Lenten Retreat: Bishop Varden reflects on 'God's help'

Bishop Erik Varden delivers his third reflection at the Spiritual Exercises in the Vatican for Pope Leo XIV, Cardinals residing in Rome, and heads of Dicasteries, focusing on the theme: “God9;s Help.” The following is a summary of his reflection.

Bishop Varden delivers his Lenten reflection (@Vatican Media)

Mary Ward, that great Christian educator of the 17th century, used to tell her sisters: ‘Do your best and God will help’.

The notion that God can and will help us in our predicaments is axiomatic to Biblical faith. It sets the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God made compassionate flesh in Christ Jesus, apart from the Unmoved Mover of philosophy.

Psalm 90 begins with the verse: ‘He who dwells within the help of the Most High’. God’s help, says Bernard, may indeed be called a habitat in as much as it forms a sustaining reality within which we can live, move, and have our being. God’s help is not occasional to us; it is not an emergency service we call out now and then, when a house is burning or someone has been hit by a car, the way we might dial 999.

But what about occasions when God-fearing people cry out to heaven but get no perceptible response, hearing only the desolate echo of their own voice?

The Scriptural type of such plight is Job, whose majestic book can be approached as a symphony in three movements, going from a visceral Lament through an exposition of Menace to a wholly surprising experience of Grace.

Job refuses to accept his friends’ rationalisations. He refuses to posit that God is just working out sums in his life as if it were a balance sheet. Unhelped, he is determined to find God present in his affliction, calling out heroically: ‘If it is not he, who then is it?’

As believers we may at some level regard our religion as an insurance policy. Certain of subsisting within God’s help, we may think we are out of harm’s way. A world can seem to collapse if — when — harm strikes. How do I face trials which cause my carefully assembled, customised protective fencing to fall? Is my relationship with God one of barter, disposing me to follow, when things are hard, the counsel of Job’s hard-headed wife to ‘curse God and die’? Or do I live at greater depth?

God can enable a new world to emerge after he has pulled down walls we thought were the world, walls within which we actually suffocated.

To live within God’s help as St Bernard would have us do is not to peddle securities. It is to pass through Lament and Menace in order to live graciously at a deeper level.

Bishop Erik Varden *
Source: vaticannews.va/en

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* Bishop Erik Varden, Bishop of Trondheim, Norway, was asked to preach the 2026 Spiritual Exercises for Pope Leo XIV, Cardinals residing in Rome, and the heads of Dicasteries of the Roman Curia, which runs from Sunday, February 22, to Friday, February 27. Here is the link to his website.