Ending Well by Rose McCormick Brandon

 In his small but terrifying book, Night, Elie Wiesel writes of life in a concentration camp. He tells this story of a young Polish violinist, Juliek.

Near the end of the war, breathless for the allies to break through and rescue them, Jewish concentration camp inmates were herded for miles. Starved, frozen, these men who had eluded crematoriums, some for years,  died by the tens of thousands on the snow-covered fields of Germany.

Survivors of the journey arrived at Buchenwald, a concrete graveyard. Men stacked their broomstick bodies like kindling to warm one another. Wiesel and his father were in that pile of dying humanity.

From beneath him, Wiesel heard a violin playing a Beethoven concerto. The music came from young Juliek. During years of persecution, he'd protected his treasured violin.

"The darkness enveloped us. All I could hear was the violin. Juliek was playing his life. His whole being was gliding over the strings."

Wiesel fell asleep to the music. When he awoke Juliek was dead, the body of his violin crushed.

"How could I forget this concert given before an audience of the dead and the dying? Even today, when I hear that particular piece by Beethoven, my eyes close and out of the darkness emerges the pale and melancholy face of my Polish comrade bidding farewell to an audience of dying men."

Juliek's music soothed the souls of the dying.

With his final bit of strength, he gave.

A few days later, allied soldiers arrived at the gates of Buchenwald. Rescuers. 

Sometimes in the midst of hideous happenings, a bird sings, a baby giggles, the sun pierces the clouds.  Like the violin of Juliek these remind us, in the midst of human suffering, that beauty still exists. That God is still on His throne and that He moves in human hearts.

Juliek used his last bit of strength to bless others. He ended well. Many don't end well. (Often we see this in the visible and privileged.) Some use their last bit of energy to vent, rage and avenge. They leave a legacy with an unpleasant odor. 

Ending well is supremely important for the Christian. For inspiration read the story of Caleb (Joshua 14).

Make a commitment to end well.

Note: Elie Wiesel won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. 

***

Rose McCormick Brandon lives in Caledonia, Ontario with husband Doug. An award-winning personal experience and inspirational writer, Rose contributes to denominational publications and devotionals. She writes and teaches Bible Studies, authors biblical essays and is the author of the Canadian history book, Promises of Home – Stories of Canada’s British Home Children. Her book, One Good Word Makes all the Difference, contains stories of her personal journey from prodigal to passionate follower of Jesus. She is the mother of three adult children and grandmother of four. 

The Joy ot Tolerance -HIRD

By Rev. Dr. Ed Hird

The late Elie Wiesel, famed writer and holocaust survivor, commented that there is divine beauty in learning, just as there is human beauty in tolerance.  Most of us as Christians believe in the value of tolerance even if we cannot define what it means.  The Concise Oxford Dictionary speaks of tolerance as forbearance which means to completely bear with someone’s failings as you patiently give them time to grow. As Ephesian 4:2 says, we are to be patient, forbearing and bearing with one another in love.  To joyfully tolerate someone doesn’t mean that we need to agree with them. As Dr John Gottman puts it, when you honor and respect each other, you're usually able to appreciate each other's point of view, even if you don't agree with it.  You don’t need to be a moral relativist winking at sin, in order to be biblically tolerant. The joy of tolerance is the love of neighbour, doing unto others as you would have them do unto you.  Tolerance is also about choosing to forgive.  As Colossians 3:13 puts it, we need to be forbearing one another and forgiving one another, if you have any quarrel against one another.  Sometimes our children and teenagers greatly try our patience, particularly when they may be teasing their siblings.  The joy of tolerance includes setting healthy boundaries while not giving up on painful people, including our family members.  

The Concise Oxford Dictionary also speaks of tolerance as recognition of the right of private judgement in religious matters, including the liberty to uphold one’s religious opinions and forms of worship.  Our democratic freedoms, like freedom of thought, speech and assembly, enshrined in our Bill of Rights, are all rooted in the primary freedom, which is freedom of religion.  

The British Act of Toleration in 1689 was a huge step forward in advancing the democratic rights of people to freedom of religion.  GK Chesterton commented[1] that tolerance sometimes leads to timidity where people become afraid to even mention their religious views.  True tolerance doesn’t push religion into a closet but welcomes it joyfully in the public square.  Intolerance is often like bad breath and body odor; it is difficult to always notice one’s own intolerance. Sometimes people who pride themselves on being more tolerant than others end up intolerantly looking down on other people.  Dr Timothy Keller commented: “If you're intolerant of people you think are intolerant, you're still intolerant. If you are judgmental of people you think are judgmental, you are judgmental.”  Sometimes smokers in our postmodern culture are intolerantly treated like outcasts.  We Christians need to remember to love the smoker even if we cannot tolerate their second-hand smoke.

Recently we visited all 10,000 homes in the Seymour/Deep Cove area, inviting people to the March 3^rd to 5th Festival of Hope at Rogers Arena with Franklin Graham.  We were impressed by the tolerant welcome and hospitality of our neighbours.  Even atheists would kindly engage us in fascinating conversations.  True tolerance does not have to agree in order to love.  As Romans 2:4 says, God himself is tolerant, forbearing, kind and patient, giving us time to change and turn back.  My prayer for the Lower Mainland Christian community is that we would grow in joyful tolerance as we share our common faith in the one Lord Jesus.

The Rev. Dr. Ed Hird, Rector

St. Simon's Church North Vancouver

-author of Restoring Health: body, mind and spirit

-an article adapted for the Light Magazine and the Deep Cove Crier

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[1] GK Chesterton, Autobiography of GK Chesterton (Ignatius Press, 1936), 238. https://www.amazon.com/Autobiography-G-K-Chesterton-G-K/dp/1586170716

Eyes to See -HIRD

By the Rev. Dr. Ed Hird

Recently my eye surgeon Dr. Kirker had me lie face down for three days.  I had just had laser eye surgery for a microscopic macular hole.  This condition was not noticeable until I was out at UBC reading tiny 19^th century print.  Upon going to an eye specialist, I discovered that I did not have either  lense correction, cataracts, glaucoma, retinal detachment or macular degeneration.  Over time, the gel or vitreous in our eyes shrink and detaches from the retina.  In rare cases, it sticks and causes a microscopic hole.  Before 1970, they could not do anything about this.  After laser surgery, the surgeon filled my right eye with gas which temporarily held everything in place.  In order for the gas to do its job, I had to be vertical for 90% of the time.  Fortunately I was able to rent a massage desk and full-body massage pillow.  Sleeping facedown for four nights was a brand new experience for me.   My wife Janice said that I didn’t snore at all.  I never hear myself snore. 

Lying face down prohibited me from watching TV or checking my computer.  Because our North Vancouver Library system has a large assortment of talking books, I was able listen to John Grisham, Louis Lamour, and Elie Wiesel.  All three authors were passionate about justice.  Grisham sought justice in the court room.  Lamour sought justice at the end of a gun.  Elie Wiesel sought justice from God and neighbour.

Lying on my face enabled me to listen to Elie Wiesel’s trilogy: Night, Dawn, and Day. Each of the trilogy was deeply moving and disturbing.  Like my successful laser surgery, Elie’s trilogy gave me eyes to see what I had been previously somewhat blinded to.  As a holocaust survivor, Wiesel has written over 50 books interpreting the meaning of the Holocaust for our modern age.  Wiesel miraculously survived the Concentration camps when so many of his family and friends ended in Hitler’s ovens.  In his receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, they said of Wiesel: “From the abyss of the death camps, he has come as a messenger to humanity – not with a message of hate and revenge but with one of brotherhood and atonement.” 

Too many people in our culture have either never heard of or hardened their hearts to the message of the Holocaust.  It seems to some like water under the bridge, as ancient history.  Wiesel’s book help us to enter into the story of the Holocaust as if for the first time.  As a vivid story teller, Wiesel makes you feel that you were right there in the midst of the great tragedy.  Would it be possible for Wiesel’s books to be included in our school systems as a way of reducing hatred and anti-Semitism?  It could give our young people new eyes to see what it is liked to be bullied and rejected.

It is too easy to scapegoat other people and blame them for the problems in our lives.  Racism seems to be deep in many of our cultures.  It dies a hard death.  Without regular self-examination and repentance, racism can easily slip back into our hearts.  Anti-Semitism has proven in the past century to be one of the deadliest forms of racism.  Jewish people have suffered deeply again and again through pogroms, inquisitions, and job discrimination.  When conflict arises in the world, anti-Semitism and racism seem to spike.  What would it take for us to truly forgive and love those who offend us, those who are different? 

Chronic and acute anxiety push us in the direction of requiring that everyone act and smell just like us.  Elie Wiesel’s writings encourage us to celebrate differences and uniquenesses of other neighbours.  Jesus quoted Leviticus in commanding us to love our neighbour as ourselves.  Love is always the answer.  Love gives us eyes to see when we are blind.  Love is an expression of amazing grace, where I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see.  My prayer for those reading this article is that God will give us eyes to see that other neighbours are just as human, as valuable and as sacred as we are. 

The Rev. Dr. Ed Hird, Rector

St. Simon’s Church North Vancouver

Anglican Mission in Canada

http://stsimonschurch.ca

-Ed’s brand-new sequel book Restoring Health: body, mind and spirit is available online with Amazon.com in both paperback and ebook form. In Canada, Amazon.ca has the book available inpaperback and ebook. It is also posted on Amazon UK (paperback andebook ), Amazon France (paperback andebook), and Amazon Germany (paperback and ebook).

Restoring Health is also available online on Barnes and Noble in both paperback and Nook/ebook form.  Nook gives a sample of the book to read online.

-In order to obtain a copy of the prequel book

‘Battle for the Soul of Canada’, please send a $18.50 cheque to ‘ED HIRD’, #1008-555 West 28th Street, North Vancouver, BC V7N 2J7. For mailing the book to the USA, please send $20.00 USD. This can also be done by PAYPALusing the e-mailed_hird@telus.net . Be sure to list your mailing address. The Battle for the Soul of Canada e-book can be obtained for $9.99 CDN/USD.

-Click to download a complimentary PDF copy of the Battle for the Soul study guide : Seeking God’s Solution for a Spirit-Filled Canada

HORROR-- Alan Reynolds

            A recent item in our newspaper noted the 20th anniversary of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Attending were former U.S. President Bill Clinton and Nobel Prize laureate and Holocaust survivor Eli Wiesel, who as a boy was interned in the horror of Auschwitz.

 Despite movies and books which seek to portray situations of horror for our entertainment, we have not
completely domesticated the word. The bombings at the Boston Marathon, the continued bloodshed in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as Somalia and other parts of Africa, the collapsing of a garment factory building in
Bangladesh -- the horrors seems to be endless. Of all the horrors of the last hundred years, one stands out,
perhaps because we feel a part of it, bearing some responsible for it: that is the Holocaust, the attempted
elimination of the Jewish people during World War II by the Nazi regime. You may not like reading the following (as they say on TV, you may find the contents disturbing), but it is important that we remember. It is important that we wrestle with the questions it raises, and to read the comments of Francois Mauriac from a Christian point of view.    

 And yes, I admit that this, the suffering of the innocent, the righteous, is the problem I find most difficult theologically. In fact I doubt that it can be resolved theologically. The closest I come to any satisfaction I find in the Cross. God is with us, even when God seems gone, to have left us bereft; when God seems to have forsaken us. I have found it to be true. “God was in Christ” (II Corinthians 5:9), and is with us today in the horrors we face in our own lives.

In his book, Night, Eli Wiesel tells of being a child in the internment camp at Auschwitz, a story of horror upon horror, where the SS guards would toss babies in the air and shoot at them, using them for target
practice:

One day when we came back from work, we saw three gallows rearing up in the assembly, three black crows. Roll call. SS all around, machine guns trained.  Three victims in chains, one of them a young boy, a child with a refined and beautiful face, the face of a sad angel. The SS seemed more preoccupied, more disturbed than usual. To hang a young boy in front of thousands of spectators was no light matter.  The head of the camp read the verdict. All eyes were on the child. He was lividly pale, biting his lips. The gallows threw its shadow over him.
 The three victims mounted together onto the chairs. The three necks were placed at the same moment within the nooses.
“Long live liberty!” cried the two adults.
But the child was silent.
“Where is God? Where is He?” someone behind me asked.
At a sign from the head of the camp, the three chairs [were] tipped over.
Total silence throughout the camp. On the horizon the sun was setting.
"Bare your heads!" yelled the head of the camp. His voice was raucous. We were weeping.
Then the march past began. The two adults were no longer alive. Their tongues hung swollen, blue-tinged. But the third rope was still moving, being so light, the child was still alive….
For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying the slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet glazed.
Behind me, I heard the same man asking,
 “Where is God now?”
And I head a voice within me answer him:
 “Where is he? Here He is – He is hanging here on this gallows….” 

(Night, by Eli Wiesel, Avon Books, 1972, pp. 74-76.)

 In the forward to the book, Francois Mauriac tells of being interviewed by Wiesel some years later. Wiesel was now a young man, a journalist.

The young Israeli who came to interview me for a Tel Aviv paper immediately won my sympathy, and our conversation very quickly took a personal turn. It led me to recall memories of the Occupation. I confided to my young editor that nothing I had seen during those somber years had left so deep a mark upon me as those trainloads of Jewish children standing at Austerlitz [train] station [in Paris, during the Occupation]. At that time we knew nothing of Nazi methods of extermination. And who could have imagined them! Yet the way these lambs had been torn from their mothers in itself exceeded anything we had so far thought possible. I believe that on that day, I touched for the first time upon the mystery of iniquity.
 This then was what I had to tell the young journalist. And when I said with a sigh, “How often I have thought about those children!” he replied, “I was one of them.” He had seen his mother, a beloved little sister, and all his family disappear into an oven fed with living creatures. “Never shall I forget that night,” he wrote. "Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever, those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust.”

And Mauriac writes,

 And I who believe that God is love, what answer could I give my young questioner. What did I say to him? Did I speak of that other Israeli, his brother, who may have resembled him – the Crucified, whose Cross had conquered the world? Did I affirm that the stumbling block to his faith was the cornerstone of mine, and the conformity between the Cross and the suffering of men was in my eyes the key to that impenetrable mystery whereon the faith of his childhood had perished? … All is grace. If the Eternal is the Eternal, the last word for each one of us belongs to Him. This is what I should have told this Jewish child. But I could only embrace him, weeping.