AUGUST 17 2019
HOPE
Perhaps I have been pretty judgemental on matters such as Climate Change. Perhaps I have sounded too pessimistic on our personal practises. Perhaps I have hinted too often that it is next to impossible to do the right thing, to live properly, in line with creation, cultivating a loving relationship with the world around us. I know in this day and age serving people and animals, plants and all created matter in an all embracing way, is something that has become nigh impossible as technology rules our lives and oil powers everything.
I guess I am hinting that living today calls for compromises.
So what caused my different outlook?
Well….I’ve been reading a biography of Maimonides written by a Hebrew scholar and professor of Ethics, Abraham Joshua Heschel.
He made me see that it is not the big things that save us: it’s the little things.
Here’s what this great medieval Jewish thinker observed,
”During the Babylonian Exile, only the three companions of Daniel refused to worship the image of Nebuchadnezzar. All the other bowed to the idolatrous effigy. And never had any scholar called the Jews of this generation heathen, blasphemous or unfit to bear witness….Ahab, king of Israel, denied God. But because he once fasted with a pious intention, the Lord did not fail to reward him for this little deed. Eglon, king of the Moabites, afflicted Israel for years and years. But because he once paid homage to the Lord, God requited it. His descendants mounted the holy throne named after God. For Ruth, the ancestress of the dynasty of David, was Eglon’s daughter. Nebuchadnezzar had Jews massacred in great numbers, and he destroyed the divine temple. But he once paid tribute to God’s name, his rule lasted forty years, as long as that of Solomon. Esau, the transgressor, led a life of vice. He observed only one commandment: to honor his father. For this good work, he was recompensed: his descendants would keep their kingdom uninterruptedly until the Messianic Age, for it is a law of history that the Redeemer will not come until Esau has been rewarded for honoring his father. And if the Lord richly repays these evildoers for minor, insignificants works, shall he not credit Israel for secretly keeping the holy commandments, even if it is forced into sham apostasy? And should there be no difference between the man who does not do his duties and the man who does, between the man who serves God and the man who denies Him?”
I still have to get used to that line of reasoning, stern Calvinist I am.
So how do I see matters now, after reading this wise Jewish writer? For one thing: I trust Jewish writers: they have a grasp of the Old Testament unequalled among Biblical scholars. I know. I have a lot of books by Jewish rabbis. I also have some issues of the magazine TIKKUN, the Hebrew word for RENEWAL, and greatly appreciate Michael Lerner, the editor. One of my best friends was a Jewish Psychologist, Dr. Harold Goldsman who for years taught at Concordia University in Montreal, and later moved to Tweed, and Belleville where he became a consultant with the Board of Education.
Just like the Jews during the 70 years of exile were totally exposed to the Babylonian culture, but also were re-united with the original sources of the Salvation Story, we too are in exile, totally imprisoned by the oil-saturated economy, and we too now are starting to ask basic questions related to our ultimate redemption.
We today, anno 2019, are caught in the same position as the Jews in Babylon some 2500 years ago. We too have been forced to live a creation-destroying life style, worse than anything else before us, worse than under the Nebuchadnezzar rule, worse than under the Nazi Regime, because what is at stake today is God’s Holiness, his very being as expressed in creation.
Let’s be honest: no longer do we live in a democracy; no longer is our voice heard. In the dying days of our planet the plight of the cosmos is totally ignored by those in power, in parliaments, in corporations, among the wealthy elite and vested interests. We, the people, have become powerless, as, for all intents and purposes, vested interests have given up on the habitability of large parts of the Earth and on the survival of numerous species and future generations. As the Psalm time and again reiterate, “They have had their reward, they have their yachts and trophy wives.”
So, it’s beyond us to make a difference, that’s why it’s not the big, drastic changes that redeem us, but the tiny adjustments we make in our own lives.
But………
The ultimate condition is that our minds must be geared to The Kingdom, the Perfect World we yearn for, even though our actions can only be limited to what we personally can achieve.
Yesterday that meant quitting tobacco. Today, the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, recommends that we become vegetarian, which actually entails better health and longer lives.
Yes, believe me, there are lots of little things we can do: despise plastic with a passion. And, of course, the 4 R’s: Reuse, Reduce, Recycle, Repair: that too contributes to the quality of life.
Start a journal. For 27 years I have written a daily journal based on a text from the lectionary: 400 words on weekdays, 800 on Sundays, scribbling in my tiny, almost impossible to read handwriting.
Some biographical details.
Looking back 70 years, I can’t quite remember what motivated me to come to Canada. My wife and I were engaged on August 31 1950 when we both were 22 years old. I then was serving in the Dutch Army as a conscripted sergeant-instructor. I was discharged in April 1951, well-educated after 16 years of schooling, but unfit for any specific profession.
Even last week, after almost 70 years, I have dreams that date back to that period, in which I desperately wondered how in the world I would ever be able to marry that beautiful woman to whom I am engaged, and be able to support her and have a family.
Then in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, thousands of my compatriots were emigrating, most of them to Canada, with the majority being of Reformed and Christian Reformed stock. So, influenced by ‘the spirit of the age’, by ‘cosmic resonance’, I joined the exodus and three months after my 18 months stint in the army, my younger brother and I were on the way to Canada, sailing in a luxury liner from Rotterdam to New York City, landing there on July 4 1951.
My fiancée arrived in September 1952 and we were married in June 1953. Instead of joining the much more conservative Netherlands Reformed Church in which we grew up, we became members of the much larger Christian Reformed Church.
Over the years I have become even more liberal in my thinking than most, especially in matters of theology, having made a U-turn on such matters as same-sex, seeing creation as God’s Primary Word, and becoming a fervent environmentalist.
That we, as a society have made the ultimate wrong turn was again confirmed when reading Dr. Jung’s autobiography, his 156,000 word, 530 pages tome, doing some 30 pages each day.
He too yearned for the old days, good in the way of being more ‘down to earth’. He writes of the home he built, “I have done without electricity, and tend the fireplace and stove myself. I light the old lamps. There is no running water, and I pump the water from the well. I chop the wood and cook the food. These simple acts make man simple; and how difficult it is to be simple.”
He started to build his place in the 1920’s and expanded it over the years. He died in 1962, before the onset, or perhaps the onslaught of technology, something that now is playing havoc with the very idea of ‘being human’.
I am not quite sure what C. G. Jung is hinting at when he writes that, “I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete or unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family, which is passed on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished. It is difficult to determine whether these questions are more of a personal or more of a general (collective) nature. It seems to me that the latter is the case.”
I had to look up the exact meaning of “karma”. My 2000 page Webster tells me that ‘karma’, a Hindu term, is “a cosmic principle according to which each person in this life or in reincarnation is rewarded or punished according to his deeds in the previous reincarnation”
That’s quite the mouthful. If I understand Jung correctly then it seems to me that our ancestors, both immediate and historic, have failed to come to terms with their ultimate destination.
I think I know what he is hinting at: my mother, on her deathbed asked me what comes after death, and struggled with this concept, apparently not happy with the ‘heaven’ thing. Not my oldest brother. The very last words he said to me when we saw each other for the last time “See you in heaven.”
Nietzsche, the ultimate rebel, always agitated against conventional Christianity, begging us to “remain true to the earth”.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “God cannot be understood without the earth, nor the earth without the God who has entered it in Jesus Christ.” Here I hear an echo of Nietzsche’s words: Remain true to the earth!
Bonhoeffer insisted that it takes creation to understand God. In his “Creation and Fall”, he wrote, “The human being is the human being who is taken from earth…. The earth is its mother…. It is God’s earth out of which humankind is taken….. Its bond with the earth belongs to its essential being. Human beings have their existence as existence on earth”.
Johan Herman Bavinck says essentially the same. In his “Between
the Beginning and the End: a radical Kingdom Vision”, he writes,
“A long time ago, the Bible tells us, God fashioned the first human pair from
the earth. The Hebrew word for soil is Adamah, from which Adam comes. The word
adam reminded the Israelite immediately of the first Adam who was taken from
the soil of the earth, hence the well-known saying: soil we are and to soil we
shall return. Just as we have red clay and black soil, we too have people of
different colors. The word ‘adam’ typifies the human race in its unbreakable
unity. We all come from the earth and we all go back to the earth. Earth-bound
we are, forever. We, the human beings, are adam, and belong to adamah, the
life-bearing earth. With every sinew of our existence we are tied to the earth,
which bears us and feeds us.”
I suspect that this is the “karma” Jung felt missing in him and his ancestors. The house he designed and built proves that.
In LIVING FAITH, a statement of Christian belief, my Presbyterian Church tells me that ‘we belong to God’. That is only a half-truth. Genesis 3: 19 says, affirming Bonhoeffer and Bavinck, “Earth we are and to earth we will return”.
We are fortunate that Nietzsche, Bonhoeffer and Bavinck have clarified this ‘KARMA’ concept for us. To me Karma indicates the new pristine Earth under a new heaven, where all space junk and satellites are swept away.
Believing in such a future gives us HOPE. Pursuing ‘heaven’ is a dead-end: however, the New Earth concept has a caveat: getting there starts HERE and NOW. HOPE means LIFE, LIFE FOREVER.