As is traditional for the First Week of Lent, the Pope and the Roman Curia will spend several days making their annual spiritual exercises. This year’s retreat is being preached by Bishop Erik Varden of Trondeim, Norway. Some readers might know Bishop Varden already from his wonderful blog Coram Fratribus. A convert and then a Trappist monk, Bishop Varden has a gift for communication comparable to our own great Robert Barron, though with his own unique style.
At a mere 51 years old, Bishop Varden also represents something of a turning of the page in the life of the Church. I’ve written before (here and here) that the zealous and youthful Church I encountered in Scandinavia hints at what fidelity and evangelization must look like in an increasingly secularized world. Bishop Varden–articulate, orthodox, cultured, and creative–seems to understand how to respond to our twenty-first century reality.
Last year I read Bishop Varden’s profound book Chastity: Reconciliation of the Senses, and I thought this week would be a good opportunity to share a few of its many insights…
For one thing, chastity is not a denial of sex. It is an orientation of sexuality, of the whole vital instinct, towards a desired finality. It is a function of wholeness sought and healing found.
On the body:
It is hard to entertain a chaste approach to the body if we have a reductive understanding of that of which the body is capable; if we reduce a dimension of ourselves configured to the image of God simply to a discardable garment of skin. We carefully, sometimes obsessively, attend to the body’s present needs, appetites and pains. But are we not often deaf to its crying out for ways to transcend itself while staying fully itself?
What sets Varden’s approach apart from much of the spirituality of the mid-twentieth century is his realistic understanding of the contemporary world, including its lacunae. He understands the challenges with which young Christians must grapple to remain faithful in today’s world.
The Christian proclamation can easily become rather abstract. This is more the case today than in the recent past, as Christian terminology is increasingly emptied of specific meaning. It is hard to present the Gospel on the terms, say, of the Letter to the Romans to people who shake their heads at the very notion of ‘sin’, see no need for ‘expiation’, so cannot conceive of what ‘redemption’ is good for, never mind ‘sanctification’. The tendency of our time is to idealize nature, with its impulses and appetites, not to transcend it. While anthropological discourse since antiquity has dwelt on what sets man apart from other species, there is a strange determination abroad, these days, to evidence that we are no more than animals.
Varden’s reading is vast and eclectic, and I was delighted he mentioned an author from Western Australia, where I spent a few wonderful months a few years ago. It strikes a good note on which to close…
For years I have been haunted by a throwaway statement in Tim Winton’s weird, in some ways perverse, novel Breath. One of its characters sees, looking back over life, that he awoke to a new dimension of being one day in adolescence, out on an Australian beach, when he noticed surfers riding a wave. It was new to him: ‘I couldn’t have put words to it as a boy, but later I understood what seized my imagination that day. How strange it was to see men do something beautiful. Something pointless and elegant, as though nobody saw or cared.’ […]
To do something beautiful for its own sake, for the intrinsic delight of it, without thought of gain: this, I’d say, is a way of beginning to live chastely in this world, poised to balance elegantly on whatever surging billow providence provides as a means to bear us homeward, towards the shore.
Tony Lusvardi, S.J. 