Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

December 1 2018

FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS.

Jesus, in the prayer he left with us, created a lot of controversy: for instance: what actually is meant by DEBTS?

Newer versions translate DEBTS as TRESPASSES and lately I have understood that to indicate our sinful excursions into nature, our unwarranted ‘trespassing’ into God’s creation, the environment or whatever you call our actions in cutting down the rain forests, in degrading the land and fouling the air.

But my recent contemplations, new reading of the Bible, and seeking out commentaries, have made me wonder whether my current explanation needs to be expanded.

So, what did Jesus have in mind when he asked us, his followers, to pray to his father, who is in heaven, to forgive us our debts, or trespasses, or sins, as we ought to forgive our debtors – those who make life difficult for us.

My struggling with these lines is the more acute because THE LORD’s PRAYER is often the only section in the Bible we have memorized, that’s why I believe it is necessary to have a clearer, more accurate understanding of that prayer.

However, I still believe that, in the light of the environmental sins we all continuously commit (because we are forced by our capitalistic society to either starve to death by not wanting to use oil – now an impossibility – or be a collaborator in sinning against creation) ‘forgive us our trespasses’ definitely has an ecological aspect. But now, thanks to my continuous reflection on this so important prayer, I am more and more convinced that it also has a deeper meaning.

So I decided to take a fresh look.

For this I resorted to two different sources, one written by two people I know well: Bob Goudzwaard and Mark Vander Vennen, in their HOPE IN TROUBLED TIMES. In that important book I looked up their references to THE YEAR OF JUBILEE, so explicitly described in Leviticus 25.

Here’s what Goudzwaard and Vander Vennen wrote: “If God’s people would practice JUBILEE justice and righteousness… where periodically debts are cancelled, slaves are set free, land returned to the original owners … then God would bless the land with peace and prosperity.
“Jesus, in his inaugural sermon, declares that he has come to proclaim the Year of Jubilee (Luke 4: 16-30 Page 197).”

A few pages later, (page 203), they wrote, “It is not an accident that the Year of Jubilee begins with the Day of Atonement (“atonement means ‘reconciliation’ or ‘making reparation’.) And that day is not just one of personal reconciliation. It is also the day of economic forgiveness and a new beginning for a sinful economy.”

I can add that a contemporary example of DEBT FORGIVENESS happened in Germany in 1947 when the Allies, the USA and Great Britain, forgave all the debts the German economy had made thanks to Hitler’s war policies. This signaled the beginning of the German’ Wirtschaft Wunder”, its post war Economic Miracle.
The USA would do itself a great favor by canceling ALL STUDENT DEBT. Let’s hope that the Democrats make this a priority.

My second source is Michael Hudson.

Michael Hudson is Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City and a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College.
His new book has the telling title of AND FORGIVE THEM THEIR DEBTS, “Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Years.”

Dr. Hudson’s book is about the origins of economic organization and enterprise in the Bronze Age, and how it shaped the Bible. It’s not about modern economies. But the problem is that the Bronze Age –2,000 -1600 Before Christ – and early Western civilization was shaped so differently from what we think of as logical and normal, that one almost has to rewire one’s brain to see how differently the archaic view of economic survival and enterprise was.

Hudson writes, “Credit economies existed long before money and coinage. These economies were agricultural. Grain was the main means of payment – but it was only paid once a year, at harvest time. You can imagine how awkward it would be to carry around grain in your pocket and measure it out every time you had a beer.
“We know how Sumerians and Babylonians paid for their beer (which they drank through straws, and which was cleaner than the local water). The ale-woman marked it up on the tab she kept. The tab had to be paid at harvest time, on the threshing floor, when the grain was nice and fresh. The ale-woman then paid the palace or temple for its advance of wholesale beer for her to retail during the year.
“If the crops failed, or if there was a flood or drought, or a military battle, the cultivators couldn’t pay. So what was the ruler to do? If he said, “You owe the tax collector, and can’t pay. Now you have to become his slave and let him foreclose on your land.
“Suddenly, you would have had a slave society. The cultivators couldn’t serve in the army, and couldn’t perform their prescribed public duties to build local infrastructure.

“To avoid this, the ruler simply cancelled the debts (most of which were owed ultimately to the palace and its collectors). The cultivators didn’t have to pay the ale-women. And the ale-women didn’t have to pay the palace.

“All this was spelled out in the Clean Slate proclamations by rulers of Hammurabi’s dynasty in Babylonia, and neighboring Near Eastern realms. They recognized that there was a cycle of buildup of debt, reaching a not repayable high overhead, followed by a cancellation to restore the status quo.”

Dr. Hudson continued, “This concept is very hard for us Westerners to understand. Yet it was at the center of the Old and New Testaments, in the form of the Jubilee Year – taken out of the hands of kings and placed at the center of Judaic religion.
“When debts were cancelled in Babylonia and other Bronze Age Near Eastern realms, it would have been against their way of thinking to complain that some debtors were benefiting from being freed from debts that other people had paid. In the first place, all cultivators became debtors during the growing season, with payments for everything from agricultural inputs to beer at the local ale-house to be paid on the threshing floor at harvest time. So annulling such debts benefited the population at large.

“With regard to individuals who had borrowed out of need, it was recognized that if some could not keep up, it was because they were poor or unable to do so. Mutual aid became the principle of helping people who were sick, widows who lost their husbands or other factors that obliged them to run up debts. Not to have helped such people would have deprived the community of their productive labor.
“Conspicuously absent from ancient moral values is the modern “moral hazard” theory to play solvent individuals against debtors. The point of reference was what would happen if people were not forgiven their debts. How would this have affected the community as a whole?
“The answer is that debtors unable to pay would have fallen into bondage to their creditor, working on his land, and ultimately have lost their own land. They therefore would not be available to work on their own land to grow crops to pay taxes and other obligations to the palace, or to provide corvée labor on public works, or serve in the military. Clean Slate proclamations were part of the community’s self-preservation.
“At the same time, the moral opprobrium was felt toward creditors. They were blamed for impoverishing society at large by their selfishness. The Greeks called his hubris, money-love and wealth addiction. And rulers saw an independent creditor class turning its wealth into large landholdings of creating a rival power to the palace.
“The context for today’s debt overhead is one in which most debts are owed to private-sector banks, bondholders and other creditors. Also, not everyone is in debt – and society is rich enough to afford imposing a loss of status and self-reliance on large classes of debtors. Still, there is a logic in forgiving debts owed by the needy (but not by the wealthy).

So far Dr. Hudson describing his new book AND FORGIVE THEM OUR DEBTS.

Today`s situation.

Today we live in a society where DEBT will do us in. Never has there been a time when the rich were so rich and indebtedness so pronounced. Thanks to historically low interests today’s debt is easy to carry, but inflation looms.

When, in 2008, banks were on the verge of collapsing, and with it the economy, governments rescued the banks. Today the indebtedness extends to governments, especially of poor nations, but also the USA which runs an annual ONE TRILLION deficit, their total debt being more than $23 Trillion. The USA public at large carries a $13 Trillion debt, while world-wide debt exceeds $250 Trillion.

The danger is that inflation will increase, due to Climate Change which endangers the food supply and thus make daily living more expensive. Trump has made a devil’s bargain with Saudi Arabia, promising not to punish them for killing Jamal Khashoggi, in exchange for lower oil prices, something which will temporarily keep inflation in check.

My new understanding.

Jesus announced THE YEAR OF JUBILEE, the age of peace and prosperity.
Jesus left us with the words, “Forgive us our debts”. My new understanding is that we must ask forgiveness for getting into debt, because debt binds us to the forces of evil where ‘the lust for money’ is the leading cause of all sin.

Once we have debts, we must obey the forces of capitalism, the malignant powers that destroy God’s good creation, the opposite of JUBILEE, because JUBILEE signifies the beginning of THE NEW CREATION. Once we have debt, our allegiance is to the DEBTOR, who, in turn also is a slave to the Greater Evil, reason why we also must ask for forgiveness there.

Shall I mention ENVIRONMENTAL DEBT as well? In Jesus’ time there was little of that because it is a Modern Day sin. To merely explain FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS as a small personal matter, such as a white lie here and being jealous there, is too easy an explanation.

Faith is an all-encompassing affair: it extends to every action we do. Faith involves our diet, what we eat to stay healthy; faith is a factor in how we live, from exercise – our bodies are holy – to the way we travel-highly polluting. Faith also extends to monetary matters. Debt – trillions of it – is a major factor in the exploitation of creation.

Ernest Hemmingway in THE SUN ALSO RISES, wrote, “How did you go bankrupt?”: Two ways, gradually, then suddenly.”
The same applies to collapse, whether financial or environmental: it often happens slowly at first and then suddenly it’s there, as the tipping point is passed.

Every one of our actions contributes to collapse and makes it necessary to pray, FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS.

Matthew 19: 23-25 is part of the story of the rich man who came to Jesus for instruction, and was told by Jesus to give all he had to the poor and then join the Jesus` followers, and live by faith. For him that was too much.
That same question haunts us to day
Then Jesus said to His disciples, “Truly I tell you, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” When the disciples heard this they were greatly astonished and asked, “Who then can be saved?”

We are richer than this rich man. How did we become so rich?

We, every one of us, including me, became so rich by theft: We simply stole everything we have from the future. Our fraudulent wealth, both environmental and monetary, we stole from our children and grandchildren. We have left them with little or nothing: worse than nothing: messy weather, filthy air, dangerous storms, sickening soil, depleted fauna, the list goes on.

The time for answers is over.

“Who then can be saved?”

It’s time for PATIENCE and PENITENCE and especially for the PRAYER: FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS.

NOVEMBER 24 2018

WILL CLIMATE CHANGE ALSO BE A MIND CHANGER?

Most of us humans are an optimistic bunch. Not I. Perhaps it is my age. Perhaps it is my upbringing. Perhaps it is my inclination, my religious outlook, which prompts me to pray every day, “Maranatha, Lord come quickly.”

It’s not that my life is hard, or that I am destitute. It’s not that I am in poor health, even though my spouse of 65 years has some health issues which keeps her home-bound and has made me a care-giver, also needing the constant assistance of our children and friends plus extra help. Perhaps for some the news may be depressing, but actually I am among the few who is totally optimistic about the long-term outlook for the world, because the Bible, my constant source of wisdom, tells me that all is well that ends well.

So, what is the bad-news/good-news scenario out there?

The bad news.

The bad news today centers on the accelerating effect of Climate Change, the rise of fascist and “alt-right” politics, violent world-wide conflicts, millions of stateless refugees, a looming Brexit crisis, and a financial system teetering on collapse. Trump.
There’s more. A few weeks ago WHO (World Health Organization) published a 180 page report, centering on the particular vulnerability of children due to the dire consequences of air pollution.
Every year air pollution kills 7 million people world-wide, more than the total death toll of AIDS (1,1 million), TB (1,4 million), Diabetes (1,6 million) and traffic accidents (1,3 million). That makes air pollution the greatest health danger.

Blame Climate Change and the increasing peril of forest fires. Air pollution cuts the average lifespan of people around the globe by almost two years, analysis shows, making it the single greatest threat to human health. The research looked at the particulate pollution produced by the burning of fossil fuels by vehicles and industry. It found that in many parts of the worst-affected nations – India and China – lifespans were being shortened by six years.

Children are especially vulnerable here. Every year some 600,000 children die from infected air passages because they live in an atmosphere saturated with tiny particles caused by automobile traffic, industrial activities, agriculture and other hazards as well as indoor pollution. Ban all cars from urban areas: yes, we know the remedies, we won’t implement them.

The world is a unity: everything is connected to everything else.

Are wild-life species less important than humans? True, most of us live in cities where we hardly ever see wild-life. A new study has shown that “loss of one species can make more species disappear (a process known as ‘co-extinction’), and possibly bring entire systems to an unexpected, sudden regime shift, or even total collapse.”

Well, it so happens that 60 percent of all wild life, all birds, all fish has already disappeared. Are we next?

Physical fatigue fosters failure.

City people today must work longer hours, need more overtime, more wage earners per family, just to make ends meet. This means that they come home tired, have less time for their children, less time for reflection, hardly the energy to watch TV, never time for God and his world, for religion and serious reading, let alone time to get in touch with their inner selves.

Is there any good news?

I believe we live in an age of great spiritual hunger, which calls for open discussion, as part of the healing consists of striving for greater harmony with the natural world in which we live and which is, itself, so gravely threatened.

Needed: Days of Atonement.

What we need is Days of Atonement, that so beautiful concept initiated in Leviticus 23: 28, “Do not do any work on that day, because it is the Day of Atonement, when atonement is made for you before the LORD your God.”

Atonement today means saying sorry for the sins against Creation, and promising a new start, initiating reform and sticking to it.

Churches are the natural initiative takers there, but don’t expect them to start that biblical concept: we are in an age that thought it knew better than the collective wisdom of ancient religious traditions. It thought that the progress of scientific knowledge would turn aside the darkness and that the need for religion would recede, but the opposite has been the case.

Sad to say, Western Religion, both Christianity and Judaism, just as in Jesus’ days, have stagnated and resorted to empty formalism and vacuous traditions, afraid to see the reality of the state of creation, where mounting evidence points to collapse. All signs shows that a 5°C rise in temperature could occur very rapidly, as soon as September 2019.

The signs are clear to the discerning eye.

I don’t want to rehash all the ominous indications of Climate Change: to the discerning citizen, these are all too clear. What is happening is not a linear, gradual heating, but exponential increases that will take months, rather than decades, to take effect.

WILL CLIMATE CHANGE ALSO BE A MIND CHANGER?

No. The largest Christian denomination, the Roman Catholic Church, is in total disarray. A top Vatican official last week issued a scathing open letter accusing an archbishop who launched an unprecedented attack on Pope Francis of mounting a “political frame job devoid of real foundation”.

The fiasco was not surprising — the tone-deafness and self-protectiveness of the Roman intervention, the bafflement and internal divisions of the American bishops, and the liberal-versus-conservative arguments that followed were all characteristic of Catholicism’s crisis under Pope Francis.

A church in disarray has no interest or inclination in being prophetic: too busy to retain the status quo, as sex abuse scandals and consequent lawsuits multiply. In everything else connected to the scandals there is little progress because Catholicism’s leaders cannot agree on what progress means.

What’s needed is a VATICAN III, an open debate questioning where the church is going, and let variety appear, allow priests to marry, let the differences take form in separate denominations, the way Protestantism has developed. The Roman Church which prides itself to be united in faith and doctrine, in reality is split in many different ways, a sign of the times. What is needed is the ending of Popery, is doing away with the office of The Holy Father altogether. And let the chips fall. Yes, Francis could well be the Last Pope.

And the Protestant wing?

There most believers are winging all the way to heaven, delighted in leaving the earth in total disarray, clinging to the satanic belief of Pre-Tribulation-Rapture: well, they got a surprise coming.

All this is true to form, as Revelation 22: 11 indicates: everything will in the end show its true colors. The church is no exception there.

The same is true for all created matter.

We are – nature-wide – in such a vulnerable position that only ONE of the many support systems on which we depend – soils, aquifers, rainfall, ice, the pattern of winds and currents, pollinators, biological abundance and diversity – need fail for everything to slide.

Here the most immediate danger is ICE, melting ICE.

When Arctic sea ice melts beyond a certain point, the positive feedbacks this triggers (such as darker water absorbing more heat, melting permafrost releasing methane, shifts in the polar vortex) could render runaway climate breakdown unstoppable. When the Younger Dryas period ended 11,600 years ago, temperatures rose 10C within a decade. That can happen again!

Given human nature and the 40% support Trump has in the USA, Climate Change only will accelerate making collapse inevitable.
Of course were the world totally united, were all politicians on the same page, were all believers to see the world as God’s world and thus holy, then, yes, disaster could be avoided.

When the US joined the Second World War in 1941, it replaced a civilian economy with a military economy within months. In one year, General Motors developed, tooled and completely built from scratch 1,000 Avenger and 1,000 Wildcat aircraft … Barely a year after Pontiac received a navy contract to build anti-shipping missiles, the company began delivering the completed product to carrier squadrons around the world.” And this was before advanced information technology made everything faster. So, yes, a total switch to renewable energy is possible, if….

The problem is human.

It already started in the Garden of Eden. The voice of The Evil One was more seductive than the voice of God.

So let me go back to that beginning, to Cain killing his brother Abel in a fit of jealousy. He fled, and God went after him and promised him a free hand to develop God’s world according to Cain’s conception.

Why did God do that?

I believe that God wanted to see creation developed faster, wanted a quicker pace of progress in the world so that his coming again might happen sooner.

Cain, driven from his fields, uprooted from a slow-moving agricultural society, received carte-blanche to mold creation into the image of murderous humanity. Cain shattered that great stability, the affinity between the human race and God’s creation, obliterating the lingering legacy of Paradise. He introduced insecurity, the taste for blood, the desire for revenge.

With Cain, Satan took effective control over the earth, yet Cain, who defied God and denied him, is promised protection by God.
So where did Cain go? He turned his eye and his desire to Eden, toward the lost Paradise, which also happens to be the perpetual quest of humanity.

The search for a home, the search for Paradise Lost, is nothing else than the human desire for God’s presence, the God Cain, and humanity in general, rejects.

Cain, haunted by fear, in order to feel secure, built a City.

It is now nigh impossible to imagine life without the City. People even in the smallest communities depend on the city. Our pension cheques, our TV programs, our tax notices, they all come from the city. Human development and the City are intimately intertwined. The City, the place of progress, is the direct consequence of Cain’s murderous act and his refusal to accept God’s protection.

Cain calls the City Enoch, which means “A New Beginning.” Cain is going to make the world all over again, but now in his image. God’s creation is seen as nothing. Cain, with everything he does, digs a little deeper the abyss between himself and God. But each solution becomes also a new problem, each invention a new offence. Cain molds creation according to his plan. It is no longer God’s world: it is Cain’s creation and now almost totally Satan’s.

Today we all have become extensions of the City. Yet the City, Cain’s answer to Eden, to Paradise really, is God’s way of preparing God’s people for the New Jerusalem, the City of God.

The City is now the place through which Christians must pass. It is the World Today. The world is the City. Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, China, Russia, even the Sahara deserts, the satellite-filled expanse above, every square inch of the universe has been annexed by the City. Yet God uses the momentum of human progress and the advance of our knowledge not only to bring about the downfall of those who willfully pollute creation, but miraculously God also blesses human progress for the benefit of the building of God’s City.

The City today is our Virtual World, dominated by technology, flick of the switch heat and cool, where reality is not allowed.
But reality is cruel: it does creep up on us, while we sit in our spiritually dark room, staring at a stupid screen.

It now looks that we will have an ice-free Arctic two years from now, which means total Climate Change, resulting in COLLAPSE.

WILL CLIMATE CHANGE ALSO BE A MIND CHANGER?

Don’t bank on it: as always I end with a biblical given: Revelation, of course.
Here is what it says: (Revelation 16: 21), “And they cursed God on account of the plague of hail, because the plague of Climate Change was so terrible.”

Climate Change will happen. Will personal change also take place, or will it lead to curses?
WILL CLIMATE CHANGE ALSO BE A MIND CHANGER?

Yes, the GOOD News is that ALL IS WELL THAT ENDS WELL, in this case: a new humanity in a new creation.

November 17 2018

TIKKUN

A Jewish friend of mine, the late Dr. Harold Goldsman, who taught psychology at Concordia University in Montreal, gave me a number of TIKKUN magazines. The Hebrew word TIKKUN means “to heal, repair and transform the world.”

In one of the issues I found a statement that is dear to my heart. The author, a professor of Hebrew, writes, “Most importantly, we need a new sort of Jewish piety, a religious attitude fitting to an environmentally concerned future that is already upon us. Among the elements I seek is a Judaism unafraid to proclaim the holiness of the natural world, one that sees creation, both of the world and the human self, as a reflection of the divinity and the source of religious inspiration….The insight that God and the universe are related not primarily as Creator and creature, but as deep structure and surface, a central insight of the mystical tradition, is key to the Judaism of the future.”

I’d say, “Amen, brother.”

I have said this often, and also have maintained that, if we want to ‘evangelize’, bring the Good News to the world, then all Christian and Jewish believers will find common ground proclaiming the message that creation is holy, that we, by harming it, sin directly against God, the creator. This central insight of the mystical tradition is key not only to the Judaism of the future, but to all Christianity as well.

From there is it just a small step to bring the Best news the world has ever heard: that, when we self-destruct – and this is only a matter of time – a renewed creation awaits us.

Jewry and Christianity have a lot in common. Years ago, when one of our daughters lived on the edge of Beverly Hills, our hotel was next door to a Messianic Synagogue where we attended a 2 hour long service, complete with the carrying of the scroll and a Cantor, singing the law. The sermon was based on one of the letters of Paul. Had we lived in L.A. we would have joined that congregation, visually combining the Old and New Testament.

That TIKKUN – total renewal – is needed world-wide becomes more apparent every day. Our Globe has 70% water coverage, and most of the heat we generate by the zillions of carbon explosions in our beloved automobiles each minute, settle in the oceans.

Warmer oceans result in stronger cyclones. Cyclones can suddenly push huge amounts of salty warm water into the Arctic Ocean. The danger is that a strong influx of salty warm water into the Arctic Ocean could trigger destabilization of hydrates in sediments, resulting in massive eruptions of methane from the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean. Methane is TEN times more lethal than CO2.

This methane could cause temperatures to suddenly rise strongly at the higher latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, speeding up decline of sea ice and permafrost, and further deforming the jet stream.

This could trigger even more extreme weather events, in particular storms, flooding, heatwaves and fires, across the Northern Hemisphere that could devastate crops, take down power grids and threaten meltdowns of nuclear power plants.

Such fires could add huge amounts of black carbon to the atmosphere as is happening right now in California.

Furthermore, without access to fossil fuel and with the electricity grid down, many people could turn to kerosene lamps for lighting and burning wood for heating and cooking, resulting in even more black carbon emissions that have a huge immediate warming impact.

I believe we vastly underestimate the immense dangers of our way of life. TIKKUN means “to heal, repair and transform the world.” It is too late to change the course of events that inexorably will lead to destruction of everything living. But it is never too late to change the way we, as individuals, live. Actually it seems to me that this is a requirement for entering THE KINGDOM to come.

LIFE IS A UNITY.

Life is a unity: we are what we eat; we are what we think; we are what we do. But we also are what we believe, as faith must guide us, also in sickness and health.

Always uppermost in my mind is The New Creation, and trying to imagine conditions there and simulate them in the here and now. It seems to me that, as Genesis, the first Bible book, relates people ‘in the beginning’ lived hundreds of years, still, supposedly, influenced by a healthy atmosphere such as pure water and air and good genes, as well as natural eating habits and close community ties.

Today we eat plastic and plastic is a poisonous substance. The world produces 300 million tons of plastic each year. Given that a ton equals 2,000 pounds, this is 80 pounds per person on the earth.

Every month or so, living in the country as we do, I have to gather my recyclables and bring it to the recycle center, some 10km away, a job I hate because it brings home to me how much plastic is part of our daily life. Already plastic has infiltrated our innards. It cannot be long before these poisonous products will affect our health and wellbeing, causing an epidemic of cosmic proportion, a new killing disease called PLASTICIDE. Already it is found in our drinking water, and, I would not be surprised in much of our manufactured foods. Once it is ingrained in our bodies, there is no way we can expunge it: we are what we eat and plastic, a pure oil-based product, becomes part of the human psyche, distorting the way we think, the way we act and the way we die.

That is just one of the hazards we face.

Nobody can say exactly where and when a major earthquake will take place, but we know that there is a very high probability for it to occur in seismic zones: the Ring of Fire around the Pacific Ocean comes to mind.

We are totally distorting the earth’s balance with huge forest fires, untold billions of tons of ice melting at both poles, making it certain that enormous earthquakes will occur.

In Revelation 11: 13, the last book in the Bible, whose title means ‘disclosure, or revealing secrets’, such an enormous earthquake is mentioned, “Then there came flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder and a severe earthquake. No earthquake like it has ever occurred.

Revelation 16: 18 repeats that ominous prediction, “At that very hour there was a severe earthquake and a tenth of the city collapsed.”

REVELATION tells us that Nature will fall upon the human race as a provoked lion: it will breach all the constrains humanity has laid upon it, and will explode into extraordinary catastrophes, earthquakes, floods, failed harvests, pandemics. All these will be more severe than ever.

Already the signs are there in trumps. Before TIKKUN can take effect, before the healing, repairing and transforming of the world can take place, all traces of The Old World must be eradicated.

That process is now happening.

CLIMATE CHANGE: WAR ON CREATION

Climate Change is simply a euphemism for WAR ON CREATION. Today the war zones are all too visible: The fires in California, the ice disappearing in the Poles, the destructive hurricanes and typhoons, all are the opening salvos in this war.

In our urbanized world we don’t notice that the frogs are mostly eradicated, that the insects have mostly been eliminated, that the mammals, elephants, whales, tigers, lions, are mostly gone, because we have usurped the habitat to grow soya beans, which we feed to the cattle, whose manure causes more Climate Change, and whose meat clogs our arteries.

Enter Ivan Illich.

Influenced by Ivan Illich, and his LIMITS TO MEDICINE, I have long been interested in natural healing, in trying to combine all creative elements in day-to-day living.

Illich has a tendency to exaggerate matters, but in essence he points to the right direction. “The threat which current medicine represents to the health of the populations is analogous to threat which the volume and intensity of traffic represents to mobility, the threat which education and the media represent to learning and the threat which urbanization represents to competence in homemaking. In each case a major institutional endeavor has turned counterproductive.”

Illich wrote this in 1976. I bought his book, LIMITS TO MEDICINE, in that same year, at a time when CLIMATE CHANGE had not yet become a universal phenomenon. Today counter-productivity extends to all facets of society: No matter what we do, we cause more trouble. Economic Growth really means Climatic deterioration. It is like cancer that is fatal, because it is fanned by the human mind. Just as The War on Cancer quietly expired, now that it will affect a major part of the Western World, so Economic Growth will kill us as sure as incurable cancer.

This fatal global outcome is not the result of ideologies, religions, mad rulers, or the like. This death-march emerges out of a social network as a result of the way the universal system is connected. That doesn’t mean there is no direct cause for this mortal outcome: it is the result of the capital in the hands of the top TEN Percent, money that needs to be spent in some way.

Wherever there is a poor Ninety Percent and a rich Ten Percent, thus an imbalance in the accumulation of capital, the excess will spill from the more endowed side to the less endowed one. In that sense, the War of All Wars, Humanity –us – against Creation, is the Child of Capitalism: in other words “Too many Resources in Too Few Hands.

Paul was so right when he wrote to his protégé Timothy, “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. (1 Timothy 6: 10), including the evil that will destroy us all, and, let’s face it, we all are guilty of causing the ultimate demise.

HOW THEN SHALL WE LIVE?

In these last days that is the ultimate question. My grandparents and even my parents – all children of the Pre-Carbon Age – did not have that problem which is unique to us CARBOHOLICS.

We all are responsible for this deadly situation. There’s no such thing as clean living for us Westerners. Even though our house is heated by wood-ends obtained from the local Pallet Factory, while some of our electricity is supplied by solar power stored in batteries, in the scheme of things it amounts to little.

What I am trying to do is to reduce my carbon footprints to a minimum in every way possible: that aim is constantly on my mind, not an obsession, by certainly a genuine desire.

I believe that such a goal in life is different for every person. I take my cue from Paul again, when he wrote to his friends in Philippi, “Dear friends, as you have always obeyed–not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence–continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, (2 Philippians 12).

Fortunately there is no singular way to salvation. Jesus’ own words tell us that, “In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. (John 14: 2).
Many mansions also mean many different ways to redemption.

It is not only what we do: it’s how we employ TIKKUN, how we

“heal, repair and transform the world.”

We all have the responsibility to work within the means allotted to us. Our ultimate conduct always must be guided by the Royal Command, “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” (Matthew 6: 33).

For today, in the extreme times we live, this means that in all our actions we must strive to do TIKKUN, “To heal, repair and transform the world, the cosmos.”

This is a leap into faith, believing that when our single-minded purpose in life is to pursue the welfare of creation, that, when we do that all our needs for daily life will fall into place.

Trust and obey, there’s no other way.

NOVEMBER 10 2018

NOT HONORING THE EARTH MAKES GOD INTO AN IDOL

Both Dietrich Bonhoeffer and J.H. Bavinck regard us humans as part of nature: God, the Earth and Humanity are not only mutually dependent but are so intimately connected that they form an organic unity. Genesis 3: 19 unequivocally states that we will return to the ground out of which we are formed, for “earth we are and to earth we shall return.”

J.H. Bavinck writes in BETWEEN THE BEGINNING AND THE END, “A Radical Kingdom Vision”, that, “The word ‘adam’ reminded the Israelite immediately of the first Adam who was taken from the dust of the earth. That made the word eminently suitable to typify the human race in its unbreakable unity. The Israelite here sensed some¬thing of the fact that humans are earth-bound. A human being, ‘adam’, belongs to ‘adamah’, the life bearing earth. With every sinew of his existence he is tied to the earth, which bears him and feeds him. That is the reason why in the word ‘adam’ there is some¬thing of the strains of tran¬sitoriness, of perishability, of vulnerability and insignificance.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer says essentially the same. In CREATION AND FALL, in a lecture he gave in the early 1930’s he wrote, “In my whole being I belong wholly to this world: it bears me, nurtures me, holds me……….The more I master it, the more it is my earth.”

With uncanny foresight Bonhoeffer in 1932 saw the dangers of technology: “Technology is the power with which the earth seizes hold of humankind and masters it. And because we no longer rule, we lose the ground so that the earth no longer remains our earth, and we become estranged from the earth……….There is no dominion without serving God. …Without God, without their brothers and sisters, human beings lose the earth….. God, the brother and sister, and the earth belong together.”

Just imagine that was written by a 26 year old theology professor in Berlin, more than 20 years before Jacques Ellul wrote his THE TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY in 1954.

Canada and the USA: so different. Vive la Difference!

I am very happy to live in Canada, where we still struggle to rectify the way we have treated our indigenous people, the original occupants of our nation, a country with its various climates, and thus greatly different approaches to life.

From them we have inherited the inclusive way of life, where every living thing is treated as holy, in contrast with us Western whites who came as conquerors, not only of their ecologically friendly existence but even more so as conquerors of nature.

Today’s all-encompassing crisis is telling us in no uncertain terms that we are wrong, have been wrong, and will perish when we persist in our destructive ways.

From 1861-65 there was the US Civil War between North and South, between the Confederates and Unionists. The issues then, basically centering on the way minorities were treated, have never been resolved.

In South Africa a similar conflict led to a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which openly laid bare the differences and genuinely probed the basic fundamentals, to come to some lasting solutions. Canada followed a similar path.

Canada’s more conciliatory approach toward nature and our First Nation people, is in sharp contrast to the way our Southerly neighbor does its business.

In the USA there has never been a public discussion and an open and honest effort to bring genuine unity between the North and the South and consequently the USA still stands for DSA, the Divided States of America. Today this division is enhanced by religious differences, where the real schism centers in the way we see and treat creation.

All Christians believe that God created the earth, but, for reasons I have often outlined before most church people believe that, upon death, they go to heaven, leaving the earth.

Yet, we are here to serve, each other and also the earth.

We are here to serve, including creation. Matthew 20: 28, “The son of Man did not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life for many.”
The general misconception of Jesus’ mission is that he came to save souls, but John 3: 16 states that Jesus came to buy back the cosmos from The Evil One, who by hook and crook had attained temporary authority over the earth. Matthew 4: 8 describes this, “Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.” Satan’s grip on creation is confirmed in 1 John 5: 19.

Society in general and the church in particular has bought into this untruth, this LIE, that we can live separate from the earth, which, in essence means, that we can live without God, making that very God concept an idolatrous faith. Yes, NOT HONORING THE EARTH MAKES GOD INTO AN IDOL

That’s why a TRUMP can be endorsed by many in the church, a church that has no use for the earth, essentially no use for God, while using that very name as a talisman. Too often we are like a magician who pulls a rabbit out the hat. From it comes the saying Deus ex Machina, calling on God only when we need him.

We are smart.

We think we are powerful, and in a sense we are: we are very clever, we are very resourceful, very inventive, but we are not wise. Nobody can be wise without God, who is the source of All Wisdom.

Today all our ingenuity, all our smartness, all our braininess is being tested and found wanting, because we are convinced that we are gods and therefore need not pay attention to God, the creator of the earth.

NOT HONORING THE EARTH MAKES GOD INTO AN IDOL.

For many centuries we have managed without God. But now exponential growth has taken us in a surprisingly short time from a relatively empty world to a world full of people and their furniture. It is now full of our things but empty of what there was before, empty of God.

So what? the Christian Right argues. Why care for the earth? We take from it what we can, exploit it, and then ‘zoom’- we are swished off to heaven in the great Rapture.

That lack of wisdom is the reason why rural American folks have placed their trust in Donald Trump, a person who has fought to cancel the very medical insurance these people need, a president who has reduced the taxes on the rich and tried to eliminate the benefits for the down and out, proving that there is no wisdom without God.

They have forgotten that all white Americans are of immigrant stock, that all black Americans have been imported by the white people to make money.

When I was in grade school, as a 10 year old, in 1938, I was taught that people of color, whether black or brown were inferior to white. Trump has reinforced that notion, has promoted that lie in order to gain votes and create division, a purposeful ally of the Prince of Lies.

When I survey the world then matters are not good. David Brooks in his Friday column reported that in the last few months he had visited 23 states and found that the real divide is between rural and urban people. I remember traveling through parts of Wisconsin just prior to November 2016 when one of our grandsons got married. I noticed the TRUMP signs wherever there were three old cars in the driveway on a yard with a less than a luxurious dwelling, and neglected gardens. Likely these people lived on food stamps, draw some sort of Social Security, depend on Medicaid, and probably were in debt, most likely due to medical bills. Yet they voted Republican.

When I look around where I live in rural Ontario, then I don’t see the same scenario. True when I visit the medical clinic in Tweed, a municipality located in one of the poorest sections on the province, the same sort of people are visible: older, perhaps somewhat overweight, but there is an enormous difference: medical treatment is the same for all: rich or poor, educated or not, everyone is equal. The biggest worry in the USA is a medical emergency.

Years ago my wife had an acute medical problem while visiting our daughter in Minneapolis: we called the ambulance, received top care in the nearby hospital, the stay there was about 24 hours, and the bill was $12,000 US. Fortunately we had insurance, but for many in the USA the premiums are high, the deductible alone almost insurmountable, so they go without coverage. They have been brainwashed that the State is evil, yet only the state can provide the so needed care, and that care must be applied equally to all created matter, to people and nature alike: because without the earth, without taking care of the very substances of our body, water and soil, we die and religion becomes a sham because “NOT HONORING THE EARTH MAKES GOD INTO AN IDOL”.

God needs no sacrifices, but he wants faithful obedience. The great sacrifice has been made when Christ died on the cross to redeem creation. But idols need sacrifice all the time, and the true nature of The American Religion is evident from creation being sacrificed for the short-term benefit of the people.

When God issued the Commandments, he made provisions for any eventuality. In Leviticus 20:2 he decreed, “Say to the Israelites: ‘Any Israelite or any foreigner residing in Israel who sacrifices any of his children to Molek is to be put to death. The members of the community are to stone him.”

Our short-sighted society is committing that very act: by our actions, in our utmost idolatry, we are sacrificing everything living, including our children.

This is God’s world and we are responsible for how we treat it. This is such an elementary statement that it is hard to say more about it. Capitalism prides itself of being efficient. No system that uses resources at a rate that destroys natural life-support without meeting the basic needs of the people in the world can possibly be considered efficient.

Our ability and inclination to enrich the present at the expense of the future and of other species, is as real and as sinful as our tendency to further enrich the wealthy at the expense of the poor. To hand back to God the gift of creation in a degraded state capable of supporting less life, less abundantly and for a shorter future, is surely a sin.

If it is a sin to kill and to steal, then surely it is a sin to destroy carrying capacity – the capacity of the earth to support life now and in the future. To sacrifice future life on the planet to protect present prosperity and extravagance goes directly against the work of Jesus who came to save the cosmos.

We must face the failure of the economic growth idolatry. We must stop crying out to the growing economy “Deliver me for you are my god!” Yet, that is exactly what we have been doing. We have made God Almighty our IDOL. Instead we must have the courage and the faith to ask with Isaiah, “Is not this idol I hold in my right hand a LIE?” (Isaiah 44: 20).

That LIE is eminently embodied in the person of the president who only speaks truth when it suits him. For now he will use his still considerable power to promote right-wing populism, authoritarian, intolerant, and isolationist he is.
The Democrats – divided as they are – also are fanatic adherents of the GROWTH ECONOMY.

So what holds the future?

Revelation 18 tells the future:
In fear of her torment, they will stand at a distance and cry out: “Woe, woe to the great city, the mighty city of Babylon! For in a single hour your judgment has come.”
NOT HONORING THE EARTH MAKES GOD INTO AN IDOL.
The great city, the mighty economy, our capitalistic society, which we idolized, which we exploited, robbed of its essence, will collapse and in its stead will come THE HOLY CITY, God’s RENEWED CREATION.

NOVEMBER 3 2018

DREAMS

Last week I, 90 years old, had a dream that centered on an event that my subconscious told me happened close to 70 years ago. The curious aspect of this dream was that this was the second time that I visualized myself as a 22 year old, engaged to be married, worried that I would ever earn enough to support a family.

I dreamed that scenario even though I, since then, had been a successful entrepreneur, starting a career from life insurance to general insurance, from real estate broker to professional Real Estate appraiser, specializing in commercial and industrial properties.

This dream brought me back to a time when I had completed 14 years of schooling, mostly academic stuff, had just been discharged from the Dutch army, as an infantry sergeant, but had really no marketable skills at all, and, in my dream, I desperately wondered how I would ever translate these experiences into some sort of a career.

I cannot recall that these thoughts ever bothered me at the time. I am now sure that this lingering uncertainty about my future life gave me the impetus to emigrate to Canada, then very much in vogue, especially in the Northern Provinces of the Netherlands, Groningen and Friesland.

Lately another dream, also dealing with the past, had popped up in my mind. Three years before that, when my wife and I were dating, she broke off the relationship. Apparently this affected me so much that even now I dreamed that I was biking past her house, only some 300 m from where I lived, hoping to get a glimpse of her. That dream too occurred a few times.

These nightly happenings made me curious, and I started to read a book I have by Carl S. Jung, probably the world’s most famous authority on dreams. His 73 page essay had as heading, The Approach of the Unconscious, with the subheading, The Importance of dreams.

I am not capable to give an explanation of my dreams. I suspect that in my old age suppressed feelings are emerging, perhaps a kind of mind-house cleaning.

The result of these current dreams was that I started to read, not only Carl Jung, but also other authors. From Dr. Jung I learned the concept of “Misoneism”, a term I have never encountered before, meaning “a profound and superstitious fear for something new”. This gave me the impetus to make a note in Jung’s book on the margin: “Is Jesus’ promise to make everything new, including Creation a subject of fear for many believing Christians?”

The other two persons I consulted were Thomas Berry and MLK, Martin Luther King.

First Berry and his “The dream of the earth”.

Berry was a Catholic priest who wrote THE DREAM OF THE EARTH.
I expected some biblical givens here, but was very much disappointed. He never mentions God or Jesus, never refers to creation or fall, never points to the evil one or Christ’s redemptive acts.

However, he correctly implies something that J.H. Bavinck also states that, “The End is in the Beginning,” and quotes with approval E.O. Wilson of Harvard, who said, “Scientific analysis points, curiously, toward the need for a quasi-religious transformation of contemporary cultures,” without commenting on this. Berry’s own suggestion is that we must return far beyond recorded history: “going back to the genetic imperative from which human cultures emerged originally”. Bavinck called this “THE URZEIT,” the Primeval – prehistoric – era, primordial time, that preceded the time when humanity began life on earth. Bavinck writes: “This “Urzeit” was the time when all things were put in place. What happened then became the measure for everything that would happen afterwards. In that era the basis was laid upon which all subsequent events rest.”

MLK, Martin Luther King, in his now famous speech, I HAVE A DREAM, gives a totally different picture. Here is part of his historic sermon:
“I have a dream today … I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted. (MLK then quotes Isaiah 40):
Comfort, comfort my people,
says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and proclaim to her
that her hard service has been completed,
that her sin has been paid for,
that she has received from the LORD’s hand
double for all her sins.
A voice of one calling:
“In the wilderness prepare
the way for the LORD;
make straight in the desert
a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be raised up,
every mountain and hill made low;
the rough ground shall become level,
the rugged places a plain.
And the glory of the LORD will be revealed,
and all people will see it together.”

His speech continues,
“This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be fine one day.”
So far MLK.

I too have a dream.

I have written a book which really is a dream in its entirety. The section below is based on Matthew 26: 29, “I tell you, I will not drink from this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.”

In the episode which follows below, I envision a possible scenario, where Jesus implements the promise he made at the Last Supper. There he renews the Covenant with both humanity and all living matter, as outlined in Genesis 9, guaranteeing perfect life for all humans, all animals, all trees, all bacteria and insects, all microbes and fungi, every virus and amoeba, all protozoa and algae, forever freed from the curse Adam had brought upon creation. There is fulfilled the promise made at The Last Supper that He would not drink wine again until He would be united with His sisters and brothers and all creation in the Father’s kingdom, his so well ordered cosmos for which He had sacrificed his life.

Here is that dream:

“That moment has now arrived. The complete common-union is now to start. The marriage ceremony is about to begin and the sealing of the new and final Covenant is about to take place. Immanuel’s presence is everywhere, His mind penetrates all and our minds connect with His. All non-human living things, relieved of their groaning as in childbirth, joyfully embrace the birth of the New Creation. I see the trees stretch out their branches, as in prayer, the leaves vibrate in joyful expectation and the flowers sway in unison, even though there is no breeze. I see birds and all sorts of animals concentrate on Jesus in devout expectation.
The Son of Man, Immanuel. God everywhere.
Jesus rises above the crowd, His hands raised in a blessing. Gradually the singing subsides as slowly the music ceases. In the background a lonely bird continues its tune, asserting its independence. Jesus, smiling, begins to speak.
I am sitting on a rock, leaning against a tree, my arms neatly folded, as though I am again a kid in school, my eyes glued to my teacher. Jesus addresses creation and I know that what He conveys to me and the way I interpret it is all one experience. There is no possibility of misunderstanding or wrong explanation.
Jesus speaks to us and to all creation, a sermon without sound, a message without human words, transmitting ideas and concepts equally understandable to tree and human alike. He implants His love into the very core of the life of each woman and man, in fish and fowl, in plant and herbivore. Jesus imparts his love into all created matters, into the entire new creation, while holding up a chalice full of foaming wine.
My mind, starting to fill with His mind, receives a beginning of understanding the universal scope of our undertaking and the momentous magnitude of our mission. I feel the reaction of the tree against which I am leaning in the form of a slight shock of affirmation. I sense the approval of the earth in the faint vibrating of the rock on which my body rests.
A hush has fallen over the New Creation. All eyes are glued to the Son of Man, Who now raises both His hands, while holding that large golden cup full of freshly poured wine. In an instant we all have a long-stemmed, crystal wineglass in our hands, also filled to the brim with the fruit of the vine, formerly pressed by the human sole, now a symbol of the new human soul, creation’s most joyful gift to life. My glass is supplied by Cornelius, who is gone the next instant. It flashes through my mind that I am not the only person he looks after.
“A toast,” Jesus says, His voice echoing through the Universe, “a toast to you who have completed your journey and now are about to start a new life, a life of slowly and ever more intimately becoming united with the cosmos, God’s world, bought with my blood, of which this wine is a token. A toast to Our Father, Creator, who made this all possible through Me, the Lamb of God.”
We, radiating His smile, raise our cups to acknowledge the God-Creator. The Son of Man drinks from His cup. He then gently pours some wine on the earth, and also into the air, as birds everywhere circle around Him in perfectly maintained concentric circles.
We all drink from our precious glasses filled with a red wine so delicious that it fills us with an even greater sense of wellbeing. It is amazing that, just as His earthly ministry started at the wedding feast in Cana, so now our first encounter with Him is also a wedding feast, this time our wedding feast, the uniting of the saints of the Body of Christ with his New Creation.

Freely flows the wine which gladdens our hearts even more. A song from my schooldays plays through my brain: “lo vivat, io vivat, nostrorum sanitas. Hoc est amoris poculum, doloris est antidotum. lo vivat, io vivat, nostrorum sanitas.” Here the wine is indeed something which will make us live, which will increase our wellbeing. The cup is most certainly the cup of love, of the greatest love ever; no longer is it an antidote for sorrow or grief.”

End of that quote from my book, DAY WITHOUT END, of which an electronic copy is available upon request. (Already a group near Ottawa, Ontario is discussing this book).

A dream shattered.

Today we experience world-wide chaos, augmented by President Trump’s remorselessly cynical, jungle-style vision of how to conduct business and politics, which is ripping apart a society already impacted by generational, demographic, and emotional stress.

What we NOW are experiencing are the birth pangs outlines in Romans 8 verses 19-25. Welcome them!
Consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.
We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to son-ship, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.

We must have dreams. The beauty of biblical dreams is that they come true.

OCTOBER 27 2018

THE SLEEPWALKERS

I have never walked in my sleep. Over the years I have fought while slumbering, thrashing around in my bed, kicking and wrestling with some imaginary intruder, but sleepwalking? No.

So why do I broach that subject?

Well, in my previous blog, MURDER, Christopher Clark used the term in the title of his book, “The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914”. Clark writes, the European leaders were “watchful but unseeing.”

I like that phrase: watchful but unseeing. When people ‘sleepwalk’ they are careful not to bump into other objects, but they really don’t know where they are and where they are going: they sort of float without a defined goal, are watchful but unseeing.

That got my thinking, so I searched my book collection and came up with Arthur Koestler’s THE SLEEPWALKERS. He states that by abandoning religion, by leaving God out of the picture, by relying solely on REASON, we drift aimlessly in our world.

Koestler is of the Jewish persuasion – born in Budapest he lived in Israel for a while and settled in London– and writes that with earlier scientists, such as Kepler and Galileo, ‘Apart from reassuring the conscious mind by investing the universe with meaning and value, RELIGION acted in a more direct manner on the unconscious, pre-rational layers of the self, providing it with intuitive techniques to transcend its limitations in time and space by a mystical short-circuit, as it were.’

That is the central theme of the book. He deplores how the relationship between faith and reason, which existed harmoniously earlier in many of the greatest intellectuals of the West, is no longer evident today.

Koestler thinks that modern science is trying too hard to be rational. Scientists today allowed themselves to become “sleepwalkers,” by trying to be guided only by ‘reason’.

He concludes that within the foreseeable future – the book was published in 1958 –humanity will either destroy itself or take off for the stars, (a theme the late Stephen Hawkins seems to favor).

Sleepwalking into eternity.

Well, I am convinced that ‘sleepwalking’ is all the rage today. Not physically, not that everywhere people’s sleep is suddenly subject to erratic roaming, but more in the broader sense of being lost theologically, politically and especially ecologically.

Every day we read of another species under threat: last week it was insects. This week it is frogs.
When we moved to Tweed 43 years ago, the bullfrogs in our nearby pond would wake us up in the morning. They have long gone.

Last week’s New York Times reported, “Frogs are linchpins in the ecosystem, both predator and prey. And they are our watchmen, keeping vigil over our ponds, marshes, lakes and streams, our meadows and our woods, the quality of our water and our air. “If they go silent, there could be bad stuff happening,” says Christopher J. Raxworthy, a herpetologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Like honeybees, whose colonies began to collapse en masse across the United States a decade ago, frogs are portents of the greater ills that could befall our environment — and us.”
Indeed, we are sleepwalking toward the final apocalypse.

We also have become religious sleepwalkers, evident throughout the ecclesiastical spectrum.

One of my favorite books is Tom Hayden’s THE LOST GOSPEL OF THE EARTH. There Tom Hayden – a California legislator – passionately argues that we must reclaim our spiritual bond with the earth, a regular theme of my musings.

He writes, “We divide grace and spirit from nature at our own peril. When we worship a God above, the earth withers from neglect below. We develop a society where everything from human habits to politics and economics exploits the environment with callous indifference. Unless the nature of State is harmonized with the state of Nature our greed and ignorance will eventually take us beyond the capacity of the very ecosystems that support human existence.”

It is sadly true that all religions, from Protestant to Roman Catholic, from Buddhist to Judaism, have lost the earth affinity and so have thwarted the spread of the true gospel.

We automatically pray The Lord’s Prayer, where “Hallowed Be Thy Name” is the very first line after the salutation. We don’t realize that God is totally present in all his expressions: God’s name represents God in entirety. It simply means that whatever emanates from God is holy.

This really means that in our uttering of The Lord’s Prayer we actually say that Creation is as Holy as God is Holy, that by molesting his cosmos – as we do continuously – we curse God.

Yes, we constantly sleepwalk in church. Yes, we continuously sleepwalk through worship as if we are permanently doped up, unconscious, drunk and ‘out of it’. C. S. Lewis once wrote, “The safest road to hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” That is a typical sleepwalking exercise.

Two of my other favorite authors also point to Sleepwalking. Jacques Ellul is one of them. He was a liberated Christian academic, a professor of law at the University of Bordeaux, France, most famous for his book THE TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY which was written in 1954, appeared in English in 1964 and which I bought in 1965.

Among my six books written by Ellul is HOPE IN TIME OF ABANDONMENT, which truly is a Cri de Coeur, a cry of desperation, over the condition of the church. I prefer the French title: L’Esp?rance Oubli?e, the Forgotten Hope.

He writes that the church has forgotten the decisive importance of the promise, the approach of the Second Coming, the ESCHATON which comes. “Eschaton” is the Greek word for ‘The final event in the divine plan; the end of the world’, something we are rapidly approaching. He thinks that the church, by not mentioning the Hope of Eternal Life on earth, is totally in the Sleep Walking business, aimlessly drifting from one priority to another, without really going anywhere.

In this he echoes Bonhoeffer who, in his CREATION AND FALL wrote, “”The church of Christ witnesses to the end of all things. It lives from the end, it thinks from the end, it acts from the end.”

I was reminded of Jacques Ellul by one of my readers who sent me an article which appeared in The Tyee Magazine, written by Andrew Nikiforuk, dealing with Ellul’s classic, THE TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY.

Here are some quotes.
Nikiforuk writes, “Ellul, the Karl Marx of the 20th century, predicted the chaotic tyranny many of us now pretend is the good and determined life in technological society.
“He wrote of technique, about which he meant more than just technology, machines and digital gadgets but rather “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency” in the economic, social and political affairs of civilization.

For Ellul, technique, an ensemble of machine-based means, included administrative systems, medical tools, propaganda (just another communication technique) and genetic engineering.
The list is endless because technique, or what most of us would just call technology, has become the artificial blood of modern civilization.
“Technique has taken substance,” wrote Ellul, and “it has become a reality in itself. It is no longer merely a means and an intermediary. It is an object in itself, an independent reality with which we must reckon.”
Just a break from Nikiforuk’ s article.

Ellul’s real message fits in with my theme of SLEEPWALKING. He writes that technology which supposedly is humanity’s servant, in actual life will overtake human development unless we take the necessary steps to move beyond ‘technique’ to reclaim our humanity.
Today that prophecy has been fulfilled: we have become enslaved to our gadgets. We now more and more resemble the situation painted in Psalm 115,
“They have mouths, but cannot speak,
eyes, but cannot see.
They have ears, but cannot hear,
noses, but cannot smell.
They have hands, but cannot feel,
feet, but cannot walk,
nor can they utter a sound with their throats.
Those who make them will be like them,
and so will all who trust in them.”

Actually we have gone beyond what the poet of this Psalm visualized: our robotic devices CAN walk, CAN feel, CAN talk, which makes them all the more dangerous.

Back to Nikiforuk:

He argued that propaganda had to become as natural as breathing air in a technological society, because it was essential that people adapt to the disruptions of a technological society.
“The passions it provokes — which exist in everybody — are amplified. The suppression of the critical faculty — man’s growing incapacity to distinguish truth from falsehood, the individual from the collectivity, action from talk, reality from statistics, and so on — is one of the most evident results of the technical power of propaganda.” So far the The Tyee article.

SLEEPWALKING AND ENTERTAINMENT.

“Amusing ourselves to death”.

Neil Postman, the author of the book by that title, states that in the entertainment television provides us with “soma”, the fictitious pleasure drug in Brave New World that famous book by Aldous Huxley, where the citizens’ rights are exchanged for consumers’ entertainment.

The most striking point of this important book is that “form excludes the content” which means that TV can only convey a limited amount of ideas and knowledge, as opposed to books and literature. Reading allows for reflection, tickles the brain, gives opportunity to go back and memorize, thus allowing for gaining wisdom.
Owing to TV’s shortcoming, politics and religion are diluted, and “news of the day” becomes a packaged commodity. Television de-emphasizes the quality of information in favor of satisfying the far-reaching needs of entertainment, by which information is encumbered and to which it is subordinate. In other words, TELEVISION is the ultimate mind-killer, enhancing sleepwalking.

THE GOOD NEWS IS……

So, after all this negative stuff, after outlining why we sleepwalk in the dark, why we go about our lives as zombies, why the entire society is conspiring to prevent us from becoming what we are – the Devil’s ultimate aim – there is good news.

The Good News is that it is possible to find GOD again: we cannot find ourselves and cannot become what we are unless we find God. Bonhoeffer repeatedly has stated: God, we ourselves and the earth belong together. The Belgic Confession beautifully has formulated that belief:

“Article 2: The Means by Which We Know God

We know God by two means:
First, by the creation, preservation, and government
of the universe,
since that universe is before our eyes
like a beautiful book
in which all creatures,
great and small,
are as letters
to make us ponder
the invisible things of God:
God’s eternal power and divinity,
as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20.
All these things are enough to convict humans
and to leave them without excuse.
Second, God makes himself known to us more clearly
by his holy and divine Word,
as much as we need in this life,
for God’s glory
and for our salvation.

Let me concentrate on that first aspect, because I believe that today the church, by exclusively dealing with the Bible, has forfeited to be the gateway to salvation.

We must go beyond the Bible, the Scriptures, because interpreting it has led to nothing but confusion, that’s why, in this late stage of history, Creation is more important. Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, (Matthew 5: 5) “Blessed are the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth”. The ‘gentle’ are those who treat the earth with tenderness, with the utmost consideration, who love it as Jesus did.

For now, the Bible makes clear – 1 John 5: 19 – that God’s opponent rules. The evil one has created the perfect conditions to prevent us from coming to God-knowledge, by putting us to sleep, by sleepwalking through the world, making it almost impossible to learn THE TRUTH.

Fortunately the environmental crisis is a wake-up call. Informed people know that Planet Earth is about to die, and Christ is the only answer for remedying this dreadful situation.

The Truth is that Christ died to save the world he made because he loved it beyond anything else. By following his example, by loving creation, and thus loving the Creator, we can inherit eternal life in a totally restored and perfect world.

Only in Him can we do that: it means giving up all sleepwalking, squarely facing the true situation, acknowledge our SIN and start a new life NOW.