NOVEMBER 4 2017
TURMOIL
I like that word TURMOIL. It sounds like what it portrays.
I sometimes write lines of the rhyming kind. TURMOIL for instance, rhymes with toil, spoil, oil, soil, with boil, foil, roil, foil, with despoil, embroil, recoil — oodles of possibilities to make up something that ends in …oil. Rhyming lines make for easier remembering and can be made into singing versions.
I once wrote six verses on a minister who was retiring and I had the congregation sing them on a familiar tune: “Praise God from whom all blessings flow” (8888LM). Here are 3 of them.
A man acquainted with each trend,
in dogma steeped, in creed not bend,
unerring knowledge quick to lend:
our dear beloved Reverend.
The sick to see, the rifts to mend,
And always justice to defend,
The Gospel preach, Goodnews extend,
Our dear beloved Reverend.
On the Lord’s will he does depend,
he must, he can’t on his stipend,
another reason to commend,
our dear beloved Reverend.
For some I could have added, but never did:
His sermons are, I must contend
Quite often boring, without end,
That’s why I simply do pretend
To listen to the Reverend.
On TURMOIL here’s what my muse tells me:
Our world today, by using oil,
Has done away with human toil,
But poisoned our so precious soil,
So will it end in great turmoil?
Yes, soon there’s nothing left to spoil
Then all of nature will recoil
Who do we think we can still foil
Before it ends in great turmoil?
The ocean waves already boil
The forests burn and tempers roil
Our rulers lie and truth destroy
Yes, it will end in great turmoil.
(Can be sung on the tune: By Babel’s streams we sat and wept)
Turmoil is the trend: wherever I look matters are in motion, often violently.
Jonathan Wiener, in 1990, wrote, “THE NEXT ONE HUNDRED YEARS, Shaping the Fate of Our Living Earth”. He relates how already in 1896, a Swedish chemist, Svante Arrhenius, wrote, “We are evaporating our coal mines into the air. …Eventually this change might very well heat the planet to heights outside all human experience.”
Wiener relates how Charles David Keeling, 60 years later, in 1956, when 26 and with a fresh Ph.D. in chemistry made it his life’s goal to measure CO2 in the atmosphere. Carbon Dioxide is the gas that our cars exhale through their tail pipes, causing Green House Gases.
Now, another 60 years later, these gases are fueling WEATHER TURMOIL. As of October 31 this year the count had accelerated to 404.16 parts per million, the largest annual increase ever. Historically 280 was the norm. Globally trees – thanks to forest fires and clear-cutting – now emit more CO2 than they absorb.
A recent report points out that concentrations of CO2 are now 145%, methane 257% and nitrous oxide 122% above pre-industrial times.
The beginning of the End.
This year is signaling the beginning of the end. From now on the most watched website will be ARCTIC NEWS which also gives details on what happens in the air above us, where NORMAL is no longer a current word.
As I have written before: everything is connected to everything else. That ‘everything else’ reminds me of Colossians 1: 15-16. It says that: “Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through Him and for Him.”
Now, with Satan in charge, ALL THINGS are about to change, in the air, in the soil and in the seas, including all that is not visible such as the airwaves, the rays that are bounced to and from the satellites, the TV streams that are received via the dishes sporting on our roofs, the thoughts that penetrate our minds: all these invisible things shape our minds more than the few sermons on Sundays: everything is about to change; nothing is stable anymore: TURMOIL is the new state.
A Chinese curse is with us: may you live in interesting times.
This past week Washington was awash in turmoil. It’s just one example of what’s going on over the entire globe. The election of Donald Trump is not exceptional: he is the exact outcome of the mentality of the American Psyche: brash and loud and abrasive and entirely focused on money, given to exaggeration, stretching the truth, seeking to appear bigger and richer than they really are: the proverbial American. Trump so resonates with the American psyche because he embodies it.
What is so dangerous is that America claims to be religious, except that its religion is no longer Christian. As Harold Bloom so acutely observed: America claims to be Christian, but has ceased to be so: Gnosticism rules the church, and not any church but all the churches: it’s built into their very structures.
The USA is not the only country is disarray. Great Britain, when it chose by a tiny majority to leave the European Union, has also been at odds with itself as its economy is facing declining growth prospects. The ruling Conservatives have no clue how to quit the E.U. without doing even more damage to their country’s future. That’s what happens when you vote for “disrupters” who never spent a second thinking through how all of their disruptions connect the morning after the morning after.
Everywhere in the Western world the rulers have an impossible task: how to pay for the generous social benefits – pensions and healthcare – when faced with old and older people and a declining younger work force. So far mountains of debt have done the trick, impossible to sustain.
RELIGION AGAIN.
Last week the Guardian had a long article on the state of the Roman Catholic Church, in particular on Pope Francis. It started with the ominous words: s
“Pope Francis is one of the most hated men in the world today. Those who hate him most are not atheists, or Protestants, or Muslims, but some of his own followers. Outside the church he is hugely popular as a figure of almost ostentatious modesty and humility. From the moment that Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio became pope in 2013, his gestures caught the world’s imagination: the new pope drove a Fiat, carried his own bags and settled his own bills in hotels; he asked, of gay people, “Who am I to judge?” and washed the feet of Muslim women refugees.
But within the church, Francis has provoked a ferocious backlash from conservatives who fear that this spirit will divide the church, and could even shatter it. This summer, one prominent English priest said: “We can’t wait for him to die. It’s unprintable what we say in private. Whenever two priests meet, they talk about how awful Bergoglio is … he’s like Caligula: if he had a horse, he’d make him cardinal.” Of course, after 10 minutes of fluent complaint, he added: “You mustn’t print any of this, or I’ll be sacked.”
To judge by the voting figures at the last worldwide meeting of bishops, almost a quarter of the College of Cardinals – the most senior clergy in the church – believe that the pope is flirting with heresy.
His most violent opponent is Cardinal Burke who represents a long tradition of heavyweight American power brokers of white ethnic Catholicism. The hieratic, patriarchal and embattled church of the Latin Mass is his ideal, to which it seemed that the church under John Paul II and Benedict was slowly returning – until Francis started work.
Cardinal Burke’s combination of anti-communism, ethnic pride and hatred of feminism has nurtured a succession of prominent rightwing lay figures in the US, from Pat Buchanan through Bill O’Reilly and Steve Bannon, alongside lesser-known Catholic intellectuals such as Michael Novak, who have shilled untiringly for US wars in the Middle East and the Republican understanding of free markets.
It was Cardinal Burke who invited Bannon, then already the animating spirit of Breitbart News, to address a conference in the Vatican, via video link from California, in 2014. Bannon’s speech was apocalyptic, incoherent and historically eccentric. But there was no mistaking the urgency of his summons to a holy war: the second world war, he said, had really been “the Judeo-Christian west versus atheists”, and now civilisation was “at the beginning stages of a global war against Islamic fascism … a very brutal and bloody conflict … that will completely eradicate everything that we’ve been bequeathed over the last 2,000, 2,500 years … if the people in this room, the people in the church, do not … fight for our beliefs against this new barbarity that’s starting.”
To guarantee Francis’ changes will last, the church has to accept them. That is a question that will not be answered in his lifetime. He is 80 now, and only has one lung. His opponents may be praying for his death, but no one can know whether his successor will attempt to contradict him – and on that question, the future of the Catholic Church now hangs.” End of quote.
I welcome the TURMOIL in the Roman Christian Church, a situation brutally necessary for arriving at the TRUE state of the Gospel: away from heaven – still 100 percent Roman Catholic teaching – and honoring God’s creation, and its eternal existence, which many Catholics do.
BACK TO MUNDANE MATTERS
As we well know, all is not well.
Climate Change is the catalyst here, already causing Pandemics, deadly droughts, flooding rains, and hellish heat that devastate the crops.
As a prelude to THE END, the Bible Book REVELATION mentions EARTH QUAKES, especially in Chapter 16: 18: “No earthquake like it has ever occurred since man has been on earth.”
You can imagine how the seismographs in the capitals shake wildly in record numbers beyond any ever registered. You can visualize how the houses tumble, the palaces are flattened. No human technological expertise is any help. Nothing can withstand this force of nature: no nuclear bomb has this devastating power. Now an endless series of ever more frightening events roll over the world.
The catastrophes mentioned here extend to the entire cosmos. They affect people everywhere. In the disastrous happenings preceding the last things, two types of distress can be detected. There are calamities that originate in nature and there are those that are the result of human action. Here only the first type is mentioned. It is as if the tamed earth, given by God as a gift to humanity as his own domain, is now rebelling, is now rising up against her tormentor. It is as if nature that, for so long, for so many centuries, has faithfully furnished humanity with all its needs, has now become recalcitrant, and full of revenge has thrown itself upon humanity.
And this humanity, this so superior human race, with her nuclear energy, her mighty medical system, her military prowess, and her entertainment establishment all of which made her feel so immense mighty and strong, these same men and women are now in a total humiliating fashion confronted with the fact that in the final analysis they amount to nothing, that they are a mere rag that is thrown out as useless.
Today the signs of looming earthquakes are everywhere.
One newspaper reports:
Europe Fears ‘The Big One’ After 140 Earthquakes Strike The French Alps In 40 Days.
The same is happening in Yellowstone Park where also hundreds of small earthquakes have been detected. The danger there is so immense that a volcanic explosion there could spell the end of the world. Other regions too report volcanic unrest: in Bali, Indonesia, in Alaska, in Iceland, wherever volcanoes are found.
To make sure that this message penetrates the dull minds of humans the Bible mentions earthquakes in various places, such as in Matthew 24: 7, in Luke 21: 11, in Ezekiel 38: 19, in Joel 2: 10, all as preludes to THE END.
We, as the modern Humanity, are unleashing powers and disasters which today are the harbingers of world-wide calamities. All the signs are there.
TURMOIL visible and invisible will only accelerate. Be prepared. John the Baptizer comes to mind: the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.