January 2012.
OUR WORLD TODAY
It’s now well into 2012. Some people associate the year 2012 with disaster, thanks to the movie by that name, which in 2009, predicted that this year the earth would be struck by calamities so immense that only a few would survive. However, just as George Orwell’s prophesies for the book 1984 – written in 1949 – did not come to pass in that year, so 2012 will not see the world turn upside down, even though there are signs that not all is well in the Western world.
Perhaps a phenomenon called “collective consciousness” might play a role: if enough people believe that something disastrous will happen, it just might, no doubt influenced by the bad news out there. Just look at the monetary system: it’s not too far-fetched to believe that the entire banking business might collapse someday. John Kenneth Galbraith, in his The Great Crash 1929, called the chapter preceding THE CRASH “The Twilight of Illusion.” To me it seems that today we live not in the twilight, but in the dark night of illusion, brought on by our pious faith in perpetual progress, the ‘unknown known’ which simply ignores the everyday realities of diminishing returns and limits to growth, and by our stubborn belief that the future will always be better than the past. That’s why we allowed trillion dollar deficits, and also convinced ourselves that our pollution problems would be solved with improved technology, another illusion, that false belief which we intuitively accept as true. Curing debt with more debt and treating pollution – caused by technology – with more of the same, reminds me of Matthew 12 where Jesus was accused of driving out demons in the name of the prince of demons.
As we go deeper into the teenage years of this century, one thing is sure: it will be a decade of deleveraging: we’re in for at least 10 years of paying off over-due bills, pushed aside, waiting for economic growth that refuses to come. Debts are always paid, either through inflation, with money of less value – the more likely scenario – or deflation, lower prices and wages, both signaling hardship. Paying for our climate overshoot will result in more floods, more ice storms, more tree-breaking winds, more drought and failed crops, increasing living costs everywhere.
Sorry, young people, just as the Roman Catholic Church keeps on apologizing for sexual crimes, we, older people, must keep on saying sorry for leaving you with an immense mess: a world changed beyond recognition, in which species disappear at a rate 1000 times faster than before, and in which everything we’ve taught you – based on our life style – is vanishing right before your eyes. We still piously sing “This is our Father’s World”, but we, at best, have treated his world with callous indifference. Don’t repeat our mistakes. Don’t make money your goal. Instead handle our living planet with the reverence it deserves.
Keep healthy habits: run, walk, bike, ski. Not for nothing the bible emphasizes that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. I know you young can take a lot of abuse, but there always is a price to pay. Poor diets, watching too much TV, sitting too long in front of a computer screen, may not kill you, but will lead to decades of chronic disease: prevention is better than curing, especially as future health-care dollars will become far less plentiful. Choose a mate with extreme care and seek to be part of a viable community.
Don’t rush into anything. Christians have eternal life, and, as Revelation 14:13 says “Your deeds will follow you in the New Creation.” So investigate everything, and discover what has lasting value. Remember Creation is God’s primary word. The best way to love God is to love creation. Treat her with all the care you can muster, for our health depends on her health. Oil-based enterprise is no longer the answer because of its toxicity. Renewal is the key, which is also the key ingredient of the New Creation.
Happiness is to be “in the Lord.” It means to be consciously busy to seek the best for people and the earth. Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes in Creation and Fall “Without God, without our brother and sister, we lose the earth (because)… God, brother and sister, and the earth belong together.”
We are in the earth, of the earth. The sum total of being a creature is that we completely belong to this world, because it bears us, it nurtures us and embraces us. Any heaven-oriented teaching is from the devil, because it denies God’s very Word of creation.
Bert Hielema lives in rural Tweed, Ontario where he tries to practise what he preaches of which he does too much.