Varden: Building with New Bricks

Ignacio Carbajosa - Yesterday, Cistercian monk Erik Varden, the bishop of Trondheim (Norway), gave a lecture on the topic of the 2025 Meeting.

The aridity that has come to characterize T.S. Eliot's couplet—which serves as the title for this edition of the Rimini Meeting ("In desert places we will build with new bricks")—belongs to the desert.

Empty, irritating public dialectics, communication based on slogans where reason disappears, screens spitting out images instead of classical works... The monk and bishop Erik Varden presented himself to the Rimini audience not with yet another attempt to attract attention using multimedia resources but by returning, with paradoxical effectiveness, to the roots of language: its symbolic nature, where the signifier and the signified are irretrievably united in the word.

Just as the classics drew on Greek myths, Monk Varden spoke for an hour about the symbolic work that, along with those myths, built our civilization: the Bible, specifically the great stories of the Old Testament. This is the great resource that restores fertility to words: a starting point in the ever-rich stories and images of the Bible. From Adam to Cain, from Eden as a congenial habitat to Babel—the first metropolis built without God; from Jerusalem, the city redeemed by the presence of the divine temple, to the Church as the place that preserves the words essential to our time.

The idea of construction is the common thread. But the very idea of construction is underpinned by nostalgia for the Garden of Paradise, where harmony reigned with all things, beginning with communion with God. The loss of that harmony marks all subsequent attempts at construction which, being conceived on the margins of God, inevitably end up being against man himself and against others.

And so God returns to the idea of construction with the choice of Abraham, the man who welcomes God himself in the figure of three strange travelers. The law given to Israel on Sinai becomes a principle of just construction for human coexistence. First the tabernacle, and later the temple, constituted God's first dwelling place among men, which in a sense redeems the concept of the city, making Jerusalem the paradigm of an orderly community. It is the divine presence that allows for a construction that isn't violent or directed against humanity. It thus becomes a promise that should reach all of humanity.

But if one contemplates the violence that has been taking place in the Holy Land in recent times, the question naturally arises: Isn't the defense of that paradigmatic city, Jerusalem, perhaps the source of that flicker of hatred that is the antithesis of harmony among peoples? Think of the Wailing Wall, where one senses the tension between the desire to rebuild the temple and the presence of mosques, a sacred place for Palestinian Muslims. How can a dwelling, a city, a physical place, not become an object of contention between people?

Varden's journey welcomes this valid objection at its climax. In the fullness of time, as the fulfillment of the great promise, the Church, the body of Christ, becomes the new and definitive dwelling place of God among men. Christ made the reconciliation of all peoples possible. The Church we must build is no longer a building made of stones but the one that makes us “the dwelling place of God in the Spirit.”

This is our mission, concludes the monk-bishop: "Only when that temple has been built, when we have become that temple, will our work be accomplished." Like the Christians in the Holy Land, they constitute that temple which, having no stones to defend, becomes a place of reconciliation—a place where, in the experience of forgiveness, the glimmer of violence is stopped.