Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

July 1 2023

I am worried.

‘Sinning against creation is sinning against God’. 

An Iowa meteorologist is resigning from his television station because he developed post-traumatic stress disorder after threats over his climate change coverage.  

Jeremiah 26 has a similar story. This great prophet experienced an identical treatment as the weatherman: Jeremiah told the religious elite that their actions carried consequences: Both told the truth, and both received death threats. Here’s the biblical version: But as soon as Jeremiah finished telling all the people everything the Lord had commanded him to say, the priests, the prophets and all the people seized him and said, “You must die! 

I too, tell an unpopular truth. Look at Matthews 24:29 and Acts 2:20: “The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord.” That is happening now, July 2023, as the ash and smoke of forest fires lethally fills our lungs: with 4 months of burning to go! 

Or is it too late?

In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, humans everywhere believe there is solution to the mess we are in, and, perhaps there is, if we set the clock back 150 years, dismantle the automobile structure, return to local food production, mow the grass with a scythe, milk cows by hand, get light from candles, cook with wood, and heat with woodstoves, all theoretically possible, but practically impossible.

Believe me: We have gone too far. Blame ‘Religion’.

Blame ‘religion’. Too simplistic? No. Today the reigning religion is Gnosticism, evident in our disdain for the earth and everything material, a lifestyle to which we are so devoted that we are blind to the truth, the unpopular truth, so well described throughout the Scriptures: Jesus died to renew creation! The saving of souls only is the old-time religion of Gnosticism. 

The new time religion is captured in John 3: 16: “God so loved the cosmos”, a truth the church has never fully endorsed and implemented. The ‘cosmos’ indicates ‘all of creation’, everything fashioned by God’s hand. Yes, blame the American Religion, Gnostic to the core.

Gnostic? 

My NIV Study Bible, introducing John’s letters, describes Gnosticism as the most dangerous heresy. It lists these points: 

Body, any matter, is evil; Creation is evil; God is spirit, and thus good.

Salvation is escape from the body to heaven, achieved through special knowledge-gnosis.

Christ’s true humanity is denied.

Yes, Creation is seen as evil.

Since creation is evil, Climate Change is welcomed and encouraged: the sooner the earth vanishes, the better says Hal Lindsey’s in The Late Great Planet Earth: heaven is our destination!

All churches have been affected by this heresy. All churches have spires, pointing to heaven. 

Matthew 24, depicting today, mentions the concept of Abomination: “When you see standing in ‘the holy place’ (pointing to God’s creation/cosmos), the ‘abomination’ that causes desolation – let the reader understand”. It simply points to climatic pollution. The phrase, ‘let the reader understand’ means that only when it happens, can we grasp the tenor of the text.

That brings me back to that weatherman in Iowa, a very religious state: a very Republican state: They go to church. In the USA church is synonymous with ‘religion’. Harold Bloom, that great American professor of humanities at Yale, and English at New York University, and translator of the Hebrew Bible, wrote The American Religion, with as subtitle, The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation. His analysis is that American Christianity has ceased to be ‘Christian’, has succumbed to ‘Gnosticism’, affirmed by Bonhoeffer decades earlier. 

Bonhoeffer visited the USA twice. After his second visit he noted that “American Christianity was pragmatic, morally courageous, oriented toward social activism, and individualistic but was also entirely theologically unmoored”. Bonhoeffer found that American theologians placed little emphasis on the fundamental theological questions: the Crucifixion, the resurrection, salvation, grace, and redemption. “There is no theology here,” he wrote in a letter to a friend.

In his essay “Protestantism without Reformation,” Bonhoeffer offered an explanation for this situation. “American and continental Protestantism developed differently. While European Protestantism emerged from a revolt against the established religion, Catholicism, American religious communities were the product of the pre-Reformational English tradition of dissent launched by John Wycliffe, a 14th-century priest who challenged certain church teachings. That was at the time when the Roman Catholic Church reigned supreme. 

What Bonhoeffer presents as specific to the Christian faith is the perception of God and the world as one, which makes me to conclude that ‘Sinning against creation is sinning against God’. 

This means that: “Human salvation and planetary salvation go hand in hand”, and, as we are now experiencing: “Crimes against creation carry their own punishment.”

I am worried. Does this mean the end? Are we ready?

June 24 2023

THE RUSH IS ON.

From my student days a Greek saying pops up after 75 years: panta rhei, oude menei, which translates as ‘everything (panta), flows (rhei), nothing (oude), menei (remains the same). (The rivers Rhine and Rhone have their root in ‘rhei’.)

The ‘flowing’ in that slogan is not an orderly process: it gnaws at the existing system so carefully coordinated to regularity and order. That ‘gnawing’ is dangerous, because our societal structure is fragile and built on a monoculture: our poisonous petrol dependency. 

Our very present peril lies North, at the Pole. There the loss of Arctic Sea ice albedo, (that white snow-covered top layer, reflecting the sunrays), signals the disappearance of an important heat buffer, exposing the shallow seafloor consisting of methane, trillions of tons. That stuff is 80 x more lethal than our very own CO2. The bubbling up of this gas constitutes a dangerous tipping point, and could abruptly accelerate the temperature rise in the Arctic: yes, the rush is on: and the El Nino has yet to arrive!

Also, the Jet Stream is strongly deformed, threatening to result in heatwaves that extend over the Arctic Ocean and cause hot water from rivers to enter the Arctic Ocean, while storms accelerate the flow of ocean heat there, with forest fires ash and choppy waters contributing to disintegrate the sea ice, speeding up its demise. 

I repeat: The rush is on that threatens to release the methane on the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean. Once that process starts, it will shoot up the world’s temperature: then the rush becomes a crush!

Nature is stronger than any man-made machinery.

One thing is becoming certain beyond a doubt: There is nothing that can withstand the force of nature: no nuclear bomb has this devastating power. Already an endless series of ever more frightening events roll over the world and over people everywhere, preceding the last things.

Preceding the last things. 

The tamed earth, given by God as our own domain, is now rebelling, is now rising up against us, its tormentors. It is as if nature that, for so long, for so many centuries, has faithfully furnished humanity with all its needs, has now become our enemy, and full of fury has thrown itself upon humanity. And this humanity, this so superior human race, with her nuclear energy, her Artificial Intelligence, her mighty medical system, her military prowess, and her entertainment establishment all of which made her feel so immense mighty and strong, these same men and women are now in a total humiliating fashion confronted with the fact that in the final analysis they amount to nothing, that they are a mere rag that is thrown out as useless.

Yes, the signs of ‘change and decay’ are all around us. It even has affected the church in all its manifestations: its pronouncements of certainty themselves are signs of doubt and uncertainty.

The Southern Baptist Church, America’s largest, has reaffirmed that women are not fit for the ministry. The church I grew up in, the Christian Reformed Church, has pronounced that practicing homosexuals are living in sin: Their ruling ‘males’ know exactly what God has commanded, in itself an aberration and sin against God’s majesty.

Ora et Labora, Pray and Work.

This is not a hopeless situation: on the contrary: the current situation contains valuable information: We are being prepared for eternity, where the lessons learned NOW will be applied THEN. 

In that regard I want to pay tribute to Dr. Barry Commoner, who has formulated the four laws of ecology: 

1. nothing disappears, 
2. everything is connected to everything else, 
3. nature is our best guide,
4. nothing comes free.

These bills are now due, and they are more than humanity can afford: we must pay with our lives: nobody is excepted, not you, not me.

Long ago, the church sent out missionaries with a message containing only a partial truth. 

I made a song reflecting that:

Tune: all creatures that on earth do dwell

Five Hundred Thirty years ago

Columbus left the Spanish shore

He praised the Lord, lauda Deum

He did this ad infinitum.

He and his crew sailed duly west

To India was their unknown quest

When the outlook cried, ‘land ahoy’,

They praised the Lord and danced with joy. 

They took along the perfect crutch

“Nobody’s saved outside the church”.

Set out to tell the natives there,

Their pagan ways lead them nowhere.

(Their pagan ways redeem them!)

They kill the prey only for food

They see in forests only good,

Regard the earth a holy gift

For them it is a spiritual lift.  

We have ignored their keen insight

molested their indigenous right

We should pay homage to their way

Before we totally go astray.

June 17 2023

SOCIETAL SUICIDE?

The date, June 17, brings back many memories. On that day, 70 years ago, in Hamilton, Ontario, my fiancée, Diny Hilbers, and I were married. My wife died on October 23 2020. On our gravestone is inscribed, under our birth names, “Till we meet again”. I wholeheartedly believe in, what the Apostles’ Creed says, “the resurrection of the dead, and life everlasting.”

I sense there is a growing obsession with death in today’s society, a desire to let go of responsibility -witness climate change -, a desire to shed the burden of individuality, choice, freedom, a desire to just give up and sink back into the ‘dust we are’.

In the January/February issue of The Atlantic, under the theme of Notes from the Apocalypse,was an article by Adam Kirsch: The People cheering for Humanity’s End. The author wonders, “Is the reign of human beings on Earth nearing its end?” He states that there is a disparate group of thinkers who say ‘yes’ to that notion, and would welcome such finality. 

I agree: a cold and basic analysis of the human state would, indeed, come to such a conclusion.

Look at the young people today. They are grappling with challenges that no generation ever, has been forced to deal with. They just have come out of the Covid experience, and now face disastrous Climate Change, which has become a visible threat, evident in universal forest fires, forcing us again to wearing face masks. 

Indeed, there are immense changes taking place everywhere, even in places where few people make a living: the frigid North. There, for many millennia, the color of the landscape was pure, eye-blinding white, where ‘white’ bears were among the world’s largest creatures. That significant part of God’s creation, is now totally out of balance. 

El Niño.

The next El Niño is on the way. They are forming when the water at the surface of the central and eastern Pacific around the Equator is warmer than usual. This occasional pattern influences weather dynamics worldwide and indicates warmer years globally. This year humans have pumped three additional years’ worth of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere since the last El Niño. That means the current one emerges amid planetary conditions that will accelerate its warming effects.

There you have it

There you have it: the oceans are already running record warmest, without the El Niño properly developed yet. Once it has fully come into force, it could well destroy habitat for all living creatures. Be prepared!

Morphic Resonance.

There is something like Morphic Resonance, remembrance of matters past. The entire world remembers when trees, animals, seas, earth, sky, formed a unity with us humans: the suffering of one involves the suffering of all: killing one, kills all. These vibrations still penetrate our minds and spirits and, yes, our bodies too: “All one body, we”, says the Bible.

This phenomenon is especially evident in the polar regions, where warming is three times faster than the global average, where the loss of ice is producing a vicious spiral of heating world-wide: ‘morphic resonance’ at work, that penetrates every core of all universal beings. It seems that the smarter we become technically, the dumber we become mentally and spiritually.

The Natural smarts we lack.

Those four kids in Colombia survived because they know more about ‘how to live’, than we do, wealthy Westerners. They know what is important in life; they know the essentials of existence. Thirteen-year-old Lesly Mukutuy was able to identify edible fruits, find suitable water and avoid dangerous plants and animals, thanks in part to knowledge handed down by her environmental schooling: the ancestral knowledge of the eldest child kept her younger siblings, including a ‘one year old’ baby, alive after 40 days. Of such is the Kingdom:  Imagine: forty days in the wilderness, just like Jesus!

For once I partially agree with former President Donald J. Trump, when he cast his indictments as a “final battle” with “corrupt” forces that are destroying the country, except that he is the instigator of this evil. It certainly relates to Revelation 12: 7: “Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back”. Whatever happens in heaven, resonates on earth.

Let me conclude with an apocalyptic passage from the Mayan period, around 

250 AD. It succumbed soon after.

Eat, eat, while there is bread

Drink, drink, while there is water;

A day comes when dust shall darken the air,

When a blight shall wither the land,

When a cloud shall arise,

When a mountain shall be lifted up,

When a strong man shall seize the city,

When ruin shall fall upon all things,

When the tender leaf shall be destroyed.

June 10 2023

THREE SOCIETAL FAILURES

My Latin dictionary defines the verb deficio, as: to fail, or, to do less than one might. Our word ‘deficit’ finds its root there, a ‘failure’ to live up to expectations.

Societal failure affects us all. The most common one is monetary: “the excess of expenditure or liabilities over income or assets in a given period”.  The Economist, that 150+ years old British weekly, in its mid-May edition, sported on its cover, FISCAL FANTASY LAND, referring in its editorial to the deficits all major governments run, manageable when debt only costs 1-1.5 percent, but now courting ‘failure’, having soared to quadruple that amount. 

With life expectancy increasing and a rapidly soaring population of older people, clamoring for good pensions, a bubbling increase in ‘old age’ ailments is guaranteed. Add crumbling infrastructure and looming climate change, requiring repair and costly upkeep, while wars and military hardware call for immense investments, the need for money goes sky-high, financed through debt. How high can debt go, before societal failure looms?

Other ‘failures’, environmental and religious, are even more dangerous.

ARCTIC NEWS June 3 2023 opens with:

• Earth’s energy imbalance is at record high 
• emissions are at record high 
• greenhouse gas concentrations are at record high 
• temperatures are very high, especially in the Arctic

• North Atlantic Sea surface temperature is at record high

• sea ice is very vulnerable 
• the Jet Stream is strongly deformed.

It continues:

El Niño is on the way, sunspots are higher than predicted and the Tonga submarine volcano did add large amounts of water vapor high into the atmosphere.

Both loss of Arctic Sea ice and eruption of seafloor methane constitute tipping points that threaten to abruptly accelerate the temperature rise in the Arctic, thus also accelerating loss of permafrost in Siberia and North America that threatens to trigger further releases of greenhouse gases.

Well?

Where the monetary deficit/failure can cause financial hardship, the environmental shortfall, the lack of arable land, the poisoning of water and soil, the heating of the atmosphere, can end all life on earth. 

The Future.

Today’s ‘weather’ situation, has direct consequences for us. The world economy has been based on temperate atmospheric conditions: moderate heat, regular rains, fertile soils. All these are now in jeopardy, on the verge of radical change. 

That’s just the weather.

The faith failure.

Jesus, at one time, lamented, “However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18:8). 

Reading and re-reading Karen Armstrong’s book, Sacred Nature, it is quite clear that humans are religious beings, have been throughout history. I come from a string of deeply believing God-fearing Christians. My children have followed in that line, but not my grandchildren. For them there is nothing that attracts them to ‘religion’. I believe the church, by neglecting to preach and practise the ‘Earth-Word’, as indicated in John 3: 16, is squarely to blame.

It is not ‘faith’ that has declined. There still is faith in progress, faith in democracy, faith in technology, dubious faith in AI, but the trouble is that ‘The Great Adversary, Satan, the Devil, whatever you call this entity’, rules the world – 1John 5: 19 – and – assuming he is male – his aim is to destroy it.

We now have reached the condition where this secular faith is backfiring, witness the universal conflagration. That faith deficit already started in The Garden of Eden, when the human pair, call them Adam and Eve, didn’t quite trust God’s instructions to be a ‘servant and enhancer of creation’. So, when their previous regard of the earth’s bounty ‘beautiful to look at and good for food’, as in Genesis 2:9, was, prompted by the great seducer, reversed to ‘good for food and of nice appearance, (Genesis 3:6), this also caused a faith deficit, now evident ‘in extremis’. 

Summary.

We are stuck in a pattern from which there is no escape. As I write this I am ‘house-bound’, not because I am ill, but because ‘the outside’ is ill: it is dangerous to inhale the air because of our environmental endeavors. 

The word deficit means: ‘failure’. Our money policies ‘lack’ wisdom. Our environmental practices ‘lack’ wisdom. Our faith life ‘lacks’ wisdom. The Bible, that forgotten book, has a line about wisdom: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning – the beginning! – of wisdom”. That really means that LIFE starts with “being in awe of God’s Creation”. Once we start ‘serving’ God’s earth, we no longer ‘lack’ but have life in abundance.

By the way.

A couple of nights ago, I was looking at the sky. Here’s what I saw:

 Forests Fires: The sun turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord. (Acts 2:20)

June 3 2023

A bit about me.

In 1975, after I sold business and home, our family moved from urban St. Catharines, On., to rural Tweed, halfway Toronto-Ottawa, where I had bought 50 acres, 20 hectares, mostly woodland. 

My first call was to a ‘witcher’, a water wizard, who plotted two underground streams. He told me to drill where they crossed, about 25 meters deep through sheer rock. Lo and behold, water gushed up: 150 liters per minute, enough to supply 10 dwellings. 

Years later, I put a frost-free handpump on the wellhead, ready for today’s uncertain times. We can do without food for 30 days, but without water only for 3 days.

My house. 

On a clear patch I built a passive solar, well insulated house, into a southern-facing hill, 2 storeys facing south, with large windows, and 1 storey on the north, a small window there. Later I added three solar panels and battery storage, just in case.

My garden.

I wanted a large garden, desiring some self-sufficiency, but discovered that the soil was sheer sand. But, then 48 years younger, I wheelbarrowed from a nearby farm pure black cow manure, days on end. Each year thereafter I added more compost.

Springtime is garden-time for me. Last year I bought a load of mushroom compost, which yielded such excellent results, that I had another batch this year. Soil is like my body: it needs feeding. 

The future has come.

Today, 2023, food prices have shot up and food quality has gone down: it is increasingly clear that the stuff we eat is mainly oil: apples from South Africa or Chile, oranges from wherever. Oil means global heating, and global heating is a sin against creation. Oil also is a poisonous substance which causes cancers and sickness, just as smoking does. What Fentanyl does to the human body fertilizer does to our soil: both kill. 

Our bodies, says the Bible, are temples of the Holy Spirit. Where the Holy Spirit resides, there is God, as we are made in his image. Karen Armstrong, in her recent book, “Sacred Nature”, shows how all ancient religions have seen ‘nature’ as holy. My working the soil is akin to prayer. 

Robin Wall Kimmerer in, “Braiding Sweetgrass”, writes, 

“Love the soil, and it will love back”, adding, “Redemption lives in knowing that you might also hear our hymns of joy when we too marry ourselves to the earth”. Both Genesis 3: 19: “Soil we are and to soil we shall return”, and Revelation 21 affirm this: “The new Jerusalem comes, prepared as a bride.” People adhering to Islam, in their prayers, touch the soil with their heads, symbolizing their affinity to the earth.

All this means that the soil I work is not my own: I am a mere servant: growing food there is an act of worship. The food products we buy are often Ultra-processed, doing more harm to the body than good. Capitalism has only one concern: Profits at all costs, including the cost of health. Food has been replaced by nutrients, and common sense by confusion. The result is what Michael Pollan calls the American paradox: The more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become.

I try to emulate what my grandmothers would recognize as food: home-grown stuff. True, their diets were often one-sided: lots of potatoes and plenty of pure fat, straight from the pig, and sparse in greens. But then they were physically active from early morning to late at night, which made up for the poor nutrition. Now that I am on my own, food preparation is my concern, and I follow Michael Pollan proposal: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. 

Ever since I bought Francis Lappé’s book, Diet for a small Planet, about 45 years ago, my wife and I have been vegetarian. We have fared well with this regime.

How then shall we live?

That is the perennial question. A complete reorientation is needed. We are speeding toward the END, to the fulfillment of history, of which the arrival of AI, Artificial Intelligence, is a clear indication. We have been created in the image of God, a statement that defies precise definition, because God is beyond conception and articulation. Colossians 1: 15-20 is for me one of the most enlightening sections of Scripture. There Jesus is revealed as the ‘first-born’ of creation, and in the capacity of being pure human he created “All things”.  We need ‘I I’, “Incorporated Intelligence”, not AI, Artificial Intelligence. The key to divine insight is ‘service’, serving God through serving his creatures and creation, God’s Primary and Direct Revelation. 

Working my garden and writing about it, is a feeble attempt to prepare for God’s Garden to come when the New Creation is revealed.

May 27 2023

“God does not play dice with the universe”. Albert Einstein.

Einstein believed there are laws governing the universe, including the planet we call our own. Yes, that great scientist, Einstein, believed that Creation was regulated by norms, founded on wisdom. Discarding and disregarding creation laws results in chaos, clearly evident in today’s global weather events, and technological developments: “The leaders of the ChatGPT developer OpenAI have called for the regulation of “superintelligent” AIs, arguing that an equivalent to the International Atomic Energy Agency is needed to protect humanity from the risk of accidentally creating something with the power to destroy”, reports the Guardian.

Now, more than ever, we need proper prayer.

The Lord’s Prayer points to our self-generated planetary phenomena in its very first petition: “Hallowed be Thy name”. This phrase has nothing to do with God’s name. Karen Armstrong in her Sacred Nature, mentions that the Bible has 50 different names for God, indicating that God is beyond names.  That line from ‘the prayer Jesus taught us’ means that we have to honour the holiness of God’s signature on every created item. If we fail to do that, we play ‘dice’ with the planet, a place we have populated possibly beyond its carrying capacity.

What’s going on?

There’s a lot happening out there. And by that, I mean that everywhere, in the air, unseen to the naked eye, in the waters, not noticeable at first glance, in the soil, seemingly normal, forces are at work that determine the future of the planet. The Roman Philosopher Lucius Anneaus Seneca (4 BCE-65 CE) was perhaps the first to note the universal trend that growth is slow but ruin is rapid. Everything, everywhere, has become saturated with poisonous, abnormal substances: hence Climate Change, which actually goes far beyond climate: it’s a “everything and everybody” change.

FIRE

Already, we’re into the billions of daily human-caused fires, but it’s when I started looking at engines that the numbers really took off. Globally, we’ve got well over a billion cars, a quarter-billion trucks, 200 million motorcycles, 25,000 passenger jets, and 50,000 ocean-going freighters (a third of which are devoted to transporting more fuel to burn). A single six-cylinder minivan running at driving-to-school speed – 2,500 RPM – will generate around 10,000 combustions a minute, more than half a million per hour. That’s a lot of fires. Add them all up and you get tens of trillions of individual combustions.That, roughly speaking, is the number of fires humans make every day – uncountable as stars in the universe. No wonder the man, Peter, who denied Jesus three times at a crucial moment in Jesus’ final hours, learned his lesson – as we all will do eventually- when he wrote, “the elements will be destroyed by fire and everything will be revealed.”

Today we live by fire: we will also die by fire. 

The hour of ‘revelation’ is now upon us. 

Bottom line: When you extract, upgrade, refine and burn toxic substances such as coal, bitumen, oil and gas at the rate we are burning them, decade after decade, we’re going to see changes. Atmospheric CO2 levels are now fully 50 per cent higher than preindustrial times, and it affects everything we care about, from fetuses to phytoplankton, from water to winter. 

Global heating will drive billions of people out of the “climate niche” in which humanity has flourished for millennia, a study has estimated, exposing them to unprecedented temperatures and extreme weather.

The world is on track for 2.7C of heating with current action plans and this would mean 2 billion people experiencing average annual temperatures above 29C by 2030, a level at which very few communities have lived in the past. Arctic News asserts that all humans will die with 3C increase.

Curiously, the segment of the population that claims to adhere to the Christian Religion, supposedly use the ‘Holy Book’ as their guide in life. If they do, they will discover that 1Thessalonian. 5: 21 urges us “to test everything; hold on to what is good”. 

 That points to careful thinking and thorough analysis. Karl Barth, wrote that ‘the message of the Bible is that God hates religion”. Religion makes many devout people choose Trump as their favorite: not surprising as religion killed Jesus.

God does not play dice with the universe: We do!

Romans 8 speaks to us today. It confirms Karl Barth’s observation that we must read the news while keeping an eye on the Bible. Look at verse 22: We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Beautiful. Completely applicable to today. Our world is pregnant with the new world to come. The earth is about to give birth. Believe. Celebrate. Rejoice. A new earth is on the way. Praise the Lord.