The Shattering of Loneliness: On Christian Remembrance

By Erik Varden

The experience of loneliness is as universal as hunger or thirst. Because it affects us more intimately, we are less inclined to speak of it. But who has not known its gnawing ache?

The fear of loneliness causes anguish. It prompts reckless deeds. To this, every age has borne witness. No voice is more insidious than the one that whispers in our ear: 'You are irredeemably alone, no light will pierce your darkness.' The fundamental statement of Christianity is to convict that voice of lying.

The Christian condition unfolds within the certainty that ultimate reality, the source of all that is, is a personal reality of communion, no metaphysical abstraction. Men and women, made 'in the image and likeness' of God, bear the mark of that original communion stamped on their being. When our souls and bodies cry out for Another, it is not a sign of sickness, but of health.

A labour of potential joy is announced. We are reminded of what we have it in us to become. That our labour may be fruitful, Scripture repeatedly exhorts us to 'remember'. The remembrance enjoined is partly introspective and existential, partly historical, for the God who took flesh to redeem our loneliness leaves traces in history.

This book examines six facets of Christian remembrance, complementing biblical exegesis with readings from literature, ancient and modern. It aims to be an essay in theology. At the same time, it proposes a grounded reflection on what it means to be a human being.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Sep 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9781472953278

Erik Varden

Erik Varden is a monk and bishop. Norwegian by birth, he was, before entering Mount Saint Bernard Abbey, a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. He has published several translations and scholarly monographs and is much in demand as a preacher, spiritual director and lecturer. In 2019 Pope Francis appointed him to the see of Trondheim. He is the author of The Shattering of Loneliness (Bloomsbury Continuum, 2018).

Book preview

Fr Michael Kayal

in memoriam

CONTENTS

List of illustrations

Introduction

1 Remember you are dust

2 Remember you were a slave in Egypt

3 Remember Lot’s wife

4 Do this in memory of me

5 The Counsellor will call everything to mind

6 Beware lest you forget the Lord

Afterword: In Memoriam

Notes on the Text and on Sources

Permissions

A Note on the Author

List of illustrations

1.1 Stig Dagerman, in excellent company, seeming happy (PA Images)

2.1 Mary and Zossima seen through the eyes of a fifteenth-century scribe, France, Central (Paris) Yates Thompson 3 f. 287 (© British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images)

3.1 Anna Akhmatova in the 1920s, looking back (Getty Images)

4.1 The austere realism of Zurbarán’s ‘Agnus Dei’ (1635–40) plays into the wealth of symbolic associations lodged in the theologically literate viewer’s mind (Getty Images)

5.1 The translation of Seraphim’s relics, with the Tsar as the front-right bearer (SPUTNIK / Alamy Stock Photo)

6.1 Auguste Rodin, Mains d’Amants (Getty Images)

INTRODUCTION

Must I have personal experience of something to say, in truth, that I remember it? The question has exercised me all my life. I trace it to a particular memory that I wish, by way of introduction, to share, in the hope that it may be helpful, not just self-indulgent.

I must have been nine or ten years old. The family was at table. We were speaking of the day’s events. My father, a country vet in southern Norway, told of an unsettling encounter. Arriving, that day, at a given farm, he had found the owner haymaking. The day was hot. The farmer, no longer young, worked shirtless. His back, my father said, was crisscrossed with deep scars from whipping. Why? He had been in German captivity during the war, submitted to savage torture. The marks of his imprisonment, normally concealed, had revealed themselves as an unintended testimony, a confession of sorts.

No one orchestrated the account. It was noted; then talk turned to topics of which I have no recollection. The image of the scars, though, was etched on my mind. It was as if the world’s pain had entered, by them, into my protected universe, which remained disrupted. I felt vulnerable of a sudden, and exposed. I had been vaguely aware, as a child might be, of the war, the occupation, man’s capacity for cruelty; but the realization that someone near me, someone I didn’t know but could know, had been subject to such violence appalled me. We are prone to idealize our early years. We should distrust our reconstructions. Yet I do not think I read too much into my childish sensibility if I say I felt a need to trace the meaning of those scars, to decipher what they stood for.

I did what I could. Already bookish, I conceived an interest in the Second World War. I read avidly about the camps. The librarian at our local library did not know what to do with me. I had to carry notes from home to assure her, against her better judgement, that I could borrow what I wanted. I read history, biographies. I discovered the life of Herman Sachnowitz, one of only 34 deported Norwegian Jews still to be alive in 1945.

His memoir quickened a sense of responsibility I was unequipped to shoulder. The world, I came to see, was a place of menace; human life carried immense potential for pain; someone had to answer for it. It may seem perverse to have touched such depths at such an early age, yet I am glad I did. I acquired a sense of the seriousness of existence. I saw that, to live, one must learn to look death in the eye. Before I could have known what the word meant, I had tired of superficiality.

Of course, my childhood was not confined to this sombre meditation. It was mostly happy. But the message of the scars haunted me. It was something of a snare at times, I see that now: I could tend towards melodrama. Still, the weight I carried into adolescence was fundamentally a function of truth. The darkness that enclosed me with whispering strains of despair was not, as I later came to fear, a sign of some temperamental deficiency. It was a latent compassion struggling to find a voice. Longing for coordinates to live by, I sought them in literature.

I picked up familiar resonances in Hesse, Undset, Blixen, later in Kafka and Rilke. The war continued to preoccupy me. I was drawn by testimonies from those awful years of man reduced, as it were, to his core, striving to live by an inward fire in a world plunged into night. The canon of writings that traces this quest has become for me a structural reference. I have been formed by the works of Élie Wiesel and Primo Levi, Etty Hillesum and Aharon Appelfeld, Jacques Lusseyran, Ilse Weber, and many others.

It would be preposterous to maintain that the child I was or the man I have become could recognize himself in such extreme destinies. What I can say is this: I knew, even as a boy, that to become a man is to assume a great burden; that this load must be borne with strength from within; that a particular, as yet unidentified task of bearing was assigned to me; and that I must rise to it.

There were days when this knowledge was crushing. Still, had I not acquired it when I did, I might not have noticed the light that shone of a sudden into what seemed a starless darkness. It reached me through music. I was close to 16, developing an interest in Mahler. Having splashed my savings on a CD player, I bought a Bernstein recording of his Second Symphony, the Resurrection. The Christian significance of the theme was known to me, but left me cold. Although I had been baptized, I had never affirmed belief. If anything, I was hostile. Christianity appeared to me a wishful flight away from the inner drama I was trying to negotiate, which was full of ambivalence, far distant from the studied certainties of preachers.

The faith’s ambassadors failed, on the whole, to impress me. I took pride in declaring myself an agnostic, a term that spelled independence of mind without demanding much by way of assertion. Mahler, to me, was about harmonics and instrumentation. Nevertheless, as I listened to the symphony, I could not remain aloof. I had not expected to be so moved. What the music spoke was reinforced by the composer’s texts, and so made doubly compelling. The contralto solo of the fourth movement evokes man’s lot starkly, yet serenely. Drawing on a fragment from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, it affirms that somehow, from somewhere, a glimmer will illumine the nocturnal progress of one who determinedly seeks day.

Out of its peace, the fifth, final movement arises like a thunderstorm. It conjures up images of chaos, a world in the grips of the tohu wavohu, ‘formlessness and void’, of the first verse of Scripture. Gradually, a rhythmic theme forms within what might pass as mere noise. It is first articulated by the deepest, darkest strings. Then it ripples through the orchestra. It unites its myriad voices, drawing forth direction and sense. The suggestions contained in this melodic surge are made explicit by the chorus:

Wieder aufzublühn, wirst du gesät!

Der Herr der Ernte geht

Und sammelt Garben

Uns ein, die starben.

You are sown to blossom again.

The harvest’s Lord goes and

Gathers in, like sheaves,

Us, who have died.

Could it be true? Before disbelief had time to configure, it was hushed by voices singing of a hope that must, in secret, have gestated in my depths, for I recognized it as mine:

O glaube, mein Herz, o glaube: Es geht dir nichts verloren! Dein ist, ja dein, was du gesehnt, dein, was du geliebt, was du gestritten! O glaube: Du warst nicht umsonst geboren! Hast nicht umsonst gelebt, gelitten!

Have faith, heart, have faith: nothing will be lost to you. What you have longed for is yours, yes, yours; yours is what you have loved and fought for. Have faith: you were not born in vain. You have not lived or suffered in vain.

At these words, something burst. The repeated insistence, ‘not in vain, not in vain’, was irresistible. It was not just that I wanted to believe it. I knew it was true. It sounds trite, but at that moment, my consciousness changed. With a certainty born neither of overwrought emotion nor of cool analysis, I knew I carried something within me that reached beyond the limits of me. I was aware of not being alone. There was no special warmth, no ecstatic inner movement. There were no tears. But I could no more doubt the truth of what I had found than I could doubt that I existed. The sense of it has never left me. That this should be so amazes me still.

What had happened? I believe it true to say: I had remembered. In a privileged insight, provoked by the music, I had found my deep intuitions confirmed. The distress of the scars, the chronicle of man’s presumption against man, corresponded to the world as it was, the world I inhabited. Its reality had seeped into me. The pain I felt in what I had not learnt to think of as my soul was mine; yet it sprang from sources preceding and exceeding my experience. I was alert to a palpable communion with mankind, which I saw before me as a suffering mass overshadowed by death. Not to avert my gaze was a duty, I was sure: I had to have the decency to see. But a voice sang within me: ‘not in vain!’ Mahler let me sense that one can face life without yielding to despondency or madness, since the anguish of the world is embraced by an infinite benevolence investing it with purpose. Having encountered – recalled – this benevolence, I recognized it as a personal presence. I wanted to pursue it, learn its name, discern its features.

I looked to the Bible for guidance. Until then, it had been in every sense a closed book, an arsenal, I thought, of platitudes and abstruse dogma. Some of its vocabulary repelled me. But I also found beckoning, attractive words:

In the night my soul has desired you:

from daybreak I shall watch for you with my spirit in the depths of my being.

You have sorrow now

but I will see you again

and your hearts will rejoice.

Everything exposed to the light becomes light.

I cannot claim I grasped the meaning of such statements, or even that I grasp it now, but they bestowed a sense of recognition. It was as if they spoke of familiar things, called to mind forgotten memories. In this way, the Christian proposition dawned on me from within, resonant with the vibrations of my mind and soul, even of my body. It revealed my longing to me. For some, I know, conversion is instantaneous, the effect of some sudden effulgence. My trajectory has been different. In a way, it has not been especially spiritual, if one takes that word to indicate an evident touch of the transcendent. The mystery of God was made manifest to me