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We’re addicted to disturbance: Norway’s Bishop Varden

by | Nov 13, 2023 | News

– Luke Coppen, The Pillar, August 2022

Bishop, what is Christianity?

Christianity fundamentally is faith in – and an existential attachment to – the revelation of Jesus Christ. By which I mean fundamentally his manifestation of our call to share in the very life of God, in his victory over death. Fundamentally, Christianity is the certainty that in Christ death has lost its sting. “Christ is risen” and everything else flows from that. There are enormous consequences, more or less simple or complex, that embrace all of existence.

What is prayer?

It’s the lifting up of the heart. It is an opening of my being to the reality of God and an engagement of my being with God’s being in a dialogue, which is sometimes an explicit dialogue and sometimes very implicit and mysterious.

There’s a marvelous story of Metropolitan Anthony Bloom. When he goes to an old people’s home, he encounters this old lady, who is in a great spiritual crisis, because she says she recites the Jesus Prayer day and night, and yet she is in this state of spiritual desert.  The Metropolitan advises her: “From now on, I ask you to spend half an hour a day not saying any prayers, but simply sitting in your chair and knitting in the face of God.”

It totally revolutionized this woman’s spiritual life.

Sometimes, if we could learn just to shut up and open ourselves attentively to God.

Is that what you’d call contemplative prayer?

I’ve been helped by a phrase from a Florentine Renaissance humanist, Pico della Mirandola, who speaks of our fundamental vocation as being “universi contemplator”, as one who contemplates the universe, who contemplates the whole.  I’m convinced that we, by nature, are contemplative. To live contemplatively is fundamentally a matter of standing still and paying attention.

There’s a contemplative hidden in everyone?

And not necessarily all that hidden. In our cultural context, there’s a lot that militates against the contemplative life because we’re addicted to disturbance. We love to be disturbed. And if we haven’t been disturbed for the last 20 seconds, we find something to disturb us. Part of the soul pain, frustration that experience can release in us is an indication that, fundamentally, we’re constructed for a different mode of interacting with the world.

Blaise Pascal said that ‘all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.’ There’s such wisdom in that.

Does the Church still have a need for contemplatives?

An urgent need, because the heart of the Church is a contemplative heart. We need that constant refocusing of our sight, of our mind, of our heart upon the mystery of God.

The Month of the Most Holy Rosary

by | Sep 26, 2023 | Uncategorized

“The month of October each year is dedicated to the Most Holy Rosary. This is primarily due to the fact that the liturgical feast of Our Lady of the Rosary is celebrated annually on October 7. It was instituted to honor the Blessed Virgin Mary in gratitude for the protection that she gives the Church in answer to the praying of the Rosary by the faithful.

The feast was introduced by Pope St. Pius V (1504-1572) in the year 1571 to commemorate the miraculous victory of the Christian forces in the Battle of Lepanto on October 7, 1571. The pope attributed more to the “arms” of the Rosary than the power of cannons and the valor of the soldiers who fought there.

Legend tells us that the Rosary as a form of prayer was given to St. Dominic (1170-1221) by Mary, the Mother of Our Lord, who entrusted it to him as an aid in the conflicts with the Albigensians. The Dominican pope, St. Pius V, did much to further the spread of the Rosary and it thereafter became one of the most popular devotions in Christendom. It was the same Pope St. Pius V, who in 1569 officially approved the Rosary in its present form with the Papal Bull, Consueverunt Romani Pontifices. It had been completed by the addition of the second half of the “Hail Mary” and the “Glory be to the Father” at the conclusion of each mystery.

Middle Ages where it came into being in various medieval monasteries as a substitute for the Divine Office for the lay monks and devout lay persons who did not know how to read.”
In line with the Church’s devotion to Mary, our Mother, and the Church’s tradition, the archdiocese has its annual, rosary campaign during October, asking the faithful to pay special attention to offering the daily rosary.  As part of that campaign, they ask us to keep count of how many rosaries we pray and register that number each Sunday at church.   
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