CHAOS OR COSMOS: A CHOICE
The word Chaos is perhaps best described by its opposite: Cosmos. Where Cosmos indicates something wholesome and harmonious, pictures an orderly and logical situation, and illustrates a simple and coherent solution, in my Greek dictionary Chaos is defined as, well the opposite: an unformed and shapeless mass, a useless, unreformable blob. Yet God saw this indefinable entity and, says Psalm 33: 9, “God spoke and chaos came to be cosmos”. It’s as simple as that, so simple that it is beyond our comprehension.
The phrase ‘came to be’ included evolution. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, that famous priest-paleontologist, author of “Le Milieu Divin”, THE HOLY EARTH, saw this gradual development, the innate capacity of the initial creation to blossom into something beautiful, and tried to explain this process to the church, for which he was condemned as a heretic by the ecclesiastical authorities who stuck to the Genesis story addressed to a people with acute agricultural insight but with no scientific knowledge. More often than not, the clergy has been the death of progress and the bane of the church.
Cosmos
Last Monday morning, I sat back and looked around in my living room, where I saw ‘cosmos’. I saw on my windowsill flourishing plants, silhouetted against the sky; I saw beautiful furniture, functional and attractive to the eye, I saw a large decorative bookcase full of colorful books, I saw original paintings, some from local artists: in other words, I am surrounded by cosmic creativity, reflecting my innermost being, fully dependent on the Way, the Truth and the Life, personified in Jesus Christ.
When I peer outside, I see a large vegetable garden and fruit trees, as well as gigantic maples, providing ample shade to keep my two-storey home cool in the summer, with windows south-facing to warm the dwelling in the cold winter months. All that too is part of cosmos.
Chaos.
However, when I open my computer and look at the three dailies I read every morning, the Toronto Globe and Mail, the New York Times, and the British Guardian, I see chaos everywhere. I also see it as irreversible. Chaos, noticeable in the atmosphere, where excessive heat has created chaotic conditions among the very elements that make life on earth possible. And that most certainly involves trees: No trees, no LIFE.
I noticed a little poem while reading a book on ‘trees’:
“Poems are made by fools like me.
But only God can make a tree”.
That’s how God started to make cosmos out of chaos: he made trees to sprout. At one time a person could walk along the North of Africa, from Morocco at the Atlantic Ocean to Oman at the Pacific and always be in the shade: indeed, civilizations, from the early Sumerian era flourished and fell when trees and land fertility disappeared.
These same trees have been in the news lately, proclaiming their intricate root connections, their utter usefulness for the human existence. I once read that a CIA study had calculated that, in order to sustain the oxygen level for the average North Americans, including the O2 burned in our combustion engines, 4500 trees per person are needed. From a friend, a retired forester, in British Columbia, and affirmed by Peter Wohlleben in his new book, “The Heartbeat of Trees”, I learned that the ‘plantation’ method of replacing old-growth-clear-cut approach to forestry with pine-seedlings, is causing the immense forest fires in the North American Pacific West.
The Tree of Life, in the Garden of Eden, means to me that the TREE is LIFE. Trees can live without us, but we cannot live without trees. The frenetic forest fires, now wherever trees are found, spells the end of our civilization. Its abusive agricultural practices deprived Rome from its nearby food sources and aided in its fall. History is repeating itself. A lengthy article in the New York Times on August 18, predicts that the anti-weed chemicals produced by Bayer and Monsanto are becoming ineffective, as weeds defeat all efforts to suppress them, with dire consequences for our food supply, spelling Chaos also in the soil.
Chaos in the church.
Whenever God erects a house of prayer,
The Devil always builds a chapel there;
And ‘twill be found upon examination,
The latter has the largest congregation.
Daniel Defoe in The True-born Englishman.
The Latin Mass, anyone? Abortion? Same Sex Marriage? Evolution? The Bible’s Letter-for-Letter accuracy? Female Priests? No salvation outside the church?
The church is deeply divided everywhere I look, much more Chaos than Cosmos, much more devilish than divine.
Jesus usually was quite mild-mannered, but when it came to organized religion, and its leaders, he was furious, warning his disciples to be aware of the church officials, and in a direct confrontation with the religious leaders, he called them ‘poisoners’ and ‘hypocrites’. Matthew 23 contains a long list of statements condemning the clergy of his days. They ended up killing Jesus. Jesus hated religion: he wants us to be god-fearing, creation loving humans, just as he was.
Michael Coren, ordained in the (Canadian) Anglican Church, in a Globe and Mail article, decried the resistance of ‘fundamental Christians’ to Covid vaccination. Cardinal Raymond Burke, a staunch conservative in the US Catholic church who has emerged as a leading critic of Pope Francis and a vaccine skeptic, was placed on a ventilator just days after testing positive for Covid-19.
Abide with us.
That song plays through my mind: “Abide with me, fast falls the eventide, the darkness deepens, Lord with me abide.”
“We are entering an unprecedented era in human history, two simultaneous and hugely challenging climate changes at once: one in the climate of technology and one in the climate of the climate”, writes Thomas Friedman in the New York Times.
We are sleepwalking into CHAOS everywhere: politically, religiously, environmentally, agriculturally: everywhere we look, we are at the end of the road, and we have run out of solutions.
“Abide with us”, but God has abandoned us because we, as a society, have abandoned God.
Chaos everywhere: just as God in the beginning, created cosmos out of chaos, with leaving us in charge of creation, he knew what the outcome would be: chaos everywhere, and the resulting immense hardship, now already evident everywhere. Brace yourself. We will see Matthew 24 emerging in all its dramatic disasters.
Here’s a Jesus’ quote:
“For then there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now—and never to be equaled again. If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive, but for the sake of the elect those days will be shortened.”
Other Bible passages also refer to this event, emphasizing the prosperous conditions, and the abundance of material production, before Jesus returns, with merchants lamenting the lack of sales of their luxury wares: all utterly normal times! Yet, sudden and unforeseen events do happen, witness Afghanistan today, or the Haiti earthquake or pouring rain in Greenland, another unique event.
The literary world is full with sayings such as “the last straw that broke the camel’s back, or the grain of sand or the snowflake that caused the avalanche.” As Seneca said long ago: “Increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid.”
The Bible tells us to live our lives always with eternity in mind, more relevant today than ever, as the finiteness of the world becomes increasingly evident. The trouble is that we live in a culture capable to accomplish almost everything but unable to imagine anything. That the God Creator has plans for a totally new creation, is something even the church no longer believes, and is unable to imagine.
So, total CHAOS will come: be assured. And total COSMOS will follow: be assured, because the Lord will never allow his beautiful creation to permanently fall into disuse.