No Other Foundation

In 2010 country singer Miranda Lambert recorded and released a song written by Tom Douglas and Allen Shamblin entitled “The House that Built Me”. It was a clever song as well as a moving one, playing on the notion that we build houses; houses do not build us. The point of the song, however, was that the house the singer once lived in did build her— i.e. it was responsible for the kind of girl she became. In the song, the singer confessed, “You leave home, you move on, and you do the best you can. I got lost in this old world and forgot who I am.”

I have just finished reading the excellent and admirably honest autobiography of Anthony Hopkins entitled We Did OK, Kid. Hopkins seems to have been (he is still alive) one of those people who grew wiser, better, and kinder with age. Throughout the book, however, I thought I could discern a life suffused with loneliness and sadness.

When I was a young man and a new teenage convert to the Christian Faith through the Jesus People movement I believed whatever I read in a book as long as it was written by someone with letters after their name. Yep: I was that dumb. And so when I first read an article written by S.G.F. Brandon saying that Jesus was a Zealot, I was shaken in my faith and thrown for a loop. In my distress I turned for help and refutation to the young people who converted me, fellow Jesus People just a few years older than myself. They basically just shrugged and said (essentially) “whatever”. Yet despite my distress, I soldiered on and tried to keep my doubts firmly locked away.

Eva Mozes Kor was a Jewish girl, born in Romania to Alexander and Jaffa Mozes, the only Jewish residents in the area. She had three siblings, one of whom was her twin sister Miriam. Her parents and two older sisters were gassed in Auschwitz; she survived because, along with her twin sister, she was the subject of medical experiments that Josef Mengele was performing on twins there. After the camp was liberated by the Red Army in 1945, Eva went to live in Poland, Romania and eventually the U.S. She died on July 4, 2019 at the age of 85 in Krakow, Poland accompanying a group on an educational tour of Auschwitz.

Not too long ago I wrote a blog piece entitled “Music Hath Charms” in which I argued for the softening and transformational nature of music (adding a plug for choir directors with the suggestion they were mostly all underpaid). One person who read the piece called my attention to some (shall we say) less edifying music and said, “What about this music?” I replied: “Good point.” My respondent was right: not all music hath charms to soothe the savage breast. Indeed, some music hath charms to incite a savage breast or even to create savagery in the human breast where it did not exist before. All music hath charms but sometimes the charms are harmful.