BALTIMORE (OSV News) – During his May 7 visit to St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore, Bishop Erik Varden of Trondheim, Norway, a member of the Trappist monastic order, sat down with OSV News to share his insights on Christian hope, the dangers of AI and weaponizing the Christian faith, and the need for patience in the spiritual life.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
OSV News: You provided the reflections for the Lenten Spiritual Exercises in the Vatican for Pope Leo XIV and others, and in your final reflection, you focused on the theme of communicating hope. In the U.S. there's been a real interest in Nordic noir films and books – often bleak and morally ambiguous – and a perception that Nordic culture is broadly the same. Do you find any irony in a Nordic bishop focusing on hope?
Bishop Varden: Well, your question makes me smile, because I've lived in a number of different countries, mainly in Europe, and I find that the more you move south in Europe, the more people have extravagant notions of the North, and the more they assume that it is an area of the world plunged in perpetual darkness, where everyone is given to drink and excess, and where everyone is on antidepressants, and where people keep killing themselves with axes.
And it isn't really quite like that. I think this idea of the long Norwegian winter powerfully impacts the imagination. But what most people don't realize is the extreme luminosity of a Norwegian summer, and that exposure to light without any trace of darkness. That is intrinsic to our way of just living the cycles of the year.
The phenomenon of Nordic noir is interesting. But I suspect that it is a genre that has arisen precisely because a few cunning authors have noticed that it corresponds to what people expect. And so they feed the stereotype because it sells, and because people find it entertaining in a slightly perverse sort of way.
But when you look at our own literature, poetry and music, it is to such an overwhelming extent a celebration of light and of the spring. The amount of Norwegian poetry and music dedicated to spring, to the melting of the ice and the appearance of the first flowers, is fascinating.
By all means, I'm not trying for a moment to deny that the Vikings weren't brutal – but that wasn't all they were about. I think that there is a constructed Nordic identity that spans centuries.
OSV News: In your Lenten reflection about hope, you noted the modern tendency to either attach ourselves to our wounds or to airbrush them altogether. How do we avoid either extreme?
Bishop Varden: I think it's largely because we absolutize our own experience that our wounds are so problematic. We're drawn either to think, "I'm carrying this thing, and this is my great tragedy, and this is the drama of my existence." Or I think, "Let's make absolutely sure that no one suspects this wound that I'm carrying."
We do that rather than looking around and saying, "Actually, being wounded is the human norm. And my wound may not be all that dissimilar from my neighbor's wound."
If I learn to live with my wound, and if I learn to believe and to entertain the hope that it might actually be healable, and if I pursue the correct sort of remedies, I may even be able to step beyond it.
And what will remain is a remembrance of healing.
There is so much around us that encourages us to live enclosed in ourselves, as if each of us were the only significant subject on planet Earth. Immersed in my own experience and its pathos, I forget to look around, and I forget to consider others' experience, their exhilaration, and their suffering. And I shut myself off from the motor of compassion that enables community and even communion.
OSV News: As a shepherd, how would you like to see community built in your parishes?
Bishop Varden: Well, I'm a little bit skeptical of master plans; I'm not sufficiently entrepreneurial. But I rejoice in a study day we had at the cathedral parish in Trondheim. It was a very, very mixed crowd, and lots of people came who didn't know one another.
In the evening, we had a supper together, and the room was absolutely heaving with conversation. I stood in a corner and I could see all these little clusters of people who'd met one another that day, enjoying one another's company, taking food and drink together, listening to one another, learning from one another – and not even thinking of looking at their mobile phones.
I think the more our parishes and communities can foster that sort of togetherness, the more they will have an impact also beyond themselves, because that's the sort of thing that draws other people in.
It has to be said that it (the Trondheim cathedral parish event) had been a day made up of some conferences, but also of prayer. We'd had Mass, we'd celebrated the Divine Office together, we'd had a time of quiet prayer together.
And I think it was because our community of the day was rooted both in intellectual food and spiritual nourishment, shared silence and shared conversation, it could be so effective in such a short time. Those various elements have all got to be in place – spiritual, intellectual, social and convivial.
OSV News: What are your hopes and fears for artificial intelligence and its use to foster spirituality?
Bishop Varden: I'm afraid that, if I may express my own nihilism now, that in terms of spirituality I have absolutely no hopes at all for AI.
Anything can be used as a tool, but I don't think AI is going to generate any spiritual renewal, because any spiritual renewal worthy of its name is one that pierces the human heart, and that is something that an algorithm can't do.
Obviously, I mean, there are things I can use in digital media and artificial intelligence that may save time and even make me discover useful things, but I have little faith in it as an agent of conversion.
OSV News: You've previously spoken to the dangers of weaponizing Christianity for political aims. How do we stop that process, instead of continuing to admire the problem?
Bishop Varden: Good question. And you do see it all over the place; I see it in my own country as well.
First of all, I would stress that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is an end in itself, an end that is significant of a goal. Any attempt to instrumentalize the Gospel for a subsidiary purpose, be it cultural or ideological or political, is suspect.
And we must beware of any attempt to brandish Christianity void of the message and presence of the Wounded and Risen One. Any presentation of Christianity that abstracts the scandal of the Cross or perversely uses the Cross as a weapon with which to strike others is veering towards heresy or even blasphemy.
So we must remain resolutely Christocentric and resolutely committed to following Christ and to apply his commandments, as well as his promises – first of all to ourselves. And beware of too much rhetoric, beware of too many words and consider how people live.
Ultimately, that is how Christianity spread and that is how Christianity renewed a weary world in late antiquity. By all means, there was an element of preaching and teaching and catechesis. But what bowled people over and turned societies round was seeing a new way of being human, and a new way of creating and fostering community, seeing and recognizing the possibility of reconciliation, of forgiveness, and of building a society, a new city, on the basis of reconciliation and forgiveness.
And so when Christianity is invoked as a component of what is ultimately hate speech, we've just got to not jump on the train.
OSV News: How do we ensure that we're not falling into the danger of getting on that train, and how do we help others to disembark from it?
Bishop Varden: The foundational principle – which is an old one, you know, it's there in St. Paul – is to train ourselves to speak the truth in love.
To love those who make mistakes is not to pretend that the mistakes don't exist, but it is to address them in a constructive way, instead of yielding to an exacerbation of conflicts.
So to speak the truth in love, to make sure I've really studied the truth, that I understand the truth, that I'm prepared to give an answer, that I'm prepared to give an account for the hope that is in me, and that I don't just hold on to some tribal instinct. It's really important.
The best thing all of us can do is to study the faith more thoroughly, to read the Scriptures, to become learned in the Scriptures, to understand and live the sacramental grace of the Church deeply, in order to speak from within that.
And I'd say that presents the ultimate healing remedy that you addressed in your question, because when one sees the splendor of the Church as a community of the redeemed, living by grace and illumined by Christ's love, instantiated in a concrete community, then that has an attractiveness and a beauty that makes any other allurement of allegiance just pale into insignificance.
OSV News: Some of that weaponization of Christianity is an effort to "hasten the coming of God's kingdom on earth" through human means. As Christians, how do we balance that tension between the present life and our hope for a future in heaven?
Bishop Varden: Above all, by practicing patience, which is not a very fashionable virtue, and one that everything militates against – because we live now with the illusion that if I have a need or a desire, it must be satisfied immediately. There must be something I can download, or a number I can ring, or some delivery man who can come to the door with stuff in his rucksack that will give me what I crave, or what I long for, or what I feel I can't live without.
But that delusion is an illusion. It works out to some extent, if we have money on our credit card; it can keep us fed and clothed, and to a certain extent, entertained.
But a human life is a drawn-out affair. And things take time.
Great things take time. That's a principle that (St. John Henry) Newman liked to stress.
And to be a human is a great thing.
