Eighty years after St Edmund Campion was martyred at Tyburn, Father Henry More – the great-grandson of St Thomas More – visited the North of England to find that the sermons the great Elizabethan Jesuit missionary preached there “remained fresh” in the memories of the local people. He was amazed to discover Catholics in Lancashire who could tell him precisely what St Edmund had to say about the Hail Mary, the Ten Lepers, the Last Judgement, about the King who went off on a journey, among many other subjects.
More was also fascinated to hear about how “very many persons of notable families” would even spend whole nights in neighbouring barns so they “might be early at the place the next day” to attend Mass and hear the saint preach. “They were not drawn so much by his eloquence or elocution, although he was admirable in both respects, as by his fire, and a certain hidden force in his way of speaking which they considered could only flow from the Holy Spirit,” he concluded.
That’s the thing about the Gospel: it has tremendous transformative power when preached authentically and by a credible witness. But water it down and very often something instantly forgettable and tedious is presented in its place, leaving even the most patient among us itching to glance surreptitiously at our wristwatches.
Most homilies probably sit somewhere between these two extremes and there may be only a handful of people alive today who are as illuminating as St Edmund Campion. We know who some of them are by their reputations; think of people such as Cardinal Robert Sarah or Bishop Robert Barron, for instance. Into this category I would include the erudite Erik Varden, the Cistercian former Abbot of Mount St Bernard and, since 2019, the Bishop of Trondheim, Norway.
We have met twice: first in 2018 when I went to Leicestershire to interview him for this magazine about the launch of Tynt Meadow, the acclaimed Trappist beer brewed by the monks at Mount St Bernard. The second was shortly afterwards at Stanbrook Abbey, North Yorkshire, when I also had the privilege of hearing him preach at Mass on the feast of Ss Anne Line, Margaret Ward and Margaret Clitherow. His words about how Christ will never abandon His Church made a great impression upon me. I have since often reflected upon them and I’m confident that even in 10 years I will be able to remember what he said. In this light perhaps his new book, coming four years after his debut, The Shattering of Loneliness, is something of a gift to the Church.
Most of them were preached to his fellow monks and are therefore rich in spiritual direction and biblical exegesis, reminding the members of Mount St Bernard who they are and instructing them on how to scale the holy mountain to become more fully the men they were called by God to be. His depiction of monastic life is always deeply attractive. He presents it almost as exciting, as a dramatic daily challenge to live the beatitudes, to strive toward holiness. Truth and freedom are continuous, enduring themes. “Let us entrust ourselves to God’s freeing possession,” Varden exhorts his brethren. “Let us run the risk of freedom.”
Throughout, Varden speaks with the tone of a loving father: he is authoritative but compassionate; he is wise yet familiar. His homilies are accessible – written in clear, standard English – but rich, sometimes breathtakingly, in their content.
His reflections on manliness are a case in point. Ancient and medieval people considered the “manly man” as one whose appetites were governed and restrained by “grace-inspired reason”, he explains, adding that by the same standard the “modern-day icon of maleness, the lager-swilling, erotically insatiable, anger-inducing lad, would be called effeminate”.
Certainly, this is not a book which is best consumed in a single sitting: better to read just a few homilies at a time so that his messages might be properly digested, perhaps with a glass of delicious Tynt Meadow at your side. It is divided into two parts. The first, What Makes a Monk, considers monastic life and identity, including the challenge of priestly celibacy. A flavour of the other homilies in this section can be gained from titles such as Bear One Another’s Burdens, Follow the Way Marked Out to the End and The Final Note is Joy. One of the most interesting is simply titled Murmuring and it represents a scholarly dissection of the reasons behind St Benedict of Nursia’s seemingly harsh insistence that anyone who spreads dissent within monastic communities must be expelled. Varden likens it to acid rain: “A habit of murmuring in daily life can slowly but surely strangle a soul,” he says.
The second part is called A Monastic Year and it reproduces some of Varden’s homilies preached at the major religious seasons of Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter as well as on some feast days and on select readings from Ordinary Time.
The final section deals with saints and there are marvellous reflections on such figures as St George, St John Houghton, St Francis Xavier, St Alban, St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) and St Bernard of Clairvaux. These include a homily preached on the feast of St Thomas More and St John Fisher, in which Varden expounds the role of conscience, saying it was the aspect of Fisher’s life “which makes him stand out above all”, turning him into a figure “at once attractive and awe-inspiring”. “We are children of times that largely refuse the existence of absolute values,” reflects Varden on the contemporary lesson of their witness. “Claiming to be accommodating they are in fact, ever more, times of coercion. Freedom of conscience cannot always be taken for granted. Fisher and More were not fixated, ideological men … Yet there came a point when the pressure put on them to deny core convictions, to call black white, cold hot, was more than they could bear … they held truth dear enough to die for it.”
It is in this section that I discovered – to my great satisfaction – the homily I heard Varden preach in Stanbrook three years ago. To read it was a blessing, although to see the words on the page was a bit like absorbing a song’s lyrics without hearing the music. As Father More recognised, faith is caught and transmitted to others by the authenticity of the messenger as well as by the clarity of the message. It has been like that since the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles.
So this is what Varden has to say about the three heroic Elizabethan women canonised among the 40 martyrs of England and Wales and what they represent to the Church today: “They stand before us like cut, polished diamonds, all the more brilliant for being set in sackcloth,” he declares with typical eloquence. “They give us courage, should we feel tempted to despair at the state of the Church today, for they teach us that the Church’s holiness is not always most in evidence where we would most readily expect, and hope, to find it. The seed of sanctity grows in secret; what matters is the goodness of the soil. Christ does not abandon the Church – but he may manifest himself within it in unlikely places. We have to be watchful, then, and strive to recognise him even now where he chooses to be found.”
Perhaps the heart of the Bishop of Trondheim is one such place.
Simon Caldwell is the associate editor of the Catholic Herald.
This article first appeared in the February 2022 issue of the Catholic Herald. Subscribe today.
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