Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

SEPTEMBER 14 2019

ABOLISH THE CLERGY?

James Carroll certainly thinks so. A former priest he knows the Roman Catholic Church inside out, and wrote an article on THE CHURCH AND THE CLERGY in the Atlantic Magazine, in which he boldly stated that to save the Roman Catholic Church it would have to get rid of the clergy.

Here is an excerpt of his essay.

“The virtues of the Catholic faith have been obvious to me my whole life. The world is better for those virtues, and I cherish the countless men and women who bring the faith alive. The Catholic Church is a worldwide community of well over 1 billion people. North and South, rich and poor, intellectual and illiterate—it is the only institution that crosses all such borders on anything like this scale. As James Joyce wrote in Finnegans Wake, Catholic means “Here Comes Everybody.” Around the world there are more than 200,000 Catholic schools and nearly 40,000 Catholic hospitals and health-care facilities, mostly in developing countries. The Church is the largest nongovernmental organization on the planet, through which selfless women and men care for the poor, teach the unlettered, heal the sick, and work to preserve minimal standards of the common good. The world needs the Church of these legions to be rational, historically minded, pluralistic, committed to peace, a champion of the equality of women, and a tribune of justice.

“That is the Church many of us hoped might emerge from the Second Vatican Council, which convened in the nave of Saint Peter’s Basilica from 1962 to 1965. After the death, in 1958, of Pope Pius XII—and after 11 deadlocked ballots—a presumptive nonentity from Venice named Angelo Roncalli was elected pope, in effect to keep the Chair of Peter warm for the few years it might take one or another of the proper papal candidates to consolidate support. Roncalli—Pope John XXIII—instead launched a vast theological recasting of the Catholic imagination. Vatican II advanced numerous reforms of liturgy and theology, ranging from the jettisoning of the Latin Mass to the post-Holocaust affirmation of the integrity of Judaism. Decisively, the council defined the Church as the “People of God,” and located the clerical hierarchy within the community as servants, not above it as rulers. The declaration, though it would turn out to have little practical consequence for the clergy, was symbolized by liturgical reform that brought the altar down from on high, into the midst of the congregation.

“Clericalism, with its cult of secrecy, its theological misogyny, and its hierarchical power, is at the root of Roman Catholic dysfunction.”

My question: “Does the same apply to the Protestant wing?”

That’s what I am exploring. For this I am intrigued by Walter Brueggemann’s book, THE PROPHETIC IMAGINATION. This well-known theology professor, already on the first page of his 1978 book – of the five books I have by him, I think this is his best – writes, “The contemporary American Church is so largely enculturated to the American ethos of consumerism that it has very little power to believe or to act.”

He sets out – and succeeds – to explore that, “The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.”

There’s no doubt that today circumstances have changed for the worse: Climate Change is starting to rip, drench and destroy: we all know, or should know that we cannot continue to live as we do. This means that the church too must change.

Brueggemann again, “It is the task of the prophet to bring to expression the new realities against the more visible ones of the old order.”

Today it is becoming generally accepted that Business as Usual will lead to annihilation, which means that ‘nihil=nothing’ will remain the same. Basically the world is at it wit’s end. How can we stop the current track of commerce, of consumerisms, of industrial growth? Our business world is built on them. No growth means stagnation, means layoffs, means less tax income, means deathly deficits.

Already in prosperous times we experience enormous revenue shortfalls. When inflation comes – and in a world where soil, air and water are under ever growing stress – a rise in the cost of basic food items is bound to happen, we will see the worst of all possibilities: shrinking incomes and rising costs.

Churches are middleclass institutions. Especially the middle classes will face the brunt of financial cutbacks.

Back to Brueggemann. 

Jesus was a threat then and is now. Writes Brueggemann: “Very early Jesus is correctly perceived as a clear and present danger (by the church of his day)”.

It reminds me of an episode that ties in with this. 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”.

That perfectly illustrates that the church then and now rather not give the people a free hand. Yet, before Jesus returns, more imminent by the day, we have to break free from the ecclesiastical enterprise. Yes, James Carroll is correct.

The Bible again.

Already in the letter to the Hebrews the immaturity of the pew-sitters is evident. The author writes, (Hebrew 5: 11-14):

“Concerning him we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you have need again for someone to teach you the elementary principles of the oracles of God, and you have come to need milk and not solid food. For everyone who partakes only of milk is not accustomed to the word of righteousness, for he is an infant. But solid food is for the mature, who because of practice have their senses trained to discern good and evil.”

That was 2,000 years ago when the church was in its infancy. Now the problem is worse, and the structure of the church is to blame. Our crutches have to be taken away and we either walk by ourselves, or tumble and fall. 

Brueggemann hints at that when he writes: “Jesus’ ability to heal and his readiness to do it on a Sabbath (Mark 3: 1-6) evoked a conspiracy to kill him. The violation is concerned not with the healing but with the Sabbath.”

This is a clear indication that Jesus directly aims at the institution, and the maintainers of the establishment, the clergy. Then and now they have become a hindrance to the coming of the kingdom.

I have mentioned ATONEMENT before. Atonement is an expression of compassion. Brueggemann again: “Jesus in his solidarity with the marginal ones is moved to compassion. Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural but is an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness.”

Do you know of any church that has initiated a Day of Atonement?

The Bahamas has been ravaged by our actions. Climate Change has been put on our debit account. Jesus loves the ‘cosmos’ and today he is in tears and agony because of us, because we have totally despoiled HIS creation.

Brueggemann again, “Jesus brings newness in the situation, but only in his grief: grief, embodied anguish, is the route to newness.”

The refusal to confess ATONEMENT represents denial of The New Creation. Brueggemann writes, “Prophetic criticism knows that only those who mourn can be comforted and so it first asks about how to mourn seriously and faithfully for the world passing away”.

There is no doubt that this world is passing away: all the signs are there.

Back to James Carroll’s article:

“My five years in the priesthood, even in its most liberal wing, gave me a fetid taste of this caste system. Clericalism, with its cult of secrecy, its theological misogyny, its sexual repressiveness, and its hierarchical power based on threats of a doom-laden afterlife, is at the root of Roman Catholic dysfunction. The clerical system’s obsession with status thwarts even the merits of otherwise good priests and distorts the Gospels’ message of selfless love, which the Church was established to proclaim. Clericalism is both the underlying cause and the ongoing enabler of the present Catholic catastrophe. I left the priesthood 45 years ago, before knowing fully what had soured me, but clericalism was the reason.

“Clericalism’s origins lie not in the Gospels but in the attitudes and organizational charts of the late Roman empire. Christianity was very different at the beginning. The first reference to the Jesus movement in a nonbiblical source comes from the Jewish Roman historian Flavius Josephus, writing around the same time that the Gospels were taking form. Josephus described the followers of Jesus simply as “those that loved him at the first and did not let go of their affection for him.” There was no priesthood yet, and the movement was egalitarian. Christians worshipped and broke bread in one another’s homes. But under Emperor Constantine, in the fourth century, Christianity effectively became the imperial religion and took on the trappings of the empire itself. A diocese was originally a Roman administrative unit. A basilica, a monumental hall where the emperor sat in majesty, became a place of worship. A diverse and decentralized group of churches was transformed into a quasi-imperial institution—centralized and hierarchical, with the bishop of Rome reigning as a monarch. Church councils defined a single set of beliefs as orthodox, and everything else as heresy.”

Back to our roots.

The Beginning is in the End and the End is in the Beginning. We live in End Times, that’s why everywhere churches are dying, including the church I attend. All institutions, all human endeavors, will fail, including the church. The End is in the Beginning.  

In the beginning believers met at each other’s homes. Church buildings are energy hogs, and getting there means driving polluting cars, while sitting to listen to a monologue is the most ineffective way to communicate ideas.

What is needed is personal exploration and reflection, discussion, praying together, hosting events, and inviting neighbors. In a world, desperate for answers, Christ is the only answer: The Coming of The New Creation.

That means going back to the church in its infancy, when the “Christians” met in pious anticipation of the coming of the Lord.

All the old will be new again.

Brueggemann ends his book with these words, “Those who have not cared enough to grieve, will not know joy.”

Just as in Jesus’ days, the church structure has become an impediment to The Coming of the Kingdom, the New Creation.

James Carroll is right: “Clericalism is at the root of the church’s dysfunction.”

SEPTEMBER 7 2019

BRAIN-DEAD?

Solomon, the not always wise king, wrote that “Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body” (Ecclesiastes 12:12).

I guess Solomon was right. But reading is my life. Always has been. Where speaking is silver, and silence is gold, so writing is silver and reading is gold. How else can I gather knowledge? TV does not provide it: on the contrary. Newspapers or periodicals have their peculiar biases, so selective reading is the only avenue left. Of course my daily Bible reading always inspires, and so does utilizing my library, where I continue to find nuggets of wisdom.

I am still brooding on Jung. Brooding may be too strong a word, but his words that “We are very far from having finished completely with the middle Ages, classical antiquity, and primitivity,” still lingers in my mind.

Somehow my eye fell on a book I bought in 1991 and never read, “The Medieval Vision”. Here is how it ended, “Understanding the past means…..trying to re-create a holistic view of existence that has not been generally held for four centuries. To live in medieval Europe was to appreciate that the events of human experience were linked irremediably to the past and the future, and that beliefs and judgements were inseparable from a vast network of complementary ideas.”    

Then people knew where they came from and knew where they were going. We may take issue with their Hell and Heaven notion then prevalent, but it gave them clear objectives. Then, as the book states, “The vision of Christ’s divinity and the Paradise of God were crucial not only to piety but to all earthly affairs.”

My brother Drewes each month sends me the digital version of Civis Mundi (Citizen of the world), written in Dutch, a high-brow digital magazine with some Roman Catholic flavor. Dr. Jan de Boer, a professor in Amsterdam, commenting why we are what we are, wrote the following in the August edition, and I translate,

BRAINS

Now even these beliefs are hardly ever mentioned in the church let alone by business and politicians. We are the last generation, because we are devoid of vision, devoid of perspective, devoid of knowledge of past and future. We have become gods in our own right, so we no longer need God, the creator. We are the first generation to have the power to destroy everything, both by our way of carbon-induced death, or through our nuclear arsenal. These powers are the direct result of us abandoning religion: we have become our own religion, no longer rooted in the Medieval way when magnificent cathedrals were living testimonies to their commitment, something we still long for, witness the outpouring of compassion when Notre Dame de Paris went up in flames.

Our faith is vested in ever higher skyscrapers, strikingly silhouetted against the horizon where the moneymen plot their ever more dangerous schemes, and the legal minds are twisting to make the rich richer.

That brings me to our brains.

The question remains: how come that our brains urge us to destroy the planet and wonders whether there is a way to prevent that.

That is precisely the subtitle of a book, Le bug Humain written by Sébastien Bohler (February 2019).

He describes how our cortex, the outer contours of our brain, continues to pursue goals which are incompatible with efforts to save human society on our planet. He quotes the author, “For a long time our brains were our best ally, but they now are a real risk factor in our demise. Why? Because our brains have a programming problem in its design, a veritable deviation right at the center of this unbelievably complex organ: the nerve cells, the neurons, which supposed to guarantee our survival, are now never satisfied, and require ever more sustenance, sex and energy.”

The British ecologist, George Marshall, gives a more complicated explanation. In his book, with the fitting title The Ostrich Syndrome (2014) he maintains that our denial to effectively deal with the threat of Climate Change can be traced to our evolution, which urges us to opt for the short-term advantage. According to Marshall our rational brain by not recognizing the seriousness of climate change, acts contrary to our emotional brain which determines our decisions and so is not capable to effectively deal with the reality of the anxiety and uncertainty caused by this weather anomaly.”

Dr, Jan de Boer continues, “Reading these two and other sources have pretty well convinced me to have little faith in a future that promises little and threatens a lot. I am sorry to say but I am convinced that we do not really face up to the deadly seriousness of climatic changes and their disastrous consequences.”

So writes Dr. De Boer.

Yet, Africa is still different.

Years ago my wife and I spent three weeks in Central South Africa, visiting our youngest son who had a two year assignment there. What struck me about the African people was their innate sense of art and beauty. With the simplest of tools and the most ordinary of material they are able to create something beautiful.

Again reflecting on the first chapters of Genesis, the first bible book, confirms the African mentality: when God pointed out the TREE to the first couple living in Paradise, he described it as ‘beautiful to look at and good for consumption’: beauty before anything else. Africa has understood that priority, we have not.

I believe that, unless we escape the brain-dead trap, and free ourselves from human tendency to ignore the evil in society, we are goners.

Jung maintained that we are the product of past generations, so it behooves me to look back to my ancestors to enable me to reflect on who and what I am. So here it goes.

My parents named me Egbert Drewes, both after my maternal grandfather, Egbert de Haan, my mother’s father, and Drewes Bouwsma de Haan, my great-grandfather. A double surname, in those days, signified country gentry, and that was the case with him, as his grandfather an Egbert Drewes de Haan was the honored member of the Groningen Provincial Parliament, an appointed, not an elected position, a fervent supporter of the Dutch Royal Family during the French annexation of the Netherlands in around the year 1800. In my ancestor’s church, dating from the year 1300, my great-great-grandfather was honored with a plaque cemented in above the church’s entrance, forever proclaiming him a true royalist. Both were organic farmers, loved the land. My parents were the first to settle in the city. I am the first to return to the soil that shaped me, surrounded by forests which have had a calming influence on me and prevented me from becoming brain-dead.

I relate this because Jung has told me that my psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components. Body and soul therefore have an intensely historical character and find a proper place in what is new, in things that have just come into being.

My school Greek already taught me to “gnoothe seauton”, to ‘know thyself’, the eternal struggle to reflect on what I am and why I do what I do.

Jung tells us “Not to do so, has made us plunge 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.”

This past week is a perfect example of what Jung refers to: turmoil everywhere, including the oceans, including the not so Great Britain, including the trading frenzies involving the USA and China.

Don’t get emotionally mixed up in the frenzy that is modern life. Get used to the eternal pace, our glorious future that awaits us, because, as Jung also asserts, “we refuse to recognize that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse”. He also said that, “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.”

So, what am I implying?

For one thing, God has to enter again in our lives, in the person of Jesus Christ through whom and by whom everything exists, including us. Jesus is the image of the invisible God.

Right now we are on a brain-dead trajectory witness our unwillingness to tackle Climate Change. We need to imagine a cultural shift away from the way of death we now are on, and dream again, dream about our roots, which lie in the earth, not in concrete, not in steel and cement, not in high rise and technology, but in down to earth humility: ‘earth we are and to earth we must return.’

We have to start all over again, wised up, chastened, humbled: listening to the cries of creation, recognizing our complicity in the unfolding climate crisis, praying, PRAYING for forgiveness, learning the true meaning of METANOIA, because a mind-change is needed: we have to become trustworthy to Creation once again.

Psalm 51 comes to mind, “My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise.” We have to be delivered from the cult of objects that leaves little room for emotion, little room for reverence or wonder. False images and gods have hypnotized us so completely that they’re killing us – and yet we remain in their thrall.

We have to again admire the greatness of creation, where every snowflake is different. If that is true – and it is – then we too should refuse to become homogenized, molded into Homo Economicus, oblivious to the pain of creation.

Admit that we have lost our indigeneity, our Earth stories and our Earth-memories; admit that we do not make the time to cultivate these things, or to reinvent them. Re-discover again how synchronized we actually are to Earth’s living rhythms, her inhale and exhale; like the water in the soil, the liquids in our bodies rise and fall twice daily with the moon, like internal tides, no matter how far we might be from the shore.

At one time, we too walked the Earth with feet perfectly suited to all her varied terrains. In recent times, though, we have lost our baseline gait, a term borrowed from the science of wildlife tracking that refers to the prints left by a healthy animal moving in a relaxed manner through her environment. With our shoes and our pavements, our high-rises and cars, we have eliminated the in-built, visceral knowing received directly from the Earth. And because we are being bombarded by information, toxins, and electronic signals coming at us faster than our bodies can process, our brains assemble fragments of information into a distorted composite from which we react rather than respond.

I have read that some 500 years ago the earth in North America was so vibrant that disease was virtually unknown: now suicide and cancer are the leading causes of death there. 

I have come to believe that only in surrendering to the grief that takes us apart and strips everything away, can we hope to salvage the essential alliances that keep life going: the partnership between God – Christ, humans and Earth and the reverence engendered by deep knowing that God is all and in all, which signifies PANENTHEISM.

In the Native American and Indigenous prophesies of what we now call the Americas, doom was foreseen.

The Bible, written thousands of years ago, echoes this sentiment. The great enemy, whose initial aim was to prevent the coming of the Christ, now that the Evil One rules our world (1 John 5: 19), has only one goal: to destroy God`s creation. Over the decades our brains have changed, no longer receptive to the cries of creation. Salvation is an all-inclusive affair: our redemption and the redemption of creation go hand in hand.

AUGUST 31 2019

GREED IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL

Radix malorum cupiditas est. 

Nowadays we experience the culmination of history: everything is becoming what it is. We are rushing to the END, and that means that the true nature of humanity and the true nature of human enterprises are being bared in all its vulgarity and vileness, exposing GREED as the root of all evil, but also revealing the good deeds that will accompany us into eternity.

The Latin word ‘cupiditas’ is derived from the verb, ‘cupido’ which signifies erroneous desire of all sorts, money, power, sex.

The saying “The lust for money is the root of all evil” originates with Paul, the apostle, who wrote it to his protégé, Timothy (1 Tim.6: 10). Paul was a passionate person: whatever he did, he did with gusto and, when young, with fanatic overtones. He reminds me of myself in my younger and even not so younger days. No half-way measures for him. I love the man, not only for his wise writings, truly inspired, but also for his forthrightness. He shows the power of his upbringing as an aspiring Pharisee, steeped in the Scriptures, and a great artist and poet as well – just read 1 Corinthians 13, that great song of love: “Faith, Hope and Love, and the greatest of these is LOVE” – even though he apparently never married.

He mentioned that he was afflicted with ‘a thorn in the flesh’. He fervently prayed to have it removed, but the Lord had other ideas, something like, “That sting will keep you humble”. In my DAY WITHOUT END you will meet him, and there he reveals what I think, is his Thorn, not an unusual affliction, I believe.

For many ‘greed’ is the thorn in the flesh, and when we give in to it, it poisons our personality. For politicians “economic growth” at all costs, is the scourge of society. Many who faithfully attend church justify their greedy exploitation of creation by basing it on the ancient misinterpretation of Genesis of ‘dominating’ the earth, abetted by the ‘heaven’ syndrome. By and large the church people see the earth as disposable, even though the Bible repeatedly claims that, “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it” (Psalm 24), making it holy. There too greed is the driving motive.

So what do we observe in our world today?

Satan, God’s enemy of old, kicked out of heaven for subordination, has landed feet first on earth, where he and his army of angels turned evil, now rule all rulers everywhere. There’s not a just government left: all exploit the earth.

That’s why OIL is still king. We have become helpless. You may think, “I will drive less, and so cut back on my energy consumption.” Unfortunately, in the entire scheme of things, whether or not we cut back on the use of gasoline doesn’t get the world economy very far. Gasoline accounts for about 26% of world oil consumption, or about 8.7% of total energy use. A cut of gasoline consumption by 10% would curtail world energy consumption by less than 1%.

Still I bike wherever I can, even though pedaling my iron horse makes no difference on the global scale, but that is not the point: I am totally responsible for how I conduct my daily life. Since the earth’s eclipse is looming far faster beyond anyone thought possible, I know that I have to give account of how I have conducted myself in God’s earth, because, once the earth is consumed by human induced FIRE, Judgment Day is the immediate next immense event.

Yes, we will never get away with murder – and that is what God will charge us with: murder of species, murder of air, soil, water, trees, and everything that depends on these basic elements. All based on GREED.

The main charge against us, humans, will be that we have fashioned a society totally relying on greed, of which carbon energy is now all-pervasive, because Carbon energy is needed for every activity that is considered part of our GDP, Gross Domestic Product. 

God gave us the energy from the sun without which food can’t grow. That’s why initially human beings were vegetarians: no supplementary heat sources were needed: the sun did it all.

Once we started agriculture and used animals, one thing led to another. Without supplemental energy of some kind (such as using electricity to heat an electric stove or burning animal dung or sticks), it becomes impossible to cook food or smelt metals.

Slowly at first, and now at breakneck speed, we have painted ourselves in a corner. Now everything, everything depends on energy consumption. The tasks that governments do, such as building roads and schools, require energy consumption. Both transporting and cooking food require the use of energy products. Refrigerating food requires energy products. These energy uses, as well as many other everyday hidden uses of energy, aren’t things that we can easily cut back on.

Fools in charge.

“The fools have said in their hearts, there is no God above.” (Psalm 13). Those are the people who have their values all wrong. For them creation is there to exploit. We see it in Brazil. We see it in the USA. We see it in the UK and Australia and Italy and Russia and India and China: everywhere populists, men – all men!! – catering to the lowest tendencies in human beings, are in charge today even as matters fall apart at an ever faster rate.

As circumstances environmentally deteriorate, and climate change really starts to bite, causing inflation of basic food stuff, the dream of climate friendly energy sources, solar and wind power, will come crashing down, while the use of carbon energy will soar, even when it is the source of our ills.

Just as taxes on tobacco have risen exponentially in an effort to curtail its lethal use, so governments, desperate to raise funds to pay for our earlier extravagance when oil was cheap, and cheap to obtain, now the opposite is becoming true. Soon rulers everywhere, even in the USA, will see carbon as the fountain of folly, and will tax it as a sure source of badly needed tax revenue. Why? Because due to Global Heating, the damage done to infrastructure, to dwellings and public buildings, plus the extra cost of protecting them from increasing climate change, will stretch public resources beyond their limits, screaming for extra revenues to mend the damage. 

Greed is at the root of it all.

It already started in Paradise, in the Garden of Eden. In the early Bible chapters God pointed the TREE out to the human pair, and they saw that it was “Beautiful to look at and good for fruit”. Later the sly ENEMY drew their attention to that same tree, and the order of priority was reversed, “Good for fruit and nice to behold”. Suddenly GREED raised its ugly head and Capitalism was born.

Today Capitalism thrives on OIL. Oil oils all. Oil and its related products, coal, natural gas, make modern life possible, but also kill it.

That’s the dilemma we all face. To cut down its use, Governments must tax it, but higher oil prices will increase the chances for recession. Also the easy oil is gone. The next batch is further away, is deeper in the earth, costs more to extract.

That means that oil companies have to charge more. But if oil prices rise, the prices of many different types of goods and services, food, goods transported by truck or airplane, and vacation travel, rise at the same time. Wages don’t rise as quickly, in part because it is the true energy content that the economy requires.

So, looking into my cracked crystal ball, the economy will be forced to spend a larger share of its resources to producing energy products, which means that more energy will be used to obtain energy resulting in more pollution and greater expenses.

With fewer resources to use, the economy reacts by shrinking back. An adequate supply of energy products is what makes the economy operate as it does; if buying an adequate amount of energy products becomes too expensive for consumers, they cut back and cause an even greater economic downturn. With rising inflation, interest rates too have to go up, so no wonder that the Fed, the US federal Bank, is loath to decrease rates.

Middle Eastern oil exporting countries want higher prices as well, because they have large populations and inadequate employment opportunities unless the government provides them with handouts or with programs that provide jobs. If these governments need to cut back too much, there is a real danger that the governments will be overthrown.

If prices cannot rise high enough, the vast majority of the oil that seems to be available based on published reserve amounts and geological surveys cannot really be extracted.

Whether there are ways to raise oil and other energy prices higher than they are now remains to be seen.

You see: today we eat oil – 10 carbon parts for each food part; today we move our bodies, not by the two legs God gave us, but by four rubberized wheels attached to 2,000 pounds of steel and plastic; today we travel not by wind-power and clever sails, but by jet engines, whose contrails poison the skies; today we don’t get the news from neighbors and friends but on the boob-tube and the internet.

Carbon energy is deeply buried in all goods and services that are made. If there isn’t enough supply, the world stops or at best stagnates.

Today Collapse is in the cards, because no matter what we do, no matter where we turn, dangers dawns, either in the form of depression or wars or epidemics or defaulting debts or failing governments and intergovernmental organizations or Brexit or devastating earthquakes or super typhoons or a sudden spike in temperatures: the list is endless.

If the oil prices go too high – and they should to ascertain new supply – the economy crashes. If they go too low, the supply will stop, and the economy crashes. If we continue to use oil the climate crashes and we with it.

Needless to say, stock markets are likely to be adversely affected. So-called renewables will quickly fail because they are currently dependent on fossil fuels for repairs and the electric grid. In fact, it is hard to see any aspect of the world economy that can continue unaffected.

Under today’s circumstances, damned when we do, damned when we don’t, it is hard to believe that the overall system can stay together for many years, but perhaps, in parts of the world, it can.

Given how interconnected the economy is and how widespread the problems are at this point, the scene in Paradise, in the Garden of Eden, is now playing out. There we succumbed to GREED: it’s as simple as that: radix malorum cupiditas est.

Yes, it started in Paradise, it continued with Cain who built the first city as the world’s answer to the Garden of Eden. The Satan, the Great Enemy offered Jesus the entire world (Matthew 4: 8-10). Yes, not God, not Jesus, but the Devil calls the tune today, and his goal is to destroy creation. Sorry to say that, thanks to our lifestyle, thanks to our living habits, totally entrenched in energy, we have been led astray, seduced by greed.

Today the ruling maxim, our real manifesto, should be to return to the original rule for life: to serve creation, to love it with all our heart, soul, mind, being as it is God’s direct revelation.

Jesus was, is and always must be our example as found in John 3: 16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

The word for ‘world’ here is ‘COSMOS’. The word ‘cosmos’ means everything created, and that includes our tiny earth as well.

Cosmos is the opposite of chaos. God called forth cosmos from chaos. We have turned this same cosmos into chaos, but Jesus in turn reversed it again, turning our chaos into his cosmos. That’s why he died: he died not only for our sins: he died to make paradise, the Garden of Eden, REAL again.
   

AUGUST 24 2019

ON LIFE AFTER DEATH – C.G. JUNG.

There are too many signs that the damage we have done to the earth has brought us to the point where we have to seriously consider whether there is life after our death as the human species. Many of us are starting to realize that we live in a FINITE EARTH. Of course the earth will not disappear: it will last forever, but we won’t. We would have if we had been responsible owners, but we have fouled our own nest.

Owners you say? Yes, there is a text for that: Psalms 115: 16 says, “The highest heavens belong to the Lord, but the earth he has given to humanity.” That’s us. We own the planet and the air around it.

Somehow the Bible recognizes three heavens (see 2 Cor. 12): the lower part, the space beneath the Ozone layer, which we now have saturated with CO2 and Methane, and where we fly our machines; the second heaven is where we send our satellites and other instruments: that too has been given to us. “But the highest heavens belong to the Lord”. There’s where he dwells, beyond the stars and planets, and here I come to a point where I disagree with most: upon death we are not going to the Highest Heaven where God dwells: that’s plain heresy. The heaven adherents don’t know the Bible. Paul, the apostle, writes, “God lives in inapproachable light, whom nobody has seen or can see.” John 3: 13 affirms that nobody has ever gone to heaven except Jesus who came from there. Harold Bloom, of THE AMERICAN RELIGION fame, calls these ‘heaven’ people, “The Know-Nothing church goers,” which, sorry to say, applies to most.

OK, enough heresy-bashing, enough condemning this heaven nonsense, but, oh, oh, it is so ingrained in church lore that it is almost impossible to eradicate.

I once sent my book DAY WITHOUT END (imagining eternity on earth) to a literary agent. He liked the writing, but wrote that the concept is so alien to the reading public, that it will never sell. Eerdmans, who published four of my translations, also refused to touch it.

Yet, the idea of perfect living on earth is immensely appealing. After all, our task, as human beings, given to us in the Garden of Eden, is to lovingly and intelligently explore creation: an unending assignment.

Both Jews and Christians, affirmed in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, are told, “Love the Lord with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength”. In other words, all our faculties must be intimately and totally and comprehensively involved in loving God: not only musically and devotionally, but also physically, emotionally, artistically, and intellectually. Somehow we’ve got the idea that singing and praying and passively pew occupying is the prerogative: it is not.

One of the maxims drilled into me as a young man, was “Soli Deo Gloria”, “Do everything to the Glory of God”.

And that ‘everything’ includes loving his creation. That’s primarily how we love God. We build museums to honor the great artists of the world; we build concert halls to celebrate the music of the great composers; we build theaters to showcase Shakespeare and Shaw: the earth is God’s creative museum, his work of art, his ultimate masterpiece, showing his infinity: our task is to pay tribute, explore, honor AND love God for this gift.

Just look at the universe: Nature arranges matter and energy and manages forces that even the most learned physicist must acknowledge are beyond our capacity to understand. A simple question: What is more impressive, a human-made skyscraper or the complex interactions we find in a square inch of soil? What mystifies us more, the internet or the call of a bird? Nature creates at a much profounder level than humans are capable of, and we would be well-advised not to seek power over it but find power with it.

What have we done?

Don’t get me going what we have done to the earth. We have treated it worse than our vilest enemy: we have abused everything to the point of collapse, and, instead of mending our ways, and humbly admit that we have been wrong, like fanatic fools we are affirming our efforts.

Greta Thunberg, a Swedish teenager, is sailing across the Atlantic this week: sailing! wind power! Her coming reminds me of the fable of The Emperor’s New Clothes. Here it is:

“Everyone in the world with a grain of common sense, knows that the Emperor is walking around as naked as a jaybird, but no one’s behavior changes even though the signs are everywhere, nor would behavior change just because a couple of people whisper their doubts to each other, creating pockets of public knowledge that the Emperor is naked. No, the only thing that could change public behavior, is when the little girl (in this case perhaps Greta Thunberg) announces the Emperor’s nudity loudly enough so that the entire crowd believes that everyone else in the crowd heard the news.” 

The real news is that Capitalism, Infinite Growth, our celebrated Western Economy, our fiat money mess is self-destructing, is a death-culture, and has not a shred of viability left.

Everything is coming out in the open, the main theme of the last Bible Book, Revelation. Look at Harvey Weinstein. Apparently it was no great secret that he abused many women for decades, but only now is this finally being revealed. Or the Epstein episode, a matter that also has been going on for years, and now, exactly now, has come to a head. The consequences of his death reach all the way to the British Royal Family.

And that brings me to Carl Jung, the world’s most famous psychoanalyst.

I am still digesting his 530 page, 157,000 words Autobiography. Here are some excerpts on what he writes

On Life after Death.

“What I have to tell about the hereafter, and about life after death, consists entirely of memories, of images in which I have lived and of thoughts which have buffeted me. These memories in a way also underlie my works; for the latter are fundamentally nothing but attempts, ever renewed, to give an answer to the question of the interplay between the “here” and the “hereafter.” Yet I have written expressly about a life after death; for then I would have had to document my ideas, and I have no way of doing that. Be that as it may, I would like to state my ideas now.

“We cannot visualize another world ruled by quite other laws, the reason being that we live in a specific world which has helped to shape our minds and establish our basic psychic conditions. We are strictly limited by our innate structure and therefore bound by our whole being and thinking to this world of ours. Mythic man, to be sure, demands a “going beyond all that” but scientific man cannot permit this. To the intellect, all my mythologizing is futile speculation. To the emotions, however, it is a healing and valid activity; it gives existence a glamour which we would not like to do without. Nor is there any good reason why we should.”

Let me interrupt there, and re-iterate his words, “The interplay between the ‘here’ and the ‘hereafter’. I believe that there is an intimate connection between these two: the ‘here’ determines the ‘hereafter’: our lives are the proving grounds for eternity.

If I understand Jung correctly, then rationally we cannot grasp eternity, buy emotionally believing in an afterlife is healing.

Again Jung:

“Leaving aside the rational arguments against any certainty in these matters, we must not forget that for most people it means a great deal to assume that their lives will have an indefinite continuity beyond their present existence. They live more sensibly, feel better, and are more at peace. One has centuries, one has an inconceivable period of time at one’s disposal. What then is the point of this senseless mad rush?

“Naturally, such reasoning does not apply to everyone. There are people who feel no craving for immortality, and who shudder at the thought of sitting on a cloud and playing the harp for ten thousand years! There are also quite a few who have been so buffeted by life, or who feel such disgust for their own existence, that they far prefer absolute cessation to continuance. But in the majority of cases the question of immortality is so urgent, so immediate, and also so ineradicable that we must make an effort to form some sort of view about it. But how?”

(Here again that “heaven” thing, recalling the song “Amazing Grace”, and the line, “When we’ve been there 10,000 years etc.)

“My hypothesis is that we can do so with the aid of hints sent to us from the unconscious in dreams, for example. Usually we dismiss these hints because we are convinced that the question is not susceptible to answer. In response to this understandable skepticism, I suggest the following considerations. If there is something we cannot know, we must necessarily abandon it as an intellectual problem. … Therefore I must drop this question as a scientific or intellectual problem. But if an idea about it is offered to me in dreams or in mythic traditions I ought to take note of it. I even ought to build up a conception on the basis of such hints, even though it will forever remain a hypothesis which I know cannot be proved. A man should be able to say he has done his best to form a conception of life after death, or to create some image of it-even if he must confess his failure. Not to have done so is a vital loss. For the question that is posed to him is the age-old heritage of humanity: an archetype, rich in secret life, which seeks to add itself to our own individual life in order to make it whole. Reason sets the boundaries far too narrowly for us, and would have us accept only the known and that too with limitations and live in a known framework, just as if we were sure how far life actually extends. As a matter of fact, day after day we live far beyond the bounds of our consciousness; without our knowledge, the life of the unconscious is also going on within us. The more the critical reason dominates, the more impoverished life becomes; but the more of the unconscious, and the more of myth we are capable of making conscious, the more of life we integrate. Overvalued reason has this in common with political absolutism: under its dominion the individual is pauperized.”

So far Jung.

Read the book: it’s free on the web. Full text of “Memories, Dreams, Reflections Carl Jung“

In the end Jung believes that he will return, after death, as a psyche, a soul, sadly succumbing to this ancient Gnostic notion. He had no idea that Jesus died to restore Creation: that’s the entire point of the Scriptures!!

Me, I have done a lot of thinking on Eternity. My ideas can be found in DAY WITHOUT END, basically a dream, verging on reality, in my humble opinion. Frankly it is a better read that Jung’s version of life after death: it even has some love stories. Some groups have made it a point of discussion. You can obtain hard copies from LULU.com.

The age-old question, “How then shall we live?”

Peter’s plea comes to mind,

”But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, in which the heavens will pass away with a roar and the elements will be destroyed with intense heat, and the earth and its works will be burned up.

Since all these things are to be destroyed in this way, what sort of people ought you to be in holy conduct and godliness, looking for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be destroyed by burning, and the elements will melt with intense heat! But according to His promise we are looking for new heavens and a new earth, in which righteousness dwells.

                                             2 Peter 3:10-13

With the Arctic ablaze, Siberia burning and more than 75,000 fires in the Amazon rain forests alone this year, it is not difficult to believe Peter’s prophecy.

AUGUST 17 2019

HOPE      

Perhaps I have been pretty judgemental on matters such as Climate Change. Perhaps I have sounded too pessimistic on our personal practises. Perhaps I have hinted too often that it is next to impossible to do the right thing, to live properly, in line with creation, cultivating a loving relationship with the world around us. I know in this day and age serving people and animals, plants and all created matter in an all embracing way, is something that has become nigh impossible as technology rules our lives and oil powers everything.

I guess I am hinting that living today calls for compromises.  

So what caused my different outlook?

Well….I’ve been reading a biography of Maimonides written by a Hebrew scholar and professor of Ethics, Abraham Joshua Heschel.

He made me see that it is not the big things that save us: it’s the little things.

Here’s what this great medieval Jewish thinker observed,

”During the Babylonian Exile, only the three companions of Daniel refused to worship the image of Nebuchadnezzar. All the other bowed to the idolatrous effigy. And never had any scholar called the Jews of this generation heathen, blasphemous or unfit to bear witness….Ahab, king of Israel, denied God. But because he once fasted with a pious intention, the Lord did not fail to reward him for this little deed. Eglon, king of the Moabites, afflicted Israel for years and years. But because he once paid homage to the Lord, God requited it. His descendants mounted the holy throne named after God. For Ruth, the ancestress of the dynasty of David, was Eglon’s daughter. Nebuchadnezzar had Jews massacred in great numbers, and he destroyed the divine temple. But he once paid tribute to God’s name, his rule lasted forty years, as long as that of Solomon. Esau, the transgressor, led a life of vice. He observed only one commandment: to honor his father. For this good work, he was recompensed: his descendants would keep their kingdom uninterruptedly until the Messianic Age, for it is a law of history that the Redeemer will not come until Esau has been rewarded for honoring his father. And if the Lord richly repays these evildoers for minor, insignificants works, shall he not credit Israel for secretly keeping the holy commandments, even if it is forced into sham apostasy? And should there be no difference between the man who does not do his duties and the man who does, between the man who serves God and the man who denies Him?”

I still have to get used to that line of reasoning, stern Calvinist I am.

So how do I see matters now, after reading this wise Jewish writer? For one thing: I trust Jewish writers: they have a grasp of the Old Testament unequalled among Biblical scholars. I know. I have a lot of books by Jewish rabbis. I also have some issues of the magazine TIKKUN, the Hebrew word for RENEWAL, and greatly appreciate Michael Lerner, the editor. One of my best friends was a Jewish Psychologist, Dr. Harold Goldsman who for years taught at Concordia University in Montreal, and later moved to Tweed, and Belleville where he became a consultant with the Board of Education.

Just like the Jews during the 70 years of exile were totally exposed to the Babylonian culture, but also were re-united with the original sources of the Salvation Story, we too are in exile, totally imprisoned by the oil-saturated economy, and we too now are starting to ask basic questions related to our ultimate redemption.

We today, anno 2019, are caught in the same position as the Jews in Babylon some 2500 years ago. We too have been forced to live a creation-destroying life style, worse than anything else before us, worse than under the Nebuchadnezzar rule, worse than under the Nazi Regime, because what is at stake today is God’s Holiness, his very being as expressed in creation.

Let’s be honest: no longer do we live in a democracy; no longer is our voice heard. In the dying days of our planet the plight of the cosmos is totally ignored by those in power, in parliaments, in corporations, among the wealthy elite and vested interests. We, the people, have become powerless, as, for all intents and purposes, vested interests have given up on the habitability of large parts of the Earth and on the survival of numerous species and future generations. As the Psalm time and again reiterate, “They have had their reward, they have their yachts and trophy wives.”

So, it’s beyond us to make a difference, that’s why it’s not the big, drastic changes that redeem us, but the tiny adjustments we make in our own lives.

But………

The ultimate condition is that our minds must be geared to The Kingdom, the Perfect World we yearn for, even though our actions can only be limited to what we personally can achieve.

Yesterday that meant quitting tobacco. Today, the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, recommends that we become vegetarian, which actually entails better health and longer lives.  

Yes, believe me, there are lots of little things we can do: despise plastic with a passion. And, of course, the 4 R’s: Reuse, Reduce, Recycle, Repair: that too contributes to the quality of life.

Start a journal. For 27 years I have written a daily journal based on a text from the lectionary: 400 words on weekdays, 800 on Sundays, scribbling in my tiny, almost impossible to read handwriting.

Some biographical details.

Looking back 70 years, I can’t quite remember what motivated me to come to Canada. My wife and I were engaged on August 31 1950 when we both were 22 years old. I then was serving in the Dutch Army as a conscripted sergeant-instructor. I was discharged in April 1951, well-educated after 16 years of schooling, but unfit for any specific profession.

Even last week, after almost 70 years, I have dreams that date back to that period, in which I desperately wondered how in the world I would ever be able to marry that beautiful woman to whom I am engaged, and be able to support her and have a family.

Then in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, thousands of my compatriots were emigrating, most of them to Canada, with the majority being of Reformed and Christian Reformed stock. So, influenced by ‘the spirit of the age’, by ‘cosmic resonance’, I joined the exodus and three months after my 18 months stint in the army, my younger brother and I were on the way to Canada, sailing in a luxury liner from Rotterdam to New York City, landing there on July 4 1951.

My fiancée arrived in September 1952 and we were married in June 1953. Instead of joining the much more conservative Netherlands Reformed Church in which we grew up, we became members of the much larger Christian Reformed Church.

Over the years I have become even more liberal in my thinking than most, especially in matters of theology, having made a U-turn on such matters as same-sex, seeing creation as God’s Primary Word, and becoming a fervent environmentalist.

That we, as a society have made the ultimate wrong turn was again confirmed when reading Dr. Jung’s autobiography, his 156,000 word, 530 pages tome, doing some 30 pages each day.

He too yearned for the old days, good in the way of being more ‘down to earth’. He writes of the home he built, “I have done without electricity, and tend the fireplace and stove myself. I light the old lamps. There is no running water, and I pump the water from the well. I chop the wood and cook the food. These simple acts make man simple; and how difficult it is to be simple.”

He started to build his place in the 1920’s and expanded it over the years. He died in 1962, before the onset, or perhaps the onslaught of technology, something that now is playing havoc with the very idea of ‘being human’.

I am not quite sure what C. G. Jung is hinting at when he writes that, “I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete or unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family, which is passed on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished. It is difficult to determine whether these questions are more of a personal or more of a general (collective) nature. It seems to me that the latter is the case.”

I had to look up the exact meaning of “karma”. My 2000 page Webster tells me that ‘karma’, a Hindu term, is “a cosmic principle according to which each person in this life or in reincarnation is rewarded or punished according to his deeds in the previous reincarnation”

That’s quite the mouthful. If I understand Jung correctly then it seems to me that our ancestors, both immediate and historic, have failed to come to terms with their ultimate destination.

I think I know what he is hinting at: my mother, on her deathbed asked me what comes after death, and struggled with this concept, apparently not happy with the ‘heaven’ thing. Not my oldest brother. The very last words he said to me when we saw each other for the last time “See you in heaven.”

Nietzsche, the ultimate rebel, always agitated against conventional Christianity, begging us to “remain true to the earth”.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “God cannot be understood without the earth, nor the earth without the God who has entered it in Jesus Christ.” Here I hear an echo of Nietzsche’s words: Remain true to the earth!

Bonhoeffer insisted that it takes creation to understand God. In his “Creation and Fall”, he wrote, “The human being is the human being who is taken from earth…. The earth is its mother…. It is God’s earth out of which humankind is taken….. Its bond with the earth belongs to its essential being. Human beings have their existence as existence on earth”.

Johan Herman Bavinck says essentially the same. In his “Between the Beginning and the End: a radical Kingdom Vision”, he writes,
“A long time ago, the Bible tells us, God fashioned the first human pair from the earth. The Hebrew word for soil is Adamah, from which Adam comes. The word adam reminded the Israelite immediately of the first Adam who was taken from the soil of the earth, hence the well-known saying: soil we are and to soil we shall return. Just as we have red clay and black soil, we too have people of different colors. The word ‘adam’ typifies the human race in its unbreakable unity. We all come from the earth and we all go back to the earth. Earth-bound we are, forever. We, the human beings, are adam, and belong to adamah, the life-bearing earth. With every sinew of our existence we are tied to the earth, which bears us and feeds us.”

I suspect that this is the “karma” Jung felt missing in him and his ancestors. The house he designed and built proves that.

In LIVING FAITH, a statement of Christian belief, my Presbyterian Church tells me that ‘we belong to God’. That is only a half-truth. Genesis 3: 19 says, affirming Bonhoeffer and Bavinck, “Earth we are and to earth we will return”.

We are fortunate that Nietzsche, Bonhoeffer and Bavinck have clarified this ‘KARMA’ concept for us. To me Karma indicates the new pristine Earth under a new heaven, where all space junk and satellites are swept away.

Believing in such a future gives us HOPE. Pursuing ‘heaven’ is a dead-end: however, the New Earth concept has a caveat: getting there starts HERE and NOW. HOPE means LIFE, LIFE FOREVER.

AUGUST 10 2019

THE FIERY RED HORSE AND THE OMINOUS BLACK ONE.

About three times per week I bike 12 km back and forth to the village’s Value Mart to buy groceries. I always take along my own shopping bags, and always in the line-up I see people needing plastic bags, sometimes 4 or 5. A few weeks ago a high school teacher I know also came without. She is the typical “Akratic”, “a person who knows the right thing to do but can’t help doing the opposite”.

She is living proof that, in spite of multiple warnings, hotter and hotter days, Arctic and Antarctic melting with ominous consequences for the planet, in spite of ever more urgent reminders from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the general public remains willfully ignorant.

A world in decline is a world ignoring the obvious; instead its people perpetuate the myth that all is well. Nothing is well, again confirmed in two mass shootings in 24 hours: anger, unresolved mental disarray, simplistic solutions to problems that have festered for decades.

Everything is connected to everything else. Environmental neglect leads to psychological trauma. In the USA, denial of medical coverage, a basic human right, causes mental cruelty, resulting in mass shootings. The tested Latin saying, Mens Sana in Corpore Sano, also holds true for the opposite, Mens Insano in Corpore Insano, an insane mind the result of an unhealthy body.  

All the News Is Bad

The United States has some 300 million guns and mass shooters every month. Americans – 5 % of the world’s population – own 40% of all guns in the world, more than all civilians combined in 25 other countries.

How come the USA is what it is?

I think it is a religious problem. It piously claims to be a Christian nation but, as Dr. Harold Bloom asserts in his THE AMERICAN RELIGION it has ceased to be Christian. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, upon leaving the US, after a brief stint at Columbia Theological Seminary, claimed that the USA has not seen a REFORMATION. The 1517 Reformation tied Christianity to all of life, while both the Roman Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist remained heaven oriented. The result is that in these denominations GNOSTICISM reigns, seeing the earth as evil, the globe as something to be abused.

When we exploit creation, we kill ourselves, and, since America still is the pace-setter in the world, it sets the tone for the world’s inhabitants, with its over-arching Information Technology industry, such as Google, Facebook and similar corporations. It now has become a culture where anything goes and nothing matters.

It’s not that there have been no warnings. Already in 1972 THE LIMITS OF GROWTH warned that we live in a finite earth where infinite growth is not possible.

In 1974 I bought, “An Inquiry into THE HUMAN PROSPECT”, by economist Robert L. Heilbroner, whose textbook I used when taking economics 101 at Queen’s University. He writes, “The industrial growth, so central to the economic and social life of capitalism and Western socialism alike will be forced to slow down, in all likelihood within a generation or two and will probably give way to decline thereafter………..Therefore the outlook involves what we may call “convulsive change” – change forced upon us by external events rather than by conscious choice, by catastrophe rather than by calculations.”

Wise man he is, he assumes that there will not be a voluntary effort to reduce consumption, and so, more than 45 years ago, he predicted the current situation. Remember that then there was no talk about Climate Change as yet, now rapidly overwhelming us.

In 1995 he revisited this theme in his new book, “VISIONS OF THE FUTURE”. He did not change his mind: on the contrary. He prescribed in 1995 that, “We can content ourselves with three propositions, of which only the first is indisputable: humankind must achieve a secure terrestrial base for life. The earth must be lovingly maintained, not consumed nor otherwise despoiled. The atmosphere, the waters and the fertility of the soil must be protected against poisoning of any kind from human activities…….Without such a stable foundation there seems little chance to attain a level of civilization unmistakably more advanced than our own.”    

Well……… Yes, Heilbroner was dead on.

We have done exactly the opposite and now we are stuck: there is no way back. We have chosen the Road Most Traveled, and have learned nothing.

A look at today.  

From the Tweed library I borrowed THE THIRD HORSEMAN, a book dealing with the 14^th Century. That was when after 400 years of mild and favorable weather, the so-called Medieval Warming Period (MWP) suddenly in 1316 in Europe the weather turned nasty: unending rains for months, washing away the topsoil, making it impossible to plant and harvest crops, so that millions of people died. That extended favorable period generated a population explosion that suddenly reversed itself for lack of food.

This wet weather, lasting some 7 years, in which millions of people starved to death, was followed by the Black Plague, which found a ready feeding ground among a weakened population, killing as much as 30 percent of the then small number by our standards, perhaps 30 million out of an estimated world-wide 100 million.

There’s a lesson for us. THE THIRD HORSEMAN has as subtitle, “Climate Change and the Great Famine of the 14^th Century”

William Rosen, the author, writes in conclusion, “The conditions that destroyed millions of lives during the seven years of the Great Famine appeared just after the four centuries of the Medieval Warming Period. (In Europe) from 900 to 1300 ten million grew to 30 million – and as the least productive acres were cultivated to feed them – the balance between producing food and consuming grew more fragile every year. By the time the North Atlantic Oscillation shifted, and the weather started to change, that balance could be destroyed by a strong wind.”

Dr. Heilbroner was so correct in his prophecy, when he wrote, “The earth must be lovingly maintained, not consumed nor otherwise despoiled. The atmosphere, the waters and the fertility of the soil must be protected against poisoning of any kind from human activities…….Without such a stable foundation there seems little chance to attain a level of civilization unmistakably more advanced than our own.”   

Today love for the Cosmos, so needed to maintain the earth, has vanished. I don’t want to recite what has happened in the last few decades: it is too well-known, although rarely admitted. We have become a people of the Lie. And the Liar-in-Chief is the President of the United States of America, who started his political career with a Lie, telling all that the then president, Obama, had not been born in the States but in Kenya. He then, as president, maintained that the crowd that greeted him was the greatest ever, in spite of graphic evidence to the contrary. Now his recorded lies run into the thousands. This and many other incidents portray his obvious moral vacuum, his profound spiritual black hole that lies beneath his persona and career.  

It is that NIHILISM that now drives not only him but a good portion of the USA, supposedly a city on the hill, a shining light, now a light so dimmed that the wick has become wicked, throwing off poisonous fumes, becoming a growing threat to its 330 million of people. All this will get worse as the majority of its ruling politicians even deny the existence of Climate Change.

Our earlier circumstances closely resemble the MWP, the Medieval Warming Period, which preceded the 14^th Century Famine. My lifetime coincides with the unprecedented growth in the world’s population, quadrupling since 1928, the year I was born, when OIL became food. It so happens that OIL is poisonous, poisons everything it touches, including our minds, including our religious consciousness: oil is king, oil is our idol, oil BURNS.   

The RED HORSE

In many ways we already witness ongoing destruction everywhere. God has given our generation a power over creation that borders on the unbelievable, endangering the entire human race. Secrets that were hidden for centuries from the human eyes are one after the other in our time being revealed, even in the very heights of heaven. It is as if God has now removed the blindfolds that prevented us from discovering the secrets of the universe. But also this fabulous force now in the hands of us small humans is increasingly becoming a factor of horrific threat.

Isn’t that too a sign that God has released the brakes that now allow us to employ the unlimited evil that dwells in all of us?

However this all may be, there is one fact that is true beyond dispute and that is that the Bible bases the tremendous acceleration of planetary peril on theological grounds. It cannot be simply understood as based on human thinking but can only be explained when we grasp something of the riddle of the rider on the RED HORSE. The American general MacArthur has seen this correctly when, on the day the Japanese delegation signed the conditions of surrender, he spoke the remarkable words: “If we do not devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door. The problem basically is theological.”

The RED HORSE signifies WAR. Of course. The most striking color of war is RED, as in ‘red hot’. Flames are red. War always involves FIRE. When our hometown was liberated from German occupation, the entire downtown area was ablaze.

Today the fires are different: they have come because we have changed the weather, making it so hot that we have fires everywhere, especially there where they never happened before, precisely where the methane is buried: the Arctic in Canada, Siberia and Greenland.

The fires occur because we are at war with creation. Every tree that burns has a double impact: one tree less to absorb CO2, while a tree aflame adds CO2. Trees, the lungs of the earth, are being decimated everywhere in the world: no country is excluded: a sure sign that we are engaged in a universal war.

Immediately after the RED HORSE, the BLACK HORSE arrives, its rider carrying in his hands a scale, and while he proceeds, there is a voice that says: “A quart of wheat for a day’s wages and three quarts of barley for a day’s wages.”

Both that scale and these words signify poverty, hunger and inflation. Money loses its value and the costs of the normal daily needs become dearer by the day. A quart of wheat then was about what one person needed to stay alive, which meant that a laborer by working could only earn enough to keep himself from starving, but not his family. Were he to use barley, instead of wheat, the situation would be more manageable, but even then it would be impossible to maintain a family. The prices mentioned here are about eight times the prices normal in those days.

In my life-time, thanks to natural-gas derived fertilizer and oil-based machinery, much of the workable growing soil has become nutrient deficient, while either drought – India, China, South America and Africa come to mind – or too much moisture – think about the USA Mid-West – has the potential of causing wide-spread crop failures.   

How long do we have left, and how bad will it get? David Wallace-Wells opens his book with a short, sharp reality check: ‘It’s worse, much worse, than you think.’ All the news is bad.

Once the methane in the Arctic erupts, we will have no more than a decade, and that decade will resemble the situation depicted in REVELATION: “Then I looked and saw a pale horse. Its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed close behind. And they were given authority over a fourth of the earth, to kill by sword, by famine, by plague, and by the beasts of the earth.”

“Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away. No one knows about that day or the hour, not even the angels in heaven, but only the Father.” (Matthew 24: 35-36).