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.

Those familiar with liturgical worship will be familiar with the pre-anaphoral dialogue— the dialogue between celebrant and people that takes place just before the celebrant prays the anaphora, the long prayer over the bread and wine which consecrates them to be the Body and Blood of the Lord soon to be received in Holy Communion. It is an important dialogue, indeed, even a crucial one, for it constitutes the celebrant’s blessing from the royal priesthood (i.e. the assembled laity) to offer the Eucharist in their name and as their mouthpiece. That is why he faces them throughout—or should face them, as Fr. Sergei Glagolev (inset above) taught us. Besides, who turns their back to someone in the middle of talking to them?

In his 1697 play The Mourning Bride, playwright William Congreve wrote that “Musick hath charms to sooth a savage breast [i.e. a savage heart], to soften rocks or bend a knotted oak”.

Recently I watched the very interesting 2016 documentary entitled “Rome: Empire Without Limit with Mary Beard”. Ms. Beard, a very readable British scholar, functioned as host and narrator. Regarding Christ, Ms. Beard said, “one Jewish Rabbi had developed new ideas. His name was Jesus. The Sayings of Jesus, as they were called, were only written down later. But it’s clear enough that for the Jews he was preaching blasphemy. And at the beginning at least, for the Romans he was just another troublemaker. However exactly the story went, he was arrested, put to trial, and sentenced to death Roman-style, by crucifixion. The Romans must have thought “problem solved”, but it was only the start.

In the Protestant Evangelical world the priest (sorry: “the pastor”) is not a figure of authority within the local church community but is primarily a preacher, an administrator. He can be available for counselling, if necessary. In large mega-churches he functions as a CEO. But he is not a figure of authority within the church; anyone can disagree with his sermon, his Biblical exegesis, and his doctrine in the same way as they would disagree with any Christian. The Evangelical version of the Reformation doctrine of “the priesthood of all believers” effectively functions to deprive the pastor of most of his traditional presbyteral authority.

In a wonderful old book by Leslie Farmer published in 1944 entitled We Saw the Holy City (mentioned briefly in last week’s blog), Farmer tells a story about how he led a group of soldiers on leave during the Second World War to the church in Bethlehem at Christmas time. The Reverend Farmer was assigned to Jerusalem as the Methodist Army Chaplain for two years during that war and through exploration and scholarly research he got to know many of the places of pilgrimage in Jerusalem and throughout the Holy Land very well. Besides his pastoral duties to the sick, he also spent much time talking to soldiers on leave passing through the city and would lead them to the holy places and explain their significance.