. I think I was a freshman in college when a close family friend gave me the book, Markings, by Dag Hammarskjold. The book was like nothing I had read before. Neither fact nor fiction, it was a kind of spiritual diary that he began at the age of twenty, and to which he kept adding entries up until the time of his death. It is a life-long memoir of what I will call Scandinavian Christianity.
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. Dag Hammarskjold, as you may know, is best remembered as a Swedish diplomat who, in the post-World-War-II era, rose to become the highly respected Secretary-General of the United Nations. He served from 1953 to 1961. President Kennedy called him, “the greatest statesman of our century.” Who was this man?
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. He was born in 1905 into a noble Swedish family (his father was Prime Minister of Sweden during his youth and very early teens). The family name, Hammarskjold, literally means “Hammer shield.” (Since I don’t know what is the function of a hammer-shield, I feel free to imagine old Thor wielding a shield along with his hammer. Which, if Thor was any good as a good god, that hammer-shield would have to have been a shield of faith, as all shields must eventually be. Anyway.)
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. Young Dag, the fourth of five brothers, grew up in the city of Uppsala. Apparently, he soon found the time to hike, mostly in solitude, in the forests and snows and mountains and by the lakes and shores of Sweden. His own title for his book was Vaegmaerken, which literally means Waymarks, which almost certainly alludes to cairns of stones, whether simple or elaborate, that have been stacked beside trails, ever since men made trails. He would later say, “He is one of those who has had the wilderness for a pillow, and called a star his brother. Alone. But loneliness can be a communion.”
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. His university studies led to two advanced degrees, in philosophy and law, by the time he was twenty-five. Not surprisingly, he became known as a man who could succeed in both the world of contemplation and the world of action. In his own words, “In our era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action.”
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. His thinking matured over time, in interesting ways. He says, “I do not know Who — or what — put the question. I don’t even remember answering. But at one moment I did answer Yes to Someone — or Something — and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.”
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. “God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder the source of which is beyond all reason.”
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. And again, “It is not we who seek the Way, but the Way which seeks us. That is why you are faithful to it, even while you stand waiting, so long as you are prepared, and act the moment you are confronted by its demands.”
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. He could be specific: “He who has surrendered himself to it knows that the Way ends on the Cross — even when it is leading him through the jubilation of Gennesaret or the triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Do not seek death. Death will find you. But seek the road which makes death a fulfillment.”
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. “Forgiveness,” he said, ” is the answer to the child’s dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, what is soiled is made clean again.”
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. He was no fatalist, and he was not a perfectionist. He saw life as a meaningful personal response to revealed duty, which he summed up in these famous words:
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. “For all that has been, Thanks. To all that shall be, Yes!”
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. If you would like to read about the impact of his book upon a current diplomat, read here:
https://diplomaticjottings.blogspot.com/2011/10/dag-hammarskjold-and-journey-inward.html
— rh 23 April 2020
Sycamore Three 