Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

WHAT’S NEXT?

Agreed, we live in interesting times. Yes, I know, it is a Chinese curse, but nevertheless, by delaying dealing with matters unsolved, by ignoring problems pending, by shutting our eyes while going full-speed ahead, will hasten ‘the demise of the earth!’. Sounds melodramatic, sounds over-the-top, but nevertheless, I, from my perch in rural Eastern Ontario, Canada, know it to be true.

A few relevant questions.

Who will be the next US president? Where will the next Atlantic Hurricane land? Will the persistent heat affect my health? How about the monetary deficits? Are churches still viable? Is marriage disappearing? What about the billions in Africa and Asia who lack security, food, shelter?  Will the bird flu attack humans? Will Covid ever disappear? What will the tens of thousands of forest fires do to our health and Climate Change? After all, trees are supposed to be the ultimate solution. Why are earthworms disappearing? Is God favoring Trump? Will the next IT (Information Technology) shut-out paralyze the entire world?

Questions galore. 

We truly live in a world of profound economic anxiety, routine violence and an opioid epidemic. And, yes, there also is flagrant denial. We all know we live in an era of unrelenting news of war and nature carnage. No, it is not true that the United States is overrun by millions of dangerous immigrants, but we do have mass displacement, which Hannah Arendt described as “homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.” Questions galore. Answers? Not so much. 

What’s next?

I am an old man, rapidly approaching 96. I had a dream a few nights ago, a strange dream, which I recall only vaguely. It had something to do with Judgement, the Last Judgement. I believe there is lots that calls for judgement. God gave us a well-ordered world, where everything perfectly fitted into everything else: no discord, no friction, no chaos, no mysterious decline in some facet of creation: on the contrary. Just last week, a computer snatch threw much of the air industry into chaos: one human error, and the lives of millions are affected; one infected bird in China, and the entire Western world suffers from Covid. We live in a very vulnerable world!

It looks to me that we have lost our bearings: we don’t know where we come from, anymore, and we don’t want to know where we are going, because it simply frightens us: humanity in general cannot bear much reality.

I notice this when I listen to my weekly dose of sermons. In my church sermons avoid reality, so the preacher finds a human-interest Bible story, gives it a moralistic twist, and pronto, sermon done. Fortunately, the ad in my local weekly paper, Tweed News, emphasizes St. Andrew’s ‘coffee hour’. That’s what the church is all about: fellowship. The good things about our church also are the Wednesday Morning open access coffee hour, and, with the Salvation Army, a free lunch for whoever, on Mondays 12-1.

The church is for others.

Bonhoeffer sees the church to be ‘for others’. There used to be grassy – weed infested – ‘lawn’ around our church building. Most of it is now converted to flower beds, or covered with a dozen large vegetable grow boxes, whose harvests go to the local foodbank, all signalling that “The Earth is the Lord’s”. Every church should have at least 2 committees: A worship and an environmental one: I sincerely believe that personal salvation and environmental salvation go hand in hand.

Who Cares?

“The whole land will be laid waste because there is no one who cares”, laments Jeremiah somewhere. We are ‘the land’, because ‘earth we are’, and to earth we shall return. 

Will technology ever triumph over nature/God? The short answer is NEVER. We can’t cure with technology when technology caused our predicament in the first place. AI – Artificial Intelligence – requires so much ‘power’ that its goal is self-defeating, apart from the dangers it poses to human intelligence.

Life is a totality. The natural disasters we experience are unnatural because they are rooted in the separation of us and the land, of us and our fellow citizens, of us, and the divine. After all, ‘everything is connected to everything else’, is one of the 4 laws of ecology. Life is a totality, where ‘nothing ever disappears’, where ‘there is no free lunch’, and the indigenous people knew that ‘father, mother, sibling’ nature knows best. The original sin is ignoring these laws.

Expect matters to get worse: we are approaching ‘limits’ everywhere. By delaying dealing with matters unsolved, by ignoring problems pending, by shutting our eyes to the ‘cries of creation’ we hasten ‘the demise of the earth!’. Sounds melodramatic, sounds over-the-top, but nevertheless, I, from my perch in rural Eastern Ontario, Canada, know it to be true.

What’s next? Worse.

“VENGEANCE IS MINE”. God.

Temperatures in large parts of the Earth are soaring, flames engulf large regions everywhere, tornadoes ravage the Gulf of Mexico states, severe drought starve populations in southern Africa and climate extremes continue to taking over large parts of the Earth. Much like oncologists advising patients and their families of a terminal illness, so are climate scientists agonizing while reporting the advent of dangerous warming as temperatures rise and tipping points are broken”. 

That’s how a recent ARCTIC NEWS bulletin starts. Bad news, so people ignore it. Carpe Diem is the attitude: enjoy life while you can.

A bit of background.

God loves his creation. In good faith he endowed it to humanity, trusting that our forefathers would honor God’s gift, and develop it according to God’s instructions. Instead, we, just like our ancestors, preferred a different way, and God let us. Deuteronomy 32: 20 explains: “I will hide my face from them,” he said, “and see what their end will be; for they are a perverse generation, children who are unfaithful.” 

Remember: God’s timetable is different from ours: this was written 3-4000 years ago, but with God: “A Thousand years is like one day”.

We know now what we have done and face the consequences. We ignored the 7th commandment:

⁷ “You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.

God’s name is written on each single created item, trees, animals, humans, soil, air, seas, just to mention a few. Every created entity is holy, but to de-sacralise them, rob them of their God-ordained sacred status, as we have done and still are doing, comes with a price: our actions are backfiring on us: the entire God-designed system has its own built-in revenge mechanism. 

Two books.

All this reminds me of two books: Barbara W. Tuchman’s unequaled A Distant Mirror, The Calamitous 14^th Century, and James Lovelock’s The Revenge of Gaia, Earth’s Climate in Crisis and the Fate of Humanity.

In Tuchman’s book I found a curious parallel to today. She writes that, “At the start of the 14^thCentury the Baltic Sea froze over twice.”  That was after years of stable weather. It was the beginning of a little ice age, which meant disaster: crops failed, because incessant rains, resulted in famine and starvation. When the Black Plague arrived – 1344- it found a weakened human race. Then the church too, with its monopoly on religion (no salvation outside the church), was in turmoil, ending up with 2 popes, one in Rome, one in Southern France, Avignon. Both popes lived in luxury and opulence.  Division of rich and poor became increasingly sharp. Wars resulted, followed by the Black Death that killed close to half of Europe’s population.

A Repeat?

There is a lesson for us: when the next pandemic appears, it too will find a sick population existing on synthetic food, void of nutrition and healthy elements, an easy prey for virulent pathogens, viruses that can cause death and destruction.

Today we have not cold and rain, but heat and hurricanes, floods and drought. All of central and southern Africa: Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Lesotho, have severe drought conditions, while to the African north civic strife causes much the same. 

The irony is that drought and the resulting death toll, can fully be traced to us, the rich West, and our CO2 production. We, you and I, caused the famine there. God knows.

The revenge of Gaia.

The late James Lovelock in his book, The Revenge of Gaia, writes: “Despite their differences in doctrines, the existence of the Earth’s disease, the fever brought us by a plague of people, come from religious and humanist beliefs which regard the Earth to be exploited for the good of humankind.” 

He basically writes that the Christian religion – heaven oriented – is to blame.

All this brings me to Vengeance is mine.

In the Bible, there is Jesus’ reminder, Vengeance in mine. Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord.

Wise words, because without exception, the Western economy – that means us – is to blame for our heat predicament. Our opulent state of affairs, the wealth we have created, has been achieved, at the expense of God’s cosmos. Prompted by Bonhoeffer’s thinking, I am more and more inclined to see the unity of God and Creation. “It is a dreadful thing to become victims of Climate Change: forest fires, hurricane sufferers, tornado trauma, heat strokes, failed crops, flooding.” Earthquakes later?

That’s why we now are the direct target of God’s vengeance, making true: “It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God”. (Hebrew 10: 31).

IT IS LATER THAN YOU THINK.

‘In the beginning”.

That’s how the Bible starts. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Then, untold many millions of years ago, everything was there in principle, ready to be deployed at the correct minute or hour, year or millennium.

However, after a glorious start in Paradise, we became impatient, and made a deal with the devil to speed development. That development has now taken its full course, and has resulted in degradation and dissolution, because what has a beginning, has an end, unlike God who has neither. 

In a sense, we are on a voyage; every voyage has a starting point, and a destination. How this adventure began is the concern of many a scientist, who will forever remain puzzled about ‘the beginning’ while offering plausible suppositions. They do agree that there is a beginning. The how and what remains a mystery to them.

The law of logic.

The law of logic suggests that whatever has an origin, also has an ending. That applies to individuals like me and you, it applies to everything we observe, and consequently, it applies to the world we live in. “In the beginning” indicates that there also is ‘the end’. And, it is my guts, my feeling, my intuition, my conviction, that THE END is much nearer than statistics or news reports or TV or politicians – who still push ‘growth’ – suggest, if they mention it at all. 

Enter Arctic News,

There is one exception, however: ARCTIC NEWS. It concludes that the Arctic’s terrestrial permafrost now emits more greenhouse gases than it stores, and the trend is likely to accelerate as temperatures keep rising, especially, in the Arctic. 

The highest carbon dioxide emissions over the 2000-2020 period came from inland waters and wildfires. Then the non-permafrost wetlands exhaled the most methane, and the dry tundra released the most nitrous oxide.

A drastic change is coming.

The prospect of further toxic releases looks dire. It is estimated that the upper three meters of the permafrost-tundra region stores 1,000 Giga tons– a Giga ton equals a billion tons – of soil organic carbon, while deeper deposits could store an additional amount of 1,000 Giga tons. The analysis concludes that the permafrost region is the largest carbon and nitrogen pool on Earth. Self-amplifying feedbacks and crossing of tipping points, as well as the loss of the aerosol masking effect and sunspots reaching a peak, could contribute to cause a further temperature rise from, say AD 1800, of over 10°C, in the process causing the cloud tipping points to get crossed that can push up the temperature rise by a further 8°C. 

We all die when it rises by 5°C. 

A sudden melting in the Far North where heat has accelerated beyond anywhere else on earth, that alone could do the trick. Out of sight, out of mind, but remember the first law of Ecology: Everything is connected to everything else. It may happen silently and gradual, and, just as collapse, it may happen suddenly. Altogether, the temperature rise may exceed 18°C by as early as 2026: as early as 2026! I believe: it’s later than you think!

Already a world in turmoil.

Economic anxieties are adding to divisions between rural and urban dwellers, unskilled and college educated workers, religious traditionalists and secularists. In France, Italy, Germany and Sweden, far-right politicians have seized on this dissatisfaction to promote nationalist, anti-immigrant agendas, while growth is slowing worldwide, making it harder to find solutions.

THE DAY OF THE LORD.

Don’t be surprised: 2,000 years ago, the Bible told us so.

But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up. (2 PETER 3: 10)

Enter Jesus and John.

That the end will come unexpected, is re-confirmed multiple times in the Bible. Jesus, in Matthew 24 – that terrible chapter – also points out its suddenness: verse 36: “No one knows the day or the hour, only the father.” A thought goes through my mind: if creation and the creator are identical, as Bonhoeffer suggests, then creation herself knows the tipping point, just as a person, about to die, feels it coming.

 And then there is John’s Revelation. It too reveals a detail about the ‘when and how’.  Here’s another quote: Terrified at her torment, they will stand far off and cry: “Woe! Woe to you, great city, you mighty city of Babylon! In one hour your doom has come!’ 

Revelation 18 describes the present moment, 2024, when a surplus of luxury goods, thanks to cheap slaves, finds no market any more, and the system collapses.

Believe me: IT IS LATER THAN YOU THINK.

BE A PEACE INITIATOR 

The title of Dr. Paas’ book, VREDE OP AARDE, I have tentatively translated as PEACE ON THE PLANET, rather than PEACE ON EARTH, which misses the rolling ‘r’s’ in the Dutch; I did this to maintain the poetic stance of the original title. Also, the ‘planet’ includes air, seas, and is thus more comprehensive.

Before I translate his conclusions, found on the last two pages of this 400-page book, a few words about God’s Kingdom. Jesus, on earth, embodied the Kingdom. When a storm threatened to imperil the lives of his disciples, he ‘rebuked’ the wind. The word ‘rebuke’ indicates sharp disapproval. He used the same word when curing Peter’s mother-in-law. Both destructive weather and diseases do not fit into the New Creation which Jesus represented.

Just as Jesus, we, his followers, represent the Kingdom. “Seek first ‘the kingdom’”, is Jesus’ direct suggestion to us. Without that aim, we miss the entire message. The Kingdom? Yes, the Kingdom, God’s Holy Creation.

With that in mind, I turn to Stefan Paas’ book, PEACE ON THE PLANET.

Here is what Dr. Paas writes, and I translate his last two pages:

“For what purpose is Christendom on earth? Why should people actually be a Christian? Why would I invite others to become Christian? These were questions I posed at the beginning of this book. Well, at the end of this enquiry my answer is: Christendom is here to establish peace. It does this to generate intimate connections, to search for righteousness in the service of reconciliation, in the hopeful expectation of God’s Shalom. In that mission the aim is not to make people Christians; the real purpose is for them to become priests in partnership with God’s creation, mediators of the covenant. To become priests involves a change: we must be saved from ourselves, and from the powers that oppose God’s Peace. This salvation is to be found ‘in Christ’, and this makes it materially possible for us to shape communities of love, justice and reconciliation – the very fields in which the good news finds fruition. It is the calling of these communities to devote themselves to reconciliation, and to teach people how they can learn to become priests for this mission of reconciliation. The Christian proclamation, the liturgies, its practises and disciplines, inherent in the Christian faith, their communities, the pioneer-projects, the experiments and innovations, the prayers, exorcisms, prophesies, healings, songs and expressions of praise – all these many-faceted expressions of devotions, attain integrity and unity when we observe that all this has as their aim to witness to God’s shalom, to shape people for this task of reconciliation, to bind them to each other and to their co-creatures, in order to combat the powers that hinder the attaining of peace, to make us sensitive for righteousness, and actively contribute to reconciliation and peace/shalom.”

“Just as Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom in the context of Roman occupation, violence, and apocalyptic tensions, in the same way every salvation-theology is a discussion with the world of the day. My proposal in this last chapter – and on last page I should add – is not meant to assert that this is the only possible narrative concerning the Christian ‘way of salvation’, the so-called ‘soteriology’. Yet, I do think that it is a viable option in a polarized society in the shadow of a universal ecological crisis. 

“What does it actually mean to talk about God in the current situation, to experience him redemptively, and to live in hope in the expectation of the arrival of his peaceable Kingdom? 

“Just as I mentioned in my introduction, I don’t expect that my interpretation will lead to a mass-conversion. My goal was to write something which would cause Christians to be inspired anew, and again feel embraced in God’s mission. I hope that this book be a tool for leaders in the church and other Christians to be able to explain why all of us need to change and provide them with the tools to do so, and what it means to be a community of peace, and how this book can provide direction for Christian societal activities and politics. Theology must be lived and the story of God’s “Shalom is a story by which we can arrange our lives. It is a story that relates how friendships, the search for righteousness, and feeling at home in creation are equally the fields of God’s grace, are avenues along we yearn for God and his future, dead places in which we are raised to life, spaces in which we experience ourselves immensely loved.

“Yes: happy are the peace-initiators.”

So far, my translation.

When we pray, Your Kingdom Come, we really pray for God’s New Creation, the ultimate time when there will be comprehensive Peace on Earth.

June 22, 2024

Where is God?

The USA is a religion-drenched country, worshiping the flag and the foetus, and though the word ‘God/Religion’ is front and centre (God bless America, a city on a hill, the Trump phenomenon) the country itself appears Godforsaken. 

 Why?

Much of Christianity there is either out-dated Old Testament or modern-day Gnostic. Just imagine: The state of Louisiana has made it mandatory that all public classrooms display the Ten Commandments! No wonder, its church structure, especially the Roman Catholic wing, is a pure replica of the Old Testament High Priest/Pope ordinance, with the St. Peter church functioning as its long -gone Jerusalem temple. 

And then there is the huge Southern Baptist/Pentecostal segment, and its yearning for heaven, seeing God’s creation, for whose redemption Christ died, as evil: Evil!

Where is Christ in all this?

Me, myself, I am deeply attached to the Son, Jesus the Christ, who indisputably said, (John 14: 6) I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. But the American Religion – soaked in ‘heaven’ talk and retribution– prefers a vengeful fellow up there, sees as their national objective to revert back to the God-rule, the strict enforcement of the “Thou Shalt Not” edicts, stoning those doing abortions, or are in same-sex situations just to name a few obvious examples. Jesus, on the contrary, substitutes the word “law”, with “LOVE”.

Enter the Old Testament Amos.       

It reminds me of Amos, that farmer – an Old Testament fighter, relevant still today. I once made a song about him. Here are a few lines:

   There once was a prophet, Amos by name,                         

a farmer sent out by the Lord to proclaim                       

that Israel, chosen from all human kin                             

will surely be punished for their severe sin.

They think that God will not observe what they do;
that He will not see the sins they pursue:
the widows they trample, the poor they despise,
while rich become richer through fraud and through vice.

“The noise of their music and songs God detests
He hates and abhors their religi-ous fests;
their pious assemblies they cause Him to dread:
Let Justice roll on like a river instead”.

Back to God.

A lot of people in the USA want the vengeful God to come back. Be careful what you wish! God also is the Old Testament bringer of the Flood, the destroyer of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Creator who made the ten tribes of Israel disappear without a trace.

The US Supreme Court.

Now, Supreme Court justices have become caught up in the debate about the sort of Christianity America should have. Several of them embrace the Old Testament view, including Justice Alito, who is pushing back against the declining power of Christianity as a majority religion in America, and underwrites these outdated concepts. Cadres of true believers inspired by Donald Trump, and by the religious movement that sees him as divinely ordained, are seizing the Republican party from the bottom up.

Where is God in all this?

I have this book: “The Hidden Face of God”. I bought it more than 25 years ago, and is one of my favorite ones, written by Dr. Richard Elliott Friedman, a professor of Hebrew, and Bible translator. He writes that gradually, from Genesis on, there is a transition from divine to human responsibility for life an earth. Here is a direct quote: Adam disobeys God. Abraham questions God. Jacob fights with God. Humans are confronting their creator, and they are increasing their participation in the arena of divine prerogatives.

Where is God?

Paul in his letter to his friend Timothy -1 Timothy 6: 18 – writes, “God lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see.”  Yet we can be near to God. Dr. Friedman ends his remarkable book on this note: “There is some likelihood that the universe is the hidden face of God.”

It is truly remarkable that Bonhoeffer, whom Friedman quotes several times, came to the same conclusion.  Dr. Sabine Dramm, in her book, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an introduction to his thought”, concludes, “What Bonhoeffer presents as specific to the Christian faith is the perception of God and the world as one, and the perception of life that has its wellspring in this world in God, and in turn proceeds from this world back again to God.”

Karen Armstrong in her recent book, Sacred Nature, also sees creation as divine.

Where then is God?

He is never hidden. He is all around and in us. All of life is holy. When we abuse God’s creation, we abuse GOD. I wonder whether this is the ‘sin against the Holy Spirit’, for which, says Jesus, there is no forgiveness: Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but anyone who speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come. Matthew 12: 32. 

Is God then in and all around us?

EVERYBODY, EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE.

In several non-fiction books I have read lately, grandfathers feature prominently. My life story too follows that pattern.

Take my maternal grandfather, who, born in 1870, died in 1940. His entire life he lived the way his forefathers had done for generations. Well, no, not quite. He had a bicycle, while his forefather used horses. My paternal grandfather, also born in 1870, died in 1960, just before the great societal and religious upheaval everywhere. 

Is this my nostalgia showing? 

True, the 19^th Century was largely peaceful and static mostly. Both grandparents represented stability, sincere piety and frugality: nothing was wasted: They truly lived ‘holy’ lives. Perhaps that’s why I treasure them: my own life is so full of fakery: it is now impossible to live the way they lived, because ‘everybody, everything, everywhere’, has become unholy, contaminated, out of whack.

Everything is different. 

“Make America Great Again! MAGA. An empty slogan. We cannot go back, because everything is different. That ‘everything’ also includes everybody, church, society, family formation, sexual orientation. With right-wing politics, Trump leading the way, even democracy is at stake. It seems that evil is becoming more pronounced, and even encouraged.

Everything is weird and everyone is wrecked. This is maybe the biggest and least acknowledged truth of life in the United States and a lot of places beyond. It’s the pandemic; the eight years of Trumpism; the distortions, disruptions and corruptions Silicon Valley has promulgated and other looming menaces, including climate chaos. We all know this, because we’re living it, but maybe we should talk more about the fact that our political catastrophes are inseparable from widespread psychic devastation, that the public and private, political and personal, are entangled – or rather that the former has wrought havoc on the latter.

Evil everywhere.

A while ago I had a unique experience. I suddenly was confronted with personal pure evil. It has become so commonplace, because our entire lifestyle is based on God-denying, Creation destroying substances, now integral in our mode of living that both stopping and continuing Carbon-based substances would lead to total economic collapse. Here pops up my Calvinistic basis: “we are conceived and born in sin, and therefore children of wrath!”, now more and more evident in wars, in deteriorating climate, in billionaires ruling the world.

Even the church embodies this evil. The church – or what little is left of it – is no stranger to this evil, calling ‘the God’s world’ evil, promising heaven as reward for soul piety.

I believe that human nature is unfolding in a direction that spells trouble for our future as the human race, reminding me of the pre-Noah times, when God thought it wise to make a new beginning.

We live in a new world where all connections to God and his ordinances are severed. There no longer is a God- Consciousness. In Noah’s time. God directly intervened. Now we are in full control of our destiny in multiple ways. This, more integral dimension, reflects the state of spiritual life, so alien to the era in which, as a child, in pre-WWII, I grew up: the church itself has become a godless entity, in spite of pious words, no longer understood.

These drastic developments are suddenly visible in historic changes everywhere, in the climate, in political preferences, in unprecedented monetary policies, in warfare, in the entertainment world. All previous constrains have disappeared: in everybody, everything, everywhere we see the signs of death and pollution, of the prominence of poverty and the expanding power of plutocrats. Suddenly, overnight, as it were, these hitherto invisible forces leap to the fore, a truly historic transformation, whose outcome places the future of the West and the entire humanity in jeopardy. 

In the current, June 10, issue of the New Yorker, there is a long article asking, ARE WE DOOMED? Its subscript reads, A course at the University of Chicago thinks it through. Here’s a quote: “Hinton, a computer scientist …spoke about whether artificial intelligence poses on existential threat”. 

In short – at 76 – he believes that THE END will come coinciding with his life expectancy – say 10-15 years, that only the old and very old, will escape DOOM.

What is important, is, that an awareness is growing that we are approaching the END, and that:

A new world is coming.

A new world is in the making, as the existing order teeters and its faith in its continuation diminishes. It is time to dream the depiction of the Bible’s last chapter: “The leaves of the trees are for the healing of the nations,” and expect what Malachi, the last Old Testament prophet, writes: 

“Surely the day is coming; it will burn like a furnace. All the arrogant and every evildoer will be stubble, and the day that is coming will set them on fire,” says the LORD Almighty. “Not a root or a branch will be left to them”.