29 May: I found myself in the centre of Kyiv

A homily given by Bishop Erik Varden to Confirmation candidates on 14 May 2023 at Kristiansund.

Acts 8:5-17: Many were delivered.
1 Peter 3:15-18: Always be ready to give an account.
John 14:15-21: So he can give you the Spirit of Truth.

Dear candidates for confirmation, 

A couple of days ago I found myself standing in the centre of Kyiv. There was lovely spring weather there as here. The chestnut trees were in bloom. The city was bustling. I walked past a snazzy café with the same complex assortment we’d expect at Starbucks. I could have been on a long-weekend city holiday. But I wasn’t.

I was, with Cardinal Arborelius, conducting a visit of solidarity in the name of our Bishops’ Conference. And even if Ukraine has a rare ability to live normally in extreme conditions, not to let itself be brutalised, the country remains in the throes of a terrible war. The front has lain frighteningly near Kyiv. The night before we arrived, missiles rained down over the city. We visited Irpin and Bucha, names familiar from the news, names associated with terrible massacres. The towns are only about 30 km from the capital. There’s a straight road from there into Kyiv.

That the occupying force was never allowed to pass that way is a strategic miracle. It is also a testimony to Ukraine’s power of resistance. This power manifests itself courageously still, at the eastern front. We honour it, and do so rightly. But let’s not forget the cost.

While we were strolling in the spring sunshine, in Kyiv, we passed the wall of the monastery of St Michael. The wall is covered with photographs of victims of the war, men and women, many of them barely three or four years older than you are today. I found myself thinking of a reportage I heard on the BBC World Service in March last year, a couple of weeks after the invasion. Jeremy Bowen stood at the station in Kyiv, where the cardinal and I had arrived, and saw youngsters go to war. He described two lads: ‘They were dressed for a camping weekend or a festival, except they were carrying newly issued Kalashnikov assault rifles. One had brand new white trainers. Another had a yoga mat to sleep on’ (see my Notebook for 5 March 2022).

There was something heart-rending about the details. The word ‘soldier’ is so anonymous. We think of faceless, greenclad extras in war films we have seen. Here one caught a personal glimpse of two fellows one might come across in a coffee shop. Are they still alive, the two of them? Or are their faces among the thousands of others on the wall by Kyiv’s Blue Church?

The thought of a major war between European nations seemed absurd until not long ago. With so much binding us together, political and economic alliances, war seemed preshistoric. My generation is heir to the 60s slogan, ‘Make love, not war’. Little by little politics itself has become strange to us. Many can’t be bothered, now, to vote in elections, or see no point in voting. What we want is to be left tranquil, have a good salary and at the same time plenty of leisure to do as we please, and access to 5G internet browsing.

But then a massive crisis can, in a trice, turn reality upside down. Suddenly we stand there, with our new trainers and our yoga mat, faced with existential choices. ‘Fight for what is dear to you, die if need be’, we sing in a song almost everyone in this country knows by heart. Is there something that dear to me? What do I live for, in fact? What stars do I navigate by when night falls and my iPhone is dead? What do I do when others’ future depends on choices I make?

Many are bewildered before such questions. Not so you, my friends. Today you declare yourselves to be Catholic Christians. In the name of Jesus, you stake out a clear direction for your lives. In the sacrament of confirmation you are sealed with the gift of the Spirit. The Spirit of Jesus, the Gospel tells us, is ‘the Spirit of Truth’. Truth is more than theory. We cannot always think our way to truth — even if the ability to think clearly is of inestimable worth. Circumstances may arise that simply give us no time to weigh alternatives. Then we must know how to act. The sense of what is true must be alive in us and form our judgement.

The Spirit of Jesus helps us to judge rightly. To receive the Spirit is not to be varnished with magic; it is to enter a friendship, to become aware of God’s presence in our lives as a light, a source of consolation, living wisdom. In this way we are freed from fear, freed to act.

The world needs women and men who see clearly, who are not taken in by lies, who recognise sincerity and radiate goodness. This is the task for which you are prepared today. None of us knows what awaits us. With all my heart I wish you a safe and prosperous future. I wish that you may use your gifts fully, that your lives will be fruitful, that you will know love and genuine friendship.

Still I ask you to be prepared to fight for what is good and true. A world order that only yesterday appeared unshakeable is collapsing. This fact places demands on all of us. Simple pragmatism, the attitude that leans back to wait and see, is inadequate in the long run.

‘What is truth?’, Pilate asked Jesus. Jesus answered by giving his life for his friends. He went through death in order to vanquish death.

The power inherent in Jesus’s Paschal sacrifice manifests itself again when ordinary people, people like you and me, transcend themselves and display the boundlessness of the Gospel: when those who have known injustice refuse to give in to hatred, when those who have lost all still rise up to help others, when weakness is transformed into strength. In Ukraine I saw proof of such transformation. That is why I wanted to share this experience with you.

As Christians we are called to live in a new way. We don’t want to merely be spectators of life; we want to enter life consciously, whole-heartedly, as agents. Thank you for saying Yes to this call. Let us help one another to be worthy of it.

In the name of Christ! Amen

Erik Varden

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Pentecost: This Gift of Love

Canterbury cathedral’s collected Paschal Candles: this year’s special Easter candles will be lit in churches today, the Church’s Birthday.

Reflections from Fr Anthony Charlton of St Thomas’, Canterbury.

In my previous parishes, on this feast of Pentecost the children released helium-filled red balloons, at the end of Mass, to celebrate the great feast. The feast is sometimes referred to as the birthday of the church, hence the balloons. Pentecost ushers in the age of the Church. Now Jesus lives and acts in, and with, the Church.

We are not merely remembering a past event, when those in the Upper Room were transformed and changed. For us, the Holy Spirit is not just a help for the mission of the church. He is salvation; he is life itself. We celebrate today that we are all filled with that Spirit — just as Mary, the women and the apostles were transformed.

Today we celebrate the gift that is given to all of us, this gift of love. We are all immersed in the ‘ocean of the Father’s love’, Cardinal Ranerio Cantalamassa wrote. ‘They discovered for the first time what the love of the Father was, this love that Jesus spoke to them about for so long and in vain. They discovered the tenderness that is in the name Abba which they had heard their Master share about many times.’

A great Pentecost hymn is Come down O Love divine, seek thou this soul of mine.

Because of the gift of speech, all were able to understand the apostles. It was the reversal of Babel. At the building of the tower of Babel, the people said, ‘Let us make a name for ourselves.’ Their focus was on themselves and not on God. At Pentecost, instead everyone understood each other, because they had forgotten about themselves. There was unity, harmony and communication. The apostles did not want to make a name for themselves, but for God. They were no longer discussing among themselves who was the greatest.

We need in our prayer to put the accent on praise. We no longer want to live for ourselves but for the Lord. ‘Praise is what best helps us to decentralise and to recentralise on God.’ We need to rediscover this living Christ, whom only the Spirit can stir up in us. Let us rediscover this personal experience of Jesus — who died and was raised for me.

We need to have the same burning experience that Paul had on the road to Damascus, when he asked, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ (Acts 9:5). From that moment on, Paul considered everything as worthless, so that he might gain Christ.

At this time some of the people of the parish are joining with others, throughout the Diocese, participating in the Life in the Spirit seminars. It is a seven-week course of renewal, and yesterday they went to St George’s Cathedral, for a day when they asked for a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit, sometimes referred to as ‘Baptism in the Holy Spirit’.

Let us all pray on this Pentecost Sunday:

Lord Jesus I open my heart to the Holy Spirit so that I may rediscover and proclaim you as Lord.

13 January: now you see him.

Mrs Turnstone, whose birthday this is, loves the fact that on 13 January the sun is visible in Greenland for the first time since the winter’s darkness took over. Let’s pray that we might be ready to observe the light we are given and to rejoice this day and every day.

And Happy Birthday to Mrs Turnstone!

21 December, Advent Light XXI: The Dayspring

After Father Tom yesterday, here is another Franciscan, Father Andrew this time, reflecting on the O Antiphon for today: O Oriens, O rising dawn, or as the English hymn has it, O come thou dayspring!

The Dayspring

The dawn drives off the dark, and day doth come
Queening away the fearsomeness of night;
But all the world is blessed Mary’s home,
Nor any hour can lack for her its night
While He, our hearts’ one Home, curled cosily,
Can even straw and stall and stable raise
To throne and palace by His royalty;
For perfect Love hath come Who casts out fear –
Now doth the Dayspring from on high appear.

Father Andrew

O come, Thou Day-spring, come and cheer
Our spirits by Thine advent here;
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,
And death’s dark shadows put to flight.

And let us sing, Rejoice, rejoice! Emmanuel has come to thee, O Israel! Let us be joyful this Christmas; He can raise our homes to palaces with his Kingly presence.

19 December, Advent Light XIX: by wisdom and understanding.

 

NASA

I’d got as far as Proverbs in reading through the Bible when I realised that there are many launching points for reflections in there. Take 3:19-20. It runs like this in the King James Version:

The Lord by wisdom hath founded the earth; by understanding hath he established the heavens.

If the heavens are a product of God’s understanding, then understanding the heavens – moons, planets, galaxies, light years, red shifts, black holes – should give us clues to what God is like. Our three-year-old grandson loves to recite the litany of the planets and to look out for Jupiter, at present shining brightly opposite his front door. May his experience of the Lord’s creation light up his heart this Christmastide and all his life through.

17 December, Advent Light XVII: Carols by lamplight.

What made me think of carol singing in the run-up to Christmas? Whatever it was, my thoughts turned to Ireland in 1968 when I was a student at the Missionaries of Africa’s Saint Augustine’s College in Blacklion, Co Cavan and we continued the tradition of walking the local lanes and the village streets, calling at every house, including the Protestant pastor’s down by the lake.

Away from the village, Blacklion had many small farms with big dogs; there were dark skies and hedges to darken the way further, but we went everywhere and no-one got bitten. We had a couple of good farm lanterns but others were candle ends in jars, slung at the tops of poles. It was a challenge to read the words on the sheets, but we knew all of them and often enough in four voices.

Patricia Hawkins de Medina was living in the village;

My father, Dr. William Hawkins, was medical officer for St. Augustine’s in Blacklion, all those years ago. I have fond memories of attending some of the Christmas pantomimes as a child way back then, and I can remember many of the Fathers. And the students carol-singing at Christmas in the village, and all coming into the hall of our house in Blacklion. So many memories.*

We were creating memories for ourselves as well as the villagers. We were bearing witness to the coming of the Lord, both to our neighbours and to ourselves, as a community of committed young men. But this witnessing brought us face to face with the local families, good, hard-working, struggling people as well as those who were better-off, like the Hawkins family. It is good to be told how special it was to have a male voice choir singing under Patricia’s roof well after bedtime.

Not quite a band of Angels, but we were proclaiming peace on Earth, a grace that certain people in Ireland turned their backs on for years, as they still do in so many parts of the world.

We enjoyed our carol singing, and so did our audience: feasts are given to us to enjoy. Let us not yield to cynicism this Christmas, but pray for peace in our land and peace within our homes and families. Amen.

* See The Pelicans Website

Photograph: Children and staff at Brocagh, a local school, in 1968; some of them will have heard our singing.

16 December, Advent Light XVI: unexpected lights.

They like bikes in Belgium! Not that they are always the most appropriate means of transport. This is the story of an overloaded bike in Canterbury and what happened next.

We begin with Will parking his bike against a rack where there was already a red lady’s Dutch style bike, not unlike the one outside the shop above. When Will had finished his shopping, the Dutch bike had gone, but there was a red purse on the ground. It had an address in it, a few minutes’ ride away, so off he went. It was shortly before Christmas.

The door was opened by an older lady, dressed in red, pleased to have her purse back: ‘My basket was too full, I am silly!’ now she was ready to press me to take tea in her winter-wonderland front room. A red settee and armchair, flashing lights and a glorious fake tree, a few copies of the Watchtower. The Watchtower magazine of Jehovah’s Witnesses? The same.

Yes, Mrs S was a Witness. Will had always believed that Jehovah’s Witnesses stood at a distance from Christmas and all things Yule. There had been the time when our regular witness missioner, Joe, had knocked on our door at 1.00 p.m. on December 25th with a personal delivery of the magazine. Obviously Christmas day was nothing to him. There had been more than one year when Witnesses expected a Christmas tree, given by a family, to be removed from a shared bay of the hospice where Mrs Turnstone worked. No surrender to other people’s sensibilities there, even when the other people were dying.

‘I came late to the Witnesses through my late husband,’ she explained. ‘But I like to put up something for Christmas to welcome my friends and neighbours. And the lights are a lovely, comforting sight at this time.’

‘What does Joe have to say about it?’ I asked. ‘He knows I take round my share of leaflets. He doesn’t have to know that I have a Christmas tree!’

And perhaps her Christmas tree and hospitality were as powerful a witness as her magazine.

15 December, Advent Light XV: Lovelight.

Another of the Anglican Franciscan Father Andrew’s Advent and Christmas poems. Some of those we are sharing this Advent were composed for parish mystery plays, so are simple in language and construction. This one is more reflective. Love came for you and me.

Lovelight

Once down some steep old Syrian stair,
A dim, sweet vision in the night,
Stepped Mary with her Blossom fair,
While God’s soft stars gave candle-light.

And oh, how steep life’s stairs might be,
And oh, how dark may be the night;
Yet since Love came for you and me
Even thorns have blossomed wondrously,
And through all dark with certainty
Love leads to Light.

13 December, Advent Light XIII: The bell strikes one.

The bell strikes one. We take no note of time 
But from its loss. To give it then a tongue 
Is wise in man. As if an angel spoke, 
I feel the solemn sound. If heard aright,
 It is the knell of my departed hours: Where are they? 
With the years beyond the flood.  
It is the signal that demands despatch: 
How much is to be done? My hopes and fears 
Start up alarm’d, and o’er life’s narrow verge 
Look down—on what? a fathomless abyss; 
A dread eternity! how surely mine! 
And can eternity belong to me, 
Poor pensioner on the bounties of an hour? 


How poor, how rich, how abject, how august, 
How complicate, how wonderful, is man! 
How passing wonder He who made him such!  
Who centred in our make such strange extremes! 
From different natures marvellously mix’d, 
Connexion exquisite of distant worlds! 
Distinguish’d link in being’s endless chain! 
Midway from nothing to the Deity!" 

From "Night Thoughts" by Edward Young.


Edward Young was a contemporary of Samuel Johnson so did not know the mixed blessing of electric lighting! George Gilfillan, his editor of 1853, described,'his lonely lamp shining at midnight, like a star, through the darkness, and seeming to answer the far signal of those mightier luminaries which are burning above in the Great Bear and Orion.' Surely he had a few sleepless nights. We can turn to Saint Paul for further comment.

5 But of the times and the seasons, brethren, ye have no need that I write unto you. For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night.

 But ye, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief. Ye are all the children of light, and the children of the day: we are not of the night, nor of darkness. Therefore let us not sleep, as do others; but let us watch and be sober. For they that sleep sleep in the night; and they that be drunken are drunken in the night. But let us, who are of the day, be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love; and for an helmet, the hope of salvation. For God hath not appointed us to wrath, but to obtain salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ, Who died for us, that, whether we wake or sleep, we should live together with him. (1 Thessalonians 5:2-10)

12 December: Advent Light XII: Fill my lamp.

We read a prayer of Saint Columban on his Feastday; here is another prayer taken from his Instructions. An Advent Prayer indeed!

I beg you, my Jesus, fill my lamp with your light. 
By its light let me see the holiest of holy places, 
your own temple 
where you enter as the eternal High Priest of the eternal mysteries. 
Let me see you, watch you, 
desire you. 
Let me love you as I see you, 
and before you let my lamp always shine, 
always burn.
AMEN

Thought for the day:

let my lamp always shine, 
always burn.