KRAKOW, Poland (OSV News) ─ As Advent unfolds in the far north, Bishop Erik Varden says the season's power lies not in cheerfulness but in hope -- "light shining at the darkest point of the night."
In a wide-ranging conversation with OSV News, the Norwegian Trappist monk and bishop spoke about his own path to monastic life, the challenges facing believers in the North, and how the Gospel can still speak "face to face" to a fragmented culture.
Bishop Varden, a former abbot of Mount Saint Bernard Abbey in England and now the Catholic shepherd of central Norway's Trondheim, has become known for his spiritual writing, his work on Christian anthropology, and his ability to articulate the longings of the human heart. He's also known as an abbot who launched the abbey's own Trappist beer, Tynt Meadow.
The church's need for communion is expressed in his episcopal motto, "Coram Fratribus Intellexi" ("Face to face with my brethren, I have come to understand") ─ and frames much of his pastoral approach in a country where Catholics represent around 5% of society and communities are often distances away from each other. In 2021 Bishop Varden, an acclaimed book author of "Chastity" and "The Shattering of Loneliness," launched a website to share homilies and reflections, as he discovered the deeper task is helping people truly meet Christ.
Asked when he first experienced God calling him, the bishop traced it back to childhood. Raised in a Lutheran family, he said while he was "fascinated by the infinite" from when he "was very little" and "was very struck by music from early on" -- and it was music that "became a vehicle of transcendence for me" -- at the same time "the impressions I had of religion were just very uninteresting, and Christianity seemed to me limiting, boring, narrow minded, old. And it held no attraction. So as a teenager, I was very vocal in my rejection of it."
When he was 16, it was Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2 ─ "Resurrection" ─ that changed his life.
"I didn't expect this symphony to move me so deeply," Bishop Varden wrote in "The Shattering of Loneliness."
"The message conveyed by the music was further reinforced by the lyrics, making the work doubly compelling," he said.
Speaking to OSV News, Bishop Varden said his soul had been "shattered" at that moment -- cracked open and looking for answers. "I started to look for some sort of reality that corresponded to what was going on inside me," he said at the start of December in the Dominican Basilica of the Holy Trinity in Kraków, Poland, where he preached an Advent retreat and promoted his books published by "W Drodze" Dominican publishing house.
Searching for answers took some years until, between his high school and college years, he visited a monastery "more or less by mistake," he said.
"I asked to be instructed in the Catholic faith during my first year as a student and was received," he said.
The young Erik ─ a son of a village veterinarian in the south of Norway ─ did not immediately join a monastery. He studied at Cambridge, and after 10 years at one of the world's most prestigious universities, he entered the Trappist community, what he called "a form of life which is ideally fully oriented towards the search for God."
Bishop Varden told OSV News that it's not necessary to make faith attractive in today's world.
"I think any attempt to adapt it to tastes or sensibilities are likely to reduce it to less than it is in itself. I think the only thing we need to do is just show the riches that are there, to open the Scriptures, the liturgy, the teachings of the church are the art of which the church is the custodian," he said. This can be achieved "simply by resting on the pillars that make up the church's stability, celebrating the liturgy, and making sure that it really is worship as well as communion, fostering community by social activities, by charitable enterprises, teaching," and being able to "hear many voices" and using "seminars, conferences, the internet, and writing books," as evangelization tools.
He said the Sisters of St. Elizabeth who came to northern Norway in the late 19th century found "2 or 3 Catholic families, hardly anyone there," and, only by answering the needs of the local community, they were witnesses to the Gospel.
"They stepped off the boat, stepped into the town, looked around and asked, 'so what is needed here?'" Bishop Varden told OSV News. "And then they built a hospital, or in other places they built a school or a birth clinic, or a kindergarten ... they came as missionaries ... but they also came simply to serve the local people in the name of Christ. And that produced not spectacular results, but it laid a foundation that enabled the flourishing we see now."
Winter ─ which in Norway is as nowhere else in the world ─ brings great meaning to celebrating Advent and Christmas, Bishop Varden said. While there is nothing bad in being cheerful for the season, he said, "Advent isn't about cheerfulness. Advent is about hope, and Advent is about the light shining at the darkest point of the night."
"Advent and Christmas is a time that speaks to us of a really quite incomprehensible degree of divine self-emptying of ... that image of divine impoverishment" that the Scripture uses.
For those that experience a time of loneliness during the season, Bishop Varden said perhaps they are "supremely equipped to understand what Christmas really is about, and thereby to touch, perhaps, a level of compassion in myself that enables me, through my own sensed desolation, to call that visitation of mercy down upon other people in their desolation."
"The chances are," the bishop said, "that within a 200-meter radius of where I'm sitting now, whether I'm on the bus or in my easy chair at home," that "someone else is feeling the way I feel. Or perhaps worse." And "perhaps I could invite them. Or perhaps I could simply suggest that we go for a walk or go to the coffee shop, or go to Mass."
While the church awaits the coming of Emmanuel along with Mary during Advent, Bishop Varden encouraged to look to her example not only when Christmas is around the corner.
"I belong to an order which has and has had from the beginning, from the 12th century, a strong Marian character ─ which isn't primarily about reciting lots of Marian devotions ─ but it is about living within," he told OSV News.
"When you look at the liturgical prayers for the great Marian feasts ─ be it of the Immaculate Conception or the Assumption -- that representative and inclusive dimension of the Virgin Mary is so clearly stated that she is the great trailblazer," Bishop Varden said. "She is the champion who went ahead, to open, and to stake out the path that we are called to follow. So this is a time during which ─ ideally with a degree of quiet and recollection ─ to ponder my own, yes, my own fiat, and to invoke the help of the Mother of God in letting that become ever more total and free."
As the Jubilee Year of Hope wraps up, Bishop Varden said one of the highlights of that special time in the church for him was a Nordic pilgrimage to Rome, attended by around 1,000 pilgrims.
Reflecting on the opening Mass at the Basilica of St. John Lateran, he said "just seeing that huge space full of Catholics from the extreme diaspora was, for the people there, a profound experience of unity in the church, and a realization of how ultimately very relative those categories are in the center and periphery ... that was beautiful."
He mentioned that while the theme of the Jubilee Year in English is "Pilgrims of Hope," the Latin phrase goes: "Peregrinantes in Spem," "and that presupposes that hope is the goal towards which you journey, that hope isn't a possession that you carry in your rucksack, but that hope is a dynamic reality that presupposes movement. And that's something I've been trying to convey in different ways during this year ─ to invite people, to get moving, and to remind them that whatever your starting point is, however desolate and hopeless that might seem ─ you're not shackled there. You can move out of that space into hope, and you can call hope into it."
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Paulina Guzik is international editor for OSV News. Follow her on X @Guzik_Paulina.
