, whom certain politicians would confine in reservations or drop off the edge of a cliff.
One can interpret this development in different ways. It seems hard to deny that the eclipse in public consciousness of the figure of the Crucified, the Wounded-yet-Unovercome, has something to do with it. A civilisation that, at some level, seeks its measure in an image that affirms the stature of patience and redemptive suffering is changed. It may learn empathy, which is not spontaneous to fallen humankind.
Reverence for Christ’s wounds defined Christian sensibility for centuries. It found expression in devotion to relics of the Passion; in Stations of the Cross; in poems and paintings; in works of music from Renaissance Lamentations through Bach’s Passions to nineteenth-century hymnography. It was expressed in the cult to the Sacred Heart that spread worldwide in the wake of revolutionary furies. At the heart of it was respect for the tremendous mystery of suffering, constitutive of the human condition as we know it. The Cross lets us own reality while it affirms the non-finality of wounds, which can be healed and become sources of healing.
To root ourselves within this mystery of faith is to work a constructive revolt against several fallacies: against the political fallacy that society, and the state, should be run on an evolutionary model in view of human perfectibility; against the anthropological fallacy of a normative standard of ‘health’ deployed to mark divisions between lives ‘worth living’ and lives ‘not worth living’; against the cultural fallacy that ascribes to wounds a fatal, deterministic power; and against the psychological fallacy that surrenders to hopelessness, mesmerised by the voice that whispers in our ear, at dead of night, regarding our most intimate hurts: ‘It will always be like this’.
Christ’s Passion lets us lament without rage. It opens us to compassion, which is an epistemological category apt to prepare a graced insight like Job’s: ‘I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, now my eye sees you.’ We may call out to the Crucified-and-Risen-One: ‘My Lord and my God!’ The Gospel states that Christ’s wounds, after his rising, were not done away with, but rendered glorious. The world’s wounds can be, too, when Christ’s oil and wine are poured upon them.
The Cross is to believers at once symbolic and the memorial of an event. The symbol of Christ’s Passion is not one we engender. It has been given us. It interprets us, not we it. This is worth insisting on as we swim against the tide of a symbolic capitalism set on ‘producing knowledge’. In this virtual world, ‘facts’ are artefacts. Narratives, images, and data are trafficked to perpetuate change, thereby to further consumption. It is hard to understand something and to change it at the same time. As a result, the quest for clarity plays a minor role in current public discourse, whose flitting rhetoric and erratic symbols are rather designed to befuddle.
Yet the human being craves understanding. It is defined by its need to ask: ‘Why?’ It needs the Church’s clear thinking and Christ-centred hope. It needs her confident sense of direction. It needs her symbols, which are realistic, different from the world’s, focused on an historically wounded body, on the dying of death, on the eternal destiny of ‘the whole of man, composed of body and soul’. The sublime perspective of our faith is founded on realities that happened and that, within the communion of Christ’s mystical body, happen still. We profess that a transforming Benevolence has saturated human suffering even in its most extreme manifestations, reaching right into the very depths of hell, and that no desolation therefore is final.
Such is our Gospel. Our time is crying out for it. The young lamenting in our parks with heavy hearts hunger for it. They do listen when it is presented ‘with authority’ by Christians able at once to expound and display the truth of it without compromise, showing Christ’s gracious power to renew and to transform lives.
At Clairvaux in 1139, Bernard preached his last sermon on Psalm 90 on the eve of Easter. It breathes the delight of an athlete who has finished the race. A monk’s life, says St Benedict, should be a continuous Lent, ever focused on Christ’s victory over death. The liturgical season reveals the thrust of our existence as such. Bernard makes this explicit. Life’s trials are birth pangs. They make us discover what it means to be alive: ‘We live fully when life is vital and life-giving.’ We are born to bear fruit. There is a ‘hope of glory’ in tribulation, Bernard tells his monks before he corrects himself and says, no, glory is in tribulation, the way the fruit is in the seed. He exclaims: ‘My brothers, glory hides in tribulation now; eternity hides in the present moment, a sublime, immeasurable weight in this lightness.’
The inversion is complete. What weighs us down now lacks lasting substance. The weight of glory draws us upwards, towards a magnificent, multiple glory. Configured to a full share in Christ’s life, we shall know the patient joy of God who proclaims in Psalm 90, ‘I am with him in tribulation’. He also says: ‘My delight is to be with the sons of men.’ ‘Oh Emmanuel’, Bernard responds: ‘God with us!’ He adds: ‘Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you’, delicately outlining the Marian character of graced growth into authentic Christian maturity. God knows what we desire and thirst for, what is to our taste. We must not to settle for too little. We must know, and proclaim, in whose image we are made, what greatness we are, by grace, capable of.
On the morning after preaching this last sermon, Bernard will have opened his Gradual to sing the introit of Easter: the lovely Resurrexi in the sixth, ‘grave’, mode, a musical expression of upward-surging gravity. This liturgical composition proclaims the resurrection with quiet wonder. It lifts the Church’s praise before the empty tomb into the eternal embrace of the Trinity. Drawn finally into that embrace by Christ’s Paschal victory we shall see as we are seen, know as we are known. We shall at last love perfectly.
For now, still, we know and see in part as we keep vigil in the night. We work. We serve. We teach. We do battle when we must. We endeavour to love and honour each other, our eyes fixed on Jesus, the pioneer of our faith. He, the Lamb of God, is our lamp. His kindly light, also when hidden, is full of gladness.
(Tip: Amy Welborn)
