Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

The State of the Church.

Not so long ago – say 100 years – most people had a viable church connection. Now many only have a nominal one, except in the USA, the most religious country in the West. With the new pope being from Argentina some statistics there are being quoted: 90 percent of its population is Roman Catholic, but only 7 percent attend mass. The same is true in the Quebec province of Canada. Where we live, in the Municipality of Tweed, Ontario with just over 5100 population there are still 6 churches operating: 2 large Roman Catholic churches (attended by 100 people each, according to the new priest), United, Presbyterian, Pentecostal and Salvation Army. The Anglican Church closed. I am optimistic when I say that 8 percent -400 people- attend church in Tweed on a regular basis. Even then most churches – fortunately not all – resemble more social gatherings than spiritual communities. Their sole service often is self-service and preservation and their vision no larger than the collective interests of the in-group. No wonder Jesus once said: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth? (Luke 18:8).

As for me: I am a religious man. I also go to church- Presbyterian. At table my wife and I pray aloud and read at breakfast a Psalm or a portion thereof. We both for decades have written a daily meditation on a text of the lectionary of 400 words on weekdays and 800 words on Sundays in Journeying through the Days, published by the Upper Room Books in Nashville, Tenn. That, more than anything else, has shaped our insight into matters biblical. We both also are products of Christian education on the primary and secondary levels, and, of course come from a long line of Christian forefathers – and – mothers.

I am not a person who mindlessly believes. I question and probe all the time. I believe that Heraclitus was right, a Greek philosopher, who lived from about 540 BC to 480 BC, thus some 2500 years ago, at the same time when the people of Judah returned from Babylon to re-build Jerusalem and the temple.  Heraclitus coined the Greek saying “Panta Rhei, Oude Menei” which translates as “Everything flows, Nothing Remains the same.”  For the Jews the 70 year period of the Babylonian Exile had been one of deep religious questioning. The clash of opinions came to a head when a remnant returned from Persia- Iran-Iraq. The dispute: return to temple-centered worship or implement the divine vision of God as the universal creator and redeemer, recognizing that “Everything changes, nothing is static. Sad to say the conservatives won as usual. When we look at the Roman Catholic Church and Islam as well, we also see little of change: a body of believers gathered in an organizational structure that basically has not altered for more than 1500 years, or in case of the Protestant churches, 500 years. The Greek saying from more than 2.5 millennia ago does not apply to the ecclesiastical scene. So either the church or mosque is right or Heraclitus was.

I recently translated a book by Johan Herman Bavinck: The Kingdom: Speed Its Coming, soon to be published by Eerdmans in Grand Rapids, Mich. In it Bavinck writes:

“At first glance we might see some similarity between a merchant in the Roman Empire and a CEO of a commercial enterprise in our time. They both deal with identical problems; both cope with the laws of economic reality, valid for all ages. But when I search the two lives a bit closer I discover that the comparison does not hold water. They stand at a different point in time and this determines their entire life. History has advanced during those two thousand years, which is why the human problems too are totally different. It is simply not possible to lift a person out of his time?frame and his milieu: we must regard him or her within the context of the totality of that particular period of history in which his life is anchored. Only then do we see that person in his totality. After all, mankind is history. History is not an aspect of his being; no, it is at the core of his life. This is the outlook which modern Western man has acquired on history and on the individual person.”

Does what applies to persons, also pertain to institutions? In my opinion a form of organization that dates from as far back as the Fourth Century can no longer function in the Twenty First Century in the same format. And that includes all organized religion, including Islam.

In the introduction to his highly acclaimed book CHRISTIANITY the First Three Thousand Years, the author Diarmaid MacCullogh writes that “Still in the eighth century of the Christian era, the great new city of Baghdad would have been a more likely capital for worldwide Christianity than Rome. [The Middle East was Paul’s most successful mission field]. The extraordinary accident of the eruption of Islam is the chief reason why Christian history turned in another direction.” This Oxford Professor continues to relate that already in the fourth century the bishop of Rome was referred to as papa (‘Pope’) and became the unchallenged leader of the Western, Latin-speaking Church. As the emperors abandoned Rome, more and more power was flowing into the hands of the churchmen. The church itself assumed the structure of the fading empire.

I think it was exactly by becoming a secular power where the church went wrong. Jesus repeatedly said that “My kingdom has no connection whatsoever with political matters.” The disciples kept on urging Jesus to use his divine powers – resurrecting the dead, miraculously feeding thousands – to re- establish the Davidic Empire, but Jesus always refused, emphasizing that the church must grow from the ground-up and not from the top down. This was the case after the Pentecost event in Jerusalem and later with Paul: word of mouth and charitable living made the early church grow. The ‘extraordinary’ accident of Islam could well have been the direct result of the power grab of the Bishop of Rome. As the post-exile period about 500 years before Christ shows, the church always prefers building physical structures rather than spreading ‘shalom’ fostering human relationships in whatever form. Shalom describes the cosmic harmony that exists where the world and all its inhabitants are reconciled with God. T.S. Eliot defines it poetically: “What life have you if not life together? There is no life that is not in community, and no community not lived in praise of God.”

All religions, but especially Islam and the Church of Rome are typified by their determination to adhere to certain manmade rules, and by refusing to alter them. Had the church been more down to earth, empowering people and encouraging them to approach neighbours at the door-to-door level to live peacefully together, the extraordinary event of Islam might not have happened. (I admire the Jehovah Witnesses for their zeal in promoting its religion.) For centuries the Roman church forbade its adherents to read or have a bible. Even now the Bible is a closed book for most church-goers.

Is it too late now to have true Church Reform? Jesus fervent prayer was for church unity “May they be one as my Father and I are one”. In the New Creation – the Kingdom to come – people will be as united as Jesus and the Father- personified in creation- are one. Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell once suggested that the root of the modern crisis is spiritual. People thought that in a society come of age, they could live without the sacred. Now that they stare into the void of secularization and profanation, which is failing to answer the questions dealing with death, tragedy, obligation and love, Bell believed that this crisis would prepare the way for a ‘return to the sacred’. I am not that optimistic. It seems to me that the situation is more in line with what G.K Chesterton once said: “When we cease to worship God we do not worship nothing, we worship anything.”

Is that what we see now? Is that The State of the Church?

That brings me to today where Religion is very much in the news. The April issue of HARPER’S has an essay on “BLINDED BY THE RIGHT? How hippie Christians begat evangelical conservatives. According to T. M. Luhrmann, Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, the Jesus People of earlier days changed what it meant to be a Christian in America. “They made speaking in tongues common. They made reading the Bible literally a mainstream practice. They made the idea of Rapture – the process by which believers will be spirited up to heaven when Jesus returns for the Second Coming – a cultural touchstone.”

All these revolutionary hippies of yesteryear are now mostly the Tea Party, right-wing Republicans. The flag and the fetus is their main political plank. Jesus saw real dangers in the flag as a symbol of nationalism, while the Bible never mentions abortion, which was legal under Roman law, and Exodus distinguishes between the murder of a person and the murder of a fetus. The first is punishable by death, the second by a fine.

In the USA Republicans – about 50 percent of the population – are primarily the church-going crowd, who, paradoxically, see such issues as pollution, resource depletion, Peak Everything, irrelevant, because they will be “Raptured”, a word that has its root in the Latin verb Rapio, rapere, raptum, which my Latin dictionary defines as “to seize, snatch, tear away.” Actually our word ‘rape’ is derived from it as well. Indeed Rapture plays an important role in allowing the ‘rape’ of the earth, God’s beloved creation (John 3:16) to proceed unhindered. The “Left Behind” series, so immensely popular, actually displays the biblical ignorance of this movement. Matthew 24: 39 clearly says that the sinners are swept away while the righteous are ’left behind’ to have another go at rebuilding creation.

Harold Bloom, famous for his commentaries on Shakespeare, Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and Berg Professor of English at New York University, America’s most distinguished literary critic, wrote The American Religion the emergence of the Post-Christian nation, in which he examines America’s national soul.

Bloom, an acute observer, argues in his book that the American Religion, which is so prevalent among us, masks itself as Protestant Christianity, yet has ceased to be Christian. He sees American society as dangerously religion-soaked, even religion-mad. Dr. Bloom sees the American religion as a variation on Gnosticism. Gnosticism is so condemned by the Apostle John in his 3 letters that he explicitly warns the church against it. Gnosticism teaches that spirit is good but matter is evil, including one’s body. Salvation is the escape from the body- hence Rapture. Christ’s humanity is denied. All created matter, including one’s body can be treated harshly. I see that as the original cause of obesity, especially rampant in the American South, where the Southern Baptists and the Pentecostal Churches constitute the majority.

Dr. Bloom is quite severe in his pronouncements on the American religion. He writes: “Since I am persuaded that much of what this book describes can be found also in Americanized Catholicism and Judaism, as well as in most mainline Protestantism, much of American religiosity clearly lacks spiritual content.”  At the root of the problems in the North American Church, and the cause of the miserable State of the Church, lies the heresy of ‘going to heaven’, something never mentioned in the Bible. No wonder Dietrich Bonhoeffer once stated that “God has granted American Religion no Reformation.”  Jesus too had his doubts about the church’s effectiveness when he said: “Many are called, few are chosen” (Matthew 22:14).

Carl Jung, one of the first modern psychologists to address the issue of collective madness, makes an interesting observation. He theorized that individual humans possess not only a personal unconscious mind but has also a collective unconscious mind which from time to time becomes activated and generates a form of communal madness. The American Religion with it Gnostic emphasis is a kind of concerted derangement, as all idolatry is. It also has exported this to the Rest of the World, especially South America and Africa where Pentecostalism is rapidly expanding. The result is that most inhabitants of the world are living in cultures committed to infinite growth, consumerism, resource extraction, war, and of course, massive denial that any of these destructive policies lead inevitably to planetary suicide. Thanks to a devilish interpretation of religion humans are united in perpetuating universal insanity, based on an erroneous illusion which can only have one possible outcome: collapse. Of course there are notable exceptions to this situation, but they are definitely very much in the minority.

Next week I will continue to investigate the church, religion and atheism, and conclude with the task of the church.

March 17 2013

OUR WORLD TODAY

The Home Stretch

Somehow we have labeled the period from the years 1000-1500 as the Middle Ages, implying that the subsequent centuries comprise the End Ages. I disagree. I believe that the 500 years, from 1500 to about 2000, were a special period, a time when everything came to its full potential. We now are in the final, downhill stretch of history, signified by “The End of Things,” a time when, as Economist Herman Daly put it, “the elites who make the decisions have figured out how to keep the benefits for themselves while ‘sharing’ the cost with the poor, the future, and other species. It is a time when empty-world economics with its emphasis on spurring economic growth by the accumulation of man-made capital has run its course.”

End-time is, just as dying, a very unpopular topic, but it is confirmed by such books as The End of Nature, The End of Science, The End of Oil and The End of Growth. They all indicate the finality of life. That the war from 1914-1945 was The War to End all Wars found its proof in the failures of the follies of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Time is running out. Global warming is proceeding at a much faster rate than was predicted by the International Panel on Climate Change: polar ice is disappearing at a rate which is far more penetrating than predicted, threatening the release of vast quantities of 20 times more potent greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere from melting permafrost and from enormous deposits of methane concentrations on the ocean floors. Other feedback loops may be introduced as drying of the Amazon basin and Australia’s interior makes these and other regions vulnerable to forest fires ignited by lightning flashes.

We are also in an unprecedented situation in other fields. Thanks to cheap energy= cheap food, we sired 7 billion people. Now we are in danger of an overshoot: too many mouths have created high oil prices, high food prices, species loss, air pollution, shortage of clean water, soil erosion and disease explosion made worse by antibiotic resistant drugs. Its financial effects are wealth disparity, debt default, nations unable to collect taxes and forced to cut back on benefits, resulting in riots just to name the most obvious The immediate most likely result is financial collapse. The West is like the Prodigal Son. It has squandered its heritage, but now that people realize their plight and return to Father State, Papa too is bankrupt. No warm welcome or fatted calf for us spendthrifts.

Recommendation One: if possible have extra cash on hand- at least $500 in small bills – just in case.

One consequence of the world being on its last legs is The Age of Fraud, especially in the money market. Revelation 22:11 – the last chapter of the Bible – confirms that: “Those who do wrong will increasingly do so; those who do right will persist in their good ways.” The Age of Fraud is evident everywhere, including in our self-deception that “matters will turn out fine”, or “science will find an answer”, or most common “I don’t want to think about it: too frightening”.

Today much of what hear or do are at best half-truths. Much of what we eat and drink is contaminated and falsely labeled: it is engineered to look good, but looks deceive as they often make us obese and cancer-prone, saturated as they are with salt and sugar to make us addictive to these poisons for the sole purpose of generating profits for the multi-national corporations. If “We are what we eat,” then that too bodes ill for the future.

Everything created is sacred, especially real food. Jesus prayed before eating, and many of us still do this. If food is holy then so is proper farming. I will probably get sued for this, but in my book Monsanto is a satanic enterprise. The name itself is blasphemy: Mon-santo refers to sanctus: holy. It is as far from holy as the devil is from Jesus. Why is Monsanto evil? Because it tampers with seeds so that farmers cannot use them for next year’s crop: that is anti-creational and hurts, especially the poor. Monsanto seeds will prove to be a curse in the long run.

My grandparent-farmers were deeply religious: they knew that for their well-being they depended on God giving rain and sunshine at the appropriate time. Now water is mechanically pumped from the Ogallala aquifer (already rapidly decreasing) or irrigation from other sources, all in danger of running out or low, while fertility is furnished by chemicals containing potassium, nitrogen and phosphorous. The result has been that we no longer need to believe: science – Monsanto – ConAgra – has all the answers. So farms have become factories without a roof. Since oil equals food, and oil equals poison and is finite, oil is another sign of the last days.

Another reason why we are in The End-Times is that people are becoming conscious of yesteryear’s missteps. I remember that in 1965 I received, as a member of a book club, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. I gave it away without ever reading it. I simply was not ready for new insights: too comfortable, but somewhere between 1970 and 1973 I got converted, was born again to different insights, including hearing Dr. Evan Runner coin “Life is Religion”.

Yes, all of life is religion. By and large organized religion has separated nature from grace, heaven from the earth, and soul from the body: the so-called the spirit/matter dualism. According to this belief the church’s business is the soul not the soil, yet for God the ‘soil’ is at least as important as is soul. The German word for ‘worship’ is Gottesdienst, which means ‘serving God’. We do that also when we devotedly work the soil. That’s why I like Bonhoeffer who said: “God, the Human Race, Creation belong together.”

Recommendation Two: prepare for the End. See life as one: everything is religion-oriented, even for the agnostic, probably turned off from the church by its staleness and lack of ‘all of life is religion.’

We now are in the home stretch. The industrial age is behind us. The carbon-based abundance is being forced into abandonment. The old order is dying and a new age is struggling to be born: a shifting of emphasis, away from the consumer society, and preparing for the Lord’s Age to come, which means getting ready for a life-style of eternity, a truly sustainable existence as the first step.

We need a new approach to life. The old approach of treating the earth as dead matter, as ‘being dominated’ is back-firing. Globally matters are beyond repair. It is simply inconceivable that the Seven Billion of Us will suddenly see the light and start living sustainably, which actually is no longer possible, because we rely so exclusively on carbon-based productivity that the outcome is guaranteed: collapse. That is not pessimism: that is the cruel reality.

Recommendation Three:  we must acknowledge where we have gone wrong, pray for forgiveness and re-assess the situation. For almost all of us that is all we can do, while embracing the belief that everything is holy. Peter tells us to “live holy and godly lives”. (2 Peter 3: 11), which for today means ‘living as green as possible”, because soil is as important as soul. He urges us to make the earth “The home of ??????????, of dikaiosunè , which, my good friend Sylvia Keesmaat has pointed out to me actually means ‘justice’ in this context. Righteousness is something personal, justice is all-embracing, pertains to all of God’s creation. The way we have lived and still are living, is sin. I can’t put it any other way. We must strive for an eternal life-style, one of true sustainability.

Sustainability is now a popular word. It generally means that we are willing to try solar energy and windmills and drive a hybrid, while maintaining our comfortable life. Sorry, that won’t be enough. A complete re-orientation is needed, which include a new kind of spirituality, seeing that all of life is religion. Religion is simply one of many possible means of expressing one’s spirituality. The cardinals, who elected a new Pope, were engaged in ‘religion’. Spirituality is seeing all of life as sacred, regarding it as being in harmony with the totality of the divine creation order. That’s what the apostle Peter meant by living just lives. Churches are religious institutions, but often lack the true spirituality; they are often in the grip of the ‘world’ which promotes the separation of religion from science and society. Descartes (famous for “I think therefore I am- cogito ergo sum”) sought to do that. This mechanistic worldview has supported industrialization without an active role for the sacred, separating mind from matter, people from nature, people from each other, the body from the mind, and the mind from the soul. It is the world’s dominant religion affecting all of us, including church people.

It was not so in earlier times. Native attitudes reflected what Chief Seattle may have said: “Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons and daughters of the earth. We did not weave the web of life; we are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.”

True sustainability is about “justice for everything and for all.” It reflects ‘loving your neighbour as yourself; it reflects loving God above all: and that really means loving everything- soil!- that God has made. How can we love God without loving his creation?  How can we love J.S. Bach without loving his music? He probably was a difficult man to live with, outliving his two wives and siring 20 offspring. Genesis tells us that when God had finished creation: “God saw everything he had made and found it very good.” In essence he said: This world is beautiful.  Take good care of it; do not ruin it…I place it in your hands: it now is yours”.

And that brings me to food and farming. Sustainable agriculture is rooted in the need for being in harmony with the order of things, which is a spiritual state. It means farming in harmony with creation. It means fitting farming to the farmer and the farm. It means farming in harmony among people – within families, communities, and societies. It means farming in harmony with future generations – being good stewards of finite resources. It means farming for eternity, ready for food production for the New Earth. Only a muscle-powered type of gardening can fill that bill.

As always, Christ will not do anything without us and we can’t do anything without him. He will make all things new, but that new must start with us. No use dwelling on the past, on that poisonous partnership we had in the carbon-based coalition. Leave it behind. Start a new way of doing things, including food production.

Dr. Barry Commoner, not a Christian, in his book The Closing Circle, (Alfred Knopf, New York, 1971), was one of the three persons instrumental in my conversion. The other two were Dennis Meadows of The Limits of Growth and Rev. B. Telder who wrote a (Dutch) book questioning heaven: After Death: What? (Sterven..en dan?) Where Meadows made me see that the earth’s resources are finite, Telder made me realize that heaven was a Satan ploy. Commoner, a biologist, coined the Laws of Ecology. Here they are:

(1)     Everything is connected to everything else. We are discovering that with Climate Change. Disturb the delicately balanced chemical composition of the atmosphere, and the entire world is in turmoil, from the Arctic to the Rainforests.

(2)     Everything must go somewhere. There is no such thing as waste. Nothing disappears. It is simply transferred from one place to another. Our universe is a closed system. We are locked in a sealed chamber from which nothing can escape.

(3)     Nature knows best. Given time, and absence of people, the cosmos will heal itself. The Lord created the world in such a way that all the evil done against it will disappear. That means that the Lord, in his grace, will cause a period to appear where no human beings will be able to disturb this remedial process. After that a chastened and wiser humanity will emerge.

(4)     Nothing comes free. We have built a lopsided world where we have never calculated the true cost of doing business, totally ignoring the environmental damage. We now are in the process of paying for this immense lack of proper accounting.

We are in the final stages of world history. It will be met with denial because it is a frightening prospect. For believers also it will be a bumpy ride for a while but in the end it will be rejoicing because Revelation 21 tells us the glorious future: “There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain….I am making everything new.”

Starting next week I will begin a series dealing with “The Church”.

March 3 2013

Clones or clowns?

Some comments on the coming conclave of the Catholic Cardinals.

Last spring I ran a 10 km race and caught up with a runner with whom I talked the rest of the way, an interesting man who had been the head of a provincial police force. When I asked him about the Roman Catholic Church and the sex scandals in his jurisdiction, he was quite blunt: a code of silence on all levels and – his words- affiliation with the Mafia.

Here’s an episode that ties in with that. I noticed it in The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky’s last book. It’s called “The Grand Inquisitor”. It’s a story that Ivan, the atheist Karamazov brother, has composed and recounts to his younger brother Alyosha, the aspiring priest. In it Jesus returns to the earth during the Spanish Inquisition. Ivan says: “It is fifteen centuries since signs from heaven were seen. And now the deity appears once more among the people.” Everyone recognizes him, because a blind man sees and a dead child rises. But the old cardinal, in charge of the Inquisition, takes Jesus to prison and tells him that: “You have no right to add anything to what you have said…. Why have you come to hinder us?” Ivan explains that this is a fundamental feature of the Church that God cannot ‘meddle’ now because “all has been given by you to the Pope. The Church is the authority now.”
The Grand Inquisitor then tells Jesus that he erred when he resisted the devil’s three temptations in the wilderness, where the devil offered him miracle, mystery and might, which the Church has accepted. Jesus, however, wanted them to have freedom of choice. But, says the clergyman, freedom is too difficult and frightful for the masses and so the Church has taken the three awesome gifts for them. The Inquisitor concludes: “We are not working with you, but with the devil– that is our mystery.” Jesus, still not speaking, kisses him on the lips. “That was all his answer.” The Grand Inquisitor opens the cell door and says, “Go, and come no more, never, never.” And the divine visitor leaves.

“Freedom is too difficult for the masses” says the cardinal, but that is an important part of Jesus’ teaching: “The Truth shall set you free”. The church of his day and of today rather not gives the people a free hand. Is the result of this the following?

“Whenever God erects a house of prayer

The Devil builds a chapel there;

And ‘twill be found upon examination,

The latter has the largest congregation.”

Daniel Defoe in The True-born Englishman

I don’t have television but I can quite well picture the room where the cardinals gather: two rows of figures, from top to toe attired in bright red, reminding me of the sea of red that is the permanent colour of most national budgets. It’s also no coincidence that the Bible uses red to portray our sins. Cardinals are, after all, human, just as the new pope will be, if they choose one.

If they choose one? Why do I say that? I say this because this entire ecclesiastical set-up is wrong, is as outdated as the temple in the Old Testament, is as outdated as the Sanhedrin, chaired by the High Priest, the Pope of his day who condemned Jesus to death.

When Jesus died the curtain separating in the temple the Holy Place from the Most Holy Place tore into two pieces, signifying that the temple no longer had a place in Israel, or anywhere else. The church then needed a completely new structure. Jewish worship also was a ‘from the top down’ affair: from high priest, to priests, to the people. Jesus reversed that order. Jesus wanted to see a church that started from the ground up. And that’s indeed the way it grew: by the word of mouth of the small folk, who created true fellowship through their charitable acts.

Back to the cardinals. It seems to me that this time the princes of the church can no longer resort to half measures. As this election approaches, some hope that the shortage of priests, and their damaged reputation and morale, can be remedied by adding married priests, or women priests, or gay priests. But that misses the point. Whatever their sexual status, they will still be priests. They will not be chosen by their congregations (as was the practice in the early church). They will be appointed from above, by bishops approved for their loyalty to Rome, which will police their doctrinal views as it has with priests heretofore. The power structure will not be changed by giving it new faces.

When the Roman Emperor Constantine declared Christianity to be the official state religion the church organized itself taking the Roman Empire as a model: The Pope resembled the Emperor, the cardinals the consuls, the priests the centurions. Jesus had always resisted this sort of structure, one that his disciples had advocated continuously. Now finally the outspoken aim of the Twelve to have the church resemble a worldly power had been accomplished, to the detriment of the Christian movement until this day. Jesus wanted people to have the freedom to make their own often conflicting, often unwise but nevertheless valid decisions. “My kingdom is not of this world,” was Jesus’ mantra, indicating that his kingdom is “The New Creation to Come” for which we all must strive.

The tragic reality is that the just resigned pope appointed many of the cardinals who will elect his successor. Pope Benedict always was a very conservative and somewhat timid theologian. As Cardinal Ratzinger he was in charge of purity of teaching, and as Pope he appointed to the conclave of electors those who agreed with his views, assuring the status quo: clones of his own mindset.

I believe that Benedict, elected at the age of 78, was meant to be a safe stopgap: with him the church could kick the ‘reform’ can down the road one more time. He certainly had no experience in dealing with people in a businesslike way, dogmatic theologian he was. Now that he has retired I believe he will completely withdraw from the intrigues of the inner church, a world no different from the Congress in Washington, where the budget can too has suffered the same fate, with disaster as the inevitable result. Just as all Western nations are at the edge of the abyss, the same is true in Rome in particular and the world-wide church in general. Now that Benedict – which means ‘well-spoken’ – has said his last words, the real question is whether we will see a clone- a conforming cleric, a party-line proponent, the business as usual advocate – or a clown – a courageous eccentric, who will not first gauge what his ecclesiastical colleagues will prefer, all perfect pictures of pure conformity. The church needs a few fools, clowns who, in the way Shakespeare used them, have the capacity to stir things up, to say things that other characters in their ecclesiastical capacity couldn’t possibly get away with saying, people who cut through the pomposity and tell the blatant truth. The blatant truth is that the current model is no longer valid, if it ever was.  What the church needs is a sober look at the world as it really is: godless, at the end of the rope, desperate, crying for guidance in these last fateful years, or in Latin In his ultimis annis fatalibus, which brings me to The Clowns of God.

In 1982 a younger brother, then a project manager in Australia, on his way back to the Netherlands, came via Canada and gave me a book he had bought on his travels: The Clowns of God. It’s all about a pope who – you guessed it – was forced to resign. The pope was in the planning stage to publish an encyclical with the very biblical name of ”In these last fateful years,” or in Latin, the church’s official language In His Ultimis Annis Fatalibus.

A draft of the papal document was lifted from the private papal apartment and given to the Curia, the Vatican cabinet (sounds familiar, doesn’t it).  Gregory the Seventeenth – that was the name of the pope in this book – was forced to abdicate because he claimed to have a vision of the end of the world, of the globe going up in flames, and Jesus’ Second Coming. He believed he was called to warn the world that Christ’ return was imminent. The cardinals give the pope an ultimatum: resign for medical reasons, or we will declare you mentally unfit to continue as Holy Father.

The 1981 the world was pre-occupied with the nuclear dangers. Today the perils are far worse, carrying all the features of finality. Morris West in The Clowns of God, which he wrote in 1981, could not have known the extent of the natural and man-made disasters devastating country after country and ecosystems after ecosystem in the world today. Knowing human nature, this process will never be reversed: matters will only get worse.

The next pope may not be the last one, as some maintain, but I believe that this conclave of 115 old men –average age 72 – all bachelors and supposedly ‘undefiled’ by women (or men), are faced with a final choice. Why? Because the institutional church in whatever category, colour, conviction or confession, Protestant, Jewish, Islam, has become dominantly atheistic. I realize that this sounds like a gross over-reaction, but it seems to me – and I may be wrong, of course – that those (the Religious Right comes to mind) who claim to know exactly what God wants, display a form of self-deification, are making themselves equal to god. This more than anything else has made religion rigid, caused by the failure to admit that the Bible expressly states that we ALL see through a glass darkly. This really means that to know the Truth with a capital T is beyond our grasp. We can only say with a great degree of certainty that it is our Christian duty to devote ourselves religiously – with all we possess – to the betterment of creation and its occupants. There’s where faith enters. To be ‘religious’ without having regard for God’s creation is what Bonhoeffer calls “pious secularism.” Christianity in essence knows three truths: (1) God created the universe; (2) we disturbed God’s harmonious cosmos to the point where (see Isaiah 24) “The earth is split asunder, it reels like a drunkard”; or ( see Romans 8): “We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pain of childbirth”; (3) Jesus, by his sacrificial death and consequent resurrection, paid the price and will bring back the renewed earth, the Kingdom, commonly called redemption. The rest is commentary.

The End of the World is predicted in the Bible. We are warned, not only by the Bible but by our clergy to always be prepared because no one, except God, knows when the end of the world will come, but there are definite signs, as Jesus himself outlines with the lesson on the fig tree. (Matthew 24).

The College of Cardinals can ignore the signs of the times, and continue business as usual which is probably what will happen. However, we should pray that the princes of the church, by not electing a pope at all, would send the strongest possible sign that it’s not business as usual.

Let’s face it: a pope is like a president: his power is an illusion. He basically is a P.R. guy, a salesman for an important branch of religion. The conclave, recognizing this, should call Vatican Council III and discuss with all religions the state of the world “In these last fateful years.”

There have been two of these Councils before: Vatican I from 1870-71; Vatican II from 1962-65: now it is time for Vatican III. The need has never been greater. Cardinals are not stupid. Times are different for the simple reason, as Morris West outlined in The Clowns of God, that we are indeed In his ultimis annis fatalibus in these last fateful years.

Electing a new pope without any conditions will simply accelerate the death of the church as more and more people get fed up with the empty pageantry of the moribund system.

It only takes a few clowns to initiate this process. We need modern equivalents of what the Apostle Paul wrote (1Cor.3: 18) “we need to become fools so that we may become wise…. (1 Cor. 4:10) We are fools for Christ.”

Fools in that sense are like the clowns of God, people that go against the established practises and dare to be different. “Unless you become like little children you shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” That also applies to the Pope and the College of Cardinals and each one of us.

In the short month of February 4943 visitors went to www.hielema.ca/blog where also this column, books and essays are posted.

My next column will deal with “The Future isn’t what it used to be.”

February 24 2013

Horticulture versus agriculture

“The land is mine,” says the Lord (Lev. 25:23)

We have 50 acres of land. Typical Eastern Ontario terrain: a bit of clear land where I planted 4000 trees, enough open space around our house to have a spacious vegetable garden, a toolshed, a woodshed, and a guest house with garage. The rest is woods, rocks, hills and lots of wet lands.

Actually according to Leviticus: my first sentence is wrong: “the land is mine” says the Lord. I have legal title, but ultimately the Lord created it and He gave me the holy obligation to look after it.

Last week I concluded my column by suggesting that we can’t do anything without Jesus and Jesus won’t do anything without us. In other words: Ora et Labora, pray and work. That applies to land also: God gave it to us; we must work it to the best of our calling. How do we do that?

There are three basic necessities in life: shelter, clothing and food. I built our house in 1975 on solid rock. It’ll be there a few more years. Clothing: got a closet full: more than I ever will wear out. Food: even though it is good to fast once in a while, our bodies need daily refueling.

Very early humanity, like Adam and Eve, were simply gatherers. The Garden of Eden provided them with a great variety of fruits. Instructed by the Lord-Creator they had first-hand knowledge of the earth’s bounties. When banned from paradise, hunting was added to their skills. Much later horticulture expanded to agriculture which in turn led to domesticating animals and our current industrial culture.

The original foragers lived in small bands and tribes. There some would be tool makers, others skilled in medicine, but almost none had exclusive specialties and everyone helped gather food. Most of their calories came from meat or fish, supplemented with fruit, nuts, and some wild grain and tubers. Rarely would a forager overexploit the environment because destruction of a resource one season would mean starvation the next. Foragers would naturally limit population expansion in line with available resources.

Agriculturists domesticated grain which allowed hoarding and surplus. Because land owners tend to get greedy, the Lord in Leviticus 25 ordained that every fiftieth year would be the Year of Jubilee, in which all land sold would revert back to the original owner: “because (verse 23) the land is mine and you reside in my land as foreigners and strangers.” I doubt whether it ever did take place.

Most of the earth’s surface was forest at one time. Agriculture changed that. When a forest is cleared for crops, the soil begins to deplete immediately but that won’t be noticed for many years, but once it is ruined it may never recover: that’s how deserts start their sterile lives.  When land supply was abundant, farmers, faced with soil exhaustion simply moved on to ‘greener pastures’, often displacing the natives. These original foragers were usually confined to a certain region where they knew the habits of particular species and had a culture built around a certain place. They rarely conquered new lands, as new terrain and its different species would alter the culture’s knowledge, stories, and traditions. Agricultural societies were and are more progressive, always in need of equipment for grain processing, tractors, combines, robot-milk machines: million dollar tools. This is not a condemnation: we all are engaged in some form of the rat race. As a result societal structures have grown more complicated, from mega-cities to complex governing bodies.

We think of foragers as frequently facing famine, but actually agriculturists fared far worse. Hunter-gatherers, with much lower population densities, with a much more diverse food supply and greater mobility, could find some food in nearly any conditions where farmers regularly experience hunger conditions. By and large they were healthier and taller than farmers.  The historian Fernand Braudel shows that in Europe country-wide famines occurred 10 times in the tenth century, 26 in the eleventh, 2 in the twelfth, 4 in the fourteenth, 7 in the fifteenth, 13 in the sixteenth, 11 in the seventeenth, and 16 in the eighteenth century. Agriculture did not become a reliable source of food until fossil fuels gave us the massive energy subsidies needed to avoid shortfalls: farming now needs 4 to 10 fuel calories for each calorie of food energy.

Leviticus 25 says that “the land belongs to the Lord.” Forager cultures have a built-in check on population, since the plants and animals they depend on cannot be over-harvested without immediate harm. But agriculture has no similar limit on over-exploitation of resources. Thanks to the recent abundance of fertilizer and cheap fuel modern agriculture caused our current population explosion.

Here’s what Jesus had to say about abundant yields. In the parable of the Rich Fool – as recorded in Luke 12: 16-21 – he tells us about a man who had an excellent crop, so good that he planned to tear down the old barns and build new ones to store the surplus, sell it off slowly and enjoy life. Then God showed up: “fool, tonight you’ll die.” It reminds me of Psalm 14: “The fool says in his heart, ’There is no God.’” The Grail Psalms, commenting here, say: “The fool is one who has his values all wrong – get rich quick, never mind the poor – and is encouraged by past experience to behave as if God would never take action.” The fool does not believe that ‘the land belongs to God,’ so he can do with the land and the surplus as he pleases, even though his actions lead to death. Is that what current agriculture will do to us?

Jesus always looks to the final result, the ultimate outcome. So, what are the consequences of a surplus?  A surplus creates class division – rich versus poor; grain must be stored, which requires technology and materials to build barns; it takes people to guard it, and a hierarchical organization to centralize the storage and decide how it will be sold off, waiting for the best marketing conditions. Was that the reason why Jesus spoke this parable? A surplus offers a target for power struggles among the heirs, an object of desire for poor neighbours, increasing the scale of wars. With agriculture, power is concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. They who control the surplus control the group. Personal freedom erodes under agriculture.

There is another way to look at this. Agriculture is chronos, the Greek word for time as the clock dictates, time ruled by machines, time that is money, time that turns on technology that not only eclipses our souls, but also kills creation. Agriculture is now an industry, synonymous with manufactured food of which, perhaps, 10 percent is farm-stuff, liberally spiked with addictive salt and sugar. Most of our food cost is advertising, packaging, profit, and sustained by large volumes of climate changing carbon energy. Cheap food ultimately leads to expensive health care. Agriculture today, like the Rich Young Fool, causes people to die before their time, witness obesity, diabetes, heart attacks, and cancers. Modern agriculture has resulted in concentration of power by the elite whose only aim is profit.

Creation lives by kairos, a different time frame, that of the earth. We must find a way of growing food that fits in with kairos, the time in tune with the earth, the time that ticks eternally and knows no hour. I believe horticulture is kairos, eternal time, sustainable for ever.

While agriculture has an expiry date, horticulture has not. It uses simple methods to raise useful plants and animals. Horticulture in this sense is difficult to define precisely. Simply put, horticulturists are gardeners rather than farmers, using hand tools, while leaving some land fallow. That sort of gardening is a religious act, regarding the earth as a living entity.

In the long run – and that must always be our aim – horticulture is the most efficient method known for obtaining food, measured by return on energy invested.  Horticulturists use poly-cultures, tree crops, perennials, and limited tillage, and have an intimate relationship with diverse species of plants and animals. Horticulture is permaculture, and is a way of growing for eternity. It’s the way to sustainability. Where horticulture has structural constraints against large population, hoarding of surplus, and centralized command and control structures, agriculture inevitably leads to all of those. I have said it before: we need to be anthropoi teleioi (Matt. 5:48), people (anthropoi) who always keeping ‘the end’ (telos) in mind.

In the new earth there is no place for agriculture. Only foraging and horticulture will stand the test of eternity.

Next week: The next pope: a clown or a clone? If you have a chance at all, buy, beg, borrow, but read Morris West’s The Clowns of God in the next week or so. It’s about a pope who abdicates.