A Pilgrimage and a Resurrection

The pilgrimage routes that everyone knows are those leading to the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela in Spain, from starting points across Europe. 

Several Reformed Journal bloggers have commented on their physical and spiritual journeys along those routes, no doubt inspiring some readers to follow their example. Most recently, Chad Pierce shared his experiences on the Camino on the Sundays of July and August. In June, Jared Ayers described his Camino journey.

Twelve years ago my wife and I walked the last hundred miles of the Via Francese. It was deeply moving to traverse a path that fellow believers have walked for two millennia. Attending the Pilgrim Mass, with incense pouring out of a censer on a fifty-foot chain, was unforgettable.  

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In Norway, there are nine different pilgrimage routes that converge on Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim (a city of 180,000). From both north and south, some through the interior and others along the coast, some routes have been trodden by pilgrims for more than a thousand years. The saint whose resting place inspires their journey is one to whom I have a personal connection, having begun my career in academia as an assistant professor of philosophy and tutor in the Paracollege at the college he founded in Northfield, Minnesota.  

All right, I’m stretching the truth. St. Olaf never visited Northfield. But he is honored by the Norwegian Lutheran immigrants who settled in Minnesota and founded an academy for liberal studies in 1874. It became a college renowned for its musical ensembles, and one of the few offering a major in Norwegian.  

In August 2024, after ten days exploring the fjords and glaciers of southern Norway with a Sierra Club group, my wife and I paid our respects to St. Olaf in the city that was his royal seat, walking the last segment of one of the pilgrim paths. This route begins in Oslo, which was only a small trading post in Viking Norway, and ends at the city on the Trondheim fjord, then called Nidaros, that was Norway’s capital until the 13^th century. The 400-mile route takes pilgrims about four weeks, but we hiked only for a day. 

King Olav II Haraldsson, canonized just a year after his death in battle in 1030, looked down on us and other pilgrims from the west façade of the cathedral that encloses his remains and honors his memory.  (“Olaf” was a more common spelling in the 19^th century.) He occupies one of the ninety niches, alongside priests and kings, apostles and saints, and an ascendant Christ with a band of angels at the center.  

As befits a warrior king, Olav holds a battle axe. In tales and sagas he is credited with Christianizing Norway, not always by winsome witnessing. He was embraced at death as the patron saint of Norway, and a great cathedral was erected in his honor. Construction took 230 years, from 1070 to 1300. (Church building committees, stop complaining about a month’s delay.)  

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A poster drew me back to the cathedral that evening. There I learned an astonishing resurrection story, not of a deceased human being. Instead, something else once full of energy and joy, then abandoned to its grave, before being lovingly brought back to life: a pipe organ.

Biographies should begin with birth. In 1741 a splendid baroque organ was installed in Nidaros Cathedral. The workers employed by Joachim Wagner, having transported the organ from their workshop in Germany over tempestuous seas, may have wondered why such a fine instrument should be relegated to such a bleak location. There are just a few hours of semi-darkness in summer, and a few hours of feeble daylight in winter. The organ works were installed behind an enormous wooden façade adorned with heraldic emblems, carved cornices, a pair of rotating stars (the zimbelstern stop), and a magnificent sun.  The console was almost entirely hidden within the enclosure.  

Over the centuries, probably due both to the harsh climate and the challenges of maintenance, the instrument became aged and infirm. In the 1920s it was dismantled and placed in storage. The German firm Steinmeyer built a magnificent new organ, bigger, louder, more versatile, and in every way more fitted to modern European tastes than the wheezy antique.

In the 1960s, when the new organ was being updated and relocated, someone thought to have a look at the old instrument, still in storage, and found it in remarkably sound condition. Off it went to yet another German firm that specializes in restoring baroque instruments. When it arrived back home, it was reinstalled in the north transept it had once occupied, high atop a suspended platform. Its splendid case and all its pipework were fully restored.

On that August evening, a 24-year-old guest organist from Lyon, France, Luka Akaeda Santesson, offered a recital on both instruments. The console of the newer instrument, movable because it uses electro-mechanical action to sound the pipes, was placed in the center of the west nave, where ranks upon ranks of pipes towered over it in a gigantic horseshoe arrangement. A 32-foot diapason is an imposing presence even in a vast cathedral nave.    

Nearly every one of the organ’s 129 stops, incorporating 9600 pipes, were put to use in the second half of the recital, wholly devoted to an aptly named 40-minute work by 19^th century French composer César Franck, “La grande pièce symphonique.” Franck’s home church was the Basilica of Sainte-Clotilde in Paris, with an organ built in the grand French style by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll. The “newer” Steinmeyer organ seemed made for this repertoire, spanning the range from thunderous climaxes on the full organ to poignant solo passages on reed stops to gentle lullabies on the tenderest of flute stops.

The guest organist — a true citizen of the world, born in Italy to Swedish and Japanese parents, educated in France, competition winner in France and the Netherlands — had devoted the first half of the recital, seated inside the organ case high above us, to toccatas and chorale preludes by J.S. Bach on the baroque Wagner organ. It too seemed built for just such selections. Its voices speaking sharply and thanks to the direct mechanical linkage from keyboard to pipes, its reed and flute stops so distinctly voiced that Bach’s intertwined polyphonic melodies stood out clearly despite the rich resonance of the cathedral. An organ built in Bach’s lifetime, abandoned and resurrected, made his compositions sparkle with life.

The people of Norway enjoy a far better life than did their ancestors centuries ago, when famine and crop failure drove them to emigrate. They are far less likely today to identify with the Lutheran church, which has been the state church since the Reformation. Still I think I detected a smile of gratitude on the faces of the stone figures on the west front for the marvelous instruments behind them and for the wonderful music they make, delighting the ear and lifting the spirit.