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January 27
David Barnhart
January 27, 2025
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin, 2022.
Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and marks the anniversary, in 1945, of the liberation of the Auschwitz and Birkenau Concentration Camps in Poland. This is its 80th anniversary, and as such has a particular poignancy as there are few survivors left, and fascism has again reared its hideous head in the United States and Europe.
Today is the feast day of Saint Sava, an important figure in Serbian culture who helped root the country in Eastern Orthodoxy.
Today also marks the birth of David Strauss, in 1808. Strauss would scandalize the church and Christian higher education by making a distinction between what he called the “historical Jesus” and the myths (miracles) associated with him. Strauss was also one of the first theologians to use the word “myth” to indicate something that was more than true, or that could not be described with conventional language.
Today also marks the death, in 2017, of Pete Seeger, musician and activist. He was part of a folk music revival in the United States. He was also hounded by Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee, but refused to incriminate his colleagues. Instead of writing “This machine kills fascists” on his banjo, as his mentor Woody Guthrie did, he wrote “This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.”
Reflection:
Among many other lyrics, Pete Seeger wrote:
So, Mr. President,
We got this one big job to do
That's lick Mr. Hitler and when we're through,
Let no one else ever take his place
To trample down the human race.
He also said:
“The easiest way to avoid wrong notes is to never open your mouth and sing. What a mistake that would be.”
David Strauss wrote:
“If God and man are in themselves one, and if religion is the human side of this unity: then must this unity be made evident to man in religion, and become in him consciousness and reality.”
Prayer: Holy Spirit, Great Spirit, you have creates us all as part of the same event, separated from each other only by the useful fiction that we somehow end where the universe begins. Help us to see past the end of our noses into the lives and souls of others such that apartheid, war, genocide, weaponized poverty, and manufactured suffering of all kinds will end. Amen.