Br. Lain Wilson

Dag Hammarskjöld

Matthew 16:24-27

“In our era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action.”[1]

So wrote the Swedish economist and diplomat Dag Hammarskjöld, whom we commemorate today. His tenure as the second secretary-general of the United Nations was cut tragically short amid the complex Congo Crisis, when he perished in a plane crash in 1961 on his way to a ceasefire negotiation.

Hammarskjöld’s public life was an active one; there’s no doubt about that. And his journal, Markings, reveals a correspondingly rich spiritual life, drawing deeply on the Christian mystical tradition.

One theme that arises clearly is Hammarskjöld’s own understanding of his call to Christian discipleship, to the Way of the Cross: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24).[2]

In a lengthy meditation on Jesus’ time with his disciples before his crucifixion, Hammarskjöld imagines Jesus preparing to set out on his own Way: “A young man, adamant in his commitment, who walks the road of possibility to the end without self-pity or demand for sympathy, fulfilling the destiny he has chosen—even sacrificing affection and fellowship when the others are unready to follow him—into a new fellowship.”[3]

Seven years later, as secretary-general, he sounds many of the same notes in describing some of the sacrifices his own path entailed: “One of the great sacrifices is exile from the environment by which you have been molded. . . . one simply has to learn that part of the price of this effort is isolation, compensated by the feeling of a deeper and wider solidarity with the many people, known and unknown, who have fully accepted the same demands.”[4] An entry from later that same year is starker: “Didst Thou give me this inescapable loneliness so that it would be easier for me to give Thee all?”[5]

What do the life and witness of Dag Hammarskjöld offer to us today? I think two things.

First, that the Way of the Cross is a way of active commitment, and commitment to action. We all have God-given gifts, God-given power, God-given agency. We are all in the world, with all its suffering and all its need, and we are all called to be coworkers with God in this world.

What are your gifts? What is your power? How does God call you to be God’s agent?

And second, this active commitment, our participation in Jesus’ Way of the Cross, inevitably entails sacrifice. Hammarskjöld is blunt about his own experience: “I realized that . . . the price for committing one’s life would be reproach, and that the only elevation possible to man lies in the depths of humiliation.”[6]

The way of discipleship, the Way of the Cross, entails sacrifice, but we are assured that we do not walk that Way bereft and alone.

“Have mercy upon us,” Hammarskjöld wrote in his famous poem-prayer two months before his death.

“Have mercy

Give us

Thou

Amen.

[1] D. Hammarskjöld, Markings, trans. L. Sjöberg and W. H. Auden (New York, 1964), 122 (entry dated 1955).

[2] R. Lipsey, Hammarskjöld: A Life (Ann Arbor, MI, 2016), 84-89.

[3] Hammarskjöld, Markings, 69 (dated 1951).

[4] Quoted in Lipsey, Hammarskjöld, 334 (letter to the Swedish novelist Pär Lagerkvist, dated January 31, 1958).

[5] Hammarskjöld, Markings, 166 (dated July 29, 1958).

[6] Hammarskjöld, Markings, 205 (dated Whitsunday 1961).

[7] Ibid., 214-15 (dated July 19, 1961).