June 22 2022.
BORN TO WOE:
the 14th Century compared to our 21st Century.
”Born to woe”, that’s how Barbara Tuchman heads her chapter on the 14th Century, in her book, A Distant Mirror, the Calamitous 14th Century.
Seven Hundred years ago, everything was different: then, ‘Life of the Spirit and of the after-world was superior to material life on earth”, she writes. Today this would be totally untrue. Yet, today, as a testimony to that faith, Europe still have its magnificent cathedrals, many of them built during the 12th and 13th Centuries, a distinct symbol of the religiosity of those bygone years, including the Martini Church in my hometown Groningen with its 100m tower. However, all are now stripped off their innards, their believing adherents.
The previous years.
The centuries prior to the year 1400, had been very productive, with great advances in art, technology, building, exploration, universities, cities, banking: they were the high Middle Ages, when the compass, the windmills, the spinning wheels, made life more interesting and prosperous. People felt good and secure, and its population expanded rapidly.
Then the weather turned.
Sounds familiar! “A physical chill settled on the 14th Century at its very start”. The Baltic Sea froze over twice, in 1303 and 1306-7; the cultivation of grain was curtailed: a shorter growing season heralded disaster for the population that had rapidly grown during prosperity, so quickly that already then it had reached a delicate balance.
Today?
Today we see similar signs: not cold, but heat is making agriculture and horticulture a hazardous enterprise. In 1315 the rains came so incessant that crops failed all over Europe, and famine, the dark horseman of the Apocalypse, became a familiar feature. Today….
Then, “Born to woe” accelerated 30 years later. Then, after the workers’ riots in 1346-47 which plunged Rome into anarchy, a fearsome earthquake shook the European mainland, accompanied by the PLAGUE, now labeled the Black Plague, that killed an estimated 50% of the European population.
That same Pandemic was back in the news this past week when researchers, after decades of probing, found the plague-causing bacteria in graves in Kyrgyzstan, a country just north of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Then too, the One Hundred Year War was waged, coinciding with religious strife that saw two Popes vying for dominance in the church.
Today?
In many ways our era resembles the 14th Century. We too, are engaged in what constitutes a perpetual war against creation where thousands upon thousands of species are disappearing, where once fertile lands are washed away or resort to desert-like conditions, where not cold, is on the 14th century, but human-induced heat is increasing, and melting glazier and disappearing North-and South Pole ice, make the weather increasingly volatile.
In contrast with the universal Catholic Church, dominant 700 years ago, we now see decreasing church attendance and increasing conservatism, centering especially on human sexual behavior, condemning the Lesbian-Homosexual-Bisexual-Transgender conditions, while Jesus’ life of magnanimity and tolerance is pushed away, replaced by stark rule upon rule. When the current Pope dies or resigns, the most likely scenario is a recurrence of the TWO POPES event, based on the unbridgeable divisions in the largest Christian block.
The Bible.
I know: the Bible is not a history book. But I do recommend you read Matthew 24 aloud. All 51 verses apply to today, painting a picture that eerily resembles both the 14th and the 21stcenturies: ‘the abomination that causes desolation’ occurring in the holy place, the earth in which we live, and which we have desecrated. It also mentions the lack of good preaching, the frequency of famines and earthquakes. And the list goes on: the similarity painted then, and what is happening today, is uncanny.
Also, both the Old and New Testament frequently mention an unbelievably large earthquake that will destroy one third of the earth. This past week a new report specifically pointed to the likelihood of such an event happening along the North American Pacific rim.
History tells me that disasters are contagious, that natural mishaps like company. Revelation 18 tells us why: “All nations have drunk the maddening wine of her adulteries”. In that same chapter it says that “The merchants of the earth will weep..” because stagflation will stop the sale of luxury goods and homes.
Stagflation, a combination of inflation and economic stagnation, is now the forecast, plus withering weather-woes: both signs of a dying civilization.
The 14th Century was ‘born to woe’’. That woe grew worse through indigenous destruction and genocide, through further church turmoil, the holocaust, through world-wars killing hundreds of millions, and now, in the 21st Century, through the crime of all crimes: the death of nature, God’s precious earth. This final woe which will carry its own punishment: sudden global death.