Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

May 19 2013

What do I see out there in our wide-wild- world?

It’s so easy to leisurely float along on the current of contemporary news coverage. Bangladesh too far away – poor people- but hockey is more exciting. Syria? After a two year stalemate, nobody takes Syria seriously anymore: too bad those Christians there. Oh yes, Greece and Spain: a real pain for the young people with sixty percent having no work, but we are OK so it really does not touch us. Some rumblings about a dangerous disease in China: chickens again, but there’s always something wrong there, so what else is new – suppressing a yawn.

Why worry. Should we be concerned that the New York Times, not just any paper, has a lead editorial on a possible pandemic, having started in Saudi Arabia, and warning us not to be complacent?  Probably another alarm story that will pan out as bogus, so why worry.

God’s Word Today.

Among my readers – 5500 visitors in April – are a number of church-going people who recognize a Jesus’ quote: “like a thief in the night”. Also not foreign to them is “Woe! Woe, O great city, where all who became rich have hidden bank account overseas. Let the poor pay taxes. In one hour they have been brought to ruin!” Yes, that is a variation on a quote from Revelation 18. “Your multi-national companies were the leading forces behind the evil inflicted on the earth. By their magic spell all the nations were led astray.” That’s another quote, sort of, from that same Bible chapter. How about the Old Testament? Hosea anyone? Chapter 4? Because of what we do and keep on doing “the land mourns, and all who live in it waste away; the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and the fish of the sea are dying.”  And a few texts further: “my people are destroyed from lack of knowledge, because you have rejected knowledge.”

Enough. Enough. What’s the use of citing all this? What’s the use of quoting the Holy Bible, God’s secondary Word, if only a relatively few really care about God’s primary world, his Holy Creation? I know that’s strong language, yet… I once sat down in a discussion group with the head of a denomination where the future of the church was the topic. I remarked that we call the Scriptures Holy even though its final version was determined by majority vote at the Council of Nicaea in 323 after much wrangling among the 300 people there. Creation however, called into being by God’s direct action- word is never called ‘holy’ by the church. Why not? My question was met with stony silence. It seems to me that failing to consider this option has brought the world to the edge of collapse. Don’t get me wrong. I love the Scriptures. For 27 years I have written a daily meditation on the weekly lectionary: 400 words on weekdays and 800 on Sundays, guided by a journal Journeying through the days. I  have never missed one single day. I still insist that the church has failed to show the way to the Kingdom. The result is the type of Stephen Harper Christianity.

A few words on Canada’s PM Stephen Harper

I believe the church is in a mess because it shies away from the totality of God’s Word, which includes creation. Psalm 19 comes to mind. And it is not alone in committing sins of omission: the entire political world too is suffering from gigantic missteps. Canada itself is going in the wrong direction, thanks to its Prime Minister, Stephen Harper who confesses to be a protestant Christian of the ‘heaven-minded’ type. He has only one passion – apart from hockey: the economy: everything has to be subservient to economic growth. Take the tar sands, called ‘ethical’ by his administration even though they generate multiple pollution by: (1) removing the trees that cover the bitumen, eliminating a source of carbon absorption; (2) creating extra carbon as dead trees release CO2; (3) cooking or boiling the sands to extract the oil is tremendously energy intensive; (4) generating mountains of petroleum coke which according to the environmental group Oil Change International is “really the dirtiest residue from the dirtiest oil on earth”; (5)  burning the stuff in our gas tanks and so spreading pollution everywhere; (6) the transportation by pipelines and possible spills on the way to refineries; and (7) the refining process itself. Thus there are at least seven sources of pollution involved in the tar sand process. If that is ethical then I guess bad-mouthing opposition politicians is the Christian way to win elections.

No wonder that over the past few years Mr. Harper has engaged in a typical anti-science campaign, muzzling scientists who have criticized his views on Climate Change. Just lately the National Research Council has been ordered to engage in research that has only economic gain, claiming that scientific discovery is not valuable unless it has commercial value. Planning for Global Warming has no commercial value. Fighting poverty has no commercial value. Engaging in searching for suicide prevention among the native population has no commercial value. Any research on the decline of the bird and amphibian species has no commercial value. Testing the waters for possible contamination has no commercial value. Mr. Harper believes in being Homo Economicus, the one-goal human, created for a single purpose only: to go after money, to impose upon the earth for pure exploitable purposes. In Genesis 2: 9 it is related how God made trees: “pleasing to the eye and good for food.”  The aesthetic is named before the economic feature. With God beauty and art, music and song, play and pleasure, genuine human emotions, always come before the monetary factor. Jesus despised money, knowing that he would be sold for thirty pieces of silver. Paul calls the lust for money – oil – the root of all evil. When God’s opponent approached the human pair in paradise, as related in Genesis 3: 6, the order is reversed: “the fruit of the tree was good for food – economics having priority – and pleasing to the eye – beauty being secondary.” Here Satan’s influence is at work, exactly in line with Stephen Harper’s reasoning. Frankly a Christian politician is a contradiction in terms.

This past week Harper was on a mission trip to the USA: selling ethics, in the form of ‘ethical oil”. Ethical oil is equivalent to ‘clean coal’ and just as much a euphemism as ‘sustainable growth.’ All this happened in a week when the magic number of 400 was reached in the carbon dioxide account that measure Green House Gases in the atmosphere, which used to be in ‘normal’ time, before the “Age of Abundance”, 280 part per million. The higher account guarantees that much more weather trouble is certain.

What do I see out there in the wide-wild-world?

This past week I read comments from two people whose insight I value. One was by Niall Ferguson- Harvard History professor – who recently remarked that, “[Europe] is a political experiment gone wrong. The experiment was to see if Europeans could be forced into an even closer union – despite their wishes – by economic means, because the political means failed.”

Some politicians there had a grandiose idea: to prevent such terrible events as the two World Wars – 1914-1918 and 1939–1945, actually one long-long war with an armistice of some 20 years – they set out to create a United States of Europe, with the United States of America as a blueprint. They forgot that America has one language while Europe has 23 different tongues, necessitating 23 interpreters retelling every sentence uttered wherever these nations meet. And language is not the only obstacle: eating habits, family structures, working ethos, savings patterns, you name it, all are different from one continental nation to another. One Europe: one big mess. Just imagine having Canada with not one Quebec but 22 of them, all different languages and traditions and histories. As a commercial appraiser in my working life, I often had to deal with asset distribution between two estranged spouses. Nothing is more vicious than love – passion perhaps – gone sour. When – not if – Europe breaks up, expect the world to feel the terrible after effects.

A similar warning came from Seier Christensen, co-CEO and co-founder of Saxo Bank. He told an audience at the Saxo #FXDebates in London that the Eurozone will eventually break up as Brussels claims even more power from nation states. He warned investors that Cyprus showed that nobody’s bank deposits were safe, as wealth could simply be taken from the accounts, disguised as solidarity payments to pay for the country’s debt. His words: “the governments of Europe need money, and the private sector has it. It is as simple as that. Be very paranoid.”

He warned investors that the mattress may be a safer place to deposit money than their bank accounts. Frankly, it is a complete mess. And it is a mess that gets worse and worse every day, anyone with a rational view of the world now sees the currency collaboration as a historic failure that can lead to even further fatal consequences for Europe and the continent’s competitiveness vis-à-vis the rest of the world.”

A possible new scenario

The current world-wide recession has created something new: no longer Peak Oil, but Peak Demand and Peak Debt.

In the 19^th Century the West got the upper hand in the whole wide world by harnessing coal to its machinery, and later cheap oil. Now there is something new brewing: what we have today is not a lack of oil, but the inability of us in the West to compete in a global economy based on all kinds of types of energy, starting with cheap coal, now China’s secret and most dirty weapon. It used to be that cheap energy would foster a higher standard of living. Then the Oil Shock came in the 1970s which also gave the start to climate awareness – at least for me. Now we see something new: oil companies having used up all the cheap oil, must charge high prices to pay for the extra costs. But in a world economy suffering a depression, oil use is down, so oil companies are starting to fix prices, because the new situation is one of declining oil and energy prices to levels too low for the 20 to 30 major oil exporting nations and major energy corporations. They need high prices to warrant exploration and finance the high living standard in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Middle East, and everywhere governments subsidize the standard of living thanks to high oil revenue.

Oil prices that are too high give importing nations headaches, while oil prices that are too low upset the budgets of the oil producing nations including Canada and its provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan.

We are in an entirely new situation. In spite of trillions being pumped into the economy in an effort to generate inflation, deflation is looming. Cheap oil spells big-time trouble. Tar sand oil needs close to $80 per barrel to be profitable. Harper wants to sell the stuff in the USA, but the USA doesn’t need more oil: fracking, more renewables and the continuing and worsening recession have driven down the need for oil. The Middle East needs $100 oil to keep its people happy. Russia is in the same position. Cheap oil is a calamity for all. But it looks now that’s what is coming. Also everybody has debt, and debt can only be paid when oil is pricey. A return to cheap oil spells doom, resulting in Alberta going broke, resulting in Saudi Arabians going back on the bike or rather the camel, not very comfortable when being used to air-conditioned Rolls Royces. Also both the USA and Canada can easily manage on a lot less oil. Europe lives well at less than half the USA consumption and we are slowly adopting a European life style thanks to Hybrid cars, more renewables and especially a slowdown in the economies.

What do I see out there in the wide-wild-world? China will continue to manage with its cheap labour and ever- more dirty coal, stealing jobs and progress in the West. We need economic growth to save the system and high oil prices to keep the world happy. With continued less economic activity, less oil being used, the picture of Peak Oil is fading. Oil production peaked in or near 2005 and has fallen since, and so has demand. But all those in the international oil business are still banking on $100+ oil. That’s why Harper was in the USA this past week, selling expensive and extremely dirty oil for which there may not be a market. Companies have invested billions to produce this oil and have gone deep into debt to finance it. The entire oil world needs expensive oil. If the price goes down, so does the entire financial world.

Next week: why do I write these blogs anyway?

In last week’s column I promised to provide some readings and other aids for a worshipful approach to a service aimed at a greater awareness to the climate catastrophe that awaits us.

Thus this week’s blog comes in two sections.

May 12 2013

Suggested readings: portions of Isaiah 24, Matthew 24 Romans 8,  Revelation 21-22

Responsive reading

FORGIVE US AND TEACH US

All:           With the whole creation we wait for the purifying fire of judgement

Leader:      In our arrogance and pride

we have grabbed what was not ours

and abused what was entrusted to us

only for safekeeping.

All:

We have taken your name and dishonoured it

We have flouted your fixed order and

In willful defiance and deliberate ignorance

Have shut our ears to the pleading of your people

And the groaning of your creation.

Leader:      Forgive us for breaking your covenant

For enslaving the poor of the earth and

Unloading on them our paper moneys created

Out of nothing by our banking magic and now demanding

Their blood.

All:

Forgive us for breaking your covenant.

We have paved our planet with our greed for speed

And our need to escape from ourselves

And now we have upset the laws of creation

At our own peril.

Leader:

Forgive us for breaking your covenant.

We have done business to enrich ourselves

At the expense of creatures and creation and now

Have imprisoned our souls and imperiled the cosmos.

All:

Teach us to live again,

To live the true life of joy and peace

Of loving you as you want to be loved

Of loving others and ourselves as you want us to.

Leader:

Teach us to live the true life of joy and peace and justice

As your covenant children

A life of obedience

Of truly responding to your word

Your laws in creation, your word in Jesus Christ and

Your spirit in us.

All:

So that we can prepare ourselves to live

The full life of your new creation

When we have become what we are

When we will see you as you really are

When all our hurts are healed

When all our wars are ended

When all church walls are gone

When the Bible be no more, your word be in our hearts,

When everything in earth and in the starry expanse

Will be made new

When justice will reign and each eye will see at last

That this world belongs to God.

LET THE EARTH HEAR OUR VOICE

Tune: To God be the Glory.

Our soil is in trouble, our waters unclean.

The air we are breathing – the smog can be seen-

has slowly been poisoned, with storms often mean.

Where then are we going? Where then have we been?

Refrain:

Shout it out, shout it out: Let the earth hear our voice

Shout it out, shout it out, let the trees too rejoice.

O come, love creation, the Scriptures, God’s Son

And give them the glory, great things he has done.

Our lungs we corrupt, our bodies we stone,

Our highways are death ways, our morals far gone,

TV is most nonsense: we reap what we’ve sown.

To combat this trend: what have we all done?

Refrain:

Economy now has been changed to consume.

With spending we want to create a new boom

which only will lead to create a new tomb,

And we, the world’s Christians, we’ve hastened this doom.

Refrain;

We reasoned that God has redeemed just our soul

Just church work was holy, just heaven our goal

while secular world not worthy our dole

All this is now taking a serious toll.

Refrain:

The main cause why we the world’s Christians so erred

The Scriptures alone we regarded God’s word,

To honour God’s earth has an equal reward

God’s word is the Scriptures, Creation, the Lord.

Refrain:

Shout it out, shout it out: Let the earth hear our voice

Shout it out, shout it out, let the trees too rejoice.

O come, love creation, the Scriptures, God’s Son

And give them the glory, great things he has done.

I admit it is not great poetry or great prose. However, it carries a message, and with a bit of effort and patience it is even fit for communal singing. So give it a try.

This week’s blog comes in two sections.

May 12 2013-2

EAT FOOD. NOT TOO MUCH. MOSTLY PLANTS.

That’s how Michael Pollan starts his book An Eater’s Manifesto. This past week I was seeding beets and carrots, drilling holes in the soft soil for potatoes and planting onion sets galore. While doing that it went through my mind what a blessed work this is: burying life to create life. What a privilege to have a parcel of land that every year is further enriched with compost.

My wife and I have been vegetarians for the last 35 years. If you hear about food poisoning, it usually involves meat. Also cows are an enormous source of methane pollution, a major contributor to Climate Change. Pollan adds: “eating a little meat isn’t going to kill you, though it is better approached as a side dish than a main. “ His advice is to eat plants and avoid food stuff that is made in plants. He relates how political pressures from cattle-rich states have prevented governments to enact dietary measures limiting the consumption of red meat which causes both heart attacks and cancers. We’ve heard it often: to live longer, eat little or no meat and consume a lot of fruit and vegetables, and if you can grow your own produce: more power to you.

Jesus taught us to pray for our food. Praying for a meal today is needed more than ever, because much of what is offered in the stores is not prepared for health but for taste, catering to our cravings for salt, sugar and fat. I once took a group of high-school students on a week-long canoe trip where all food was health-food. Midweek our portage was close to a convenience store and sugar-deprived teenagers loaded up on the sweet stuff.

This past week I employed myself as a manual labourer in my own garden. Last year I bought an electric rototiller, powered by my solar panels. I now have all my power tools converted to electricity so that I can use my solar power for them: mower, chainsaw, trimmer: even an electric snow blower. Even if you don’t have solar power, and are in need of a new mower, please go electric: the gas-fired machines are highly polluting and noisy.

Working the vegetable garden is a spiritual act

Before I had my rototiller I double dug my entire garden, digging trenches, filling them with compost and so going through my entire 2000 square feet vegetable patch, creating 8 -50 feet long raised beds with a small path between them. The electric tool is a concession to my age. I now spread the compost on the surface and cover it with the soil of the trenches between the beds which I still dig by hand.

I see my entire garden exercise as an act of holiness: it is to me equivalent to going to church – which I also do; this is more a private act of worship. Creating home grown stuff is a triple pleasure: the pleasure of preparing the soil and planting the seeds, the pleasure of eating a healthier product, and, of course, our climate benefits with no transportation and packing expense.

We, in the 21^st Century, have it a lot easier than the primitive people, those who lived before agriculture became established and fire was discovered. The earliest humans were hunter-gatherers who never knew exactly where their next food might be coming from. In fact, their “meals” were probably eaten on the run as they stalked enough prey to furnish sufficient food, but it is unlikely that their meals were regular or even eaten daily. Given the conditions under which they secured food, it was impossible for them to take any of it for granted. Every morsel was hard-won and therefore, exceedingly precious. I am sure they prayed to their gods for guidance and safety, just as Abel and Cain sacrificed of their fruits to Yahweh. We now have become so dependent on commercial foods carried over thousands of miles that, in case of an energy breakdown or a computer failure, within a week millions would starve. Certainly the so-called poor in Africa and Asia would then be much better off.

Whether living in a small agricultural village along the Nile River in ancient times or growing food in one’s backyard garden in the twenty-first century, small-scale agriculture is labour-intensive, and appreciation for food is in direct proportion to the energy expended in growing it. Slowly there is an awareness that we must eat closer to home. Perhaps not the 100 feet diet I try to implement, but at least a 100 mile diet. I am thrilled to see that one grandson, just graduated with a liberal arts degree from Trent, let his regular well-paying summer landscaping job go in order to work on an organic market gardening outfit, at a highly reduced wage, to learn earth-friendly ways to grow food, using horses as well. Another grandson is going to a carbon neutral small college to study agriculture somewhere in Western Minnesota.

Ora et Labora – pray and work

Jesus taught us to pray for food. I too pray for the fruit of the soil, for the apple trees on our property- I have bought another apple tree, this time an Empire, in addition to the three different kind I have: a Northern spy,  which gave me exactly three apples last year, an early soft apple which makes delicious applesauce, and a Spartan. In a good year these trees supply us with sufficient fruit for the year. There are also lots of wild apple trees in our vicinity: I know exactly where the best apples are that nobody goes after, except the deer and the bears. But I can reach higher.

Throughout human history, particularly in indigenous cultures, food has been perceived as sacred. All food is sacred in the sense that the life of a plant or animal has been sacrificed to feed another being. The word ‘sacrifice’ means ‘made holy.’ Our lives are sacred because Jesus sacrificed himself for our sake, for all of humanity, and for the entire cosmos, sanctifying everything.

The more energy expended, the less food sacredness

With ever greater numbers moving from the land to cities, food has lost its sacred status. It has become an industrial product. It is no longer holy, replaced as it is with artificial, synthetic, and technologically-produced forms of food. All sorts of chemicals are added to make produce look fresh and green and keep meat from spoiling. No wonder even newborn babies have scores of harmful chemicals in their tender bodies. It now takes an average of ten energy calories to obtain one single food calorie: the sacredness of food is decreased in proportion to the energy expended to obtain it.

We must recover the holiness in all of life and the easiest way to do that is to start with food. Grow it wherever possible or make meals from scratch where this cannot be done. Eat simple. When we see eating as a form of spirituality, see it as an attempt to be in harmony with the unseen order of things, then our perspective on life changes as well. I believe Jesus saw it that way when he gave thanks for meals, something still a practice in our extended family.

Eating less prolongs life. My wife and I have two sit-down formal meals: breakfast – mostly oat porridge on which I use our own maple syrup and add wild blueberries, lecithin and ground-up flaxseed. Our morning meal start with the reading of a Psalm or a portion thereof- Psalm 119 with 176 verses we split up in segments of about 10 verses – and a prayer. Our ‘warm’ meal is mostly home grown and always made from scratch. Two or three 3 times per week we have just a big salad with field greens, onion, garlic, beets, carrots, tomatoes with lemon juice and olive oil, together with feta cheese, an egg and beans. Three times a week potatoes with a meal from the freezer: green beans, apple sauce, kale, red cabbage, broccoli, sauerkraut.  In the evening we have next to nothing: a slice of home-made bread or a bowl of yogurt.

What is the Kingdom?

All my life I have been greatly influenced by a Dutch book which I translated a few months ago. The final product I sent to Eerdmans in Grand Rapids, Mich. a 100 year old publisher, which has published one of my previous books. Just last week Eerdmans sent me a sizeable advance. The Kingdom- Speed Its Coming has some wonderful passages in it. Here is one, referring to the Kingdom to Come, the New Creation, on the threshold of unfolding:

“In the first place we must realize that God’s Kingdom has a cosmic character, which means that it comprises the entire world as we have come to know it. Not only are we humans part of that Kingdom, but it also includes the worlds of animals and plants. Yes, even the angels are part of this wider context: they too have a place in the harmonious totality of God’s Kingdom.

“This implies that all parts of the world are attuned to each other. Nowhere is there a false note, a dis­so­nant that disturbs the unity, as everything fits harmoniously into the greater scheme of the totality. This applies both to each individual specimen but equally to the various circles or spheres found in creation. The celestial bodies follow their orderly tra­jectories and do so according to God’s royal will, obeying his voice. And so the stars in their courses sound a melodious note in the great concert in which all creatures participate. The mountains rise up high above the water-saturated earth, their proud summits piercing the clouds; yet even these mountains are nothing but servants of Him who has planted and secured them by his power. On every page the Bible makes plain that the meaning of creation resides only in the one overarching motif: the motif of God’s Kingdom. That is why Scripture and Creation are never at odds: they always form a unity where the one reinforces the other.”

With J. H. Bavinck, the original author, I believe that all of life is a unity. Through a return to sustainable agriculture and in the very act of growing our own food, some aspect of our human existence pays homage to the earth, holds it sacred, and praises God in gratitude for and resonance with the elements of the soil from which we originate. An important part of being a Christian is to display a renewed reverence for the earth, a heightened appreciation for nutrition and the health benefits of organic food. Often this will also deepen our connection with our (church) families and larger communities as we share and exchange produce.

Sacred versus profane

Life is a unity. The opposite of the sacred, of course, is the profane. Much of the food we see in stores is mindlessly-manufactured and technologically-tortured. No wonder so many people display unhealthy bodies, grossly misshaped due to faulty nutrition. Not they, but the system is to blame, because these so-called foods constitute satanic substances which are unfit to be ingested in human bodies. The more deeply immersed we are in the sanctity of food and its origins, the more we are likely to be repelled by processed, genetically modified, and chemically-laden foods that have been produced by way of massive resource and ecological destruction, and which deliver more of the same to our minds and bodies. The ancient saying Mens Sana in Corpore Sano – a healthy mind in a healthy body-  also makes the opposite true: a poisoned body breeds an insane mind

When I worked in my garden these past weeks, and as I keep busy in the coming months weeding and watering and harvesting, my heart overflows with gratitude that so far each year the Lord has granted me the physical stamina and the willingness to be engaged in this spiritual exercise. Not often enough do we share our blessings with others. Part of the sanctity of eating is enjoying food with family and friends by cooking and eating meals together.

In many ways we are what we eat. The entire commercial world is conspiring to detract us from the sacred through television, through the way cities are built, and by destroying what is the sacred in life. We need a lot of prayer, a lot of grace, a lot of insight to escape this. Start simple: terminate television, refuse to be cowed by the corporations who control the food supply. Go back to basics and ‘live’.

Next week a new look at energy and debt. To view previous columns, click on ‘home’.

April 28 2013

THE GREAT CRASH.

John Kenneth Galbraith, a Canadian by birth, Harvard professor of economics and an author of many books wrote The Great Crash 1929 in 1954, now almost 60 years ago. That Crash started The Great Depression.

In it Galbraith remarked that, “compared to earlier market downturns, those in 1893, 1907 and 1920, having happened they were over. Not so the one in 1929: it lasted well over a decade and actually circumstances became worse: what looked one day like the end proved on the next day to have been only the beginning.”

After weighing all the evidence, Galbraith concluded: “Had the economy been fundamentally sound in 1929 the effect of the great stock market crash might have been small”. He stated that the crash was caused by five weaknesses, of which the first was “The bad distribution of income: the rich had a disproportionate part of the available wealth”, something also true today. Other factors were the bad banking and corporate structure, the dubious state of the foreign balance and the poor state of economic intelligence. Most of this is applies to today with Climate Change doubling the risk.

The real message of the book is a warning- a warning that 1929 might very easily happen again. We are still waiting, but I am sure that someday somebody will write a book with the same title but a different date. That date could well be 2013 or 2014.

History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes, somebody once said, so it’s advisable to look at the past to understand what’s going on now. G. K. Chesterton wrote in 1933 that “The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present.” Today that past – 1929 – tells us that economic crashes do happen, can last a long time, but would probably have a different outcome.

Robin Hood in reverse: robbing the poor to pay the rich

Ben Bernanke, the current Captain of The Money Ship in Washington, was a professor of economics at Princeton University. He made the study of the Depression his life-long task, concluding that during that lost decade the Federal Bank had been too tight in its money policy. So immediately after the 2008 Crash he pumped trillions of dollars into the banking system to replace the losses the banks had suffered with the millions of ‘underwater’ mortgages. He is still at it, expanding the money supply each month with $85 billion. All the large banks greatly benefited from this over-generous debt forgiveness because, in the fall of 2008, every major US bank was on the verge of insolvency caused by their reckless assumption of enormous debts to finance speculative investments often using derivatives such as credit default swaps (CDC) that had been created by the same group of large banks. When their debts overwhelmed their assets, the government bailed them out at the expense of taxpayers’ money. The Big Boys with their enormous annual bonuses were compensated for their outrageous behaviour with the poor man’s money.

The immense amounts of money made available every month have resulted in interest rates hovering near zero, penalizing those who have savings and depend for their pensions on interest income: again a strike against you and me. Now Bernanke is trying to punish us even more: his real aim is to generate some inflation, and so repay the trillions of debt he created with cheaper dollars, again hurting the average citizen, because his greatest fear is ‘deflation’ where prices drop and money becomes worth more, something that happened during the Depression of the 1930’s and in Japan since 1990.

Back to the future

I believe that another cause of the Depression was the sudden availability of cheap energy. In 1929 the USA was simply drowning in oil. GM bought up and closed bus companies and transit systems, advertising that cars – not trains or buses- were the future of the world. John Deere, Allis Chalmers, International, Massie Harris, all touted tractors and other mechanical tools as the wave of the farming future. True, the 1929 Crash was at least partly caused by the sudden surplus of manpower created by cheap fuel capable of generating hundreds of carbon-based horsepower replacing real horses and real men. They made hundreds of thousands of human lives redundant, and forcing them to flock to the cities where there were no jobs. Jobs only appeared when World War II came along and everything and everybody was mobilized to win that war.

After the war, with millions discharged from the armies, the pent-up demand for cars, housing and furniture, the generous allowances to study and liberal grants to buy properties all served to ring in an unprecedented period of prosperity, a Golden Age that lasted for about 50 years. Cheap energy played a dominant role here too with gasoline at rock-bottom prices.

There is something new under the sun

Ecclesiastes tells us that ‘there is nothing new under the sun,’ but these words are now out of date. John 13:34 urges us to love one another. That is no longer a mere moral given. The new approach also requires that we express this love by making sure that life’s essentials, such as water and air, are pure.

Everything has changed: the place of us humans within the natural world is not what it was: in my lifetime nothing has remained the same. Based on the optimistic view that cheap energy would be with us forever, we built an entirely new society. Everything we see around us is founded on the premise that cheap power is forever, evident in transportation, social relationships, finances, farming, manufacturing, globalization, outsourcing, and religion. They all have one wallop of weakness in common: one day fuel will cease to be plentiful or become too expensive: then there is no going back to simpler ways. We have religiously, with the fervor of divine conviction, surrendered ourselves to three fallacies: (1) infinite resources, such as energy and clean water, (2) infinite economic growth on which our banking system and government largesse such as old age security and medical care depend, and (3) an infinite capacity of the atmosphere to absorb our waste.

Another, much greater Crash, to come.

All this ensures that a Great Crash or even a Greater Crash will happen again, and this time we will exactly know what will be its cause: we have sold our souls to material progress in an all-or-nothing bet. We are playing Russian roulette with all the chambers loaded. In other words: in a finite earth, with an ever growing population that, thanks to television and advertising and the simple construct of contemporary enterprise, wants ever more of everything, we are betting on infinite growth to survive, a mathematical impossibility.

Greenspan, the predecessor of Bernanke, in testimony before the US Senate was quite open: “To exist you need an ideology. Everyone has one.” How true. Faith in infinite growth motivates governments, judging by the song books coming from the finance ministers from Brussels to Washington, with Ottawa being one of the chorus leaders.

Spend or Cut: the false choice

Now the words of the song are stuck in a groove, and come out totally garbled. Its vibrations sound like- spend-yes-cut-no – spend- no- cut- yes. Actually there is no real difference: spend means now; cut means get rid of some fat so that, a bit leaner, growth can pick up faster. Both ‘cutters’ and ‘spenders’ are true believers in economic growth. Wrote the Financial Times last week: “The world’s leading economies acknowledged on Friday that ‘further actions are required’ to put the global economy on track for strong, stable and balanced growth, but the opinions are divided between balancing the budgets, trying to curtail debts, or flooding the market with more cash.”

The Idol of Growth is just that: an idol

The only good thing about all this is that if and when it becomes clear that there is no growth left in the system, all its one-dimensional advocates, from both the Spend! and the Cut! parties, will disappear into a great void. They have no idea what to do without growth. There is no economics class that teaches them. The simple truth is that too much debt makes future growth impossible, because debts have to be paid before people start buying again. Even if economic debt is paid, there remains the ever accelerating environmental debt. The 1929 Depression was solved by World War II. It was caused in part by tractors and combines eliminating warm bodies. We now are at the verge of another depression, this time caused by too much debt, by clever robots, ever smarter software and the declining state of nature. Sorry young people! For most of you in the Western world, your own living standards are going to be below those of your parents. Given your levels of unemployment, the duration of it, and the fast rising levels of debt, it’s not a very big gamble to say that this will be true for the majority among you. Nor is it that much of a gamble to suggest that this will constitute a – major – turning point in our societies.

You’re caught up by the direct result of idol worship, because economics is a religion, complete with priests and churches and rituals and deities serving the divine dogmas of Economic Growth. The trouble with a false religion is that it needs sacrifices. You are the sacrificial lambs.

What sort of Crash is coming?

I believe there is a distinct possibility that this time the Crash will be much more all-encompassing. Some people claim to have discovered a frightening pattern that points to a massive economic catastrophe unlike anything ever seen before. “What this pattern represents is a dangerous countdown clock that’s quickly approaching zero,” said Keith Fitz-Gerald, the Chief Investment Strategist for the Money Map Press, who predicted the 2008 oil shock, the credit default swap crisis that helped bring about the recession, and the Greek and European fiscal catastrophe that is still wreaking havoc until this day. These people found an identical pattern in the USA debt, total credit market, and money supply that guarantees they’re going to fail. This pattern is nearly the same as in any pyramid scheme, one that escalates exponentially fast before it collapses. Governments around the globe are chiefly responsible. And what’s really disturbing about these findings is that the pattern isn’t limited to our economy. They found the same catastrophic pattern in our energy, food, and water systems as well: all these systems could all implode at the same time: Food, water, energy, money: Everything.

Dr. Kent Moors of Duquesne University, one of the world’s leading energy analysts, who advices 16 world governments on energy matters and who currently serves on two State Department task forces on energy, also voiced concerns over what he and his colleagues uncovered. “Most frightening of all is how this exact same pattern keeps appearing in virtually every system critical to our society and way of life,” Dr. Moors stated.

The pattern that’s hard to see unless you understand the way a catastrophe like this gains traction,” Dr. Moors says. “At first, it’s almost impossible to perceive. Everything looks fine, just like in every pyramid scheme. Yet the insidious growth of the virus keeps doubling in size, over and over again – in shorter and shorter periods of time – until it hits unsustainable levels. And it collapses the system.”

It all has to do with debt. For 30 years – from the 1940s through the 1970s – the US total credit market debt was moderate and entirely reasonable. But then in seven years, from 1970 to 1977, it quickly doubled. And then it doubled again in seven more years. Then five years to double a third time. And then it doubled two more times after that. Where we were sitting at a total credit market debt that was 158% larger than our GDP in the early 1940s… By 2011 that figure was 357%.

Dr. Moors warns this type of unsustainable road to collapse can be seen today in our energy, food and water production. All are tightly connected and contributing to the economic disaster that lies directly ahead.

According to polls, the average American is sensing danger. A recent survey found that 61% of Americans believe a catastrophe is looming – yet only 15% feel prepared for such a deeply troubling event.

The 1929 Great Crash came out of the blue. Will the next, much greater Crash, also come totally unannounced?

Next week: How to prepare for a possible collapse.

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THE EARTH: OUR ULTIMATE TESTING GROUND

Our entire life is one long test. From birth to death we are being examined. The subject of this life-long probing is precisely where we are: our physical earth.

The experiment started with Adam. I believe that God took Adam and Eve from the then existing population, just as later Abraham was singled out and called to leave his ancestral home to travel in faith to the land his descendants would inherit. David is another example of this. He was chosen to become the ancestor of Jesus.

Back to Adam who failed the test, something we do all the time. It is by grace that we are saved. Perhaps Adam’s former life proved too powerful. In Genesis, the first Bible book, we read that there were other people on the earth for whom Cain expressed fear. There were also those mysterious sons of God (Gen.6:2) who were attracted to the beautiful women on earth. The Bible authors, by the way, have a real appreciation for female beauty. Job 42: 15 tells us of Job’s daughters “Nowhere in the land were there found women as beautiful as Job’s daughters.” Perhaps Adam was also influenced by Eve’s beauty. At any rate if Adam and Eve were selected from the then existing people, God did this because our world had come to a stage where the human beings could damage the state of the earth, so God elected Adam and Eve to prevent that. He infused them with his Spirit to enable them to make a new start for the human race, instructing them how to keep the laws of creation and be a beacon of light to a world on the cusp of being irreparably harmed.

That it all started with a tree is significant. The tree is a symbol of the earth. The tree, in a sense, carries the earth, is the axle on which the universe depends. The cross of Calvary is often equated with the tree. The blood of Christ first penetrated the tree: his flesh was first pounded into its wood. The Tree of the Cross fuses the Alpha and the Omega, unites earth with heaven, the past with the future, the beginning with the end. The cross in the Bible stands between the Tree of Life in Paradise and the Tree of Life in the world to come, as described in Revelation, the last Bible book. We as the human race stand and fall with the trees. Regard them with awe. It could well be that Adam’s sin was to take the fruit without asking the tree’s permission. In Paradise everything was connected to everything else. Trees and animals and humans formed an unbreakable whole. All species were intimately connected and treated each other with reverence and deference. I can well imagine that, when Adam and Eve forgot this and took the fruit without first asking permission from the tree, the holy spell, that special symbiosis in nature was broken. That’s when suddenly insects became a nuisance, animals a danger and humans strangers to each other.

Before Adam and Eve named the species I think God infused them with special capabilities to understand the language of the animals and the plants. That’s how they were able to gauge their nature and see their function in the scheme of totality. I believe they could speak with these creatures and in close cooperation with them determined the name for each individual species. All of them, animals and plants, received instructions how and where to live. Jeremiah 8:7 tells us that “the stork in the sky knows her appointed seasons… but my people do not know the requirements of the Lord.” Just as we have a spirit which ascends to God when we die, animals too have such a mysterious ingredient. Ecclesiastes 3: 21 relates that “the spirit of man rises upward and the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth.” Adam and Eve also knew the special features of all plants: they owed their long and healthy lives to the miraculous ingredients plants had, knowledge they retained when the gates of paradise were shut, still assuring them many centuries of life.

I found a very interesting article in the Lapham Quarterly dealing with animals, their spirit and their minds. Here’s its start:

These are stimulating times for anyone interested in questions of animal consciousness. On what seems like a monthly basis, scientific teams announce the results of new experiments, adding to a preponderance of evidence that we’ve been underestimating animal minds, even those of us who have rated them fairly highly. New animal behaviors and capacities are observed in the wild, often involving tool use—or at least object manipulation—the very kinds of activity that led the distinguished zoologist Donald R. Griffin to found the field of cognitive ethology (animal thinking) in 1978: octopuses piling stones in front of their hideyholes, to name one recent example; or dolphins fitting marine sponges to their beaks in order to dig for food on the seabed; or wasps using small stones to smooth the sand around their egg chambers, concealing them from predators. At the same time neurobiologists have been finding that the physical structures in our own brains most commonly held responsible for consciousness are not as rare in the animal kingdom as had been assumed. Indeed they are common. All of this work and discovery appeared to reach a kind of crescendo last summer, when an international group of prominent neuroscientists meeting at the University of Cambridge issued “The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in Non-Human Animals,” a document stating that “humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.” It goes further to conclude that numerous documented animal behaviors must be considered “consistent with experienced feeling states.”

That same article goes on saying:

“And yet, if you put aside church dogma, and lean in to look at the Bible itself, or at the Christian tradition, the picture is more complicated. In the Book of Isaiah, God says that the day will come when the beasts of the field will “honor” Him (Isaiah 43:20). If there’s a characteristic of personal identity more defining than the capacity to honor, it’s hard to come up with. We remember St. Francis, going aside to preach to the little birds, his “sisters.” Needless to say he represented a radical extreme, conclusions of which regarding the right way of being in the world would not seem reasonable to most of the people who have his statue in their gardens. In one of his salutations, that of virtues, he goes as far as to say that human beings desiring true holiness should make themselves “subject” to the animals, “and not to men alone, but also to all beasts.” If God grants that wild animals eat you, lie down, let them do “whatsoever they will,” it’s what He wanted.

Deeper than that, though, in the New Testament, in the Gospel According to Luke, there’s that exquisite verse, one of the most beautiful in the Bible, the one that says if God cares deeply about sparrows, don’t you think He cares about you? One is so accustomed to dwelling on the second, human, half of the equation, the comforting part, but when you put your hand over that and consider only the first, it’s a little startling: God cares deeply about the sparrows. Not just that, He cares about them individually. “Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies?” Jesus says. “Yet not one of them is forgotten in God’s sight.” (Luke 12:6). Sparrows are an important animal for Jesus. In the so-called Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a boy Jesus, playing in mud by the river, fashions twelve sparrows out of clay—again the number is mentioned—until a fellow Jew, happening to pass, rebukes him for breaking the Sabbath laws (against “smoothing,” perhaps), at which point Jesus claps and says, “Go!”, and the sparrows fly away chirping. They are not, He says, forgotten. So God remembers them, bears them in mind. Stranger still, He cares about their deaths. In the Gospel According to Matthew we’re told, “Not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.” Think about that. If the bird dies on the branch, and the bird has no soul, and is from that moment only inanimate matter, already basically dust, how can it be “with” God as it’s falling?

We must embrace the totality of creation. I believe there’s where our testing comes in. Creation is God’s primary word. John 3:16 is the most underestimated and misinterpreted text in the Bible. If God loves this world so much that he lays down his life to buy it back- the literal meaning of ‘redeem’ – should we not do the same? Animals are much closer to us – witness their DNA – than we like to admit.  And what applies to animals is equally true for plants: we have to surround ourselves with them and care for them, because not only are animals special, plants too are much more sensitive than we often realize.

There is a well-known study from the early 1970s where classical music (Debussy), jazz (Louis Armstrong was used, among others), and Indian (Ravi Shankar) were played. The plants grew large and healthy, with the plants actually growing towards the radio for each of these three forms of music, just like they bend towards sunlight. In a book I have, Secrets from the lives of Trees, I read that “At a recent symposium in Montpellier, France, entitled the International Colloquium on the Tree, a South African zoologist spoke of his research with an acacia tree. When munched on by insects, it issued a warning to other trees of the attack. The scientist, Wouter van Hoven, noted that trees within fifty yards responded to the message. In less than fifteen minutes neighboring trees increased the level of tannin in their leaves, making them poisonous to the insect predators.” The current issue of the National Geographic reports that, “When drought hits, trees can suffer—a process that makes sounds. Now, scientists may have found the key to understanding these cries for help.”

I believe that the church is far too narrow in its approach to life. Basically its entire message still has that ‘heaven’ orientation, as it concentrates on God’s Secondary Word, the Scriptures, which actually are a lamp for our feet while we study God’s Primary Word. Our test does not concern Scriptures alone: our test primarily deals with our treatment of the cosmos.

I love the Scriptures and such gems as Colossians 1:15-20. Look it up. Memorize it. “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in Christ, and through him reconcile to himself all things (Ta Panta).”  Sphere sovereignty has its place, but not in the preaching of the good news. To confine the preaching to the Bible is separating nature from grace, fostering a dualism that is foreign to the Bible. Seminaries should educate students for all of life: the good news is that everything will be made new: seminarians need to learn both ecology and theology.

Johan Herman Bavinck has something to say about this. In Chapter Four of his The Kingdom: Speed Its Coming, (soon to be published by Eerdmans) with the telling title: Christ, the Central Focus of the Scriptures, he laments that:

It is extremely unfortunate that the con­cept of the Kingdom of heaven or the Kingdom of God has escaped our dogmatic reflection and is paid scant attention in our Christian life. That is the reason why we find it very difficult to read the Good News with that wonderful suspense that comes from seeing it against the backdrop of the overwhelming reality of the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God has come “near” in Christ; the great Day of the Lord is about to come. The Kingdom claims the entire cosmos in all its manifestations. Wherever Jesus comes the demons flee, the fever subsides, the sea becomes calm, the storm obeys. The King­dom of God has come near. Leprosy retreats, the blind open their eyes in utter amazement, the lame start to leap in spontaneous enthusiasm, the dead rise from their graves. Indeed, the Kingdom of God is near. All those shattering, destructive, depressing and disruptive forces now dom­i­nating the universe flee away in despair and anguish as soon as the King appears. All those miracle stories recorded in the Gospels, which we in our thoughts and our daily lives find difficult to explain and which we can only deal with if we somehow spiritualize them, are clearly meant in the Gos­pels to manifest the awesome powers of the Messiah in his kingdom. As such they serve as proof that God will not surrender this terrible world to the powers of decay at work in it, but that the Great Day has started in which he himself will gather up his world into a harmonious symphony of adoration. Christ’s miracles gather the Kingdom under a cosmic um­brel­la: the Kingdom is the restoration of the Urzeit; it is the introduc­tion of the eventual “renewal” (Matt. 19:28).

I believe Dr. Bavinck is correct. The church must have a much more integrated approach to ‘life’, because the way we go about our daily affairs is a dry-run, is the ‘testing ground for eternity’ and determines whether we will be part of the glorious kingdom to come, a kingdom where also all animals and all plants find their perfect place.

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Next week an examination of the present economic situation.