frei

Thursday now, this was meant for yesterday, to be Wednesday's blogpost. But before it was half-finished, Life co-opted the Time, and here we are.

Resuming, I'll not press "Publish" for whatever this morning's +Time blogpost turns out to be, until I find a suitable image, a picture to head it up (mind, it only has to be suitable to me, suiting you is not a factor), but for now the jumping fingers are working to convert whatever's bothering my brain to whatever shows up on the page.

The +Time page, that is, and then a link to it on my Facebook page if discretion is so indelicate. All while snacking breakfast, which Wednesday was the second Blue Willow spoof mug of hot & black from my coffee club February treat, and, on a bread plate of the Wedgwood Blue Florentine with serpent tongues weaving through oxen skull eye sockets, an open face sandwich of brown seed bread, light spread of Hellmann's and, the piece de resistance, two slices of liver loaf that in the history of my growing up I would have called liver wurst or liver cheese. Mama always discarded its edge of pork fat, but I once heard Dr Oz, whose star has since fallen like a millstone into the depths of the sea, say that, unlike beef fat, pork fat is good for, so I include it as part of the delectable experience.

Where was I?

Still plowing through my Lent 2023 discipline, Jörg Friedrich's (this is the point at which yesterday, Wednesday morning, the phone jingled and a voice asking to have the HV gate opened) - - "THE FIRE - - The Bombing of Germany 1940-1945"

In microscopically detailed research, Friedrich reports the experience on the ground. Not explosives but Fire, Fire itself as the weapon, Fire in raging, storming conflagration, and not military but civilian populations as the strategic target. Resulting in Not Only the suffering of the German people, das deutsche Volk both Nazi and resistance, prisoners of war, European Jews, and the Reich's slave labor, But Also the devastating obliteration of more than a thousand years of history in the destruction of the exquisite - - art, villages, churches, cathedrals, craftsmanship, museums, universities, the people and their things and history that comprise a civilization. And not only throughout Germany, but also France, Holland, Denmark, and other countries, humans, civilian populations and earthly treasures destroyed as the Allies pushed German forces back to reclaim occupied territory. Friedrich is not up for my speed-reading, my progress is very slow, mentally exhausting, requires frequent pauses and lay it aside.

Still also open and reading, the second book, "Voices from the Third Reich" by German authors Steinhoff, Pechel and Showalter,

And now a third, not one of the eight books I've already committed for Lent 2023, Tuesday I opened, downloaded, and read well into "Christian Attitudes Toward The Jews In The Earliest Centuries A.D." Online, a 500 page book that is the doctoral dissertation of S. Mark Veldt, PhD for Western Michigan University 2007. Why does this bother me so? And how does it relate to my Lent 2023 project?

In that of all its unbounded evil, World War Two that I am so fascinated with, the most notorious atrocity of the Third Reich is The Holocaust - - Germans rounding up, dehumanizing, and tormenting to death millions upon millions of human beings, focusing mainly on murdering some six million Jews alone. So, how and why the intense hatred of Jews? Today resurrecting throughout Europe and America into all its wickedness, it wasn't just Hitler with his Final Solution: antiSemitism, both latent and open, has origins in the Christian church? Is this true? Anyone who digs seriously, critically and hopefully objectively into Christian scriptures becomes uneasy about this and increasingly discomfited.

Veldt's research

finds it with particular vehemence from the fourth century A.D. in rabidly venomous words of the emperor Constantine, who convened the Council that prepared our Nicene Creed:

And so, I'm reading deeper than my first Lenten thoughts, to find out for myself who may be ultimately culpable for the horror and shame of the Holocaust.

The opening verses of a Palm Sunday, Holy Week, and Good Friday hymn

Ah, holy Jesus, how hast thou offended,

that we to judge thee have in hate pretended?

By foes derided, by thine own rejected,

O most afflicted!

Who was the guilty? Who brought this upon thee?

Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone thee!

'Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee;

I crucified thee.

Jesus of Nazareth, son of Mary, Son of God, crucified again and again, over and over again down through the Christian ages, every Time a Jew is the focus of anti-Semitism. Six million times in the Holocaust alone, and continuing in our day and age.

My project for Lent 2023: how to reconcile to this. macht frei - - how to myself make free?