No Other Foundation

Yesterday I was listening to a song by Ruth Hughes (now Ruth Hughes Finlay; see inset above) from her 1976 L.P. Awake North Wind, a song paraphrasing Psalm 104. I remember buying the album from her personally, showing up at the side door of her Scarborough home. She was a part of a charismatic group to which I then belonged; we were a tight-knit family so it wasn’t hard to find out where she lived. I remember in particular telling her that her voice sounded “anointed” (that’s how we talked back then). Being a modest person, she just stared and said nothing.

People sometimes ask me “What is the strangest question you were ever asked in all your years of Orthodox ministry?” I can recall many strange questions (such as “Did Adam have a belly-button?”) but perhaps few were stranger than the question which queried, “Are we allowed to lift up our hands in church when we pray?” My guess is that the query came from discomfort with some modern charismatic practices which include raising one’s hands in church whenever praying or singing. It is clearly a case of “guilt by association”: those crazy charismatics seem to always raise their hands in prayer, so we shouldn’t.

I would like to invite you to come with me on a journey of imagination that may help us to understand what it was like to live in “Bible times”. To make this journey you will need to leave behind absolutely everything you know about geography and science.

I have just finished watching a three-part documentary entitled “A band called LoveSong”, produced by the group itself and focusing upon their music and their part in the Jesus People movement in the 1970s. Pathologically nostalgic old man that I am, I enjoyed the trip down memory lane. The men in the band are now of course much older but they are still singing the old songs.

For some people, the significance of the saints is that of mediators, those who stand between us and God and through their prayers reconcile us to Him and sanctify us. In this way of thinking, Christians are primarily sinners who need to be saved and sanctified, who need a connection with the holy so that they can go from being guilty and profane to being forgiven and holy. The saints, in this setting, provide just this connection. (We note in passing that this mindset tends to forget such texts as 1 Timothy 2:5 and to confuse a mediator with an intercessor. Any Christian, including a saint, can intercede for someone else; Christ alone reconciles us to God.)