January 16, 2024
THE IRONY OF WATER.
Some happenings are uncanny and unforgettable. One of them is my emotional experience, standing in front of Lake Louise, in Banff National Park. There, in a sudden, uncontrollable outburst of elation and exultation, tears sprung into my eyes, my throat seized up, and my whole body reacted to the immense natural beauty unfolding in front of my eyes. God’s Spirit through his handiwork filled my being. It to me signified that ‘nature’, God’s creation, is both us and in us.
A similar feeling, however much shorter, went through me when a dear friend, about to die, talked of his future in the New Creation that awaited him, and with him I experienced a shared feeling of felicity, that touched my very soul.
I think the proper word for these happenings is ‘enchantment’, a feeling of the divine in me, the presence of God’s Spirit, ‘chanting’ melodiously, impacting my physique, pushing teardrops into my eyes, reminding me that my body and the world around me, are mostly water.
Water?
Rivers, lakes, seas, oceans, cover 70 percent of the earth’s surface. Our very bodies consist of water in that same proportion.
Rather than calling our globe ‘earth’ – which, after all, is only a minority stake – we should really call our world ‘water’ or ‘aqua’ by its Latin name.
What have we done with ‘water’?
“Astounding” ocean temperatures in 2023 supercharged “freak” weather around the world as the climate crisis continued to intensify.
The Flood, in which Noah played a prominent part, was purely ‘an act of God’, who promised not to repeat his interference. And God hasn’t. It is increasingly becoming obvious that we, as the human race, have assumed God’s role of inflicting punishment on ourselves.
The watery oceans.
For millennia the sea was a mystery for the human race, unaware that ‘the universal ocean-waters’, determine the steadiness of the atmosphere, a state of affairs we now have disturbed, of which we today face the consequences. We have done what has always been seen as impossible: the trillions of tiny explosions occurring every second under the hoods of our beloved automobiles, have now heated up the incalculable universal molecules of H2O in adverse ways, robbing the atmosphere of its predictable constancy.
Our Greed for Speed
Our Greed for Speed has accelerated the Parousia, the Second Coming. That’s the Good News. It reminds me of Yeats timely poem:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Bethlehem has come and gone.
The Second Coming is at hand, as even the church’s stance, in its largest expressions, has turned to a new Messiah, Trump, turning the Good News – Eu-Angelist – into the Bad News – Kak-Angelist, perfectly in line with Matthew 24.
Water: An ironic twist.
Where God punished an incurably sinful world with the FLOOD, today the uneven spread of rains has brought on ‘drought’, which threatens the world’s food supply, affecting a quarter of humanity, causing food inflation, hunger and migration. Also, Global Heating warmed the entire earth’s waterbodies, an unbelievable feat, judging by its global percentage, to the extent that the world’s weather is out of kilter, as its stability has been jolted. Here again the unbelievable magnitude of our disastrous conduct spells nothing but current and near-future chaos.
I know, those are no proof of God’s existence for the sceptical minds, but for me they are real. That I live under divine protection became again evident to me a short while ago, when, in a dream I was alerted to a certain danger that could have mortal consequences, and when, the next day such a happening did take place, I was warned in advance.
Back some 80 years.
As an 18-19 years old young man, in the glorious summer of 1947, for 7 weeks I sailed the seas, as a guest on a 500 tons Coastal Vessel, paying $1.00 per day for food, traveling from Rotterdam to Exmouth in South England – where I stayed 4 weeks – and from there through the Kiel Canal to the Baltic, where minesweepers were still clearing safe paths through the ‘Ost See’, on my way onto Sweden and Finland.
Some happenings are literally unforgettable. That ‘sea-trip’, now almost 80 years ago, has made me love the waters which cover almost all the globe’s exterior.