JULY 20 2019
HOW GOD DISAPPEARED.
“The less we understand what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves….Our ability to embrace anything new is limited because we are our ancestors and whatever they never knew we can’t make part of our lives.”
C.G. Jung
A while ago a woman visited us and she confessed that at times she’d have dreams that caused her to even fall out of bed. My spontaneous answer was that perhaps she was struggling with an issue that had bothered one of her grandparents.
I too have these disturbing dreams where I fight an imaginary attacker and wake up with the sheets and blankets in disarray, sometimes crying out inarticulate noises. Can I blame this on my ancestors? I really don’t know.
My ancestors – let me go back 2 generations, as I have known my 4 grandparents quite well – all were rurally based. My parents were the first ones to settle in the city.
I was the fourth (in 5 years of marriage) of 9 children, so I experienced the birth of 5 of my siblings (there was a three year gap between me and my younger brother).
When a new child was on the way I was often sent to my mother’s parents, small farmers. They had a dozen milk cows, having names just as their children and treated as such. Milked by hand twice per day, with the milk cans placed at the edge of the canal in front of the farm, from where a flat-bottomed vessel, horse-drawn, would pick them up and bring them to the nearby milk processing plant. The same boat would return them, this time the cans full with whey – just for the pigs – and a supply of buttermilk porridge, thick with barley, my favourite dessert, which I was allowed to sweeten with corn syrup.
I vividly remember the trusted gray horse, the rattling wagon, the horse-drawn grass mower, the hay stacked high, and carefully pitched way up in the barn attached to the living quarters.
I should mention that my grandparents had no electricity: the light was provided by beautiful kerosene lamps. Meals were cooked on a woodstove, in a separate small building – the cook-hut – with two compartments, the eating area and the cooking space. I still recall the peculiar aroma emanating from this building.
Water was pumped from the cistern. Sunday meals where in the dining room where most of the time was spent. Only on special occasions was the living room used, with also had a built-in bed where my grandparents slept. After the noon meal my grandfather would have a nap, sitting in the chair, black cap lowered over the eyes.
When I was there I slept in the attic, right under the rafters, accessible by a steep staircase with shining treads, slippery on my stocking feet and no railing.
All this made eating and living conditions no different from 100, even 300 years ago. The only modern item were the bikes, sturdy 3 speeds.
A large vegetable garden – mostly potatoes – a bunch of chickens, a pig or two which provided the bacon and roasts, milk and cream and butter all home-made, as well as jams and bread: totally self-sufficient existence, totally carbon free. My parental grandfather, a grocer, in his horse-drawn two-wheeled wagon, basically a box on wheels, came occasionally to barter coffee, tea, sugar and other essentials for eggs, so that little money was needed to maintain a healthy life.
Both my grandfathers were elders in the local church a few kilometers away, a church seating some 300 people, and full every Sunday twice: 10 a.m. and 2.30 p.m. When my grandfather felt sleepy in church, he would stand up.
The church also was the centre of midweek entertainment: my uncle Klaas was still single in the 1930’s and was a member of the brass band, while my aunt had her women’s group. Smaller children attended Sunday School. Teenagers had their own young people societies. Occasionally there were entertainment evenings where everybody was expected to contribute, a poem or a skit, a duet or some other musical contribution.
During the fall and winter these elders each week visited their assigned families, focusing their visits on their spiritual lives.
Yes, all this I vividly remember: another age, a totally different sort of life, sustainable in the real sense, as it had been for centuries: a God-fearing life, living close to creation, completely dependent on the weather and on blessings from on high. Two prayers were offered at each meal, spoken in high Dutch, as if the Lord could not understand the local dialect.
All this continued during the war 1940-45. When I visited the farm then, the area teemed with young men hiding from the Germans. My Opa died in 1940 and my uncle took over. He then housed and fed 4 extra young men, as all males over 18 were supposed to work in Germany.
Small farming then saw its final glory days, growing potatoes, raising grains, providing milk and butter and eggs, feeding the city population, who were deprived of its regular supplies due to the German occupiers grabbing all the available food sources for its military machine and its own population back in Germany.
A sudden change.
Then, in the 1950’s and 1960’s it all changed: The automobile appeared and God disappeared at the dawn of the consumer society: the God-Creator died and the god-Carbon took its place. The ways of old were abandoned including The WAY, the TRUTH and the LIFE.
My uncle Klaas emigrated to Canada in 1951: his horse could not compete with tractors and his scythe was no match for a combine. A cousin took over the farm and built a large broiler facility housing some 40,000 chickens: industrial farming had come.
From the mid 1950’s to the year 2019, some 70 years of rural life disappeared. Land holdings expanded, farm labour no longer needed, farm hands drifted to the cities or emigrated, small businesses closed shop, the baker and butcher, the grocer and tailor, the druggist and florist, they all slowly faded away as greater choice and cheaper products were available in the larger centers, reached by carbon-based cars, while the small homesteads were sold to commuters, who needed Sunday shopping.
THE OIL WE EAT, THE GOD WE ABANDONED
The four laws of ecology come to mind: (1) no free lunch; (2) Nature knows best; (3) nothing disappears; (4) everything is connected to everything else.
Special as we humans are, we get no exemptions from these rules.
The automobile, the word derived from the Greek autos= self, and the Latin ‘mobilis’ which means ‘easy to move’, provided the tank is full of liquid carbon.
When the war broke out in 1939, Germany had no direct access to oil wells: in Europe they were in the Caucasus, in Southern Russia. That’s why Hitler launched his assault there. Once he was rebuffed, his war was lost.
Then the USA was the leading oil producer, with Esso, Texaco, Chevron, Sunoco the main companies. When the war finished in 1945, the millions of discharged soldiers, having witnesses how oil won the war put their trust in its magic powers, both in farming and in subdivisions: the auto-age the result. Oil was cheap: pennies per gallon.
So the laws of ecology were suspended: and “in Oil we trust” became the national slogan. God’s law that “Everything is there to serve everything else, and we are the servants in chief”, was overruled: now the only law reigned, “Creation is there to serve us.”
Primary Productivity
Yet there remained something called “Primary Productivity,” referring to the degree to which plants and algae convert energy. Thanks to our voracious appetite, our insatiable thirst for ‘things’, we drowned out everything else, consuming now as much as 70 percent of all there is: trees, soil, oxygen, water, depriving everything else from being there, asserting ourselves as gods at the expense of God’s creation.
We, the almost 8 billion of us greedy customers, are simply stealing the food, so that nothing else can flourish, hence mammals, fish, all else dies, including the rain forests to grow soya beans to feed our methane-belching cattle.
Here’s a piece of irony. Look at Iowa.
Iowa is almost all fields now. Not too long ago- perhaps 150 years, when my grandparents were born – Iowa was prairie, with 2 meters of topsoil. Millions of buffalo grazed there to their hearts content, the native “Indian” killing the occasional animal for the meat, the hide and used the rest for some other utility.
Then the white man came, saw the golden soil and used it to grow corn and soya beans to feed that same number of animals, domesticated cattle, for meat, using oil to accomplish this. Utter foolishness!
We now eat OIL.
Where before there was an organic food chain, perpetual sustainable, where the prairie through solar energy converted mass to flowers and roots and stems, building up into a rich repository of plant energy, we used fertilizer, pesticides, whatever, after plowing away the prairie grass, to grow corn.
Now we have a problem. We are re-discovering that there is: (1) no free lunch; (2) Nature knows best; (3) nothing disappears; (4) everything is connected to everything else, but like the fools we are, we are redoubling the efforts, expecting different results.
Enter Climate Change.
What we have done is plain robbery. Hydrocarbons, trust fund of sorts, built up over many thousands of years, we have ripped from the earth and burned in such phenomenal quantities that even the immense oceans and the astronomical skies have become affected, turning from friendly organs to deadly enemies.
Having alienated the planet, we have banned God from creation. God, seeing that humanity broke the ancient COVENANT, as described in Genesis 9, left humanity to its devices, so that now 1John 5: 19 is in full force, “The whole world is under the control of the evil one, as well as Deuteronomy 31: 17, “I shall hide my face from them. I shall see what their end will be.”
There’s where we are at this point. God has withdrawn, the God of even 70-80 years ago, before Adolf Hitler came to power, has retreated from his creation, and we are on our own, a frightful situation.
The last 90 years.
Since 1928, the year of my birth, this world’s population has almost quadrupled, now nearing the EIGHT billion mark, and that at the precise moment when everything is under threat.
A bit of history.
In 1940 the average farm in the United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used. Today the grinding, milling, wetting, drying, and baking of a breakfast cereal requires about four calories of energy for every calorie of food energy it produces, but by adding transportation the food-processing industry in the United States uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces.
That means our food = oil: 10 oil calories to produce ONE food calorie. Add to that the fuel used by millions of people driving to thousands of super discount stores on the edge of town, where the land is cheap, and the ratio is even higher, counting in the waste.
“The less we understand what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves….Our ability to embrace anything new is limited because we are our ancestors and whatever they never knew we can’t make part of our lives.”
By and large we are oblivious to what’s happening. We have left God, and embraced suicidal oil.
We can’t go back to the old, carbon-neutral world, no matter what politicians claim. We have unloosened the Devil, and must face the consequences. As the Guardian reported last week, “The true cost of cheap, unhealthy food is a spiraling public health crisis and environmental destruction.
Our fathers and forefathers consciously lived by the grace of God. They could not imagine a different situation. Today the God concept is gone. By making all of creation subservient to us, we have eliminated God in the process. Churches, by and large, have succumbed to pious secularism, confining God to one hour on Sunday, basically a meaningless exercise.
Deuteronomy 31: 17 bears repeating, “I shall hide my face from them. I shall see what their end will be.”