Our World Today

Looking back and looking ahead

I always have a few books on the go, especially now when I am preparing for a series on How Should We Then Live? Fortunately I don’t have to go to the new 6000 square feet Tweed Library for this, because my reading is quite selective, in books gathered over the years, many from the no longer there Changing Times book store operated by a good friend. In the course of my new series starting January 5 2014 I will no doubt identify many of my sources.

It’s almost the end of another year. Last December I quit writing for the Ontario, Canada-based Christian Courier, a bi-weekly magazine, after having been part of that team for close to three decades. I felt that my monthly column of some 750 words was not enough to convey what I felt needed saying. I also sensed that they really did not want a prophetic voice to create a measure of disquiet into the mix. So I decided to write a weekly blog of some 2000 plus words – the length of a sermon – so that preachers if they were so inclined, could use my blog for their Sunday homily. (That never happened, as far as I know.)

Yes, my writings have sermon overtones, and I have done that on purpose. I see sermons not as expositions exclusively based on the Bible, but clear cries for actions, based both on God’s Primary Word, Creation, and guided by the Scriptures, God’s Secondary Word. Stubbornly, and mistakenly I believe, the church relies strictly on Sola Scriptura, the Scriptures only, pays only lip service to God’s Primary Word, and so, by and large, ignores the agony of God’s creation. My suggestion made this past year to have a Day of Repentance, an opportunity to shed tears in sorrow and agony, to cry out loud and clear that we have to change the way we live, was totally ignored.

My call in life

I feel that, with the Day of the Lord looming, I have to shake up the wider thinking crowd, be that Roman Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, all those who confess to be monotheists. This past week I was reading Martin Buber’s Pointing the Way. In an essay entitled Prophecy, Apocalyptic, and the Historical Hour, this great Jewish philosopher wrote in 1954 – 60 years ago!!-: “The end of all history is near. Creation has grown old…….The present aeon, that of the world and world history, hurries powerfully to the end.” He then – this Jewish professor, living in Israel – wrote: “The antithesis of the coming age to all historical ages is expressed most strongly by a sentence of the Johannine Revelation that surpasses all that can be imagined ‘Time will no longer be.’”

So in January 2013 I started to write my weekly blog, viewed by some 70,000 people in the past year, more than 2300 in the past week alone, with readers in China constantly in third place, after the USA and Canada.

Why am I what I am? What has shaped me?

Some biographic details. In 1957 I expanded my insurance reach from life insurance only to include a full range of policies: automobile, fire, sickness, casualty. In 1959 a client of mine was dying of lung cancer, only in his late forties. I saw him die, not able to eat or drink, but still hooked on cigarettes. I then decided to quit smoking. I turned my negative addiction into a positive one, by taking up running, which I still do 56 years later, quite a bit slower, I admit.

It is funny that the reason I came to live in the country-side had to do with the church. The minister in the Christian Reformed Church we were attending in St. Catharines, On., was so dogmatic and caught up in such a rigid historical framework that, rather than reasoning – which proved to be impossible – I left, having sold our house, my insurance agency and real estate office before we moved.

For a while we were part of an intentional community with weekly house-worship, but that did not work out. So we became members of the local Presbyterian Church.

I learned a lot from our communal experience. Life is a constant education. Being an enterprising person, I soon was able to establish a real estate appraising business, which expanded quite rapidly.

It was a move, initially somewhat resisted, yet one we, as a family, have never regretted, even though the first years were difficult. The change from city to country – 5.5 km from the village – taught us a lot, both about human nature, the nature we live in, and our own spiritual and physical condition.

All this happened almost 40 years ago.

I guess that living in the country has re-shaped my outlook on life. Right now, when I glance up from my laptop, I see trees, trees to the north, trees to the west, and trees to the east. Our house is built into a small hill so that the north side is one storey, with one small window there, and the south side is two storeys with large southerly exposed windows on both floors, heating the house when the sun shines in the winter. Trees, I see them everywhere.  They give me comfort in the sure knowledge that it is here where I belong. When God created the earth, its entire surface was covered with trees. Julius Caesar in his book De Bello Gallico, which I had to read in Latin as a 14 year old, wrote that his legions, for days on end, marched through the woods of Europe: trees, trees, and more trees.

Shortly after our family came to Tweed, we planted thousands of trees. I have read somewhere that, for an urban person, having a high carbon footprint, it requires 4,500 trees to provide him or her with the needed oxygen which trees exhale while absorbing CO2. Our beloved automobiles need a rich mixture of oxygen to be able to propel its carbon-burning engine. No combustion without oxygen.

The Lord has blessed me in our marriage and in our earnings. Both are prerequisites for a long life. That’s what a long-term study has discovered. This study also concluded that the quality of personal relationships (for example, a “warm childhood” which I had) was the strongest predictor of a healthy and fruitful life. The other great influence is life-time learning, something that is certainly true for me. I am also happy to report that, as I grow older, I am more aware of my contentment: lately something like euphoria occasionally wells up in me, a spontaneous sensation of happiness that I have never experienced before in that measure.

I have also observed the devastating effects of alcoholism, not in my life, fortunately or in our immediate family, but in the community of which we were part for a while. For my friend alcoholism was the cause, not the consequence, of his unhappiness. Divorce was the result, and also premature death.

My question, at the age of 85, is: “why am I as happy as I am, actually happier than I have ever been?”

I can name a few reasons. Thanks to rewarding self-employment we have acquired enough resources to live comfortably, enjoy a carefree retirement, while doing something, like writing this blog, which is work, but not really. Also the tension of being self-employed is no longer there; our five children are all happily married and self-supporting, and our grandchildren also do well. Perhaps the most rewarding of retirement is that I have time to think. No pressure from anybody. I do my best thinking when running which, in the winter, I do on my treadmill. Also I find serenity in cultivating a large vegetable garden and can fully engage in my hobby of reading and writing. And of course, living in the present helps me not to think about the looming existential threats of illness and death.

Why are my wife and I happier now than ever? Is it simply a matter of having found the right partner or perhaps having rubbed up against each other so long that the rough spots have become smooth? Perhaps over the years my wife has become more independent, for a variety of reasons, while I have become more dependent, particularly when retired and spending more time at home, sharing the work in cleaning and meal preparation, and so becoming more companionable. One study shows that also at work are hormonal changes that ‘feminize’ husbands and ‘masculinize’ wives. An empty nest too is often more of a blessing than a burden.

But this happy outcome—more contentment and better marriages—depends crucially on having the means to live in comfort. Without that, it is hard to imagine such equanimity in the face of old age. If you don’t know whether you can afford to heat your home this cold winter, or pay your grocery bills, or hire help if you become disabled, old age is a particularly harsh time of life. A good old age also depends on remaining reasonably healthy, and that has been the case with both of us.

Of course ultimately, old age ends in death, or, as Jesus always puts it, in sleep. Because really that’s what death is. When my mother was on her death bed, she asked me: “what happens when I die.” I was dumbstruck. She had been to church every week without fail, often twice, yet for many death remains the great mystery. For me it is not. We sleep, and, just as in sleep, in death too time stops, until the Lord returns and wakes everybody up. The last verse in the bible book Daniel tells us: “As for you, go your way till the end. You will rest – sleep – and then at the end of days (now fast approaching) you will rise to receive your allotted inheritance.” Isn’t that wonderful?

In old age my sources of pleasure are different. I am totally turned off on TV, read something all the time, including the New York Times, the Globe and Mail, the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and all sorts of books, both fiction and non-fiction. And then, of course, there is my blog: a constant pre-occupation and a constant brain exercise. In the winter looking after the wood stove, getting wood in from my wood shed, also keeps me hopping. I am very fortunate that the local pallet factory sells its waste wood, all nice pieces of hardwood of various sizes.

Yes, we have every reason to be thankful, in spite of the state of the world, where the future for our grandchildren looks gruesome, as we face unsustainable population growth, disastrous climate change, depletion of natural resources, pollution penetrating everywhere, increasing inequality, both within and across countries, and violent tribalism of all forms, national and religious. Dealing with these problems will take a lot more than marginal reforms, and I don’t see that coming. Particularly in the United States and Canada, but also in the rest of the world, big money calls the shots, and it is most concerned with the next quarter’s profits.

Last week I saw an article I wrote more than 25 years ago, reporting on an environmental conference I had attended in Madison, Wisconsin, organized by the World Council of Churches: the very best speakers, but poor attendance. No wonder the conference lost money. Even after more than two decades nothing has changed in the Christian community. To continue to write seems increasingly pointless. But, the Lord willing, I will keep it up, because times are rapidly changing and the pace is increasing. Perhaps because being over a certain age, time seems to pass much more quickly. Who knows, as our bodies slow, time speeds up, and with it Climate Change which will progress so quickly that we are left unprepared, especially spiritually.

Personally I find it hard to remember that I’m no longer young, despite some physical signs, since I’m the same person and in many ways have the same feelings. What has increased is my faith in the coming of the New Creation, and its speedy coming.

Till next year.

I will skip December 29. I hope that your Christmas may not centre on that doll-like infant Jesus- ‘no crying he made’ as the song goes – but on the full-grown Christ who is to come, the first-born of creation: Redeemer and Judge.