Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

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.

May 20 2023

THE ARK, THE CHURCH, AND US.

Ojibwe/Chippewa Tribe

The story goes that the Great Spirit was unhappy with man and created a great flood. The only survivor was Waynaboozhoo who had made a raft of logs and sticks for himself and other animals that were alive. They floated around for over a month, but the waters had not gone down.

This account is only one of the many ‘flood’ legends that live in the indigenous communities of the world. The most prominent, of course, is the Noah story, related in Genesis 6, where God expressed his dismay with granting humanity such a powerful position on the planet, endangering its continuous viability. So, God decided to make a new start with Noah and his family: “Build a boat made from cypress trees”. 

Cypress Trees?

I am not sure why Vincent van Gogh, that famous Dutch painter, who killed himself at the age of 37, adopted the Mediterranean cypress tree as a motif. Maybe because the tall, tapered, cone-shaped evergreen has always carried associations of mourning and death, and the FLOOD caused a lot of death. Of course, God knew the tree’s qualities, as they are like our cedar trees, light in weight and very durable. They grow tall and slim, easy to debranch, and, by divine design, excellent material to fashion a huge ship.

The Ark as a symbol of the church.

For many years the Noah family was busy in nowhere to construct this huge vessel: felling the trees, abundant in those days, where now there only is desert. Their act was a telling testimony, a warning, and, of course, also the butt of many jokes, just like today, when preaching for the Lord’s return is seen as odd, to say the least. The signs then were loud and visible: the signs now too are loud and visible. The decade-long Ark construction job, culminating in the mysterious march of the animals, failed to impress the people. Now the disappearance of the animals and the global heating out there too, is failing to change people’s mindset.

A New and Different World emerged.

After the waters had receded, God again spoke to Noah: see Genesis 9, the most under-appreciated passage in the Hebrew Bible:

Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him:“I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you, and with every living creature that was with you—the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you—every living creature on earth. ¹¹ I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

Two things stand out: 

1. God included all animals and placed them on the same level as humans, worthy of being God’s partners: that’s what ‘Covenant’ means, a solemn treaty between equals. 

2. No repeat of God’s direct intervention with creation: we are on our own: we are the new gods. God granted us absolute power over creation. 

What is our report card so far?

Not too great, frankly. Great disparity between the rich and the rest, even in the so-called West, where I live. Christianity itself, is in deep decline, while the need for comfort and faith is at a premium. Statistics show that people who attend church live longer and more content, because human interaction is necessary for happiness. We need others; we need fellowship, but life is so busy, that there is no time to prepare healthy meals, and no time to exercise properly: so, paradoxically, we die much sooner.

Here is the problem.

The church, in general, sees the Bible as God’s only word, and the salvation of the soul of prime importance. Our treatment of the planet mirrors our own busy and unhealthy life, assuring its death as well. Our economy regards the state of the stock market and economic growth as the sole criterion for a profitable bottom line, and never counts the damage to creation as a cost. Now that cost is due: expect ever higher inflation, rapid economic decline and collapse.

The Ark, the Church and us.

Karen Armstrong in her latest book, Sacred Nature, traces how slowly we abandoned the concept of the holiness of creation, adopted the heaven heresy, preferring the Scriptures over God’s Created Word, even though the Book of Job and many Psalms affirm that “The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof, the world and all that dwells therein”.

John 3: 13 tells us that nobody goes to heaven, and John 3: 16 affirms that God’s love for creation exceeds God’s love for his Son. 

Shouldn’t we do the same? Love Creation unconditionally! 

May 13 2023

THE NEXT SIX MONTHS.

A bold statement! The next six months will decide the fate of the world, thanks to the culmination of outright stupidity and lack of religious understanding. Human initiative has surrendered to Artificial Intelligence, signalling the end of learning, promoting the sovereignty of ignorance. Human stupidity manifests itself in the evil of Infinite Growth in a Finite World, and the continuous expansion of fossil fuels. The Christian religion has gone off the rails, has degenerated into formalism and dependence on institutions, evident in the rejection of sexual differences, and the crowning of Charles III in an Old Testament structure.

Consequences.

The war of Putin versus NATO is sheer human folly. Wars are waste, waste the world cannot afford. Wars are history-makers, now leading to collapse, not only of the victims, but of the victors as well. 

The current hot war is but a small part of our total war against Creation, our war against God, a war we are destined to lose, of which the next six months will be decisive. 

May 10 1940.

I write these lines in the week of May 10, a day grafted in my mind. Now 83 years ago, I can still vividly visualize what happened on that day: Germany invaded my country, the Netherland. It was a beautiful, sunny day, and I was sitting, me, almost 12 years old, on a low brick wall, surrounding the large Reformed Church, located on the corner lot next to our house on the north and to my elementary school on the east. 

In front of me was a triangle-shaped field, where we played soccer, giving me a perfect outline of the inner city, dominated by the 100meter high Martini Church Tower. A single-engine airplane circled overhead. The next day the German Army entered, the start of 5 years of brutal occupation. 

That day the world changed for ever.

Today, May 2023.

Today we are in a similar situation: the world changing forever: the final change. Wars do that to society, as suddenly history accelerates. The   outcome of that long, long war, from 1914-18, with a lull of 21 years, and its fateful conclusion from 1939-45, came at a cost of 100 million deaths, a full Ten Percent of those living on January 1 1900.

Now, May 2023, we face worse, much worse, as the fate of all living is at stake.

 I like detours. 

Detours expose me to new unexpected vistas. Augustine, that famous theologian in the 4^thcentury, when the church was in her infancy, and Latin the language of the still active Roman Empire – it would expire soon – said, “Si comprehendis, non est Deus”, meaning in the new Lingua Franca, English: If you think you understand it, you are not talking about God. 

The same is true about the future: if you think you know the future, you fool yourself. So, my heading is an impossibility. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next six months, not in minute particulars. I even don’t know what my brain, my intuition, will write in the next few minutes. 

But one thing I know: we live in apocalyptic times: the true nature of humanity and of creation is being revealed: the true nature of us, humans, is now plain: utter stupidity. The true nature of creation too, is revealed: sinning against creation carries its own penalty: suicide.

But there are trends. And there is the Bible, and there is humanity, well depicted there, as 1 John 5: 19 tells me, “The whole world is under the control of the evil one.” That is an undeniable truth.

Evil is Putin. Evil is Trump. Evil is war, especially our war against creation. The next six months will be decisive for Ukraine. It may rout the Russians, but we all will lose, because it cannot win the war: 40 million versus 160 million.

The same is true for creation. I dislike the word, ‘nature’, a human word. 

So, where is ‘creation’ heading?

Already Western Canada is ablaze in early May. Already Siberia is ablaze in early May.

The next six months will be decisive. I am intrigued by the ARCTIC NEWS blog. Here is a quote:

“Conditions are dire, i.e. greenhouse gas levels are high, an El Niño is on the way and sea surface temperatures are high, all contributing to the threat of massive loss of Arctic sea ice. On top of that, there are developments that could make things even worse. Loss of Arctic sea-ice comes with loss of the latent heat buffer and loss of albedo that threaten to trigger subsequent eruptions of methane from the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean. Consequently, a huge temperature rise threatens to unfold soon.”

The next six months? Remember Jesus’ words about the thief.