No Other Foundation

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.

Recently I was scrolling through the website of a famously-liberal denomination which quickly became excruciatingly boring because it was so predictable. In the early 1980s my (then) Anglican bishop the Right Reverend H. V. R. Short described the group as “humanism with God-talk” and I was curious to see what it was like now. The answer: more humanism, less God-talk. The website was basically a collection of leftist causes with an occasional nod to the notion of “exploring faith”. Jesus was brought in for the odd cameo appearance to justify their acceptance of… well, pretty much anything so long as it was liberal and on the extreme left. And it occurred to me that their Jesus bore little resemblance to the one found in the New Testament or in the history of the Church.

In the narrative in John 5 we find a story which our Lord heals a paralytic who had been lying by the pool of Bethesda, and there is a detail there that I had missed in all the decades I had been reading that story. It is this: our Lord healed the man with a word, telling him to take up the pallet on which he had been lying and walk home. The man did so. It was, St. John informs us, a Sabbath when this miracle occurred. As he was walking home carrying his pallet, some Jews saw him and rebuked him for doing this, saying “It is the Sabbath and it is not allowed for you to carry your pallet.” The man replied that “He who made me well was the one who said to me ‘Take up your pallet and walk’”. The Jews responded with a question: “Who is the man who said to you ‘Take up your pallet and walk?’” Eventually of course all discovered that it was Jesus who had said that.

Way, way back in time in the years 1979-1981 I lived in the village of Turtleford, Saskatchewan, having moved there from suburban Toronto. Turtleford was a rural village of about 500 souls and my ministry as an Anglican priest took me to other villages, such as Spruce Lake and Livelong (and no, I am not making up any of these names). When I first arrived in Turtleford as the village’s local Anglican priest, I needed a map to navigate the countryside to find other villages and towns. The way from Turtleford to Prince Albert (where my bishop lived) took me past the village of Fairholme.