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...

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 r...

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 co...

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...

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 Anglic...

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 con...

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 h...

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 d...

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 exploratio...

Time to climb aboard our time machine and leave the year 2026 for a time over a thousand years before Christ, the time when Eli was high priest in Israel during the period of the Judges (read all about in 1 Samuel). The land is in turmoil yet again: the Philistines immediately west of us are threatening attack and everyone is afraid.

Recently I read a copy of the alumni magazine from a mainline Protestant seminary. It was very well done and showcased a number of people, both faculty and students, all fervent in their faith and zealous to serve the Lord. It presented the seminary, as it intended to do, as a place of thriving faith, burgeoning mission, and robust spiritual health, which I’m sure it is. Reading it you would never...

In a post-Liturgy Q & A held by a wonderful and learned priest, Fr. Justin Hewlett, someone present (a Baptist, if memory serves) asked a question about the Eucharist. He had been reading some anti-Catholic literature which had denounced the supposedly Catholic teaching that Christ was re-sacrificed at every Mass and he wondered, since the Orthodox use the same kind of sacrificial language about t...

With the expected influx of ordinations to the priesthood hoping to keep up with the recent surge of new converts coming into Orthodox parishes, many new priests will be stepping into pulpits (metaphorical or otherwise) to preach. Given the importance of preaching in the life of a parish (St. John Chrysostom knows what I mean), I am surprised at how comparatively little importance it is given in s...

The term “the donation of Constantine” refers to a medieval forgery, long used to support the claims and authority of the medieval papacy. According to the document, the emperor Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor, transferred as a gift the city of Rome and the western part of the Roman empire to the bishop of Rome. The story goes like this.

Lately, through the kindness of a friend, I watched recently an old 1961 British film starring a very young Hayley Mills entitled Whistle Down the Wind, dating from before her Disney days. I saw it as a young child when it was first released in movie theatres and re-watching it as an old man I found it had lost none of its magic.

One doesn’t think of stars immersed in Hollywood or British theatre and who attend All The Best Parties sitting in an arena and listening to an address by Billy Graham, but so it was.

In my experience it’s a safe bet that most Protestants are not enthused about the veneration of relics— i.e. bits of a saint’s bone or bits of things they once used, such as pieces of their clothing (these are called “secondary relics”). That would apply even to Protestant “saints”: if I came to a Lutheran carrying a fragment of Martin Luther’s shinbone in a fancy reliquary box and asked him if he...

It was during the 1988 All-American Council of the OCA that I overheard Fr. Daniel Donlick (then Dean of St. Tikhon’s Seminary) comment to a group of worker priests (i.e. clergy who supported themselves and their families by working at secular jobs while serving parishes) “We must bow low before you worker priests for your dedication and the work that you do.” It was the kind and generous acknowle...

During the exchange of the Peace in the Orthodox Divine Liturgy it had been my custom to greet those around me by saying, “Christ is in our midst!”, expecting the reply (and giving as the reply when the greeting was given to me) “He is and ever shall be!” I was therefore quite surprised when the (now late) Fr. Michael Oleksa commented to me, “Actually, that’s not the correct reply: we should reply...

At the ordination of a priest or deacon the following ritual is observed: some of the serving clergy take the candidate to be ordained into the nave (in the case of a diaconal candidate, two subdeacons; in the case of the priestly candidate, two deacons), assist him in making a prostration toward the assembled congregation and they then say “Command!” They then raise up the candidate, turn him aro...

On October 31 parts of the western world celebrated Reformation Day, giving thanks for the Protestant Reformation. (I am tempted to observe that on the old Julian calendar, Reformation Day was on Thursday November 13.) Here I would like to look back and make a few observations about the accomplishments of the Reformation. For the Reformation resulted in a number of things we now too easily take fo...

Tucked well away in the Divine Liturgy in a prayer that the priest says silently for himself we find a significant title of Christ. The priest offers the prayer as the people sing the cherubic hymn but because it is not a prayer of the Church but a private prayer of the priest there is no reason for the people to hear it and seal it with their “Amen”. Nonetheless, I sometimes feel that it is a sha...

As a baby boomer child of the 1950s, I was taught to hate war. For my generation, war was an unmitigated evil (though, happily, this notion did not spill over into hating or disrespecting our soldiers—later described as “peace-keepers”). Our generation’s hatred of war was well expressed in the 1969 heart-felt anti-war song popularized by Edwin Starr, some of the lyrics of which were, “War! What is...

When I was young, I read a famous poem that I now regard as one of the strangest poems ever written. It is the one entitled “Do not go gentle into that good night” by Dylan Thomas with its repeated refrain “do not go gentle into that good night…rage, rage against the dying of the light”.