May 5 2013.
How to prepare for COLLAPSE
I have given myself an almost impossible assignment. Who wants to talk about COLLAPSE? Most of the people I know – and that includes my wife and me and our immediate family – live a good life: good health, good jobs, generous pensions; true, we all have something to worry about, but in general things don’t look too bad, so my musings on how to prepare for COLLAPSE seem preposterous. Yet I will persist.
“Forgive us our debts.” That’s my old Calvinistic streak popping up again. I have to confess that I grew up in a large very fundamentalist religious family, and something no doubt has stuck with me on that score. As a little child my mother taught me an evening prayer, which translated goes something like this: “I go to sleep, I am so tired; when I close my little eyes, Lord, keep watch over me all night. The evil I committed, please do not count that against me. Even though my sins were great, make me clean for Jesus’ sake. Amen” I have no clue what my great many sins were as a 4 year old, but I prayed for forgiveness anyway.
A new view on sin
Forgive me for pursuing this ‘sin’ avenue, for over the years I have developed a totally different view of sin. Herman Daly, former economist with the World Bank wrote: “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 has been there before. 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 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 life to protect present luxury and extravagance goes against the work of Jesus who came to save the cosmos. We must face the failures of the growth idolatry. We must stop crying out to the growing economy, ‘Deliver me for you are my god!’ Instead we must have the courage to ask with Isaiah, ‘Is not this idol I hold in my right hand a lie?’ (Isaiah 44:20)”.
Dr. Herman Daly was perhaps influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, often misunderstood, especially in Christian circles because he said that God was dead. I have read once that God committed the ultimate act of humility by voluntary removing himself to make place for the Son. Actually Bonhoeffer hinted at that as well when he wrote Etsi deus non daretur which translates (we must live) “as if God does not exist.” I often wondered how we can inherit the Kingdom to Come if God were still alive. After all an inheritance comes into its own only when the testator has died. Jesus himself said that he has been given total authority as the new heir and that we are co-heirs with him. Nietzsche once wrote that “Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God has died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing….societal madness is the ultimate consequence of the death of God.” With so much societal madness everywhere, it certainly feels like God is dead.
A Paradigm Shift needed
J. H. Bavinck has clearly stated that the world is now in the hands of the devil. The main reason for Collapse is that this world is in the clutches of God’s great adversary whose sole aim is to destroy this world. All signs indicate that he is succeeding. With God, perhaps temporary out of the picture, we are on our own which calls for a paradigm shift in our thinking and doing.
What is a paradigm shift? The most quoted description of a paradigm shift – even though it may not be true in nature- is the story of the proverbial frog, which when thrown in a pan of boiling water, immediately gets out, but when comfortably settled in warm water that is gradually heated up, blithely boils to death. The frog, not noticing the paradigm shift, lost his life. It will do the same for us with eternity at stake. Had humanity suddenly been transferred from a pristine period to the state of the earth in which we find ourselves today, we would be utterly appalled but since it happened slowly, we fail to notice it.
Carolyn Baker, Ph.D. an adjunct professor of history and psychology for 11 years and a psychotherapist in private practice for 17 years, wrote a report on a book written by Paul Levy: Dispelling Wetiko – Breaking the Curse of Evil. This book exposes how the very roots of the madness that is threatening life on earth are ultimately to be found within our own psyche.
Paul Levy points out an interesting new phenomenon: the disease of ‘Malignant Egophrenia’ (ME). It is the disease of industrial civilization, an economic, political, and social arrangement which requires violence to maintain itself. The recent mass murder of hundreds of industrial workers in Bangladesh confirms this. More than a million people are killed each year in automobile accidents and tens of millions injured. We all in the industrial civilization are infected with the ME affliction. Because of this disease we are not in touch with our own humanity and therefore cannot see the humanity in others.
Reconnect with our humanity
One of the conditions of entering the “Kingdom of Heaven to Come” is to be fully human. The acronym “ME” is certainly no accident because Malignant Egophrenia naturally causes our inner vision to focus on “me” and my needs rather than more broadly on the rest of the world in addition to me. J. H. Bavinck repeatedly states in his The Kingdom: Speed Its Coming, that there is no such thing as individual salvation – no me-me-me and my heaven – but only humanity and the New Creation.
Levy also mentions that society by and large has banned the word ‘evil’, because it smacks of religion. It prefers instead to use words like “misguided,” “fallacious,” “perverse,” or “odious,” but certainly not “evil.” Yet today evil reigns, evident in the atrocities committed against the earth and against our own species such as: the Sandy Hook massacre; the carnage of terrorism; the bloodbaths of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; drone attacks on innocent civilians; human trafficking; the institutionalized sexual abuse of children by Roman Catholic and other clergy; the rampant assaults on the earth and humans by hydraulic fracturing; the cover-up of the severity of the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident; the massive, rampant, institutionalized corruption of Wall Street and corporate capitalism worldwide. Evil is the only appropriate term for these abhorrent acts. By not defining and acknowledging the ‘evil’ in the world, and by ignoring Satan’s all pervasive influence, both directly reflect our lack of being aware of our own potential for evil, all this further serves to enable malevolence to have nearly free rein in our world.
Of course those of the Reformed tradition know all too well that the Heidelberg Catechism openly states that we are conceived and born in sin and therefore are children of wrath. That the world suffers from Climate Change and earthquakes and hurricanes and whatever is part of the reason we are where we are in human history because we have not imagined the scope of evil that we can fall prey to. Before we can deal with Collapse- which is a biblical given – we must come to terms with our own shadow. So I appeal to the churches to pursue a paradigm shift in talking about sin and promoting a different type of ‘worship’ that embraces all of creation, God’s primary word, rather than staring into the light of Scripture and become blinded by God’s secondary source of revelation. Ignoring the plight of creation is a sin of omission.
All and in All.
Just as Jesus is – Colossians 1: 15-20 – “all and in all”, or ‘everything and in everything’, so we too must break away from the “me first” thinking and always regard the intimate connection with everything around us. That means that the church must sever the exclusive tie with Scripture and embrace the totality of creation. Isaiah 62:4 tells us that “we and the Land will be married”. Revelation 21 affirms this: the New Creation comes down as a bride adorned for her husband: the New Creation is the Bride and we, with Jesus as our head, are the groom: humanity marrying the earth. Both verses are not metaphors but real life situations. Real living means being in touch with all of creation, with all plants and all animals: that is the only way to live a full life: “Blessed are those who have lived that way before they died.”
A Day of Mourning instead of a day of Thanksgiving
We have so far progressed in our denial of the evil in society that it is almost impossible to underestimate how far we have digressed from our original intimate relationship with creation.
In this moment, incalculable deaths are occurring on this planet—deaths of species, deaths of rivers, mountains, forests, oceans, and farmland. A new report by the UN Desertification Convention (UNCCD) reported in April that severe land degradation is affecting 168 countries across the world, a marked increase on the last analysis in the mid 1990’s, when an estimated 110 states were at risk. Now with 70 million new mouths to feed every year, all aiming to copy our Western life style, famine for many is not far away.
Humans appear to be killing themselves and the entire planet. Has there ever been this much death on earth in its history? Even if we hermetically seal ourselves from all contact with the media and live in total isolation, something in us knows the severity of our predicament. We know that the death machine and climate catastrophe may now be irreversible. We know in our bones that not only may our own days be numbered, but also the days of most of life on earth. The only possible Christian response to this horror is deep, gut-wrenching, heart-rending grief that reverberates in the marrow of the bone. Now is the time for many, many funerals on a variety of levels, taking a host of forms, but what we must now recognize is that nothing, absolutely nothing about our grief is “private” any longer. The entire human and more-than-human community is inextricably and irreversibly involved. Now is the time for conscious, courageous, community grieving.
I believe that, instead of having a Thanksgiving Day celebration in the Fall, we should have a Day of Atonement, a Day of Mourning for Creation, a Day of penitence, of prayer and perhaps fasting, a Day to condemn our economic system that is bent to destroy everything for the sake of 666, the modern Mammon idol which has sold us on the illusions of infinite growth and unbridled human progress. We need a Day to pray for forgiveness and a Day to try to make a new beginning, visualizing life in the New Creation, a Day not just for the familiar faces, but a Day with an open invitation, a Day widely advertised, because there are a lot of non-church people out there who are often more aware of this. Something like what happened in 2 Chron. 34 and 35.
To display public grief is a powerful testimony that we openly lament the state of the world and the destructive demonic devastation due to our daily doings. A Day of Mourning will show the world that the church too shares in the corporate guilt of Climate Change and the millions of mostly disadvantaged who have become and are victims of our greed. Such a day would be liberating, because it is the honest thing to do. William Blake has said, “The deeper the sorrow, the greater the joy.” It will be a day of tears, tears of sadness and also tears of joy. Already my eyes brim with moisture just to envision a day such as that.
How to prepare for Collapse is the heading of this column. There is no way that we can take adequate measures to escape it. When – not if – Collapse comes almost all of us live in the cities where the food supply is three days at most. Escape is not the answer, although the Bible hints at that. As Christians we look forward to a new heaven and new earth to which none of the features of today’s society will have the remotest connection.
To prepare for COLLAPSE means to distance ourselves from the evil that is dominant everywhere, means to mourn the loss of the divine in creation, means to pray for forgiveness, and so speed the coming of the Kingdom.
Next week I will try to post a possible litany and other suggestions for such an event. To view previous columns, click on ‘home’.