SEPTEMBER 20 2015
HOLLOWED BE THY NAME
What keeps my mind busy this week? After 10 weeks of intensive translating, consulting dictionaries, trying some different literary devices, going back and re-reading what I have written, it is ‘weeds’ that now occupy my tired mind, weeds, in the plural, the unwanted greens that always creep in between my vegetable, tomato and potato plants, weeds that stubbornly stick out on my sidewalks and between the bricks near my back door. I know Monsanto sells some sort of poison to kill them, but that is not my cup of tea. Now that I’ve sent in the book on the Revelation of John to the publisher, more than 85,000 words in 8 chapters, I have time to come back to earth, the substance we have been made of, and to which we all will return in some form of another.
A Canadian author who wrote The Two Solitudes, once said that “I don’t know what I think until I have read what I have written”. While I write this, sort of probing what at this point I will write about, my thoughts go to my Journal, a book with 365 blank pages featuring just a bible text. The idea is that I then fill the page with my musing, which I do. I sometimes skip a day and make it up the next. Last week a text was from Romans 11: 16: “If the root is holy, so are the branches.”
My quirky mind always jumps all over the place, so somehow this line reminded me of the Lord’s Prayer, and the archaic words: “Hallowed be thy name.” It made me think about an old joke. A young kid was asked the name of God and he said “Harold” is his name of course. “Hallowed” is a word we seldom use. In other languages the phrase “Hallowed be thy name” is much more in line with the spoken language. In French it is plain: “Que ton nom soit santifié”, the same in Dutch “Uw naam worde geheiligd”. Both clearly express that God’s name is holy, which applies to everything God does, including all of creation. Today, however, the line much more resembles “Hollowed be thy name”.
Yes: ”Hollowed be thy name” is much more fitting. That`s what we have done. We have taken the heart out of the earth. We have gutted God, who is total. He is what he thinks, is what he does. Everything that God has done and still is doing is holy, that makes you, that makes me, that makes the trees and the animals, the air and the soil, all holy: everything created is holy. We have gutted all that, made it hollow, have taking the heart out of it, including the soul of us, human beings.
Take Pollution.
If the air that fills my lungs becomes polluted, if the nutrients in the soil that produce my food become depleted, or if the spring water which make up 60% of my body becomes poisoned, my own health suffers accordingly. This seems like common sense, but you wouldn’t think so by observing the way we treat the natural world today. Over time, even the boundaries of what I considered to be “I” became less and less clear. We are a mere shadow of what we supposed to be: hollowed out.
When Roman legions marched on their way from Italy, through France to Germania, they travelled weeks on end through dense forests, as recorded in De Bello Gallico, a book written by Julius Caesar – which I had to read in school in Latin. The BBC reported last week that a Yale professor, using aerial maps estimated that the world once had 6 trillion trees, now reduced by 46 Percent. We know that trees are life. They absorb GHG – Green House Gases – while converting it to O2, the oxygen we need every minute to fill our lungs. With 7.2 billion of us inhaling oxygen every minute, the world now only has 400 trees per person.
How many trees do we need to have sufficient oxygen?
The USA department of Energy asked the Institute for Energy Analysis in Oak Ridge, Tenn., to calculate how many trees we need to provide us with that life-sustaining oxygen. The average American or Canadian, through our daily use of combustion engines for transportation and the prodigious amount of electricity, each one of us needs the oxygen of 4500 trees. The average family with 2.5 children needs more than 20,000 trees. Simple living Africans or Asians can survive on the oxygen of 500 trees.
This is another example where we, through our extravagant life style, deprive even the poorest of their needed breathing elements. The recent forest fires carry a double whammy: they destroy millions of trees while the fires add trillions of tons of carbon to the atmosphere, greatly enhancing the Climate Change situation.
Then there is the matter of the hollowing out of the soil. With rapid population growth, especially in Africa and Asia, we need ever more farmland with greater fertility. But here too the trends are entirely the opposite. Land degradation is costing the world as much as $10.6 trillion every year, equivalent to 17% of global GDP. This report, published last week by the Economics of Land Degradation, also warns us that more than half of the world’s arable land is moderately or severely degraded.
So far this year every heat record has been broken. The rate of increase both in loss of trees and decreased fertility goes far beyond any projected. Both will only speed up the process as decreased vegetation cover and increased soil erosion means that land is less able to store carbon, contributing to climate change. News sources now regularly report that 50 percent of fish and large animals are gone: crowded out by human greed. Hollow seas, hollow earth, hollow people too.
No wonder: millions are on the move.
These pictures we see now every day of mostly enterprising young men trying to reach Western Europe are on the move because of ‘soil degradation’ causing desertification, the result of climate change and overgrazing. This is the root cause of the migration of millions. A study by the UN’s Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), found that the process may drive an estimated 50 million people from their homes in the next 10 years. And that is probably a very low number. Others sources go as high as 200 million.
All this reminds me of a section in the book I just translated. In Revelation John describes how there was a pause in heaven, a silence lasting a “half hour”. You may know that Revelation deals with the Last Things, and the real significance of that silence has to do with the church, how the church on earth experiences her spiritual life.
Here is that quote:
“Her prayer-life, her surrender to God, her faithfulness all are part of the process of the grand finale. And John, really upset, observes that in this important moment, when everything is ready to go and the New World is about to appear, the church herself is lagging behind. She has not kept up with God, she has clung to her old customs and modes of life, has failed to grasp God’s unfathomable majesty and refused to undergo a true conversion. While being fully exposed to the grand revelation of the last things, she remained stuck in the small, everyday events of her earthly existence. Above her the loud thunderclaps of God’s threats are cascading through the skies, while she, with eyes wide open in horror, has become mesmerized, as around her all human riches and powers are visibly collapsing. Amidst all these cries of anguish escalating exponentially she has not learned to think differently. She has remained mired in the immorally routine rest of her everyday existence. Now that the very last happenings are knocking at the door, she is not ready. She no longer knows how to pray. She can’t keep up with what God is doing. The bible time and again tells us to wait on the Lord. But now the rolls are reversed. It used to be that God’s clock ran slower than ours and we had to pause for a while for God to catch up. God always had a much slower pace than we. But now it appears to be the other way around. Now God has to wait for us. Now he is way ahead of us, now our clock is slow, now we no longer can catch up to him. Is all this happening because of what we with growing intensity see happening all around us today? Is it true that, looking back to the 20th Century with its devastating wars and its aftermath of displaced persons, famine, chaos, and today with the mayhem in the Middle East, and environmental deterioration everywhere, God wants to remind us that the seventh seal is being broken now? Could it be that the breathtaking speed in which events overwhelm us today with tsunami force is a sign that the seven angels with their trumpets are poised to blow their instruments? And would all this be a sign to remind us that ours is the next move?”
So far that quote.
My recent experience in translating a book dealing with Revelation, of which the Greek name is Apocalypse made me think of the rise of Hitler in Germany in 1933. In six short years he vaulted from a relative unknown to the greatest threat to civilization ever. By some clever manipulation of half-truths and devious money maneuvering he convinced a cultivated electorate that he had the answers to the world’s problems.
Today these problems are world-wide, witnessing the experience of unprecedented storms, relentless droughts and the associated wars and south-to-north migrations. These events will jar expectations about the security of resources and make Hitlerian politics more resonant. As Hitler demonstrated, humans are able to portray a looming crisis in such a way as to justify drastic measures in the present. Under enough stress, or with enough skill, politicians can put into effect the measures Hitler pioneered. If a nation such as Germany which gave the world such giants as J. S. Bach, a Mozart, a Bonhoeffer, and many more great people, could so easily be seduced to support a Satanic regime, it seems very likely that a less distinguished population will fall for a world figure that makes the right promises.
The world is ready for a dictator, yes, even an Antichrist, because the Real Christ only promises eternal life in a renewed world, and bases this only on faith. Hebrew 11: 1 says “Faith is sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” That no longer appeals to the masses: they want it now, never mind what is to come.
“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”. That’s what the Bible tells us. It also is an archaic expression, just as “Hallowed be Thy name”. The word ‘fear’ here has nothing to do with being afraid. It means “being in awe of”. When we look at creation with unbiased eyes and uncluttered mind, then we can only be totally floored by the wisdom of it all, how everything fits, how every animal, in the right place, how every plant in its original setting, forms a beautiful organic whole. Once we see that then we have the beginning of wisdom. That’s why the phrase “Hallowed be Thy name” must dominate our lives. We, in our utter stupidity have done the opposite. Now our life’s motto is “Hollowed be Thy name.” We have gutted God and in the process we have lost all wisdom. Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that “The sin against creation in the greatest of sin” because it deprives us of wisdom.
We must make a choice: either Hallow the name of the Creator or Hollow it.