Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

Year 9-2

We all have seen these tremendously long trains stacked with doubled up containers, most of them originating in China. That sort of transport may soon stop. It’s the money matter that may halt this.

The growing financial crisis is hampering world trade as shippers also of dry-bulk goods such as grain and coal, worry that importers won’t be able to pay for the goods they receive. This may result in food and energy shortages next year. Because of this sudden curtailment in cargo transport, rates for the biggest dry-bulk ships have plunged to an average of just $5,611 per day, compared with $166,377 a year ago. No wonder ship owners are laying up their ships rather than operate at a loss, adding to the international trade troubles.

There are still Three Auto Dinosaurs out there who will go the same way as their pre-historic namesakes who expired when their ferocious appetite could no longer be satisfied: they simply starved to death. The so-called Big Three are following a similar path as the fuel their pre-historic machines require is disappearing. The employment loss there and millions others related to it – one in 5 jobs is connected to the CAR in one way or another- will mean the death of the great American Dream with disastrous consequences especially for such cities as Detroit, Lansing, Windsor and Oshawa.

Food could well be next on the misery menu. As farmers have trouble getting bank credit for fertilizer, seed, fuel and more, the net effect will be lower planting of key grains even as world inventories of these cereals hover near historic lows. Bloomberg reports that global stocks of corn, wheat and soybeans are the second lowest they’ve ever been since 1974. Already the bank crisis threatens next year’s crop in Russia, where the head of the Russian Grain Union says, ‘Many farmers probably won’t be able to borrow money for the spring sowing.’ Russia happens to produce 9% of the world’s wheat, and that in a world where the five-year average growth rate in grain demand is 2.6% per year.

It seems to me that the global economy as we know it is finished. The meeting of the G20 in Washington did nothing to solve the problem caused by the tsunami of borrowed money. The naked reality is that the world’s buyers of last resort, the American Consumers, are suffering from a severe debt hangover that will keep them hung-up for a long time, perhaps permanently. The American “consumers”, having gorged themselves on the output of Asian factories in exchange for paper promises, have gone on a permanent shopping strike, which will foster a financial typhoon in China, where its restive population, both broke and hungry, might start another revolution. After all, that’s how the Commies there got into power.

In short: the “Real Estate Economy” is reeling; the “Financial Economy” is faltering; the “Consumer Economy” is crashing; and the “Service Economy” is disappearing. Now that the tentacles of the Credit Crisis have ensnared every sector of the world’s markets, a Global Depression Economy is unavoidable.

Welcome to a new world in need of new thinking. Think the US – wanting our oil and water – occupying Canada. Think war-time conditions. Think rationing. Think frugality. Think barter. Think making meals from home-grown food. Think thinking out of the box, as the improbable and even the impossible become the imperative.

Actually bad times can be good for us. We’ll have more time for reading newspapers and books, more time for exercise, more time for family life, more time to implement the 100 feet diet, eating from our own garden, more time to talk to, and help others.

Wartime in Europe actually improved health and mortality rates. Less economic activity gives cleaner air and force people to work closer to home and in the home. Manufacturing of the future may be more like a cottage industry, bringing to mind the title of Schumacher’s book of the 1960”s, “Small is Beautiful.” Neighborhood stores will see a revival. Local retail (and its support structures) will return.

Bush, last week, made a pitch for market Capitalism. He has been wrong so often, that now nobody pays any attention to him anymore.
Will Obama be better? He will preside over the potential restructuring of all our systems, some of them in ways he and his supporters have not even imagined, with central powers waning, and local autonomy on the rise, as each region will strive for self-sufficiency.

Welcome to a new world. Of course we leave the old world reluctantly, as a new world is forced upon us swiftly and radically with the collapse of our money economy. What we leave behind has been part of ourselves. It’s painful to be forced to die to one life, before we can enter another. Yet this experience is essentially a fortunate one, because we can be ourselves again, no longer forced to conform to a model imposed upon us by The Consumer Society that literally is threatening to consume everything including ourselves.

Year 9-1

“Christian Church lives by God’s word, even on homosexuality”.

I challenge the accuracy of last week’s headline, because God’s Word is bigger than the Scriptures alone.

For the last 23 years I have written in my almost undecipherable long-hand scribbles a daily meditation based on the lectionary (prescribed yearly bible readings), some 400 words on weekdays and double that length on Sundays.

For this purpose I also consult other religious sources, one of which is the so-called Belgic confession, dating from 1566, before the Enlightenment clouded the religious scene. In connection with God’s word it says that “we know God:

First by the creation, preservation and government of the universe, since that universe is before our eyes like a most elegant book, in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God, his eternal power and divinity, as the Apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20: all these things are enough to convict men and leave them without excuse.”

That last lines suggest to me that the opposite is also true: those who regard creation as God’s work of art and live ecologically responsible, earn God’s grace.

This confessional statement continues: “we know him,

Second: He makes himself known to us more openly by his Holy and divine word as much as we need in this life, for his glory and for the salvation of his own.”

From this I conclude that God’s Word is two-fold, of which Creation is the most prominent, something the church usually ignores.

Creation-care makes sense, because it deals with the place where we live now and where we will be forever according to the Apostles’ Creed, which states: “I believe in the resurrection of the body and the Life Everlasting.”

Based on the primacy of the Created Word, I believe that where there are discrepancies between the Written Word – the Bible – and the Created Word – call it observed reality – the Created Word wins, of which the Creation Story, as told in Genesis 1 and 2, is a striking example.

We must not forget that the Bible is, in many ways, a product of inspired human action. It was, in its present format, constituted by the men – no women there, of course – at the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D. The basic message of the Bible is that God created the world, that the human race took the wrong road, and that Jesus, God’s son, made it possible to go the Right Way again: it’s not a text book for science, history, or sexual orientation.

In John 3:16 Jesus says that God loves his cosmos so much that he offered his most precious possession, his only son, to die so that this well-ordered universe, where the plants flourish and the trees thrive, where the whales frolic and the humans are privileged to dwell and grow grapes and make wine that gladdens the heart, can again become pristine. Jesus died for everything created, including the human race.

I have read that homosexual situations occur among plants and animals, so it is not surprising that this same condition exists among humans. This makes sense because my deeply Christian homo-sexual friends tell me that they were born that way, which leads me to conclude that homosexuality in a monogamous relationship is not a sin.

What is sin is driving a car and switching on a light. That might surprise you because nobody can avoid doing this, yet by these actions we pollute and sin against the third commandment which reads: “You shall not misuse the name of the Lord, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.”

Polluting offends God’s holiness because it destroys what he called good seven times in Genesis 1-2. We now face the consequences of these sins.

Romans 8:18-25 gives a moving account how creation is suffering from our cruel treatment and looks forward “with eager longing, with neck outstretched” to be liberated from the destruction we, polluting people, have imposed upon her. Creation looks for that same freedom, that same redemption, that Christians desire, which means that human deliverance and the deliverance of the environment go hand in hand, are two sides of the same coin, that you can’t have one without the other.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was hanged by Hitler in April 1945, wrote in an essay called “Dein Reich Komme” (Thy Kingdom Come) that God, Humans and the Earth are inseparable: “To think otherwise is Christian Secularism, a renunciation of God as the Lord of the Earth.”

Jesus told us to “Seek ye first the Kingdom.” This means that our first duty is to seek the wellness of creation, not exactly something the church in general sees as a priority. For the church to be Christian it must prepare its members to live so that when God’s Kingdom comes – the New Creation – the transition to that perfect state will be a natural next step.

That kingdom has lots of room, also for homosexuals, also for all of us who try to minimize pollution, but I am pretty sure that it has no place for people who pollute for the sole purpose of procuring a profit.