Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

AUGUST 24 2019

ON LIFE AFTER DEATH – C.G. JUNG.

There are too many signs that the damage we have done to the earth has brought us to the point where we have to seriously consider whether there is life after our death as the human species. Many of us are starting to realize that we live in a FINITE EARTH. Of course the earth will not disappear: it will last forever, but we won’t. We would have if we had been responsible owners, but we have fouled our own nest.

Owners you say? Yes, there is a text for that: Psalms 115: 16 says, “The highest heavens belong to the Lord, but the earth he has given to humanity.” That’s us. We own the planet and the air around it.

Somehow the Bible recognizes three heavens (see 2 Cor. 12): the lower part, the space beneath the Ozone layer, which we now have saturated with CO2 and Methane, and where we fly our machines; the second heaven is where we send our satellites and other instruments: that too has been given to us. “But the highest heavens belong to the Lord”. There’s where he dwells, beyond the stars and planets, and here I come to a point where I disagree with most: upon death we are not going to the Highest Heaven where God dwells: that’s plain heresy. The heaven adherents don’t know the Bible. Paul, the apostle, writes, “God lives in inapproachable light, whom nobody has seen or can see.” John 3: 13 affirms that nobody has ever gone to heaven except Jesus who came from there. Harold Bloom, of THE AMERICAN RELIGION fame, calls these ‘heaven’ people, “The Know-Nothing church goers,” which, sorry to say, applies to most.

OK, enough heresy-bashing, enough condemning this heaven nonsense, but, oh, oh, it is so ingrained in church lore that it is almost impossible to eradicate.

I once sent my book DAY WITHOUT END (imagining eternity on earth) to a literary agent. He liked the writing, but wrote that the concept is so alien to the reading public, that it will never sell. Eerdmans, who published four of my translations, also refused to touch it.

Yet, the idea of perfect living on earth is immensely appealing. After all, our task, as human beings, given to us in the Garden of Eden, is to lovingly and intelligently explore creation: an unending assignment.

Both Jews and Christians, affirmed in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, are told, “Love the Lord with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength”. In other words, all our faculties must be intimately and totally and comprehensively involved in loving God: not only musically and devotionally, but also physically, emotionally, artistically, and intellectually. Somehow we’ve got the idea that singing and praying and passively pew occupying is the prerogative: it is not.

One of the maxims drilled into me as a young man, was “Soli Deo Gloria”, “Do everything to the Glory of God”.

And that ‘everything’ includes loving his creation. That’s primarily how we love God. We build museums to honor the great artists of the world; we build concert halls to celebrate the music of the great composers; we build theaters to showcase Shakespeare and Shaw: the earth is God’s creative museum, his work of art, his ultimate masterpiece, showing his infinity: our task is to pay tribute, explore, honor AND love God for this gift.

Just look at the universe: Nature arranges matter and energy and manages forces that even the most learned physicist must acknowledge are beyond our capacity to understand. A simple question: What is more impressive, a human-made skyscraper or the complex interactions we find in a square inch of soil? What mystifies us more, the internet or the call of a bird? Nature creates at a much profounder level than humans are capable of, and we would be well-advised not to seek power over it but find power with it.

What have we done?

Don’t get me going what we have done to the earth. We have treated it worse than our vilest enemy: we have abused everything to the point of collapse, and, instead of mending our ways, and humbly admit that we have been wrong, like fanatic fools we are affirming our efforts.

Greta Thunberg, a Swedish teenager, is sailing across the Atlantic this week: sailing! wind power! Her coming reminds me of the fable of The Emperor’s New Clothes. Here it is:

“Everyone in the world with a grain of common sense, knows that the Emperor is walking around as naked as a jaybird, but no one’s behavior changes even though the signs are everywhere, nor would behavior change just because a couple of people whisper their doubts to each other, creating pockets of public knowledge that the Emperor is naked. No, the only thing that could change public behavior, is when the little girl (in this case perhaps Greta Thunberg) announces the Emperor’s nudity loudly enough so that the entire crowd believes that everyone else in the crowd heard the news.” 

The real news is that Capitalism, Infinite Growth, our celebrated Western Economy, our fiat money mess is self-destructing, is a death-culture, and has not a shred of viability left.

Everything is coming out in the open, the main theme of the last Bible Book, Revelation. Look at Harvey Weinstein. Apparently it was no great secret that he abused many women for decades, but only now is this finally being revealed. Or the Epstein episode, a matter that also has been going on for years, and now, exactly now, has come to a head. The consequences of his death reach all the way to the British Royal Family.

And that brings me to Carl Jung, the world’s most famous psychoanalyst.

I am still digesting his 530 page, 157,000 words Autobiography. Here are some excerpts on what he writes

On Life after Death.

“What I have to tell about the hereafter, and about life after death, consists entirely of memories, of images in which I have lived and of thoughts which have buffeted me. These memories in a way also underlie my works; for the latter are fundamentally nothing but attempts, ever renewed, to give an answer to the question of the interplay between the “here” and the “hereafter.” Yet I have written expressly about a life after death; for then I would have had to document my ideas, and I have no way of doing that. Be that as it may, I would like to state my ideas now.

“We cannot visualize another world ruled by quite other laws, the reason being that we live in a specific world which has helped to shape our minds and establish our basic psychic conditions. We are strictly limited by our innate structure and therefore bound by our whole being and thinking to this world of ours. Mythic man, to be sure, demands a “going beyond all that” but scientific man cannot permit this. To the intellect, all my mythologizing is futile speculation. To the emotions, however, it is a healing and valid activity; it gives existence a glamour which we would not like to do without. Nor is there any good reason why we should.”

Let me interrupt there, and re-iterate his words, “The interplay between the ‘here’ and the ‘hereafter’. I believe that there is an intimate connection between these two: the ‘here’ determines the ‘hereafter’: our lives are the proving grounds for eternity.

If I understand Jung correctly, then rationally we cannot grasp eternity, buy emotionally believing in an afterlife is healing.

Again Jung:

“Leaving aside the rational arguments against any certainty in these matters, we must not forget that for most people it means a great deal to assume that their lives will have an indefinite continuity beyond their present existence. They live more sensibly, feel better, and are more at peace. One has centuries, one has an inconceivable period of time at one’s disposal. What then is the point of this senseless mad rush?

“Naturally, such reasoning does not apply to everyone. There are people who feel no craving for immortality, and who shudder at the thought of sitting on a cloud and playing the harp for ten thousand years! There are also quite a few who have been so buffeted by life, or who feel such disgust for their own existence, that they far prefer absolute cessation to continuance. But in the majority of cases the question of immortality is so urgent, so immediate, and also so ineradicable that we must make an effort to form some sort of view about it. But how?”

(Here again that “heaven” thing, recalling the song “Amazing Grace”, and the line, “When we’ve been there 10,000 years etc.)

“My hypothesis is that we can do so with the aid of hints sent to us from the unconscious in dreams, for example. Usually we dismiss these hints because we are convinced that the question is not susceptible to answer. In response to this understandable skepticism, I suggest the following considerations. If there is something we cannot know, we must necessarily abandon it as an intellectual problem. … Therefore I must drop this question as a scientific or intellectual problem. But if an idea about it is offered to me in dreams or in mythic traditions I ought to take note of it. I even ought to build up a conception on the basis of such hints, even though it will forever remain a hypothesis which I know cannot be proved. A man should be able to say he has done his best to form a conception of life after death, or to create some image of it-even if he must confess his failure. Not to have done so is a vital loss. For the question that is posed to him is the age-old heritage of humanity: an archetype, rich in secret life, which seeks to add itself to our own individual life in order to make it whole. Reason sets the boundaries far too narrowly for us, and would have us accept only the known and that too with limitations and live in a known framework, just as if we were sure how far life actually extends. As a matter of fact, day after day we live far beyond the bounds of our consciousness; without our knowledge, the life of the unconscious is also going on within us. The more the critical reason dominates, the more impoverished life becomes; but the more of the unconscious, and the more of myth we are capable of making conscious, the more of life we integrate. Overvalued reason has this in common with political absolutism: under its dominion the individual is pauperized.”

So far Jung.

Read the book: it’s free on the web. Full text of “Memories, Dreams, Reflections Carl Jung“

In the end Jung believes that he will return, after death, as a psyche, a soul, sadly succumbing to this ancient Gnostic notion. He had no idea that Jesus died to restore Creation: that’s the entire point of the Scriptures!!

Me, I have done a lot of thinking on Eternity. My ideas can be found in DAY WITHOUT END, basically a dream, verging on reality, in my humble opinion. Frankly it is a better read that Jung’s version of life after death: it even has some love stories. Some groups have made it a point of discussion. You can obtain hard copies from LULU.com.

The age-old question, “How then shall we live?”

Peter’s plea comes to mind,

”But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, in which the heavens will pass away with a roar and the elements will be destroyed with intense heat, and the earth and its works will be burned up.

Since all these things are to be destroyed in this way, what sort of people ought you to be in holy conduct and godliness, looking for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be destroyed by burning, and the elements will melt with intense heat! But according to His promise we are looking for new heavens and a new earth, in which righteousness dwells.

                                             2 Peter 3:10-13

With the Arctic ablaze, Siberia burning and more than 75,000 fires in the Amazon rain forests alone this year, it is not difficult to believe Peter’s prophecy.

AUGUST 17 2019

HOPE      

Perhaps I have been pretty judgemental on matters such as Climate Change. Perhaps I have sounded too pessimistic on our personal practises. Perhaps I have hinted too often that it is next to impossible to do the right thing, to live properly, in line with creation, cultivating a loving relationship with the world around us. I know in this day and age serving people and animals, plants and all created matter in an all embracing way, is something that has become nigh impossible as technology rules our lives and oil powers everything.

I guess I am hinting that living today calls for compromises.  

So what caused my different outlook?

Well….I’ve been reading a biography of Maimonides written by a Hebrew scholar and professor of Ethics, Abraham Joshua Heschel.

He made me see that it is not the big things that save us: it’s the little things.

Here’s what this great medieval Jewish thinker observed,

”During the Babylonian Exile, only the three companions of Daniel refused to worship the image of Nebuchadnezzar. All the other bowed to the idolatrous effigy. And never had any scholar called the Jews of this generation heathen, blasphemous or unfit to bear witness….Ahab, king of Israel, denied God. But because he once fasted with a pious intention, the Lord did not fail to reward him for this little deed. Eglon, king of the Moabites, afflicted Israel for years and years. But because he once paid homage to the Lord, God requited it. His descendants mounted the holy throne named after God. For Ruth, the ancestress of the dynasty of David, was Eglon’s daughter. Nebuchadnezzar had Jews massacred in great numbers, and he destroyed the divine temple. But he once paid tribute to God’s name, his rule lasted forty years, as long as that of Solomon. Esau, the transgressor, led a life of vice. He observed only one commandment: to honor his father. For this good work, he was recompensed: his descendants would keep their kingdom uninterruptedly until the Messianic Age, for it is a law of history that the Redeemer will not come until Esau has been rewarded for honoring his father. And if the Lord richly repays these evildoers for minor, insignificants works, shall he not credit Israel for secretly keeping the holy commandments, even if it is forced into sham apostasy? And should there be no difference between the man who does not do his duties and the man who does, between the man who serves God and the man who denies Him?”

I still have to get used to that line of reasoning, stern Calvinist I am.

So how do I see matters now, after reading this wise Jewish writer? For one thing: I trust Jewish writers: they have a grasp of the Old Testament unequalled among Biblical scholars. I know. I have a lot of books by Jewish rabbis. I also have some issues of the magazine TIKKUN, the Hebrew word for RENEWAL, and greatly appreciate Michael Lerner, the editor. One of my best friends was a Jewish Psychologist, Dr. Harold Goldsman who for years taught at Concordia University in Montreal, and later moved to Tweed, and Belleville where he became a consultant with the Board of Education.

Just like the Jews during the 70 years of exile were totally exposed to the Babylonian culture, but also were re-united with the original sources of the Salvation Story, we too are in exile, totally imprisoned by the oil-saturated economy, and we too now are starting to ask basic questions related to our ultimate redemption.

We today, anno 2019, are caught in the same position as the Jews in Babylon some 2500 years ago. We too have been forced to live a creation-destroying life style, worse than anything else before us, worse than under the Nebuchadnezzar rule, worse than under the Nazi Regime, because what is at stake today is God’s Holiness, his very being as expressed in creation.

Let’s be honest: no longer do we live in a democracy; no longer is our voice heard. In the dying days of our planet the plight of the cosmos is totally ignored by those in power, in parliaments, in corporations, among the wealthy elite and vested interests. We, the people, have become powerless, as, for all intents and purposes, vested interests have given up on the habitability of large parts of the Earth and on the survival of numerous species and future generations. As the Psalm time and again reiterate, “They have had their reward, they have their yachts and trophy wives.”

So, it’s beyond us to make a difference, that’s why it’s not the big, drastic changes that redeem us, but the tiny adjustments we make in our own lives.

But………

The ultimate condition is that our minds must be geared to The Kingdom, the Perfect World we yearn for, even though our actions can only be limited to what we personally can achieve.

Yesterday that meant quitting tobacco. Today, the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, recommends that we become vegetarian, which actually entails better health and longer lives.  

Yes, believe me, there are lots of little things we can do: despise plastic with a passion. And, of course, the 4 R’s: Reuse, Reduce, Recycle, Repair: that too contributes to the quality of life.

Start a journal. For 27 years I have written a daily journal based on a text from the lectionary: 400 words on weekdays, 800 on Sundays, scribbling in my tiny, almost impossible to read handwriting.

Some biographical details.

Looking back 70 years, I can’t quite remember what motivated me to come to Canada. My wife and I were engaged on August 31 1950 when we both were 22 years old. I then was serving in the Dutch Army as a conscripted sergeant-instructor. I was discharged in April 1951, well-educated after 16 years of schooling, but unfit for any specific profession.

Even last week, after almost 70 years, I have dreams that date back to that period, in which I desperately wondered how in the world I would ever be able to marry that beautiful woman to whom I am engaged, and be able to support her and have a family.

Then in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, thousands of my compatriots were emigrating, most of them to Canada, with the majority being of Reformed and Christian Reformed stock. So, influenced by ‘the spirit of the age’, by ‘cosmic resonance’, I joined the exodus and three months after my 18 months stint in the army, my younger brother and I were on the way to Canada, sailing in a luxury liner from Rotterdam to New York City, landing there on July 4 1951.

My fiancée arrived in September 1952 and we were married in June 1953. Instead of joining the much more conservative Netherlands Reformed Church in which we grew up, we became members of the much larger Christian Reformed Church.

Over the years I have become even more liberal in my thinking than most, especially in matters of theology, having made a U-turn on such matters as same-sex, seeing creation as God’s Primary Word, and becoming a fervent environmentalist.

That we, as a society have made the ultimate wrong turn was again confirmed when reading Dr. Jung’s autobiography, his 156,000 word, 530 pages tome, doing some 30 pages each day.

He too yearned for the old days, good in the way of being more ‘down to earth’. He writes of the home he built, “I have done without electricity, and tend the fireplace and stove myself. I light the old lamps. There is no running water, and I pump the water from the well. I chop the wood and cook the food. These simple acts make man simple; and how difficult it is to be simple.”

He started to build his place in the 1920’s and expanded it over the years. He died in 1962, before the onset, or perhaps the onslaught of technology, something that now is playing havoc with the very idea of ‘being human’.

I am not quite sure what C. G. Jung is hinting at when he writes that, “I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete or unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family, which is passed on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished. It is difficult to determine whether these questions are more of a personal or more of a general (collective) nature. It seems to me that the latter is the case.”

I had to look up the exact meaning of “karma”. My 2000 page Webster tells me that ‘karma’, a Hindu term, is “a cosmic principle according to which each person in this life or in reincarnation is rewarded or punished according to his deeds in the previous reincarnation”

That’s quite the mouthful. If I understand Jung correctly then it seems to me that our ancestors, both immediate and historic, have failed to come to terms with their ultimate destination.

I think I know what he is hinting at: my mother, on her deathbed asked me what comes after death, and struggled with this concept, apparently not happy with the ‘heaven’ thing. Not my oldest brother. The very last words he said to me when we saw each other for the last time “See you in heaven.”

Nietzsche, the ultimate rebel, always agitated against conventional Christianity, begging us to “remain true to the earth”.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “God cannot be understood without the earth, nor the earth without the God who has entered it in Jesus Christ.” Here I hear an echo of Nietzsche’s words: Remain true to the earth!

Bonhoeffer insisted that it takes creation to understand God. In his “Creation and Fall”, he wrote, “The human being is the human being who is taken from earth…. The earth is its mother…. It is God’s earth out of which humankind is taken….. Its bond with the earth belongs to its essential being. Human beings have their existence as existence on earth”.

Johan Herman Bavinck says essentially the same. In his “Between the Beginning and the End: a radical Kingdom Vision”, he writes,
“A long time ago, the Bible tells us, God fashioned the first human pair from the earth. The Hebrew word for soil is Adamah, from which Adam comes. The word adam reminded the Israelite immediately of the first Adam who was taken from the soil of the earth, hence the well-known saying: soil we are and to soil we shall return. Just as we have red clay and black soil, we too have people of different colors. The word ‘adam’ typifies the human race in its unbreakable unity. We all come from the earth and we all go back to the earth. Earth-bound we are, forever. We, the human beings, are adam, and belong to adamah, the life-bearing earth. With every sinew of our existence we are tied to the earth, which bears us and feeds us.”

I suspect that this is the “karma” Jung felt missing in him and his ancestors. The house he designed and built proves that.

In LIVING FAITH, a statement of Christian belief, my Presbyterian Church tells me that ‘we belong to God’. That is only a half-truth. Genesis 3: 19 says, affirming Bonhoeffer and Bavinck, “Earth we are and to earth we will return”.

We are fortunate that Nietzsche, Bonhoeffer and Bavinck have clarified this ‘KARMA’ concept for us. To me Karma indicates the new pristine Earth under a new heaven, where all space junk and satellites are swept away.

Believing in such a future gives us HOPE. Pursuing ‘heaven’ is a dead-end: however, the New Earth concept has a caveat: getting there starts HERE and NOW. HOPE means LIFE, LIFE FOREVER.

AUGUST 10 2019

THE FIERY RED HORSE AND THE OMINOUS BLACK ONE.

About three times per week I bike 12 km back and forth to the village’s Value Mart to buy groceries. I always take along my own shopping bags, and always in the line-up I see people needing plastic bags, sometimes 4 or 5. A few weeks ago a high school teacher I know also came without. She is the typical “Akratic”, “a person who knows the right thing to do but can’t help doing the opposite”.

She is living proof that, in spite of multiple warnings, hotter and hotter days, Arctic and Antarctic melting with ominous consequences for the planet, in spite of ever more urgent reminders from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the general public remains willfully ignorant.

A world in decline is a world ignoring the obvious; instead its people perpetuate the myth that all is well. Nothing is well, again confirmed in two mass shootings in 24 hours: anger, unresolved mental disarray, simplistic solutions to problems that have festered for decades.

Everything is connected to everything else. Environmental neglect leads to psychological trauma. In the USA, denial of medical coverage, a basic human right, causes mental cruelty, resulting in mass shootings. The tested Latin saying, Mens Sana in Corpore Sano, also holds true for the opposite, Mens Insano in Corpore Insano, an insane mind the result of an unhealthy body.  

All the News Is Bad

The United States has some 300 million guns and mass shooters every month. Americans – 5 % of the world’s population – own 40% of all guns in the world, more than all civilians combined in 25 other countries.

How come the USA is what it is?

I think it is a religious problem. It piously claims to be a Christian nation but, as Dr. Harold Bloom asserts in his THE AMERICAN RELIGION it has ceased to be Christian. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, upon leaving the US, after a brief stint at Columbia Theological Seminary, claimed that the USA has not seen a REFORMATION. The 1517 Reformation tied Christianity to all of life, while both the Roman Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist remained heaven oriented. The result is that in these denominations GNOSTICISM reigns, seeing the earth as evil, the globe as something to be abused.

When we exploit creation, we kill ourselves, and, since America still is the pace-setter in the world, it sets the tone for the world’s inhabitants, with its over-arching Information Technology industry, such as Google, Facebook and similar corporations. It now has become a culture where anything goes and nothing matters.

It’s not that there have been no warnings. Already in 1972 THE LIMITS OF GROWTH warned that we live in a finite earth where infinite growth is not possible.

In 1974 I bought, “An Inquiry into THE HUMAN PROSPECT”, by economist Robert L. Heilbroner, whose textbook I used when taking economics 101 at Queen’s University. He writes, “The industrial growth, so central to the economic and social life of capitalism and Western socialism alike will be forced to slow down, in all likelihood within a generation or two and will probably give way to decline thereafter………..Therefore the outlook involves what we may call “convulsive change” – change forced upon us by external events rather than by conscious choice, by catastrophe rather than by calculations.”

Wise man he is, he assumes that there will not be a voluntary effort to reduce consumption, and so, more than 45 years ago, he predicted the current situation. Remember that then there was no talk about Climate Change as yet, now rapidly overwhelming us.

In 1995 he revisited this theme in his new book, “VISIONS OF THE FUTURE”. He did not change his mind: on the contrary. He prescribed in 1995 that, “We can content ourselves with three propositions, of which only the first is indisputable: humankind must achieve a secure terrestrial base for life. The earth must be lovingly maintained, not consumed nor otherwise despoiled. The atmosphere, the waters and the fertility of the soil must be protected against poisoning of any kind from human activities…….Without such a stable foundation there seems little chance to attain a level of civilization unmistakably more advanced than our own.”    

Well……… Yes, Heilbroner was dead on.

We have done exactly the opposite and now we are stuck: there is no way back. We have chosen the Road Most Traveled, and have learned nothing.

A look at today.  

From the Tweed library I borrowed THE THIRD HORSEMAN, a book dealing with the 14^th Century. That was when after 400 years of mild and favorable weather, the so-called Medieval Warming Period (MWP) suddenly in 1316 in Europe the weather turned nasty: unending rains for months, washing away the topsoil, making it impossible to plant and harvest crops, so that millions of people died. That extended favorable period generated a population explosion that suddenly reversed itself for lack of food.

This wet weather, lasting some 7 years, in which millions of people starved to death, was followed by the Black Plague, which found a ready feeding ground among a weakened population, killing as much as 30 percent of the then small number by our standards, perhaps 30 million out of an estimated world-wide 100 million.

There’s a lesson for us. THE THIRD HORSEMAN has as subtitle, “Climate Change and the Great Famine of the 14^th Century”

William Rosen, the author, writes in conclusion, “The conditions that destroyed millions of lives during the seven years of the Great Famine appeared just after the four centuries of the Medieval Warming Period. (In Europe) from 900 to 1300 ten million grew to 30 million – and as the least productive acres were cultivated to feed them – the balance between producing food and consuming grew more fragile every year. By the time the North Atlantic Oscillation shifted, and the weather started to change, that balance could be destroyed by a strong wind.”

Dr. Heilbroner was so correct in his prophecy, when he wrote, “The earth must be lovingly maintained, not consumed nor otherwise despoiled. The atmosphere, the waters and the fertility of the soil must be protected against poisoning of any kind from human activities…….Without such a stable foundation there seems little chance to attain a level of civilization unmistakably more advanced than our own.”   

Today love for the Cosmos, so needed to maintain the earth, has vanished. I don’t want to recite what has happened in the last few decades: it is too well-known, although rarely admitted. We have become a people of the Lie. And the Liar-in-Chief is the President of the United States of America, who started his political career with a Lie, telling all that the then president, Obama, had not been born in the States but in Kenya. He then, as president, maintained that the crowd that greeted him was the greatest ever, in spite of graphic evidence to the contrary. Now his recorded lies run into the thousands. This and many other incidents portray his obvious moral vacuum, his profound spiritual black hole that lies beneath his persona and career.  

It is that NIHILISM that now drives not only him but a good portion of the USA, supposedly a city on the hill, a shining light, now a light so dimmed that the wick has become wicked, throwing off poisonous fumes, becoming a growing threat to its 330 million of people. All this will get worse as the majority of its ruling politicians even deny the existence of Climate Change.

Our earlier circumstances closely resemble the MWP, the Medieval Warming Period, which preceded the 14^th Century Famine. My lifetime coincides with the unprecedented growth in the world’s population, quadrupling since 1928, the year I was born, when OIL became food. It so happens that OIL is poisonous, poisons everything it touches, including our minds, including our religious consciousness: oil is king, oil is our idol, oil BURNS.   

The RED HORSE

In many ways we already witness ongoing destruction everywhere. God has given our generation a power over creation that borders on the unbelievable, endangering the entire human race. Secrets that were hidden for centuries from the human eyes are one after the other in our time being revealed, even in the very heights of heaven. It is as if God has now removed the blindfolds that prevented us from discovering the secrets of the universe. But also this fabulous force now in the hands of us small humans is increasingly becoming a factor of horrific threat.

Isn’t that too a sign that God has released the brakes that now allow us to employ the unlimited evil that dwells in all of us?

However this all may be, there is one fact that is true beyond dispute and that is that the Bible bases the tremendous acceleration of planetary peril on theological grounds. It cannot be simply understood as based on human thinking but can only be explained when we grasp something of the riddle of the rider on the RED HORSE. The American general MacArthur has seen this correctly when, on the day the Japanese delegation signed the conditions of surrender, he spoke the remarkable words: “If we do not devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door. The problem basically is theological.”

The RED HORSE signifies WAR. Of course. The most striking color of war is RED, as in ‘red hot’. Flames are red. War always involves FIRE. When our hometown was liberated from German occupation, the entire downtown area was ablaze.

Today the fires are different: they have come because we have changed the weather, making it so hot that we have fires everywhere, especially there where they never happened before, precisely where the methane is buried: the Arctic in Canada, Siberia and Greenland.

The fires occur because we are at war with creation. Every tree that burns has a double impact: one tree less to absorb CO2, while a tree aflame adds CO2. Trees, the lungs of the earth, are being decimated everywhere in the world: no country is excluded: a sure sign that we are engaged in a universal war.

Immediately after the RED HORSE, the BLACK HORSE arrives, its rider carrying in his hands a scale, and while he proceeds, there is a voice that says: “A quart of wheat for a day’s wages and three quarts of barley for a day’s wages.”

Both that scale and these words signify poverty, hunger and inflation. Money loses its value and the costs of the normal daily needs become dearer by the day. A quart of wheat then was about what one person needed to stay alive, which meant that a laborer by working could only earn enough to keep himself from starving, but not his family. Were he to use barley, instead of wheat, the situation would be more manageable, but even then it would be impossible to maintain a family. The prices mentioned here are about eight times the prices normal in those days.

In my life-time, thanks to natural-gas derived fertilizer and oil-based machinery, much of the workable growing soil has become nutrient deficient, while either drought – India, China, South America and Africa come to mind – or too much moisture – think about the USA Mid-West – has the potential of causing wide-spread crop failures.   

How long do we have left, and how bad will it get? David Wallace-Wells opens his book with a short, sharp reality check: ‘It’s worse, much worse, than you think.’ All the news is bad.

Once the methane in the Arctic erupts, we will have no more than a decade, and that decade will resemble the situation depicted in REVELATION: “Then I looked and saw a pale horse. Its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed close behind. And they were given authority over a fourth of the earth, to kill by sword, by famine, by plague, and by the beasts of the earth.”

“Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away. No one knows about that day or the hour, not even the angels in heaven, but only the Father.” (Matthew 24: 35-36).

AUGUST 3 2019

WE WORSHIP THE WRONG GOD

“We live at a time when our planet is becoming increasingly unstable and we are witnessing major earthquakes and enormous volcanic eruptions all over the globe on a daily basis now.

For a long time the United States had been spared, but on July 4th and 5th that suddenly changed.

Since that time, there have been more than 80,000 earthquakes in the state of California, and this is just the beginning of the shaking that is coming.”

L.A. Times, July 29 2019

The report continues to speculate that if California’s two major faults are affected the death toll would run into the thousands and damage into the trillions of dollars.

I should add that Revelation, that last Bible book, warns of an enormous quake heralding the End of Time.

We, as the human race are playing with more than fire: the delicate balance of planet earth is at stake. In the space of a few years, a bagatelle in earth-time, a few split seconds, we have caused trillions of tons of ice on both poles to disappear. This means that the carefully calibrated balance of the earth is wrenched out of kilter.

It reminds me of my back which occasionally gets screwed up. Fortunately we have an excellent chiropractor in the village whose services I can count on every other year or so. The Great Chiropractor in the sky – sorry about the somewhat uncouth comparison – will no longer intervene in the affairs of us, underlings because He “Is seeing what our end will be.” (Deuteronomy 31: 17).

This brings me to the recent Gwynne Dyer column in our humble Belleville Intelligencer Daily (in which I wrote a weekly column for 10 years). Its headline was “James Lovelock’s latest book foresees an approaching takeover by robots.”

Dr. Lovelock also predicts the demise of 80% of humanity, reducing the world population to perhaps 1.5 billion ‘humans’, all, by then, also robotic in appearance I suppose.

I agree with this learned man that we are at a cross roads. It’s “do or die” for the human race. No use any longer pretending. Lovelock is right. Humans are grandiosely failing to furnish a cure for the ills of the world. According to this well-known scientist, of GAIA fame, only benevolent, perfectly programmed machines, perfectly equipped with perfect artificial intelligence (A.I), will faultlessly function to make it possible for the best of the human race, carefully selected, of course, based on psychological and other tests, to be able to live (LIVE?) on a mechanical earth.

A tune plays through my head and words, so totally out of wack with Lovelock’s thesis that it almost sounds ludicrous:

Those the LORD has rescued will return. They will enter Zion with singing; everlasting joy will crown their heads. Gladness and joy will overtake them, and sorrow and sighing will flee away.

(Isaiah 51: 11)

We have entered a new phase in the earth, the very last phase, where aware humanity is grappling with the demise of everything that exists, including our very lives. This notion has not yet fully penetrated into humanity and, I presume, never will. What is certain is that nothing, nothing, nothing will be done – or can’t be done – to stop global demise: we have locked ourselves into a mode of life from where there is only one outcome: annihilation. 

What has happened is that we have bet on the wrong god.

Years ago a certain economist, by the name of E. F. Schumacher wrote Small is Beautiful.

In it he said that corporations have become so huge that they overpower democracies by creating a world-wide plutocracy solely geared to serve their own interests. Instead of growth that promotes LIFE, humanity must be subservient to economic GROWTH. And that’s what happened.

This anomaly has come about because we no longer regard ourselves as part of nature but as an outside force destined to dominate and conquer creation: thinking we are gods, superior to nature.

It is this mentality that has brought us where we are today: rather than live on the interest – the income we can derive from creation – we have squandered the capital, and now our irresponsible greed for ever greater economic speed has surpassed the possible limits and collapse is the next phase. That collapse will not only be material: it will involve everything: mental health, physical health, spiritual health, environmental health, economic health, ecological health, geographic health: not one facet of totality will be exempted.     

We simply “believed” that progress would continue forever. We simply “believed” that everything would keep getting better. We simply “believed” that tomorrow, next year, would see more prosperity, more income, more advances. We simply “believed” that the world will be great again.

Now that “faith” has been found wanting; the foundation on which we have built our life is crumbling, and we really don’t know how to handle this situation, this entirely new stage.

By our greedy grossness we have unleashed a monster, a beast so big, a danger so dire that it now dominates us and, instead of the masters we thought to be, we now are the slaves of the forces of nature, totally subject to the wiles of the weather.

Our political systems are not designed or capable to curtail our technological and economic ambitions, hamstrung as they are by our infinite inclination for more.   

James Lovelock is a good example of the perfect technocrat: his solution lies in Artificial Intelligence. We – so he reasons- have intellectually and religiously not kept pace. We have become dumber while only the brains of this world have the capability to find the solution: more technology.

A CRISIS SITUATION. 

Where did we go wrong?

Well, it goes back a long time. It all started with the TREE. We took creation for granted. We forgot that the purpose of life is not domination, but service.

The desecration of creation.

We have abandoned our awe and religious respect for creation. By and large we no longer are religious. By and large we no longer have a sense of anything that’s greater than us that we have to bow our knee to or that we have to humble ourselves before. Religion is something the old people do. Religion is something we do on Sundays for an hour. Perhaps. The number of people who darken the doors of the edifices are rapidly dwindling as they die off and not being replaced: their children and grandchildren don’t understand their rituals.

Part of the myth of progress that we believe in is the notion that we’re evolving beyond religion, but if we don’t have anything that we believe is beyond us then we become destroyers.

Go back we can’t. There’s nothing to go back to. The church preaches a fictional heaven, or Rapture.

So we go our merry way, having exotic vacations, where, thanks to our prosperity we escape to enclaves in a seemingly pristine places, a total illusion of course. We know we can’t go back to the world my grandparents enjoyed: we are trapped. Lovelock’s solution is no solution because he robs us of our humanity.

Here’s a quote from a book I have translated, THE RIDDLE OF LIFE, published by Eerdmans, Grand Rapids.

“Once we more closely have examined what goes on around us (in creation), then instead of mere admiration for the amazing newness of it all, we are struck even more by the unity and order that are evident everywhere, because everything on earth is somehow harmoniously connected to everything else. The one species influences the other and the one creature depends on the other. Plants cannot exist without the earth that feeds them. Animals, on the other hand, cannot function without plants, as these are often the sole source for their food.

The phenomena of day and night, of summer and winter, of rain and drought, of heat and cold, all are part of the grand chain of happenings, depending on where the sun happens to be and from where the wind blows. The one event influences another and yet the one cannot exist without the presence of the other.

By further investigation we discover that the order is one full of

purpose. The great connectedness of all these entities is at the same time the reason why the totality is served by it as well. We don’t even need to explore everything too deeply to discover the amazing fact that behind everything there is an invisible set of laws: that the one as it were serves to complete the other. The butterflies serve the flowers just as much as the flowers serve the butterflies. The sun, that big, beneficial celestial body, which from an immeasurable distance bathes the earth in multicolored splendor, is itself not conscious that from a distance of millions of miles it brings light and warmth. It is the sun that maintains life on earth. It is the sun that causes plants to sprout out of the moist earth. It is the sun that removes mourning and remakes it into merriment. If the sun had a mind of its own, then perhaps it would muse: I shine because that’s my nature: I delight in it; it’s the joy of my life. But it knows not that a Hand mightier than the sun has included it in the beautiful law of serving. Because, unknowingly, that so superior sun serves the tiny, tiny plant that full of life expectancy courageously stretches its stem to absorb its rays.

That little plant cannot think beyond its nature. It winks at the

sun and dreams of the joy that awaits it in a life of light and sunshine. But it has no inkling that it serves just as much as it is served by others. It serves the minuscule seeds it now carries and that later will form new plants. It serves the animal, looking for food, or is needed to help another plant using it as a crutch to climb higher. In manifold ways it serves other creatures that need support or shade or nourishment or moisture.

When we look around us with open eyes and minds, then there

is one thing that time and again touches us to the core: it’s all about serving. The law of serving is at the heart of every creature: it is the overarching purpose for every being. That law makes it possible for the entire world to exist. Every creature may think that it is there only for itself, but in the final analysis it is nothing else but a servant for others. To be alive, to exist at all, finds it destination simply in serving others. Without that law nothing else can be.”

YES, WE ARE THE SERVANTS IN CHIEF!

We are there, not to dominate but to serve. The great example always is Jesus Christ: “For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve others.” (Matthew 20:28)

ATONEMENT.

The people of Israel had a yearly day of ATONEMENT, a day especially set aside with prayer and fasting, to plead with Yahweh the creator, the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, for forgiveness.

Our own sins now are much greater: we have hurt God where it hurts the most: we have totally ruined his work of art.

In the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, God ordained this solemn ritual. “This is to be a lasting ordinance for you: Atonement is to be made once a year for all the sins of the Israelites.” (Leviticus 16: 34).

This was the only time the High Priest was allowed to enter the Holy of Holies, an indication how tremendously important this event was.

Take note: ATONEMENT IS A LASTING ORDINANCE!

Literally our sins cry to heaven. If there ever were a time for repentance, it is now. If the churches have any idea or notion why they are in the world, then a Day of Atonement should be held at least once a month.

Will it happen?

People are desperate. Desperate means “deprived of hope!”

Isn’t HOPE the church’s main message?

JULY 27 2019

DENIAL

In church last Sunday the reading was from Genesis 18. Here’s what it said in part, “Then the LORD appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre in the heat of the day, while he was sitting at the entrance to his tent”.

Two things struck me,

(1) Abraham knew the value of trees, and had settled in the forest. Trees are, next to us, the most important species in the world. Living close to trees ensures longevity and good health. And, indeed, Abraham lived a long time.

(2) Abraham relaxed. He wasn’t sending e-mails, he wasn’t talking on his mobile: he just was sitting there, at ease, perhaps looking at the leaves of the trees, perhaps contemplating their marvelous structure, perhaps day-dreaming, or praying, or recalling certain events in his life, how he had traveled hundreds of miles, away from his ancestral roots. Had there been a conflict then? Perhaps he meditated on the mysterious promise Yahweh had made to him that he’d be the father of many nations with offspring too numerous to count. Perhaps he shook his head a bit, as that promise didn’t seem to materialize at all. Perhaps he had trained himself in emptying his mind so that the Cosmic Resonance could enter, God’s spirit hovering over the universe.

Abraham was 175 years old when he died. I think his long life was due to a multiple of factors: there was no pollution; he lived among trees; no television; he lived close to God and believed his promises; he loved his animals; he was at peace; he was physically active; he meditated a lot, as he did when these three visitors came, whom he welcomed without any prejudice.  

In those days when life was moving at a snail’s pace, if at all, life was lived to the full: the past and the present flowed together. It reminds me of my schooldays from where a phrase pops up, Festina Lente”, translated as “Make Haste slowly.”

THE HIDDEN FACE OF GOD

It also reminds me of a book I was re-reading last week: THE HIDDEN FACE OF GOD. Why has Dr. Richard Elliott Friedman, professor of Hebrew cast such a spell on me with this book? I think because he so thoroughly knows the Bible, both the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament. He also treats Nietzsche with ultimate fairness, generally a much abused character in ‘religious’ circles.

Here’s what Dr. Friedman, a believing Jew, wrote, “Obviously there is much that the two faiths –Jewry and Christianity – have in common……Both appear to be more concerned with humans learning how to live, both with each other (“love your neighbor as yourself”) and in their relationship to God (“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind.”)”.

The very last words in his fascinating book are, “it could well be that the universe is the hidden face of God.”

That makes eminent sense to me: after all we love Bach not as a person, but because of his music. We love van Gogh for the same reason.

If the universe is the hidden face of God – and I believe that – then denying Creation as divine is denying God.

By denying creation, we deny God. How can we love him when we treat trees as a commodity, soil as something to be soiled.

Digging in the soil – as I do often – has curative benefits; gardening has therapeutic results.  

We deny today’s ultimate threat.

Here’s what Dr. Guy McPherson wrote last week in ARCTIC NEWS,

“A catastrophe of unimaginable proportions is unfolding. Life is disappearing from Earth and runaway heating could destroy all life. At 5°C heating, most life on Earth will have disappeared. When looking only at near-term human extinction, 3°C will likely suffice. Study after study is showing the severity of the threat that too many keep ignoring or denying, at the peril of the world at large. Have a look at the following:

Crossing the 2°C guardrail

The image below shows two trends, a long-term trend (blue) and a short-term trend (red) that better reflects El Niño peaks.
(Go to ARCTIC NEWS to see the colored graph. There the red line shows 3C by next year. The blue line by 2016.)

The image confirms an earlier analysis that it could be 1.85°C (or 3.33°F) hotter in 2019 than in 1750. 
June 2019 was the hottest June on record, it was 2.08°C (or 3.74°F) hotter than the annual global mean 1980-2015, which was partly due to seasonal variations.

Back to C. G. Jung, whom I quoted last week also.

He wrote, in “Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Available free on the web):

 “Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The “newness” in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components. Body and soul therefore have an intensely historical character and find no proper place in what is new, in things that have just come into being. That is to say, our ancestral components are only partly at home in such things. We are very far from having finished completely with the Middle Ages, classical antiquity, and primitivity, as our modern psyches pretend.

Nevertheless, we have plunged down a cataract of progress, which sweeps us on into the future with ever wilder violence the farther it takes us from our roots. Once the past has been breached, it is usually annihilated, and there is no stopping the forward motion. But it is precisely the loss of connection with the past, our up-rootedness, which has given rise to the “discontents” of civilization and to such a flurry and haste that we live more in the future and its chimerical promises of a golden age than in the present, with which our whole evolutionary background has not yet caught up.

“We rush impetuously into novelty, driven by a mounting sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction, and restlessness. We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the light of the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring the proper sunrise. We refuse to recognize that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse; that, for example, the hope of greater freedom is cancelled out by increased enslavement to the state, not to speak of the terrible perils to which the most brilliant discoveries of science expose us.

“The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity.

“Reforms by advances, that is, by new methods or gadgets, are of course impressive at first, but in the long run they are dubious and in any case dearly paid for. They by no means increase the contentment or happiness of people on the whole. Mostly, they are deceptive sweetenings of existence, like speedier communications, which unpleasantly accelerate the tempo of life and leave us with less time than ever before. Omnis festinatio ex parte diaboli est – all haste is of the devil, as the old masters used to say.”

So far a section of Jung’s biography.

We live in denial.

What Jung is saying in his memoirs is that we live in denial.

Denial today is all around us. We have cut off any contact with the past. We have severed the ties with the God of history. We have severed the connection between God and his creation.

It reminds me of Friedrich Nietzsche who was so obsessed with the direction the church was taking that he lost his mind. In his sane years Nietzsche associated madness with the death of God, and with the onset of his own madness.

In Nietzsche’s, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I was struck by one sentence, “I entreat you, brothers, remain true to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of super terrestrial hopes! They are poisoners, whether they know it or not.”

Another sentence stayed with me – also decades ahead of his time: “To blaspheme the earth is now the most dreadful offence…”

Nietzsche`s rebellion against the church originated from the preaching of the Heaven Heresy, still particularly predominant in the church today. The much maligned Nietzsche was a genius. His father and both his grand fathers were Lutheran preachers, one even a bishop. He was also slated to join the ranks of clergy but, seeing that the church was dead and so concluding that God was dead as well, he changed course and at a very young age became a professor of classical languages. 

Denial.

For those few who are questioning the course we are taking, it would be well to go the YouTube and listen to Paul Beckwith or Guy McPherson or Cambridge professor Dr. Peter Wadhams, all respected climatologists.

By denying the holiness of creation – which almost all church members do – we deny that we ourselves are part of creation and so we cannot experience that our consciousness also consists of the physical structure of the universe. Genesis 1-2 explicitly states that “earth we are and to earth we shall return”. The further we are from creation, the further we are from God.

Cosmic Resonance.

There’s such a thing as ‘cosmic resonance’. Dr. Friedman suggests that this phenomenon may explain how different Bible authors from so many different periods contributed pieces that form such a consistent picture of a gradually diminishing manifest presence of God over many centuries.

The universe is order that is made out of chaos. We are doing the opposite: we are making chaos out of cosmos. It is the “Christian” task to resist that. That’s why J.H. Bavinck in his BETWEEN THE BEGINNING AND THE END, a Radical Kingdom Vision, states that “The redemption of creation and redemption of the person go hand in hand: they are two parts of the same coin: you can’t have one without the other.”

We, in our lifestyle, in our day-to-day living deny this. We have painted ourselves in a corner. Today for every bite we eat we need 10 bites of creation-destroying carbon.

We must go back.   

We must go back to a degree of self-sufficiency where we no longer are totally dependent on creation-destroying elements.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer asserts that in everything we must keep the END in mind. He called himself an Anthropos Teleios, a person who always keeps the telos (the Greek word for END) in mind. Jesus himself in the Sermon on the Mount urges us to be Teleios, holistic. (Matthew 5: 48). We are part of the universe and living apart from the cosmos means in essence that we are gods, who do not need God.

We have made ‘idols’ of ourselves: that is the essence of GNOSTICISM, the heresy that the apostle John so forcefully condemns. It is the most dangerous of heresies, because it calls ‘matter’ evil. It so happens that creation is ‘matter’. Gnosticism asserts that salvation is escape from the body, achieved not by faith in Christ but by special knowledge. The Greek word for ‘knowledge’ is gnosis hence Gnosticism.

It is my assertion that all religions that do not practice that Creation as HOLY, are touched by Gnosticism.

It is related in the Bible how the apostle Peter denied the Lord three times. In that he voiced the opinion of all Jesus’ disciples, who, en bloc, where sorely disappointed that Jesus had failed to use his divine powers to free Israel from the Roman oppressor.

I wonder whether we are denying Jesus, whom, says Colossians 1: 15-20, “By whom all things –ta panta- were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible,” when we cause the extinction of much that lives.

I know Jesus forgave Peter his act of denial. I know he will forgive us too, but for Peter it was quite the embarrassing experience. Peter wept bitterly when he realized his denial: he felt genuinely sorry.

I wonder: how will you and I, who live in denial, show our contrition? It is virtually impossible to change our way of life.

Last week I learned a new word: “Akratic”, coined by Aristotle. It means “a person who knows the right thing to do but can’t help doing the opposite”. Hmmm.

JULY 20 2019

HOW GOD DISAPPEARED.

“The less we understand what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves….Our ability to embrace anything new is limited because we are our ancestors and whatever they never knew we can’t make part of our lives.”

                                                                           C.G. Jung

A while ago a woman visited us and she confessed that at times she’d have dreams that caused her to even fall out of bed. My spontaneous answer was that perhaps she was struggling with an issue that had bothered one of her grandparents.

I too have these disturbing dreams where I fight an imaginary attacker and wake up with the sheets and blankets in disarray, sometimes crying out inarticulate noises. Can I blame this on my ancestors? I really don’t know.

My ancestors – let me go back 2 generations, as I have known my 4 grandparents quite well – all were rurally based. My parents were the first ones to settle in the city.

I was the fourth (in 5 years of marriage) of 9 children, so I experienced the birth of 5 of my siblings (there was a three year gap between me and my younger brother).

When a new child was on the way I was often sent to my mother’s parents, small farmers. They had a dozen milk cows, having names just as their children and treated as such. Milked by hand twice per day, with the milk cans placed at the edge of the canal in front of the farm, from where a flat-bottomed vessel, horse-drawn, would pick them up and bring them to the nearby milk processing plant. The same boat would return them, this time the cans full with whey – just for the pigs – and a supply of buttermilk porridge, thick with barley, my favourite dessert, which I was allowed to sweeten with corn syrup.

I vividly remember the trusted gray horse, the rattling wagon, the horse-drawn grass mower, the hay stacked high, and carefully pitched way up in the barn attached to the living quarters.

I should mention that my grandparents had no electricity: the light was provided by beautiful kerosene lamps. Meals were cooked on a woodstove, in a separate small building – the cook-hut – with two compartments, the eating area and the cooking space. I still recall the peculiar aroma emanating from this building.

Water was pumped from the cistern. Sunday meals where in the dining room where most of the time was spent. Only on special occasions was the living room used, with also had a built-in bed where my grandparents slept. After the noon meal my grandfather would have a nap, sitting in the chair, black cap lowered over the eyes.

When I was there I slept in the attic, right under the rafters, accessible by a steep staircase with shining treads, slippery on my stocking feet and no railing.

All this made eating and living conditions no different from 100, even 300 years ago. The only modern item were the bikes, sturdy 3 speeds.

A large vegetable garden – mostly potatoes – a bunch of chickens, a pig or two which provided the bacon and roasts, milk and cream and butter all home-made, as well as jams and bread:  totally self-sufficient existence, totally carbon free. My parental grandfather, a grocer, in his horse-drawn two-wheeled wagon, basically a box on wheels, came occasionally to barter coffee, tea, sugar and other essentials for eggs, so that little money was needed to maintain a healthy life.

Both my grandfathers were elders in the local church a few kilometers away, a church seating some 300 people, and full every Sunday twice: 10 a.m. and 2.30 p.m. When my grandfather felt sleepy in church, he would stand up.

The church also was the centre of midweek entertainment: my uncle Klaas was still single in the 1930’s and was a member of the brass band, while my aunt had her women’s group. Smaller children attended Sunday School. Teenagers had their own young people societies. Occasionally there were entertainment evenings where everybody was expected to contribute, a poem or a skit, a duet or some other musical contribution.

During the fall and winter these elders each week visited their assigned families, focusing their visits on their spiritual lives.

Yes, all this I vividly remember: another age, a totally different sort of life, sustainable in the real sense, as it had been for centuries: a God-fearing life, living close to creation, completely dependent on the weather and on blessings from on high. Two prayers were offered at each meal, spoken in high Dutch, as if the Lord could not understand the local dialect.

All this continued during the war 1940-45. When I visited the farm then, the area teemed with young men hiding from the Germans. My Opa died in 1940 and my uncle took over. He then housed and fed 4 extra young men, as all males over 18 were supposed to work in Germany.  

Small farming then saw its final glory days, growing potatoes, raising grains, providing milk and butter and eggs, feeding the city population, who were deprived of its regular supplies due to the German occupiers grabbing all the available food sources for its military machine and its own population back in Germany.

A sudden change.

Then, in the 1950’s and 1960’s it all changed: The automobile appeared and God disappeared at the dawn of the consumer society: the God-Creator died and the god-Carbon took its place. The ways of old were abandoned including The WAY, the TRUTH and the LIFE.

My uncle Klaas emigrated to Canada in 1951: his horse could not compete with tractors and his scythe was no match for a combine. A cousin took over the farm and built a large broiler facility housing some 40,000 chickens: industrial farming had come.

From the mid 1950’s to the year 2019, some 70 years of rural life disappeared. Land holdings expanded, farm labour no longer needed, farm hands drifted to the cities or emigrated, small businesses closed shop, the baker and butcher, the grocer and tailor, the druggist and florist, they all slowly faded away as greater choice and cheaper products were available in the larger centers, reached by carbon-based cars, while the small homesteads were sold to commuters, who needed Sunday shopping.

THE OIL WE EAT, THE GOD WE ABANDONED

The four laws of ecology come to mind: (1) no free lunch; (2) Nature knows best; (3) nothing disappears; (4) everything is connected to everything else.

Special as we humans are, we get no exemptions from these rules.

The automobile, the word derived from the Greek autos= self, and the Latin ‘mobilis’ which means ‘easy to move’, provided the tank is full of liquid carbon.

When the war broke out in 1939, Germany had no direct access to oil wells: in Europe they were in the Caucasus, in Southern Russia. That’s why Hitler launched his assault there. Once he was rebuffed, his war was lost.

Then the USA was the leading oil producer, with Esso, Texaco, Chevron, Sunoco the main companies. When the war finished in 1945, the millions of discharged soldiers, having witnesses how oil won the war put their trust in its magic powers, both in farming and in subdivisions: the auto-age the result. Oil was cheap: pennies per gallon.

So the laws of ecology were suspended: and “in Oil we trust” became the national slogan. God’s law that “Everything is there to serve everything else, and we are the servants in chief”, was overruled: now the only law reigned, “Creation is there to serve us.”

Primary Productivity

Yet there remained something called “Primary Productivity,” referring to the degree to which plants and algae convert energy.   Thanks to our voracious appetite, our insatiable thirst for ‘things’, we drowned out everything else, consuming now as much as 70 percent of all there is: trees, soil, oxygen, water, depriving everything else from being there, asserting ourselves as gods at the expense of God’s creation.

We, the almost 8 billion of us greedy customers, are simply stealing the food, so that nothing else can flourish, hence mammals, fish, all else dies, including the rain forests to grow soya beans to feed our methane-belching cattle.

Here’s a piece of irony. Look at Iowa.

Iowa is almost all fields now. Not too long ago- perhaps 150 years, when my grandparents were born – Iowa was prairie, with 2 meters of topsoil. Millions of buffalo grazed there to their hearts content, the native “Indian” killing the occasional animal for the meat, the hide and used the rest for some other utility.

Then the white man came, saw the golden soil and used it to grow corn and soya beans to feed that same number of animals, domesticated cattle, for meat, using oil to accomplish this. Utter foolishness!

We now eat OIL.

Where before there was an organic food chain, perpetual sustainable, where the prairie through solar energy converted mass to flowers and roots and stems, building up into a rich repository of plant energy, we used fertilizer, pesticides, whatever, after plowing away the prairie grass, to grow corn.

Now we have a problem. We are re-discovering that there is: (1) no free lunch; (2) Nature knows best; (3) nothing disappears; (4) everything is connected to everything else, but like the fools we are, we are redoubling the efforts, expecting different results.

Enter Climate Change.

What we have done is plain robbery. Hydrocarbons, trust fund of sorts, built up over many thousands of years, we have ripped from the earth and burned in such phenomenal quantities that even the immense oceans and the astronomical skies have become affected, turning from friendly organs to deadly enemies.

Having alienated the planet, we have banned God from creation. God, seeing that humanity broke the ancient COVENANT, as described in Genesis 9, left humanity to its devices, so that now 1John 5: 19 is in full force, “The whole world is under the control of the evil one, as well as Deuteronomy 31: 17, “I shall hide my face from them. I shall see what their end will be.”

There’s where we are at this point. God has withdrawn, the God of even 70-80 years ago, before Adolf Hitler came to power, has retreated from his creation, and we are on our own, a frightful situation.

The last 90 years.

Since 1928, the year of my birth, this world’s population has almost quadrupled, now nearing the EIGHT billion mark, and that at the precise moment when everything is under threat.   

A bit of history.

In 1940 the average farm in the United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used. Today the grinding, milling, wetting, drying, and baking of a breakfast cereal requires about four calories of energy for every calorie of food energy it produces, but by adding transportation the food-processing industry in the United States uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces.

That means our food = oil: 10 oil calories to produce ONE food calorie. Add to that the fuel used by millions of people driving to thousands of super discount stores on the edge of town, where the land is cheap, and the ratio is even higher, counting in the waste.

“The less we understand what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves….Our ability to embrace anything new is limited because we are our ancestors and whatever they never knew we can’t make part of our lives.”

By and large we are oblivious to what’s happening. We have left God, and embraced suicidal oil.

We can’t go back to the old, carbon-neutral world, no matter what politicians claim. We have unloosened the Devil, and must face the consequences. As the Guardian reported last week, “The true cost of cheap, unhealthy food is a spiraling public health crisis and environmental destruction.

Our fathers and forefathers consciously lived by the grace of God. They could not imagine a different situation. Today the God concept is gone. By making all of creation subservient to us, we have eliminated God in the process. Churches, by and large, have succumbed to pious secularism, confining God to one hour on Sunday, basically a meaningless exercise.

Deuteronomy 31: 17 bears repeating, “I shall hide my face from them. I shall see what their end will be.”