JULY 27 2019
DENIAL
In church last Sunday the reading was from Genesis 18. Here’s what it said in part, “Then the LORD appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre in the heat of the day, while he was sitting at the entrance to his tent”.
Two things struck me,
(1) Abraham knew the value of trees, and had settled in the forest. Trees are, next to us, the most important species in the world. Living close to trees ensures longevity and good health. And, indeed, Abraham lived a long time.
(2) Abraham relaxed. He wasn’t sending e-mails, he wasn’t talking on his mobile: he just was sitting there, at ease, perhaps looking at the leaves of the trees, perhaps contemplating their marvelous structure, perhaps day-dreaming, or praying, or recalling certain events in his life, how he had traveled hundreds of miles, away from his ancestral roots. Had there been a conflict then? Perhaps he meditated on the mysterious promise Yahweh had made to him that he’d be the father of many nations with offspring too numerous to count. Perhaps he shook his head a bit, as that promise didn’t seem to materialize at all. Perhaps he had trained himself in emptying his mind so that the Cosmic Resonance could enter, God’s spirit hovering over the universe.
Abraham was 175 years old when he died. I think his long life was due to a multiple of factors: there was no pollution; he lived among trees; no television; he lived close to God and believed his promises; he loved his animals; he was at peace; he was physically active; he meditated a lot, as he did when these three visitors came, whom he welcomed without any prejudice.
In those days when life was moving at a snail’s pace, if at all, life was lived to the full: the past and the present flowed together. It reminds me of my schooldays from where a phrase pops up, Festina Lente”, translated as “Make Haste slowly.”
THE HIDDEN FACE OF GOD
It also reminds me of a book I was re-reading last week: THE HIDDEN FACE OF GOD. Why has Dr. Richard Elliott Friedman, professor of Hebrew cast such a spell on me with this book? I think because he so thoroughly knows the Bible, both the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament. He also treats Nietzsche with ultimate fairness, generally a much abused character in ‘religious’ circles.
Here’s what Dr. Friedman, a believing Jew, wrote, “Obviously there is much that the two faiths –Jewry and Christianity – have in common……Both appear to be more concerned with humans learning how to live, both with each other (“love your neighbor as yourself”) and in their relationship to God (“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind.”)”.
The very last words in his fascinating book are, “it could well be that the universe is the hidden face of God.”
That makes eminent sense to me: after all we love Bach not as a person, but because of his music. We love van Gogh for the same reason.
If the universe is the hidden face of God – and I believe that – then denying Creation as divine is denying God.
By denying creation, we deny God. How can we love him when we treat trees as a commodity, soil as something to be soiled.
Digging in the soil – as I do often – has curative benefits; gardening has therapeutic results.
We deny today’s ultimate threat.
Here’s what Dr. Guy McPherson wrote last week in ARCTIC NEWS,
“A catastrophe of unimaginable proportions is
unfolding. Life is disappearing from Earth and runaway heating could destroy
all life. At 5°C heating, most life on Earth will have disappeared. When
looking only at near-term human extinction, 3°C will likely suffice. Study
after study is showing the severity of the threat that too many keep ignoring
or denying, at the peril of the world at large. Have a look at the following:
Crossing the 2°C guardrail
The image below shows two trends, a long-term
trend (blue) and a short-term trend (red) that better reflects El Niño peaks.
(Go
to ARCTIC NEWS to see the colored graph. There the red line shows 3C by next
year. The blue line by 2016.)
The image confirms
an earlier analysis that it could
be 1.85°C (or 3.33°F) hotter in 2019 than in 1750.
June 2019 was the hottest June on record, it was
2.08°C (or 3.74°F) hotter than the annual global mean 1980-2015, which was
partly due to seasonal variations.
Back to C. G. Jung, whom I quoted last week also.
He wrote, in “Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Available free on the web):
“Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The “newness” in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components. Body and soul therefore have an intensely historical character and find no proper place in what is new, in things that have just come into being. That is to say, our ancestral components are only partly at home in such things. We are very far from having finished completely with the Middle Ages, classical antiquity, and primitivity, as our modern psyches pretend.
Nevertheless, we have plunged down a cataract of progress, which sweeps us on into the future with ever wilder violence the farther it takes us from our roots. Once the past has been breached, it is usually annihilated, and there is no stopping the forward motion. But it is precisely the loss of connection with the past, our up-rootedness, which has given rise to the “discontents” of civilization and to such a flurry and haste that we live more in the future and its chimerical promises of a golden age than in the present, with which our whole evolutionary background has not yet caught up.
“We rush impetuously into novelty, driven by a mounting sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction, and restlessness. We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the light of the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring the proper sunrise. We refuse to recognize that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse; that, for example, the hope of greater freedom is cancelled out by increased enslavement to the state, not to speak of the terrible perils to which the most brilliant discoveries of science expose us.
“The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity.
“Reforms by advances, that is, by new methods or gadgets, are of course impressive at first, but in the long run they are dubious and in any case dearly paid for. They by no means increase the contentment or happiness of people on the whole. Mostly, they are deceptive sweetenings of existence, like speedier communications, which unpleasantly accelerate the tempo of life and leave us with less time than ever before. Omnis festinatio ex parte diaboli est – all haste is of the devil, as the old masters used to say.”
So far a section of Jung’s biography.
We live in denial.
What Jung is saying in his memoirs is that we live in denial.
Denial today is all around us. We have cut off any contact with the past. We have severed the ties with the God of history. We have severed the connection between God and his creation.
It reminds me of Friedrich Nietzsche who was so obsessed with the direction the church was taking that he lost his mind. In his sane years Nietzsche associated madness with the death of God, and with the onset of his own madness.
In Nietzsche’s, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I was struck by one sentence, “I entreat you, brothers, remain true to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of super terrestrial hopes! They are poisoners, whether they know it or not.”
Another sentence stayed with me – also decades ahead of his time: “To blaspheme the earth is now the most dreadful offence…”
Nietzsche`s rebellion against the church originated from the preaching of the Heaven Heresy, still particularly predominant in the church today. The much maligned Nietzsche was a genius. His father and both his grand fathers were Lutheran preachers, one even a bishop. He was also slated to join the ranks of clergy but, seeing that the church was dead and so concluding that God was dead as well, he changed course and at a very young age became a professor of classical languages.
Denial.
For those few who are questioning the course we are taking, it would be well to go the YouTube and listen to Paul Beckwith or Guy McPherson or Cambridge professor Dr. Peter Wadhams, all respected climatologists.
By denying the holiness of creation – which almost all church members do – we deny that we ourselves are part of creation and so we cannot experience that our consciousness also consists of the physical structure of the universe. Genesis 1-2 explicitly states that “earth we are and to earth we shall return”. The further we are from creation, the further we are from God.
Cosmic Resonance.
There’s such a thing as ‘cosmic resonance’. Dr. Friedman suggests that this phenomenon may explain how different Bible authors from so many different periods contributed pieces that form such a consistent picture of a gradually diminishing manifest presence of God over many centuries.
The universe is order that is made out of chaos. We are doing the opposite: we are making chaos out of cosmos. It is the “Christian” task to resist that. That’s why J.H. Bavinck in his BETWEEN THE BEGINNING AND THE END, a Radical Kingdom Vision, states that “The redemption of creation and redemption of the person go hand in hand: they are two parts of the same coin: you can’t have one without the other.”
We, in our lifestyle, in our day-to-day living deny this. We have painted ourselves in a corner. Today for every bite we eat we need 10 bites of creation-destroying carbon.
We must go back.
We must go back to a degree of self-sufficiency where we no longer are totally dependent on creation-destroying elements.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer asserts that in everything we must keep the END in mind. He called himself an Anthropos Teleios, a person who always keeps the telos (the Greek word for END) in mind. Jesus himself in the Sermon on the Mount urges us to be Teleios, holistic. (Matthew 5: 48). We are part of the universe and living apart from the cosmos means in essence that we are gods, who do not need God.
We have made ‘idols’ of ourselves: that is the essence of GNOSTICISM, the heresy that the apostle John so forcefully condemns. It is the most dangerous of heresies, because it calls ‘matter’ evil. It so happens that creation is ‘matter’. Gnosticism asserts that salvation is escape from the body, achieved not by faith in Christ but by special knowledge. The Greek word for ‘knowledge’ is gnosis hence Gnosticism.
It is my assertion that all religions that do not practice that Creation as HOLY, are touched by Gnosticism.
It is related in the Bible how the apostle Peter denied the Lord three times. In that he voiced the opinion of all Jesus’ disciples, who, en bloc, where sorely disappointed that Jesus had failed to use his divine powers to free Israel from the Roman oppressor.
I wonder whether we are denying Jesus, whom, says Colossians 1: 15-20, “By whom all things –ta panta- were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible,” when we cause the extinction of much that lives.
I know Jesus forgave Peter his act of denial. I know he will forgive us too, but for Peter it was quite the embarrassing experience. Peter wept bitterly when he realized his denial: he felt genuinely sorry.
I wonder: how will you and I, who live in denial, show our contrition? It is virtually impossible to change our way of life.
Last week I learned a new word: “Akratic”, coined by Aristotle. It means “a person who knows the right thing to do but can’t help doing the opposite”. Hmmm.