Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

September 16 2020

MERRY CHRISTMAS?

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.”

 Elizabeth Barrett Browning  

Merry Christmas in September? Three months from now? Oh, how I wish by then we would see ‘normal’ times again: no more fires, trees healthy and happy, Washington ready to install a new president, political parties no longer at odds. People, mask-free and worry-free shopping. The Arctic happily frozen over, as it should be.

I am a forward-looking man. I am not sure who coined the expression, but I am of the opinion that “The future belongs to those who prepare for it”, and right now, September 2020, I believe that now, three months before December 25, I see a totally different scenario. I hope I will be wrong.

TRENDS

I am a great believer in trends. We can only prepare for a future event when we have a clear vision what’s going on right now, these last weeks of September 2020. Of course, there always are unforeseen events; of course, in detail we don’t know what will happen in the next minute, so I am not predicting whether it will be a white Christmas or what is in store for me tomorrow.

What I am interested in, what makes me confident that I can foresee certain events, is the general direction of current phenomena that will play out in the near future.

Take El Nina, the counterpart of El Nino. According to people who probe the weather, an El Nina is shaping up in the Pacific Ocean which will make the Atlantic Ocean more prone to have hurricanes.

That prediction is based on past experiences. Every day I look at the website of the National Hurricane Center. Now, Mid-September 2020 I see there a string of danger signs, stretching from the African coast all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. I can safely predict that the USA East Coast will be hit with a major storm, balancing out the dangers posed in the American West Coast where, due to ultra-dry years, fires are consuming vast sections of forests.

ARCTIC NEWS.

One of my favorite websites is ARCTIC NEWS. Some 20 scientists, having studied that region for decades, have discovered that this month, September, the North Pole is practically ice-free: never, in human history, has that happened before. Whatever has never happened before creates hidden dangers, can only have ominous consequences. No ice means an erratic jet stream and unpredictable and severe weather events.

Today insurance companies work in the dark: even the best of actuaries is at a loss what to advise their principals. Brace for higher insurance premiums.

THE ECONOMY.

Already before the Pandemic appeared, the general feeling among the money men was that a recession was overdue, and an economic depression could not be ruled out. Due to the Pandemic merchants were late ordering for Christmas, totally uncertain how it will pan out. People are in a frugal mood: ordering too much would ruin the store owners: ordering not enough will cost them sales. On line sales?

Thanks to the Pandemic a totally different mentality has arisen. Earlier this week I saw this little ditty in the New York Times:

Blow up your TV, throw away your paper
Go to the country, build you a home
Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches
Try and find Jesus on your own

People are depressed. Not only the change in seasons but especially the waves of wanton events, the fires, the Pandemic, the looming election, the string of hurricanes in the Atlantic.

Our doctor was visiting my wife in her room at Moira Place, the new local Long Term facility. She had people yell at her, overwrought.

Yes, I am worried. The long-term trends are ominous. Climate Change has become too tame a word: climate CHAOS looks more appropriate, and the Pandemic is far from over.

I am especially worried about the aftermath of the USA election. The current White House occupant is not a gracious guy who will respect the outcome. He also denies Climate Change, as do the pious “Christians” who, en bloc, voted for him.

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.”

The basic trouble with our societal set-up is that we live with the “Christian” mindset that supposedly allows the dominating of creation. Yet “Earth is crammed with heaven”, that’s why we must heed Jesus’ own words. Matthew 20:28 spells it out, “the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

We now see the consequences of the wrong direction Christianity has taken, serving the God of Economic Growth. Deuteronomy 5: 9: “You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me”. We’re in that stage now.

The Earth is crammed with heaven: God made it and therefore it is holy.

Blow up your TV, throw away your paper
Go to the country, build you a home
Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches
Try and find Jesus on your own.

It’s too late for that too. We live in this world and cannot escape it: there no longer is “the country”. Everything has become The City, Babylon, from where we receive our money, our food supply, our electricity, our Internet, our fuel supply. We stand and fall with The City.

Merry Christmas?

It’s only three months away. A fatal Tipping Point is more likely.  Secular Christmas is all about a baby who never grew up. This same little tike, however, did grow up, and said, referring to TODAY, in Matthew 24: “For at that time there will be great tribulation, unmatched from the beginning of the world until now, and never to be seen again. If those days had not been cut short, nobody would be saved. But for the sake of the elect, those days will be cut short.”

We now live in The Great Tribulation, and there won’t be Rapture. What will come is the REAL Christmas, the real Christ-Mass, the real Tipping Point. Creation is suffering beyond its capacity: A world-fire-map shows that fires are everywhere where there are trees: Central Africa, the Amazon region, Siberia, Indonesia, Europe. We may only see the US West ablaze, that’s because there are TV cameras close by. Every tree that burns accelerates the CO2 count and speeds up Climate Change. The Tipping Point is near.

The Real Christ-mas comes when Christ returns, restores creation and claims his own.

Be among them.

DOES THE CHURCH HAVE A FUTURE?

September 2 2020

From my rural, old folks, perspective, I see the institutional church dying, Covid-19 accelerating the process. Of course, the invisible church will prevail, as outlined by the Apostles’ Creed: “I believe in the holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints”. It is the only one of the 12 articles that needs an explanation in the form of “communion of saints”. That, invisible and undefinable church will last till the End when the Lord returns to make ‘the communion of saints’ a visible reality.

To bring me in the ‘church’ mood, first a bit of history on the Role of the Church in my early life, my base, so to say. Of course, I was baptized there as an infant, in a large edifice, seating more than a thousand people, where my father was a frequent church officer, first as deacon and then as elder, repeatedly serving the three – year limit. Then deacons did the rounds to the poor in the church, bringing financial support as times were tough in 1928 and beyond. Then elders made home visits, questioning their parishioners about their faith commitment. Children were part of these interviews.

Thinking back decades ago: church then was the center of life, with Sunday School, followed by doctrine instruction on The Heidelberg Catechism by the minister himself, then called “Dominee”, from the Latin ‘Dominus’, meaning ‘Lord’. My goodness what a name! I eagerly attended young people meetings, teenager gatherings, male always separate from female, adult men- and women societies. On Sundays two services, often 2 hours long. People were faithful, even young people committed. Then society was sharply delineated between Protestant and Roman Catholic, between Socialist and Free Enterprisers. Our allegiance to Christianity was there for all to see because of a stratified society.

That was then. Today matters are different. God has gone private and become a scarce commodity, no longer visible in society, except in a distorted way in the USA where Trump has achieved God status.

Why the change?

I think it has something to do with us: we white Westerners, found a way to dominate the natural world: thanks to fossil fuel we have unleashed unlimited luxuries, infinite travel to so-called exotic destination with all the conveniences common at home. We no longer needed God. If all the churches everywhere were to disappear overnight, society at large would not notice. God is no longer up there: we are gods thanks to our miraculous inventions, our skidoos and jet skis, our flying machines and Benzes and Bentleys, our cool-and heat devices: we have mastered nature.

So we thought.

While my fingers are busy on the keyboard, my thoughts go to LAURA, that sudden horrendous hurricane. I see this monster as God’s creational counter attack on Capitalism, the great disruptor of nature. I have come to believe that in an era of ecclesiastical irrelevance and Biblical ignorance, God is asserting himself through his creation: Creation is his Primary and Direct Word, while the Scriptures are his Secondary and Indirect Word. Both are needed to gain an understanding of God. Not seeing creation as of divine origin (Le Milieu Divin) illustrates the entire ecclesiastical emptiness.

This creation aspect is something new again: in Old Testament times – read Psalm 8 or 19 – that’s where God made him/herself manifest. Now, with the natural world constantly under attack, the creation angle is becoming prominent. That’s why Romans 1: 20 is in the Bible:

“For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.”

Read that text again; it’s a serious indictment for you and me.

Still I believe that mGod understands our situation: I believe that a gracious God takes into account that we, for thousands of years have been waylaid by the church preaching the Heaven Hoax, seeing the Earth as disposable, giving birth to Capitalism. We now are cornered, but life goes on, which made Luther say, “Sin Bravely” (Pecca fortiter).  

Fact is that, in the end, the Bible and the church as visible entities, will disappear. We are approaching the end, but creation will always be there, that’s why God is primarily known through his creation. That’s why, today, the only effective way to promote The Good News is shown in John 3: 16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” Today ‘Loving creation’ is the pre-eminent calling of the church! The word “world” is a translation of the Greek word “Cosmos”, which involves the entire creation, all that lives and moves and has a being. Our love for God is best expressed in love for creation in word and dee d. Where the church, by and large, solely proclaims the Bible as God’s Holy Word, the Bible itself sees it differently: it sees Creation as the best expression of God.

The lesson for today is different.

There is the ‘lesson’ Covid-19 teaches us. There is the lesson LAURA teaches us. There is the lesson the church has to teach: in a world estranged from the usual God concept, based on the Scriptures, so open to all sorts of misinterpretations and false premises, there is this lesson: the CREATION Word is unambiguous: love it unconditionally: all our actions, from the rising in the morning, to our retiring at night, ought to be dominated by ‘love for God’s creation’. When we do this, we also love the creator, just as loving the St. Matthew Passion, implies loving its composer, J.S. Bach. How can we say we love our neighbor, when our actions conspire to undermineth and wellbeing and that of our fellow creatures?

  
How to worship today?

Worship – loving Creation – is a 24/7 affair. The Virus has exposed the utter frailty of the ecclesiastical structure: we now are on our own. God is letting us loose in a fractured world rushing to disintegration. Just as God is hiding his face to see how we will cope (Deuteronomy 32: 20) so we too have become faceless. Masks are a symbol of how insignificant we have become: we are no longer in control. We have lost it. Now the raw elements of ‘nature’ dominate our lives. It reminds me of Psalm 29:

Ascribe to the LORD glory and strength.
Ascribe to the LORD the glory due His name;
worship the LORD in the splendor of His holiness.

The voice of the LORD is over the waters;
the God of glory thunders;
the LORD is heard over many waters.
The voice of the LORD is powerful.

The voice of the LORD
strikes with flames of fire.
and strips the forests bare.

This Psalm tells us how to worship: in the splendor of his holy creation. That’s exactly what we have not done: we have not worshiped him in his holy creation, have failed to see the sanctity of the world. So now, instead of ‘worship the Lord in the splendor of his holy creation’, we hear his voice in Hurricane LAURA, stripping the forests bare, we see the voice of the Lord in the flames of fire in California and Siberia, because of our failure to heed his voice, as is plain from Romans 1: 20, “we stand condemned not listening to God’s Word in creation.”

Conclusion.

I now believe that, by and large, the institutional church with its trappings and hierarchies has become irrelevant, yet Community, totally ecumenical, is more important than ever. We must meet and have ‘communion’, and so preach the Lord till he comes; we must meet to pray and read the Bible. But no sermon. Sermons are a holdover from Medieval Times, when people could not read. Sermons belong to the past, and ministers and priests prevent us from becoming who we are: we can’t delegate our salvation. The church only has a future when it morphs into the attributes of the invisible church: “God so loved the world”, the truly divine world we will inherit.

August 25 2020

COME HELL OR HIGH WATER….

Come what may, no matter how bad, whatever unnatural calamity occurs, we will not alter our way of life, because our mindset is frozen. If it takes Hell or High Water, Hell now all along North America’s Pacific Coast, and High Water now all along the Gulf, so be it: we will not abandon our carbon-fed luxuries, so we’ll have to face the consequences. And we will: we already are!

I don’t know about you, but this makes me feel anxious: I know, I know, ‘trust in the Lord’ and all that, but still, when I survey what’s going on everywhere, I see no way out.

So, what keeps me going? Well, I am not the passive kind: writing my blog keeps my mind in gear; walking every day 5 kilometer, or biking 11 km, or looking after my vegetable garden, keeps my old body in shape; by the way, my patch of soil has yielded an excellent crop of green beans – now in the freezer – lots of red beets, some already frozen, most still growing, and there are potatoes galore.

This year I have oodles of apples, two varieties, one to keep over winter and the other excellent for apple sauce. And I have made a lot of it, so much, in fact that I use it in my oatmeal porridge instead of milk. Every evening I phone my wife of 67 years, who is in a local new Long Term facility: we chat and sing Dutch Psalms and Hymns together, learned in our youth, and always pray: there always is a lot to pray for. I no longer am allowed to visit her in her private room, but I see her every Wednesday for 30 minutes seated some 5 feet apart. That requires a Virus test every other week, obtained some 40 km away by appointment, strictly adhered to.

Our five children are fantastic, especially our oldest daughter and her husband who come every mid-week for a few days; others visit on weekends or phone. So, yes, considering the testing times, I am doing very well and so does our extended family now multiplied from just the 2 of us in 1953 to 39 today, including 6 great-grandchildren, who grow up in a time much more challenging than when my wife and I married.

And that fills me with a degree of anxiety.

The Times, they are a’changing.

Suffice it to say that we now live in a different world, where, sorry to say, matters will never, ever, get better. During the 1940-45 war I was a teenager in the Netherlands. Then there always was the real prospect of ‘liberation’ and “after the war” to look forward to. Sorry, but such an optimistic vision can no longer be expected, except for The Coming of the Lord.

Now normal life—shopping for food, holding a meeting, going to work, seeing my wife – has shifted dramatically. The world feels different, with every assumption about safety and predictability upended. Will our grandchildren be able to keep their jobs? Will they ever ride a subway again, or take a plane? Now everybody keeps an anxious eye on the ocean and the growing intensity of hurricanes, this week with  two storms reinforcing each other. Now everybody is afraid that our TV and radio will beep the threat of tornadoes and unexpected ferocious windstorms of the kind that fell on Iowa and Illinois. And what does an ice-free North Pole mean for weather events? Is the Covid-19 the beginning of a series of pandemics as Global Warming and denuded forests unleash more of the same?

I am afraid that the year 2020 is the start of increasing global perils, because humans have fundamentally altered the physical workings of planet Earth. Don’t count on a massive conversion because, even Come Hell or High Water, human nature will not change in spite of scores of books and articles full of warnings. We, all of us, live in denial. Arctic News makes abundantly clear that we already have exceeded the TWO DEGREES Celsius threshold. Trees are life. No trees mean death. A plague of tiny mountain pine beetles, no bigger than a grain of rice, has already destroyed 15 years of log supplies in British Columbia, enough trees to build 9 million single-family homes. They now are chewing through forests in Alberta and Canada’s Northwest, while an outbreak of spruce beetles is devouring forests in the USA and are decimating supplies in parts of Europe. Hosea 8:7 has become a well-known proverb: “We have sown the wind and we now reap the storm, whirlwind, hurricane, whatever.”

Nothing happens in isolation.

Climate turmoil does not happen in isolation: it also happens to affect people in a negative way. Hot weather gives birth to hot tempers and irrational conduct. Stormy weather and natural disasters are not only property destructive, but also lead to strained relationships. Add Covid-19 to the mix, and anything can happen, including an Economic Depression. That’s the reality. But, as T. S. Eliot once said, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” Reality is confronting us and it does not look pretty. Suppose, suppose that Trump is re-elected, or contests the results! Two of our daughters live in the US. Eight of our 13 grandchildren reside there. They all are doing well. Even as reality continues to intrude, President Trump has either largely dismissed or ignored his science and medical advisers. And the result is that the economy, the one thing he seems to care most about, and which he hoped would escort him to a second term, has been devastated. The VIRUS cannot be wished away, cannot be ignored. There’s an enormous difference between the US attitude and the rest of the Western world.

Bad as the virus has been this summer, it actually spreads better in low temperatures, and when temperatures fall, more people will be in poorly ventilated areas where transmission is more likely. If the U.S. goes into the fall with new daily cases in the tens of thousands, as they are now, then the numbers could explode and the Morgan Stanley prediction of 150,000 new infections could come true. Considering our containment efforts to date, there is little reason for optimism.

I repeat: We live in totally new times.

It seems that all possible disasters are converging on us. Look at the USA: There the perils of decades of fast food breeding obesity, decades of building spacious subdivisions, making mass transportation and biking or walking to work impossible, decades of under investments in education and hospitals are now emerging. In the wider world, decades of earth-exploitation everywhere, on land, in seas, in the air, are crying for revenge.

The bitter truth is that in the USA, so long as COVID-19 continues to spread at a rate of more than 50,000 new cases per day, the virus will continue to act as a deadweight on the economy, depressing productivity — and total economic output — to well below pre-crisis levels.

Writes John Mauldin in his weekly report, quoting Dr. George Friedman, geopolitical forecaster,

Bottom of Form

“I have argued that unless a solution is found by September, the probability that the recession could turn into a depression would mount. A recession is a normal part of the economy, a primarily financial event that imposes disciplines on an overheated economy. A depression, from a geopolitical standpoint, involves the physical destruction of the economy, something that lays waste to businesses, dislocates labor and vaporizes capital. A recession is the economy cycling. A depression is an economy breaking.

Just for the record, there have been five depressions in the history of the US: 1807–1814; 1837–1844; 1873–1879; 1893–1898; 1929–1941. Note the frequency. We haven’t had a depression for 80 years! But today everything, everywhere among humanity and in nature, is under pressure, a phenomenon unique in all of history, but we live in denial, have shut our minds for the total onslaught that’s looming.

Call me a pessimist. Call me nuts. Call me anything. But reality does not lie: HELL and HIGH WATER are just the start.

Top of Form

AUGUST 14 2020

TINA?

TINA is the new-old-acronym. Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady of England, casted the expression when she proclaimed: “There Is No Alternative” (to the Capitalistic system.) And, yes, the terrible truth is that she was right: we live and die with our existing economic enterprises because ‘There Is No Alternative’.

 Thus TINA really indicates that we have been suckered, been bamboozled, been falsely fooled. Our entire economy – a word of Greek origin, meaning ‘the law of the land, of the oikos, the house, the world in which we dwell – has been constructed on the faulty premise that ONLY an oil-based society can give us the luxuries we crave. The underlying assumption always has been that the earth can be exploited ‘ad infinitum’ on the erroneous assumption that it has endless resources and constant cosmic  cooperation. We now are discovering that our curse is TINA because all our eggs are in the Carbon Basket.

A New Paradigm Needed.

As the TINA ‘truth’ has been exposed as basically flawed, the time is ripe for a new paradigm, a totally different set of rules, to be applied to all of society, including the church, because also our theological themes no longer work: we, Christians, have nothing to say anymore to society, because we too have adopted the TINA theology and have integrated ourselves with the ruling reign whose only outcome is death. Electronic speed has replaced reflection and meditation. Instead of carefully cultivating and then expanding our religious heritage, we have stuck to the old. Alienated from the cosmos that fashioned us, we have succumbed to the machine, and so have become the machine, witness our church buildings with it paved parking lots.

The Plague.

You and I know that a plague is roaming the land, easily recognized by the masks we wear. The real mask our society is hiding is the revenge we undergo by a retaliating earth, because violence begets violence. The cure for that is not a mask: it’s the opposite of one: we must expose our real face, our destructive conduct, our suicidal bent. We must publicly confess the harm we did and daily do to God’s earth and thus to God before we can attack the Pandemic.

The naked truth is that our face-covering is a sure symbol of the sickness and curse we have inflicted on the cosmos. We have to deal with that masquerade first before we can find a cure for the VIRUS. As a human race we must confess – and the church must initiate that process – that we have been wrong, that we cannot return to the old system because it is killing God. We must admit that this gradual TINA process has altered our religious nature.

In our demystified and secularized world there, apparently, is no longer a place for the idea of God: that is too old-fashioned, too humiliating, because it fosters dependency and challenges our humanity, even though we conveniently forget our total reliance on fossil fuels. Still there is a kernel of truth here: we no longer can use the church as a crutch. The current anti-gathering situation is testing that concept, and clamors for a new beginning and a new language. That too needs reflection and communal consultation, because the price for ‘progress’ is too steep, the cost for continuing means certain death as it requires the End of Nature and the acceleration of our dehumanization. Failure to implement this means the end of the church as we know it.

Enter Le Mileu Divin.

 This past week my attention became focused on a Roman Catholic Priest, born in France in 1881: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. I remembered that I had a book by him, bought many decades ago, as it still had a 75 cent price tag, and was never read.

What a treasure! I increasingly see God’s guidance in my life. The book, in English, sports the French title because the word ‘milieu’ is difficult to translate. “Milieu” means more than ‘environment’, means more than a social sphere, more than different societal classes: it’s all of that and more. “Milieu Divin” indicates that the world in which we live and move and have our being, is holy, is God’s precious work of Art.

And it is exactly there where the ALTERNATIVE lies. Teilhard, at the conclusion of his book, writes, “One day, the Gospel tells us, the tension gradually accumulating between humanity and God will touch the limits prescribed by the possibilities of the world. And then will come to end.” (As an aside: this erudite priest wrote this in 1927 while teaching in China.)

TINA has a certain limit. Exactly because “There Is No Alternative”, that limit is fast approaching, that END is very near. Teilhard, in good Calvinistic fashion also wrote, “The whole process out of which the New Earth is gradually born is an aggregation underlaid by a segregation”. That needs some clarification: ‘aggregation’ means making a ‘whole’ from separate parts. ‘Segregation’ indicates separation from that ‘whole’. God will make everything ‘whole’ and entrust this wholeness to those who have NOW worked for that ‘wholeness’.

That is the message, the ‘new’ message the church has to proclaim will it be relevant.

Teilhard, who has a doctorate in paleontology, the study of fossil animals and plants, connects traditional concepts with his scientific insights. In his Le Milieu Divin, his Divine Milieu, he convincingly argues that we must detect God everywhere in the Universe, inspired by Paul’s writing in Colossians 1: 15-20, where it says that “In Christ all things (Ta Panta) hold together,” and in Acts 17, “For in Him (Christ) we live and move and have our being.” For Teilhard God is a self-revealing, comprehensive reality, not merely an unknowable idea.

      Just before he died in New York City in 1955 at the age of 74, he wrote, “The joy and strength of my life will have lain in the realization that when the two ingredients – God and the world – were brought together they set up an endless mutual reaction, producing a sudden blaze of such brilliance that all the depth of the world were lit up for me.”

      Ever the obedient priest, but also a professional paleontologist he refrained from writing his evolutionary findings when Rome forbade him to publish them.

      Teilhard very much echoes Bonhoeffer and J.H. Bavinck. I do well to quote Bonhoeffer here who too was a visionary person. He wrote, “God is either 100 Percent real in the world or not at all: there is no third possibility. God’s reality cannot be divided into religion on the one hand and reality on the other….It is impossible to experience the reality of God without the reality of the world, or he reality of the world without the reality of God….Worldly existence and Christian existence are not simply two sides of a coin but they are at one and the same time the whole coin. If this is not the case the church degenerates into a ‘religious society’ fighting for its own existence and thus automatically no longer God’s church in the world…. Without God, without humanity we lose the earth: God, Humanity and the Earth belong together.”

      J. H. Bavinck, in his Between the Beginning and the End: A Radical Kingdom Vision, writes that our salvation and the salvation of the cosmos, go hand in hand: we can’t have one without the other.

      Is TINA, is There is No Alternative, absolute?

      No. There is an Alternative. Instead of fondly favoring fossil fuels, we must seek God’s favor, confessing, “God, I have sinned, and from now on falteringly and even hesitantly, I will try to have an alternative life-style, loving God’s earth in word and deed, loving myself, and my neighbor, and wholeheartedly live in the hope of the New Creation.”

 August 5 2020

Always plan for the
worst case scenario

Forty-five years ago – 1975 – our family moved to the municipality of Tweed, about midway Toronto-Ottawa, both some 200 km away, too far to walk. That was a time when many others too left the city and sought refuge far away from ‘the energy crisis’ and $150 oil price barrel. I sold my insurance business and surrendered my Real Estate brokerage in St. Catharines, Ontario, and bought 50 acres of mostly woods and rocks. There I built an energy efficient house into a hill sloping south, passive solar, with 2 storeys facing South, having large windows there, and one storey in the North, with only a small window. I also fashioned insulated shutters, used only in extreme cold conditions. Oh, yes, heated with wood, of course. Planted a large vegetable garden, still producing great crops.

Yes, I certainly planned ahead, later bought solar panels for personal use and also installed a frost-free handpump on a well that can pump 150 liters per minute!

Over the years many drifted back to the City, as making a living in rural Eastern Ontario proved too daunting. I stuck it out, living on some savings, doing some teaching, taking the university courses required for my appraising accreditation, writing master theses on a single-family dwelling, a 12-unit apartment building and an industrial property, 100 pages each, thus qualifying for commercial real estate fee appraiser.

I was fortunate that the area where I lived, the center and north of the county of Hastings adjoining Haliburton to the north-west, had no accredited appraiser, so I had a huge territory all to myself. Over the years I hired three residential appraisers, each specializing in their area. I did well.

Always plan for the
worst case scenario

I sincerely believe that the last Bible book, Revelation, gives us an outline of what is imminent, tells us what is on the verge of being ‘revealed’, especially in the later chapters. The book’s basic message is that ‘the true nature of human enterprise will be laid bare’. Granted, the book has some mysterious passages, too obscure to explain, such as the number game, 666, and that Thousand Year period, but there are certain happenings that apply to today and tomorrow. The Good News here is not good, except for the very ending: The New Creation emerges out of the chaos caused by you and me.

The Last Things.

In Revelation 15: 5 till 16: 21 the last things are set into motion. The picture John provides us with is a sad succession of disasters, reminding us of what happened in Egypt during the ancient Pharaoh regime, but much more intense and dangerous.

Today we experience Revelation in motion, with weather calamities having cosmic implications, as even the sun and the earth take part. The outcome is our present Pandemic, producing panic in the planet’s population, while deadly droughts, hellish heat, ferocious floods and legions of locusts are devastating crops world-wide.

And more to come. The Bible, in numerous places, tells us that the culmination of the natural disasters and the pinnacle of pain is caused by an earthquake (16: 18) “No earthquake like it has ever occurred since man has been on earth.” The seismographs everywhere shake wildly and record numbers are recorded, beyond any ever registered: the houses tumble, the office towers collapse, the highway bridges crumble. No human technological expertise is any help. Nothing can withstand this force of nature: no nuclear bomb has this devastating power.

Now an endless series of ever more frightening events roll over the world.

Revelation reveals two types of distress: there are calamities that originate from above, that find their source in nature and there are those that are the result of human action. Revelation only elaborates on the first type. It is as if the tamed earth, given by God as a gift to humanity as its own domain, is now rebelling, is now rising up against her tormentor. It is as if nature that, for so long, for so many centuries, has faithfully furnished humanity with all its needs, has now become an enemy and full of fury has thrown itself upon humanity.

Yes, we live in the Last Days.

I am convinced that humanity’s days are numbered. We are literally living in the Last Days. Of course, the entire New Testament has been written with that in mind. Right after Pentecost the small Christian congregation lived in that expectation, sold what they had, shared in-common, daily expecting Christ’s return.

That urgency has disappeared over the millennia. It seems to me that the Lord is awaiting the outcome of human ingenuity, having no doubt that sooner or later we would succeed in eliminating our own race. And that’s what is happening now.

I also think that God, in his mercy will lend a helping hand, perhaps causing a Coronal Mass Ejection: a disastrous CME, a geomagnetic storm, when millions of tons of charged particles thrown off by the sun slam into Earth’s magnetosphere, and cause all sorts of chaos.

It happened on September 2 1859, just before the US Civil War, when electricity was nearly non-existing. The few transformers around then melted. Today these induced currents would cause world-wide chaos: all electrical grids would topple and all satellites would disappear. Just imagine the global gutting of all electrical systems. We already have a pandemic; huge earthquakes are overdue, and a severe CME would paralyze all life on earth instantly. The chance of a CME is as great as being hit by a Pandemic!

Already the weather has become a factor: Arctic sea ice could disappear completely before October 1. What that means is that the huge deposits of Methane there could suddenly be released and cause a sudden 4 Degree Celsius spike in the world’s temperature, already at a historic high.

PLAN AHEAD!

Always plan for the
worst case scenario

 

There’s only one scenario possible today: the worst case. Plan for it. Is preparation still possible? It is like dying. We always live with death because, as the saying goes, it is inevitable. We simply have to keep death in mind, our own death and death of Our Way of Life, which, we all know, has truly become The Way of Death.

So, what must we do?

There is no way to escape the outcome. That must be our primary admission: we have come at the end of the road. Climate calamities will only accelerate, economic advancement today goes contrary to all common sense, and yet this is what politicians advocate.  

After consciously admitting that we are at the end of what we used to call civilization, we then must – and I emphasize the word ‘must’ – live in such a manner as if eternal life is already here.

The most telling text of the entire book of Revelation, is found in its very last chapter: Revelation 22: 11, “Let those who do wrong, let them do wrong even more, let those who do vile, let them continue to do more so; let those who do right continue to do right; and let those who are holy continue to be holy.”

That is the naked truth. The mask has to go, the secret must be unveiled, everything must in the end become what it always has been already.

Humanity is being be hit exactly there where it imagines itself to be the strongest, in its technical knowhow and in its mastery over nature. Nature is falling upon the human race as a provoked lion, and will breach all the constrains humanity has laid upon it, exploding into extraordinary catastrophes, earthquakes, floods, failed harvests, pandemics, threatening to cause the dissolution of human society.

If all else fails, make war. Donald Trump loves his nukes while, driven by radical ideology Pompeo and Pence see themselves as God’s chosen to bring on Rapture and Armageddon! Their followers sooner destroy themselves than admit defeat; they will only become more spiteful in their hatred, more determined in their powerlessness, more relentless in their rage.

Indeed, “Let those who do wrong, let them do wrong even more, let those who do vile, let them continue to do more so; let those who do right continue to do right; and let those who are holy continue to be holy.”

Always plan for the worst case scenario, but after DARK DAYS a NEW DAY dawns.

July 25 2020

LOVE: IMPOSSIBLE?

I have been thinking about LOVE lately. “All we need is LOVE”, the Beatles sang.  C. S. Lewis, in his “The Four Loves”, said that some people are glad the English language uses both the words “love” and “like.” He says his own generation was told not to say “I love strawberries,” but to use the work “like” in that instance. Lewis talks about loves in terms of Affection, Friendship, Eros, and Charity. His true message is that the four are almost always intertwined and that they are at their most intense and satisfying level when they are connected to a love for God.

That is the angle I want to explore, and I have come to a startling and disconcerting conclusion, so disconcerting that I hesitate to come to a final verdict. It most certainly remains a point of debate.

Love and Like. Biblical examples.

 Thanks to my classical schooling – Latin for 6 years and Greek for 5 years – I can read the New Testament in its original Greek and distinguish the four kinds of LOVE: Agape, Philo, Eros, Caritas, two of them evident in John 21.

When Jesus, after his resurrection, met with his closest followers on the shore of The Sea of Galilee, related in John 21: 15-17, he specifically addressed Peter who had denied him three times. This passage illustrates two types of LOVE in the Greek language, perhaps best translated as Love and Like. Jesus, pointblank, asked Peter, “Do you love me”, using the AGAPE – the unconditional ‘love’ verb. Peter answers Jesus with a different verb for love – philo – which expresses the love one has for a friend, sort of ‘like’, have affection for. Jesus, the second time uses ‘agape’ again (do you really, really love me) and Peter again answers with philo or ‘like’. Jesus then too switches to philo and Peter confirms this. The tempestuous Peter has become temperate.

How do we love God?

“God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them”. (1 John 4: 16). Jesus in Mark 12: 30, spells it out: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength”. Jesus here echoes Deuteronomy 6: 5 which has exactly the same wording. In both instances the equivalent of AGAPE is used. Jesus tells us that loving God is an all-consuming matter that’s why the ‘all’ ‘and’ is repeated three times.

This begs the question: HOW DO WE LOVE GOD? There is a definite creation-love connection, based on John 3: 16,”For God so loved (agape) the world that he  gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” I believe that this is the only other instance, apart from declaring his love for his Son, when God expresses this utmost emotion: love, in this case love for his creation.

Of course, there is 1 Corinthians 13, that famous chapter on LOVE.

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, (Agape used throughout) I am only a ringing gong or a clanging cymbal.  If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have absolute faith so as to move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.  If I give all I possess to the poor and exult in the surrender of my body, but have not love, I gain nothing.

And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of these is love.

Words come cheap: deeds are decisive. When we say we love God, then this needs clarification, hence a little detour. I have a Van Gogh biography, a most depressing book. He and his father, a Protestant minister, were constantly in conflict, especially because of his aim in life: to become a fulltime painter. He tried to follow in his father’s footsteps, becoming an evangelist worker in London of all places, but that did not last long. He was as stubborn and stupid as his parents were. However today we don’t treasure ‘Vincent’ – that’s how he signed his paintings – because of his character – depressive – and his living habits – he killed himself – but because he produced marvelous artwork, now trading in the tens of millions of dollars.

All great artists are valued by their works: Rembrandt, Bach, Shakespeare: we couldn’t care less about their personalities. God too, is and remains a mystery. The Old Testament depicts God as very human, caring, forgiving, but also vengeful and angry, but in the New Testament God is pictured differently: he is ‘invisible’: “God lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see.” (1 Tim. 6: 16). Yet we must love him, unconditionally, the AGAPE way. So how do we love him? We love him, the invisible Creator, as we love all great artists, by his works: his creation is the utmost in everything.

Practical Implications.

Back to 1 Corinthians 13.

Paul, in his letters, always warns against backsliding to the Jewish rituals, outlined in the Mosaic ordinances, such as circumcision and temple worship. He brought a new message: not LAW but LOVE. We, too, prefer the easy way out: we still want to go to heaven so that we can abuse the earth. Forget it: that’s 19^th and 20^th Century stuff, basically Gnostic Paganism. Jesus died to make a New Earth under a New Heaven possible, because God so loved the world, the cosmos, the universe. We too must love what God loves, that really means LOVING CREATION the AGAPE way, unconditionally, without any hesitation, whole-heartedly, with all the power and intellect and human strength we possess.

That is my conclusion, and I wonder whether that is still possible. Today, whatever we do, from birth to death, from our rising in the morning to our resting at night, we do the opposite of God’s love commandment in regard to creation.    

The problem  is that loving God and loving his creation is the key to eternity: that is my ultimate conclusion, but that has tremendous implications, scary and impossible.

“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not LOVE FOR GOD AND CREATION, I am only a ringing gong or a clanging cymbal. 

If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have absolute faith so as to move mountains, but have not LOVE FOR GOD AND CREATION, I am nothing. 

If I give all I possess to the poor and exult in the surrender of my body, but have not LOVE FOR GOD AND CREATION, I gain nothing.
 

LOVE FOR GOD AND CREATION is the key to eternal life, the key to THE NEW COSMOS. Jesus died to regain PARADISE, the Garden of Eden. Love for creation extinguishes the boundaries between all religious expressions: Islam, Judaism, Roman Catholic, Protestant, Hinduism, Buddhism, even the atheist, perhaps especially the atheist!

Impossible? A pipedream? Difficult today? Yes, but it explains Jesus’ words, “Many are called, few are chosen”, (Matthew 22:14) and “Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” (Luke 18:8), because today it is impossible to live totally in line with ‘perfection’. Matthew 5: 48 tells us, “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect”. The Greek word used for perfect is ‘teleios’, meaning that in all we do we must keep the ‘telos’, the far-away ‘end’ in mind, a word we daily use in ‘tele-phone’, ‘tele-vision’, and ‘tele-commuting.’

LOVE: STILL POSSIBLE?

“Work out your salvation with fear and trembling”, (Philippians 2: 12). Salvation is not something to take for granted. Jesus gave his life to buy back creation. Is salvation still possible today?

Lord have mercy! Pray without ceasing. Live to do the impossible. Save creation. Ora et Labora.