September 23 2023

COLLAPSE COMING

We’ve just had the hottest summer on recorded history, with runaway wildfires in Canada and Hawaii, ruinous floods from Slovenia, Sudan and Hong Kong to Vermont and South Americaand Libya. We’ve seen nearly half of the world’s ocean waters in a heat wave, having absorbed almost all of the heat produced by our greenhouse gas emissions. Even the Arctic has become almost tropical in temperature. The number of Hurricanes so far in the Atlantic is unprecedented for an El Nino year. And it will also affect you, and you, and me too, sooner than later: prepare for it.

The UN’s secretary general, António Guterres, said that “humanity has opened the gates of hell” by unleashing worsening heatwaves, floods and wildfires seen around the world. He echoes Matthew 24.

Collapse is in the cards

Collapse first come gradually, and then, all at once. People say that I am an alarmist because I expect collapse. I admit: I am a Collapsetarian. I see emission of greenhouse gases increase; I see how new fossil fuel projects are subsidized; I see how global warming accelerates, how bushfires and floods engulf the planet; I see climate science ignored, climate change projections kept away from the public eye; I see nations invest in killer submarines rather than water spraying aircraft and other fire-fighting equipment. Yes, I am a Collapsetarian. 

ARCTIC NEWS.

Almost every day I have a look at the ARCTIC NEWS website. I sincerely believe that our future lies buried there, or, better, the lack of our future. Especially its September 15 issue is frightening. It states, based on NASA observations, that the Arctic is heating up beyond any other region in the world. The ice that used to reflect the sunlight is now absorbing the solar heat and temperatures there are heating up with the Gulf Stream pushing hot water toward the Arctic Ocean. As the temperature of the Arctic Ocean keeps rising, more heat can reach sediments located at the seafloor, since much of the Arctic Ocean is very shallow and sediments at the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean contain vast amounts of methane. The danger is that additional heat will destabilize hydrates in these sediments, leading to explosive eruptions of methane, as the compressed volume of methane increases 160 to 180-fold when leaving the hydrates. 

This will result in huge eruptions of methane both from the destabilizing hydrates and from methane that is present in the form of free gas underneath the hydrates. The scientists studying this phenomenon fear that a tipping point may be reached within months, causing a sudden spike in the world’s temperature beyond the limits of human endurances.

COLLAPSE

I have this book, 575 pages, COLLAPSE, How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, written by (Dr.) Jared Diamond. He discusses the tragedy of Easter Island, discovered by Jacob Roggeveen, and his Dutch crew, in 1722 on Easter Sunday, hence the name. Not a living soul remained, only gigantic statues. All trees gone. Dr. Diamond wonders, “What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?” Like modern loggers, did he shout “Jobs, not trees!”? Or: Technology will serve our problems”?…. The parallels to today are chillingly obvious.

Looking around in the world, thanks to ‘The Internet’, everybody should be a “Collapsetarian”. Faith in the rulers of this world is fading. Look at the USA and the politics there: the Republicans seeking the presidency, don’t believe in Climate Change, ridicule science and scientists. For them Collapse will come as a total surprise.

Before COLLAPSE happens, all sorts of little collapses will take place, just as what happened in ungovernable Libya where civic strife prevented regular maintenance of the dams that collapsed and took away thousands of lives in a matter of minutes. I think it is a metaphor depicting our sudden demise, also due to human indulgence. 

Just imagine: a sudden spike in the overall world temperature beyond the THREE DEGREES Celsius wherever you are in the world, will make life impossible for all that has a being. Do have a second look at the ARCTIC NEWS website. If its observations are correct – for their information they rely on NASA’s satellites regarding ice formation and water and air temperatures – then it is very possible that life on earth may cease as rapidly as the sudden deluge that occurred in strife-torn Libya.

Jesus had a unique insight into the future. Matthew 24 offers a glimpse of what is to come: for you know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.

We do well to take stock and consider what it means when sudden Collapse, ultimate death and destruction, overwhelms all and everything. Be aware.

September 16 2023

Dreams 

Your old men will dream dreams. Joel 2: 28.

Count me among the old men. Count me among those who dream. Count me among those who see dreams as wrestling with oneself. Count me among those who see dreams as cleansing the mind so that I can enter eternity a bit closer to my true me. Count me among those who see dreams as often inexplicable because they deal with the unconscious. Count me among those who believe there is no one dominant explanation for dreams. 

Carl Jung stated that dreams are a way for the unconscious mind to communicate with the conscious mind. He also be asserted that dreams are symbolic and can have multiple meanings. 

My unconscious mind caused me trouble at night.

Looking back, as far back as the day of my birth, has been a liberating experience. I’ll tell you why. For many decades I’ve had nightmares, fighting off an attacker, thrashing my sheets and blankets but never able to catch the bugger. 

Then something dawned on me. When I have born, I weighed 5 kg, or 11 lbs. I also was circumcised right at birth. As a youngster I was called ‘dikkop’, ’fathead’, indicating that my head was larger than normal. Combining all these factors, I concluded, that my delivery was a difficult one, struggling to get out, while, once safe in my mother’s arms, I experienced the pain of penis plight. Once this had become plain to me, my nightmares ceased.

Several Dreams.

In the last year or so I have had different dreams. In one of them, I became quite agitated and worried: “how, in the world, I, as an unskilled, impractical, green immigrant, 23 years old, brought up in a better than average middleclass home, never having worked a day in my life, suddenly landing in Canada, engaged already to the love of my life, how would I ever be able to earn a decent income to support a family?”

Well?

Somehow, by the grace of God, I managed, reinventing myself three times: from starting an insurance business, then adding by becoming a real estate broker, and finally, relocating from the Niagara Peninsula to Eastern Ontario, where I reschooled to become a commercial Real Estate Appraiser. All good enough to earn a decent living, saw five children become professionals and managed to save enough for retirement.

Alone in an unending desert.

Last week I had a dream in which I stood in a stark, unending desert: a Sahara-like situation with sand dunes everywhere, and I the solitary person there. That was my dream. 

I immediately connected my dream to my life prior to 1972, when, raised in an orthodox Christian family, committed to everything Christian, activist, promoting Christian education zealously, but having a faith more historic and traditional than progressive and vibrant. 

That all changed when, in 1972 two books came my way, thanks to two friends: one a Dutch one, “Sterven… en dan” (After death… what) and another by Dr. Donella Meadows, the lead author of Limits to Growth. 

After death, what?

The first book changed everything in my life that I had automatically assumed to be the true faith: “we live, go to church, have a decent life, die and go to heaven”. My dream of standing in a barren desert portrayed to me that sort of existence: sterile, unquestioning, stagnant. Through that book, I suddenly saw Christianity in a new light: not heaven as goal, but the earth, God’s precious gift to humanity; God’s infinite work of art; God’s marvelous, majestic, wonderful miracle, where all creatures, great and small testify to God’s greatness. 

Then in 1972, now more than 50 years ago, faith became real for me, expressed in John 3: 16: “God so loved the ‘world’, that he offered his Son as a sacrifice to buy the cosmos back from the Devil”. I then saw for the first time in my life that Christ died not merely for our sins, but primarily to ‘redeem = buy back’ God’s precious creation. The church, exclusively focusing on ‘sin’, has turned Christianity into the desert, where it still is languishing and dying.

The Finite Earth.

The second book, Limits to Growth, suddenly saw me living in the world, a different world, a world dying by a thousand cuts. I then saw that I lived in a World that God called ‘good’ seven times, a world created to support us fully and gloriously when we practise symbiosis. I finally, by the grace of God, saw how we must truly see the world as ‘holy’ as God’s expression of what is good and wise and infinite, a true symbol of his majestic creativity. 

Yes, old men do dream dreams. 

September 9 2023

Veggies for humans; rights for animals.

Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. Genesis 1:29.

In paradise, God prescribed a special diet for Adam and Eve: strictly vegetarian. Jumping from the first chapter of the Bible Genesis 1, to the very last one, Revelation 22, describing the New Creation, or, the restored Garden of Eden, I read something similar: “the Tree of life bearing twelve crops of fruit every month”. Again vegetarian! 

What does this mean for us?

It has long been my thesis that our present existence is a proving ground for the REAL life in the new creation, a theme that dominates the Scriptures. I sincerely believe that a vegetarian life is the Biblical option: It has been mine for many decades.

But…

In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were vegetarians, eating only from the plants and trees. Later, with Noah, this changed. It seems to me that meat was then used on special occasions: Abraham provided (Genesis 18:7) the Lord with meat from a calf, tender and good. The same happened when the Prodigal Son re-appeared. Jesus ate fish. So, what do I conclude? 

For me, the likely benefits of being vegetarian, both for my health, the environment and reducing animal suffering, outweigh the minor inconveniences. So, perhaps optional: no black and white situation. 

There also is that Job text.

But ask the animals, and they will teach you; or the birds of the air and they will tell you; or ask the plants of the earth, and they will instruct you.  Job 12: 7-9.

The above text points to integration, points to intimate relations with ‘the natural world’. Yes, we are a unity: soil, animals, humans: they belong together. That’s why many people are convinced that animals are sophisticated mental creatures who have beliefs and desires, memories and expectations, who feel pleasure and pain and experience emotions, and like us, animals have a basic moral right to be treated in ways that show respect for their independent value. 

As an aware Christian I believe that we should welcome the days when chickens revert back to their natural pecking order and contended cattle roam the vast expanse of the prairies where they belong.

But back to my question: Do animals have rights? Yes, they do. Do chickens and other incarcerated animals deserve rights? Yes, they do. Just as the people in Bangladesh and elsewhere have the right to be housed decently, and live comfortably, so, if my Bible is true, animals too have the right to exercise their freedom of movement. Job’s words thousands of years ago are still relevant today. What we have lost is the wisdom animals can teach us. We no longer have the ability to understand what the birds are trying to tell us. We no longer know how plants can enlighten us. We are paying lip service to the knowledge that in God’s hands are the life of every living being – animal, birds, plants – and the breath of every human being. 

Does that include trees? Do they have rights?

Some time ago I read Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I was struck by one sentence, “I entreat you, brothers (and sisters), remain true to the earth”. Another sentence stayed with me: “To blaspheme the earth is now the most dreadful offence”. I wonder, “Is that the sin against the Holy Spirit?”

So how about trees? 

I have long maintained that our original sin included taking fruit from a tree without asking permission. I too, when I accidently brush against a tree, I ask the tree for forgiveness. I see trees as my neighbors, and love them as such. Trees really matter: no trees, no LIFE. Dying trees mean death for humans. Forest fires indicate the approach of hell. Nietzsche was right: “By killing creation we are killing God.”

 

It always strikes me that, when in Genesis 2 trees are described, the beauty aspect is mentioned first (Genesis 2:9). That also points to our original mandate of beautifying creation. It is my considerate opinion that the early humans mentioned in the Bible lived so long because the main cover of the planet was trees, breathing out super-rich oxygen.  

Luther once said, “even if I knew that the Lord would come back tomorrow, I still plant a tree today.

We need ever closer contact with creation. Dying trees, forest fires, earth quakes, violent storms indicate a broken relationship with creation. 

The Bible tells us that God, creation and the human race form an organic whole. That wholeness includes animals and trees.

Yes, animals and trees do have rights. 

September Second 2023

Inflation, more Inflation, then Explosion.

Inflation is much more than an increase in the cost of food and other consumption items. Take Putin, the Russian dictator: he represents inflation because war always leads to higher prices, armed conflict always destroys dwellings, always burns trees, always wounds and kills people and animals, and always causes fires: Climate Change does the same!. Putin, personally, suffers from super self-esteem, Hubris, the word for overweening pride, a form of inflated ego, something the entire Western world also suffers from. We behave as if earth’s finite resources are infinite, now disappearing in fire and smoke or smothered by too much water or not enough, causing foodstuffs and other essentials, such as potable water, to disappear, the source of extreme inflation: welcome to the Age of Extremes.

Global Boiling.

Of course, Global Boiling brings inflation, because Climate Change boils down to being a war on Creation. Just as war is waged to cause regime change – at a colossal cost, and often not achieving the initial goal – so the battle to ameliorate the effects of Climate Change may actually do more harm than good. The Electric Vehicle phenomenon is a case in point: some 400kg of scarce natural resources, often ripping up precious forests in Africa and elsewhere, cause irreparable damage to fragile ecosystems. Also, much of the raw material needed to build the batteries at the heart of these new motors, is controlled by China, now the world’s leading EV manufacturer.

Face it: the major factor of increasing inflation is the changing climate. Suddenly the whole world is up in arms. God is hiding his face and withdraws his presence; God sits back, and watches what’s happening on the earth with its eight billion human beings, now all of them fully aware that the earth and the fulness thereof is no longer able to sustain all that lives and moves and has a being. Everything and everybody is under stress and unable to maintain itself, while the resources, water, air, soil, are shrinking and the available basics are disappearing, causing inflation and unavailability at any price. 

Wartime conditions.

I am old enough to have lived, as a teenager, through the years of war – 1940-45 – in German-occupied the Netherlands. Then suddenly all imports ceased, oranges, bananas, coffee, tea, simply disappeared, including TOBACCO, yes, that poisonous item, became more precious than gold! All foodstuff was rationed, all new clothes disappeared and fuel was basically non-existent, while electricity was only sporadically available: barter was the key to staying alive, as money could no longer buy the essentials. 

Of course, these conditions did not appear overnight: it took months and even a few years to bite with a vengeance. Today the situation is the same, but world-wide. The poor in tropical countries already feel the effects: that’s why they risk their lives to come to the paradisical West to find out that there too Paradise is Lost. For us, the reckoning too, will come, will come sudden and abrupt for most. 

Will humans change? No way: Each day I do my 6,000 steps on the Canada Trail bisecting Tweed. I often am the only walker, but not the only user: for every walker there are 4 ATVs, dusty, noisy, polluting: for these operators the tipping point will come as a total surprise: sudden, unexpected, out of the blue. 

The near future: Change

The coming years will have no equal. They will be drastically different. They will not replicate the experience of the 1920s or the 1940s. The idea that we can recover from the fiscal and monetary excesses of the past decades without economic pain — at a time of political polarization and geopolitical conflict — seems historically implausible. The only thing constant is change. It’s not just that hard things happen without adequate notice and in a short period of time; it’s that a lot of things happen without adequate notice in a short period of time. 

Given all this, prepare mentally and spiritually for a steadfast change. The new situation we face – shortages, even collapse – forces us to focus on what we can control and let go of what we cannot.

Not surprisingly Revelation reveals inflation too as a hallmark of the last days, indicated by the rider of the black horse (Rev. 6:5) who carries a scale, and says: “A quart of wheat for a day’s wages and three quarts of barley for a day’s wages.” Both that scale and these words signify poverty, hunger and inflation. The prices mentioned here are about eight times the prices normal in those days, explains the footnote.

Our economic system is based on stability. Our war against creation wrings its neck, tightens its noose, kills the goose, leads to explosion and clears the deck for Christ’s return.

August 26 2023

God, the earth and humanity belong together.                                   

There is a new Trinity, more easily comprehended than the theological construct of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Why? Because we daily experience this concept, its failure causing calamitous Climate Change, because God, the earth and humanity belong together. 

My thoughts are the fruit of life-long reflections, shaped by such insightful people as Johan Herman Bavinck, three of whose books I have translated, published by Eerdmans, Grand Rapids. I have also been deeply influenced by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

I am engaging in a sort of reverse theology, my invented term. Customary theology examines God from our point of view. In reverse theology, it’s the other way around: how God speaks to us and about us, fully realizing that theology is a very dangerous enterprise, in which we deal with something unique, something unnameable, something beyond knowing. Just think: We cannot even start to understand ourselves, our spouses, our children, let alone dealing with God, who is beyond all knowledge and understanding. 

I read somewhere that any Christian Creed should be whispered, not shouted, and that includes any ecclesiastical confessional standard. Paul, who knew a bit about the gospel, having shaped what we now call ‘the Christian church’, at that famous encounter with the intellectual elite of his days on the Areopagus, called God “the unknown” (Acts 17: 16-17). Even the word ‘theology’ borders on blasphemy: theo- meaning ‘God’; logy – from ‘ogos’, word or science. How, possibly, can God be a subject of investigation?

Yet, impossible as it is, we have to deal with theology, thinking, venturing, probing, evaluating, the concept of ‘God’. We all have to be ‘theologians’, trying and exploring and examining the ultimate reasons for life. When we do that, we end up with God, or our concept of God. 

Frankly I am fascinated by a sentence in Dr. Sabine Dramm’s book on Bonhoeffer, where she writes: “What Bonhoeffer presents as specific to the Christian faith is the perception of God and the world as one”. She adds, and I paraphrase, ”Life has its wellspring, its origin, in God, and bounces back from there to God.” 

I know, I know, I have quoted these lines before, still trying to understand their implications. Today we are discovering that without God we are losing the earth and ourselves: God, humanity and the earth belong together: eliminate one and we lose it all. The fall in paradise affected us and the entire earth. That’s what we see today!

Aware observers realize that the extreme weather conditions around the world are interconnected and insidiously self-accelerating. The Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the world, altering the fast-flowing air currents high above the planet known as jet streams, which then cause wild fluctuations of temperature and precipitation. As temperatures rise, conditions are increasingly occurring that make it hard, if not impossible for many species (including humans) to survive, even at relatively high latitudes.

What has gone wrong? 

We don’t want to acknowledge that God, the planet and humanity form a trinity, unbreakably connected, welcoming Dr. Barry Commoner who formulated the four laws of ecology.

Everything Is Connected to Everything Else

It reflects the existence of the elaborate network of interconnections in the ecosphere: among different living organisms, and between populations, species, and individual organisms and their physicochemical surroundings.

Everything Must go Somewhere

This is, of course, simply a somewhat informal restatement of a basic law of physics—that matter is indestructible. Applied to ecology, the law emphasizes that in nature there is no such thing as “waste.”

Nature Knows Best

The third law of ecology holds that any major man-made change in a natural system is detrimental to that system. 

There Is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

Today the bills are due, apparent in Global Heating.

These laws are so important that we must memorize them and sing them everywhere: yes, even in church:

A song celebrating the laws of Ecology.

(Everything is connected)
All people that on earth do dwell,
sing to the Lord, his ways foretell.
Remember God, earth stars and sea
Are all a part of you and me.

(Creation knows best)

Creation knows the ways to go
God bred it in its natural know

We therefore must inquire of her
To see where we go right or err.

(Nothing disappears)
Nothing will ever disappear
It lingers on, it is now clear
The oil we burn creates much ill
And causes universal kill.       

(No free lunch)

There is no free lunch to be had
The bills are due: they will be bad
We now must pay this immense debt
Which robbed us of our safety net.

God, the earth and humanity belong together. Leave out one of this Trinity, and collapse is assured.

August 19 2023

THE MAKING OF ME.

Had I been conceived a second later, a different me, with the same name, would have been born some 9 months later. Now, after almost 95 years, I am a worrier, worried after reading the August 15 edition of ARCTIC NEWS, which suggests to me what 2 Peter 3 predicts: “The heavens will disappear like a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire”, as trillions of tons of methane suddenly surge to the surface.  

It’s time to take stock. Time for digging into my own self. Time to ‘know thyself’. The Greek philosophers said: “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” The Bible tells us that “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”. Both are right.

The Proverbs, that ‘wisdom’ book following the 150 Psalms in the Hebrew Bible, is attributed to Solomon, king of Israel. It was composed to give ‘prudence to the simple, knowledge and discretion to the young and make wise men wiser’. Attaining wisdom and discipline”, is a line repeated numerous times in the book. 

I believe that today we literally live in the last days, as ARCTIC NEWS points out, in frightening detail. Time is running out to get to know ourselves, so I follow Psalm 139: “Search me God, and know my heart.” Whatever we ask God to do, we must do ourselves.

So…….

Looking back on my long life (I hope to celebrate my 95^th birthday in October amidst my extended family of five children, their spouses, numerous grandchildren, great-grandchildren, brother and friends) I cannot quite pinpoint when these two facets, wisdom and discipline, become dominant in my life. Perhaps a beginning was made in 1961 when I quit smoking and started running, never quite reaching the marathon level, but repeatedly participating in 10km runs, training 4 times each week, and often galloping around the block in my rural area, along highway 37 in Tweed, going south, taking a left on Lynch Road, turning onto the LaBarge road to the Bridgewater, along mostly wooded stretches, back to highway 37 – a distance of 14 km. I once, running early, saw a lynx/bobcat standing on the edge of the forest, following my steady progress. 

In 1986, now 37 years ago, I started another routine, writing in longhand, in Journeying through the days, a daily entry of 400 words each weekday and 800 words on Sundays. I did that until the Upper Room publications in Nashville, Tennessee, ceased printing those beautiful journals, in 2013. Each entry had a bible text based on the Lectionary, on which I commented. I now do this routine on my laptop, writing 500 words each morning, right after breakfast, also based on the Lectionary. 

In 1986, initiating my journal, I wrote the following: “I really appreciate the format of this diary, as I had already kept a daily record for 6 years.” Yes, in 1980, now 43 years ago, I started a diary, which I ceased when Covid emerged, and my daily doings became routine. My wife of 67 years died almost 3 years ago, and since then I, basically, has been confined to my home and village, venturing beyond these limits only in company.

My holy duty.

I see it as my God-given task to treat my body with the utmost respect, sincerely convinced that God has given me my body as the seat of the HOLY SPIRIT, as a personal treasure to properly nourish and maintain. I also believe that in my body dwells spirit and mind, all three forming a unity that makes me a whole person. My body is more than flesh and bones, is more than nerves and sinews, more than blood and brains: it’s all of these. It is my divine duty to develop that totality within the place of creation where I find myself. Also, I have been very blessed in my marriage where my wife of 67 years has greatly beneficially influenced my personality.

So, how then do I live?

Movement is the key to my long life, combined with diet and reflection. I daily walk close to an hour, or 6,000 steps. I have been vegetarian for some 45-50 years, eat mostly homegrown and organic food. Two meals a day. No alcohol; have an afternoon nap.

In 2 Peter 3 the apostle writes that ‘everything will be laid bare’, including the Trump mentality, the aims of Capitalism, the often ineffectiveness of the church, the futility of AI, the disastrous consequences of the Technological Society. 

And me… what have I learned?

Perhaps a little patience and greater capacity for tolerance and forgiveness, and some insight into human folly and stupidity, including my own. I am looking forward to perfection in the New Creation, finally finding wisdom and discipline.