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...

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 pra...

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 set...

During the tumultuous fourth century when it seemed everyone in the Church was fighting everyone else and Arians and Orthodox (to use modern terms) were going at it hammer and tong, one of the weapons used in those debates was the Bible. All the arguing parties called themselves “orthodox” and “catholics”; all of them said they believed in the Holy Trinity (i.e. all could read Matthew 28:19) and a...

Odds are that if you began to talk about “kenosis” in a room full of strangers they would assume you were talking about a change in your metabolism. Nope: that’s “ketosis”, not “kenosis”. The term “kenosis” is a theological term used to describe the divine self-emptying that occurred at the Incarnation of the eternal Logos/ Word in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

One question that is often asked of pastors by new converts is “How often should I go to confession?” Closely allied to this query is the one which asks, “Do I need to go to confession each time before receiving Holy Communion?” These are good questions, and because they deal with the human heart, the answers are not simple. It is not like answering a query about the posted speed limit by saying,...

Twenty-five years ago today, on September 11, 2001, many innocent people died in New York City— almost 3000 by one count. Those were the ones trapped in the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center when two airplanes, commandeered by Islamic terrorists, flew into those buildings in order to make a statement and kill as many Americans as possible. Such was the horror and trauma of that day that its da...

I have just finished re-reading the late J. N. D. Kelly’s wonderfully readable biography of Jerome and it made me a bit sad. St. Jerome was, of course, the greatest Christian scholar of his day and he deserves immense credit for soldiering ahead with his translation of the Old Testament from the Hebrew when he knew that he would get all kinds of grief for it. But for all his scholarship and brilli...

In chapter 14 of the Didache, a work dating to about 100 A.D., we read the following: “On the Lord’s own day gather together and break bread and give thanks, having first confessed your sins so that your sacrifice [i.e. the Eucharist] may be pure. But let no one who has a quarrel with a companion join you until they have been reconciled so that your sacrifice may not be defiled. For this is the sa...

Readers of this blog may not be familiar with the Homoeans which would be quite understandable for they all died out centuries ago. Now they can only be discovered within the pages of church history books, but they were all the rage in the fourth century. Let’s review.

There have been a number of times throughout my ministry that I have been asked by inquirers or parishioners if I would be their spiritual father. My answer is always the same: “No, but I am happy to be your pastor and your friend”. Sometimes I explain more fully: “People in parishes don’t need a spiritual father; they need a pastor.” My guess is that my attitude is a common one among parish clerg...

In 1918 G. K. Chesterton wrote a series of five articles for the New Witness condemning the (then current) move in England to enact more liberal divorce laws. The articles were collected and published in 1920 under the title The Superstition of Divorce (image inset), a first-edition of which was given to me as a kind gift by a very dear friend. In the book Chesterton argues at length against the l...

One might imagine that the very first words of the Orthodox Liturgy consisted of a blessing pronounced by the priest saying, “Blessed is the Kingdom of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit!” It is not so. The very first words of the Liturgy consist not of a blessing by the priest but of an observation by the deacon. He turns to the priest and says, “It is time for the Lord to act!” The...

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...

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 f...

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”.