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by Matthew Milliner (First Things June 2014)
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NOT SO SECULAR SWEDENby Matthew Milliner
June 2014
I t’s 4 a.m. and I’m in an eighteenth-century Swedish castle that has been transformed
into an ecumenical monastic community run by Pentecostals. I gather my bags and
descend a grand staircase, past family portraits going back generations, past neo--
classical statues, past Coptic, Russian, and Greek Orthodox icons—their candles still
flickering from the night shift. Then past a well-stocked patristic library, down another
enormous flight of stairs, and through a foyer. I take one last look through the window
at the rolling lawn lit by a full moon. Staring down at me is the portrait of a Pietist
Lutheran, Hedvig Ekman, who married into this family in the late eighteenth century.
Behind her head the artist painted a faint hint of gold threatening to become a halo,
indicating that through her, holiness entered the household. Because of Hedvig’s
devotion, a beautiful chapel was appended to the castle.
Still making my way to the exit, I pass a picture of influential theologians gathered on
the castle steps a century ago. They include Gustaf Aulén, author of Christus Victor, and
Lutheran Archbishop Nathan Söderblom, an ecumenical pioneer who worked with
Catholics to revive devotion to Bridget of Sweden, one of Europe’s patron saints. In the
same image is the grandmother of the woman whose life, nearly a century later, would be
changed by the Jesus People USA and Pentecostal Christians—sufficiently changed that
when the Ekman family decided to give up this castle in the 1980s, it was donated to
Swedish Pentecostals. Continuing the ecumenical spirit, the castle, now known as
Bjärka-Säby, hosts Coptic, Catholic, and Evangelical Christians as well. The precision
and beauty of their prayers rival the liturgical exactitude I have witnessed on Mount
A
and beauty of their prayers rival the liturgical exactitude I have witnessed on Mount
Athos.
But I’m still lugging my bags on the way to the door. I traverse the empty kitchen soon to
be populated by volunteer members of the Pentecostal church who—at considerable
effort and expense—keep this castle-turned-monastery in nearly spotless condition.
Two mottos govern: Ora et labora (“pray and work”) and Esse non videri (roughly, “to be
and not to be seen”). The man now smiling down a long hallway, gesturing toward me,
lives them both. He is Peter Halldorf, Pentecostal minister, renowned writer, and the
spiritual leader of the castle. Bearing a white beard, black cassock, and prayer beads
wrapped around his wrist, his eyes radiate with life as if he’d been up for hours. He
wants to show me something before I depart for my flight.
Down we go into the castle’s basement depths—through yet another hidden passageway
—entering the subterranean bakery. “We call it Bethlehem,” Peter proclaims. “The house
of bread,” I reply, proud of catching the reference. He pulls out the key and we enter the
tiny kitchen. On the table are a Coptic icon of Mary and her son, two candles, and two
Swedish Psalters. It is Sunday morning, and two members of the community will shortly
be appearing to pray the Psalms while Peter and an assistant bake the Eucharistic bread
for that morning’s liturgy.
With a luminous smile, Peter shows me the Coptic Orthodox seals that will shortly be
imprinted onto the bread. There are twelve crosses in the center of the seal, eight on the
outside and four in the middle. These delineate the holiest area—the Bread of the Lord
(Asbodikon). Unlike in the Greek Orthodox liturgy, which uses a ceremonial knife, the
Coptic ceremony, emphasizing unity, does not cut the bread—though it is indented and
ceremonially pierced five times—once in each corner of the four central crosses, and
once in the center, signifying the five wounds of Christ.
few days before, I made precisely the same gesture with the five fingers of my
right hand. I was fitting them into six-hundred-year-old grooves in the wall
A right hand. I was fitting them into six-hundred-year-old grooves in the wall
outside the pilgrim entrance to the monastery church of St. Bridget of Sweden
(1303–73) in Vadstena, just an hour drive from Bjärka-Säby. A cousin of the Swedish
king, Bridget married at thirteen and bore eight children. Following the death of her
husband, the revelations she had received since her youth intensified. Faced with the
corruption of the Avignon papacy, she even predicted an eventual Vatican State,
foretelling almost the exact boundaries delineated by Mussolini for Vatican City in 1921.
Bridget—or Birgitta as she is known in Sweden—left her homeland and travelled to
Rome, Jerusalem, and Bethlehem, sending back precise instructions for the construction
of the monastery I am now entering, known as the “Blue Church” after the unique color
of its granite. Birgitta insisted that the abbess, signifying the Virgin Mary, should
preside over both nuns and monks.
As we approached the Blue Church I saw some ruins, and braced myself for another case
of the stripping of the altars. Like England, Sweden went Protestant during the
Reformation. But the Lutheran pastor who met us there was not the steward of an empty
shell, but instead oversaw a living devotional site frequented by Protestants and
Catholics alike. (It does not hurt that Birgitta’s forceful critique of the papacy led some
to see her as proto-Protestant.) After placing our fingers in the holes, my companions
and I entered the complex, and were met with a beautiful cross celebrating Birgitta and
her daughter Catherine, painted by a Pentecostal icon painter. Most remarkable was the
vaulting of this massive Gothic complex. Brigittine nuns wear the “Crown of the Five
Holy Wounds” with five red symbolic stones. In the same way, the five bosses
connecting the Gothic ribbing are here painted red, causing pilgrims to momentarily
become Brigittines themselves, their heads enclosed with the five wounds as they step
under every vaulted bay.
Although there was some destruction and damage to statues from invading Danish
soldiers, most here have survived. We make our way to the still-preserved relics of
Birgitta, but are interrupted by a bell. Thirty pilgrims stop to gather in the rear of the
church for a Taizé prayer service before a gorgeous Byzantine icon of Christ made by
T
church for a Taizé prayer service before a gorgeous Byzantine icon of Christ made by
that same Pentecostal painter.
he tour resumes. We see a fourteenth-century wooden statue of Birgitta as an
imposing abbess. “It is necessary to go after the world’s ugliness rather than its
beauty,” she once insisted, chastising human pomp. Her vivid description of the
crucifixion—corresponding to the gruesome reality of the Black Plague—lent crucifixes
a new dimension of realism, ultimately generating images as famous as Matthias
Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece. “The dead body sagged,” she wrote. “The color of
death spread through his flesh.” We then are shown another fourteenth-century statue
of Birgitta—this time in ecstasy. Her visions of the nativity, received at Bethlehem,
complemented her gritty Good Friday with a radiance that inspired Hugo van der Goes’s
famous Portinari altarpiece at the Uffizi. “I saw the glorious infant lying on the ground
naked and shining.”
Martin Luther may have called her die tolle Brigit, “crazy Birgitta,” but there was her body
—enclosed in a red casket, now tastefully tended by Lutherans. Nevertheless, leaving
Birgitta’s monastery, we visited a recently constructed Benedictine convent populated by
onetime Lutheran women who converted en masse to Catholicism. The abbess looked
herself like the imposing statue of Birgitta we had just seen. “We converted to build
bridges, not to burn them,” she told us matter of factly. She has visited Bjärka-Säby
castle several times, and knows Peter Halldorf well. The abbess proudly boasted of the
recently acquired relics of Sts. Benedict and Edith Stein—a piece of her veil—installed
in the altar at the dedication. After returning home I learned that some of the bridges she
hoped to build have already been constructed. My Wheaton College colleague Sarah
Borden, an Edith Stein specialist, keeps a relic from the very same veil in her office.
Back at the castle, after a scholarly symposium with Swedish theologians who had
gathered for the weekend, the group of us walked the grounds of Bjärka-Säby. Tensions
should have been high in this group of Protestant and Catholic scholars. The week
before, Sweden’s most influential charismatic pastor, Ulf Ekman (no relation to
I
Hedvig), had announced his plan to convert to Catholicism. The group included the
young theologian Benjamin Ekman, Ulf’s son, who preceded his father into the Catholic
Church. The group also included Joel Halldorf, a Protestant theologian and son of the
Pentecostal abbot.
Adjourning from our walk, we entered the main foyer and saw on the table an article
covering Ulf’s conversion, with quotes from Swedish Christian leaders, including some
of those present, responding to the news. There were some misquotations and typos, and
the group laughed it off. What was causing a scandal for the rest of Swedish
Christianity did not so much as ruffle the bonds of these friendships, and while global
Christians speculated as to what caused Ulf to convert, those closest to him were
reluctant to pry.
When I asked Abbot Peter about Ulf Ekman’s conversion, he exhibited the same
reticence, and announced with a peaceful smile that he himself will remain Pentecostal.
His response reminds me of Edward Pusey’s reply to the conversion of John Henry
Newman: “I cannot unmake myself,” he wrote. “I earnestly desire the restoration of
unity, but I cannot throw myself into the practical Roman system, nor renounce what I
believe our gracious Lord acknowledges. And so I must go on, with joy at the signs of
deepening life among us, and distress at our losses, and amazement that Almighty God
vouchsafes to employ me for anything.”
t is the night before my departure. After festivities elsewhere with more Swedish
theologians who seamlessly shift from Swedish to perfect English when the
American arrives, we raise one last glass to Birgitta, and I get a ride home back to the
castle. Having enjoyed some Scandinavian beer (which gives American micro-breweries
a run for their money), I am all talk. My companion Simon listens as he drives.
Overwhelmed by it all, I announce that whereas American Christianity is a mile wide
and an inch deep, Swedish Christianity is an inch wide and a mile deep. Never have I
seen ecumenical cooperation as I have here. I unfurl a grand analogy: Under secularism’s
tectonic pressure, the continents of differing traditions are drifting closer together. As
PREV ARTICLE
tectonic pressure, the continents of differing traditions are drifting closer together. As
the landmasses merge, some jump to another side, while others remain. But the merging
of continents is far more significant than isolated bounds, however athletically
impressive. Personal conversions, despite the attention they can generate, are small
change compared with the payoff of broader ecclesial union. And toward this goal,
Sweden—thanks to the remarkable Bjärka-Säby—seems decades ahead.
Simon smiles at my theory, concedes its truth, but adds a personal dimension. He is
converting to Catholicism with his fiancée this Easter, but his father—a former pastor in
the holiness movement—has already refused to come to his wedding. The agony visited
on this family feels like the pain of stitches necessary to heal a wound. “The mark of the
Cross,” wrote John Keble in response to Newman’s conversion, “seems rather to belong
to those who struggle on in a decayed and perhaps still decaying Church . . . than to those
who allow their imaginations to dwell on fancied improvements and blessings to be
obtained on possible changes of Communion.” Believing as I do that continental drift
trumps personal satisfaction, I think Keble was on to something. But my friend Simon’s
story is a reminder that there is frequently a cross for those who convert as well.
He drops me off and drives into the night. I enter the castle one last time and make my
way through the winding hallways to my room, past portraits, past statues and flickering
icons. I didn’t know it then, but I was walking over Bethlehem. “And if the priest be
skillful and well taught after the elders,” reads one of the Coptic rubrics, “he shall break
the Eucharistic loaf (qurbanah) regularly until it be broken yet remain whole, and he shall
raise it with his hands broken yet whole, and this is also good.” I pack and sleep. I have to
be up at 4 a.m.
Matthew J. Milliner is assistant professor of art history at Wheaton College.
A RT IC LES by M A T T HEW M ILLINER