Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

March 20 2016
ANARCHY

Again Keats comes to mind:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

I have often written that the last days of the present world will be horrible. I now am beginning to see how they may unfold. The American electorate is not voting for Trump or Sanders. The voting public is out to destroy the establishment. People prefer anarchy over the current state of affairs.
What really frightens me are the US army soldiers, especially those with the Special Forces stationed in Fort Bragg N.C. They voted for Trump. Even though a former Pentagon official said that the top brass would defy orders from President Trump, the troops support him. Utterly scary.
All this brings up memories from the 1939-45 war years in Europe where I, from 1940-45, lived in German occupied the Netherlands. In the early Hitler days goons were permitted to harass Jews and others opposed to the NAZI regime. America is ripe for Trump, ripe for revolt, ripe for ripping everything apart. People are angry, angry at a rotten political system in a society where economic frustration at jobs exported to China is high. Trump is exploiting all this, feeding ferment after two lost wars, as American power declines, while there is Republican political paralysis, in a system corrupted by money.

Here’s how one commentator describes Trump:
“I watch the head of this Las Vegas croupier, this kitschy carnival performer, coiffed and botoxed, drifting from one television camera to another with his fleshy mouth perpetually half-open: you never know whether those exposed teeth are signs of having drunk or eaten too much, or whether they might indicate that he means to eat you next.
“I listen to his swearing, his vulgar rhetoric, his pathetic hatred of women, whom he describes, depending on his mood, as bitches, pigs, or disgusting animals. I hear his smutty jokes in which the careful language of politics has been pushed aside in favor of supposedly authentic popular speech at its most elemental – the language, apparently, of the genitals. ISIS? We’re not going to make war against it, we’re going to “kick its ass.”

All this breeds ANARCHY; all this is pure chaotic disorder inducing.

The word has a Greek base. Anarchos is Greek for a rudderless person. Where the word ARCHE means ruler, authority, the beginning of good things – the first words in the Jewish Greek Bible, the Septuagint, are “En Arche, in the Beginning”- anarchy is the opposite. ANARCHY means disorder, rudderless, lawless, turmoil everywhere.
ANARCHY can already be seen in the weather. There stability is basically gone. Denying Climate Change is a form of intellectual ANARCHY. This atmospheric anarchy is especially evident in the Arctic and Antarctic, supposedly the coldest region in the world, yet the ice accumulation in the Arctic this year was the lowest ever, with icebergs splitting off even in February, which was the hottest month ever: 1.35 degrees Celsius above the average. Also utterly scary. Not only was last month the hottest but also the most unusual warmth for any month on record. Unprecedented temperatures in the Arctic, averaging an astonishing 11 degrees Celsius (20 degrees Fahrenheit) above normal, which melted away layers of ice to record-low levels. The heat helped prolong the longest planet-wide coral bleaching event. These unprecedented milestones caused the highest recorded jump in carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas.

THAT’S WEATHER ANARCHY.

Anarchy is never an isolated event. All of life is connected. When nature is angry then people are angry. When chaos reigns in the financial world, then all of life is affected, also our minds and spirits and even our religious lives.
We now live in a different world, where people no longer see or sense or experience the truth. “What is Truth” Pilate wondered when he was interviewing a certain man called JESUS brought to him by the church of that day to be condemned to death because Jesus had challenged their religious practises.
That was evil at work. Then and now the sad truth is that this world is ruled by evil: Satan rules supreme. The “anarchy” he induces will intensify as THE DAY approaches. The wise King Solomon in his famous book of PROVERBS hit the right note when in one of the last chapters he wrote: “Where there is no vision, the people perish” (Prov. 29: 18). That’s where we are today. We no longer have a clear cut idea what life is all about. Polluting energy use has distorted everything. No longer do we know that Life is about glorifying God by loving his creation.

David Brooks in his New York Times column referred to an essay Andy Crouch published in CHRISTIANITY TODAY. Crouch starts with the distinction the anthropologist Ruth Benedict popularized, between a guilt culture and a shame culture. In a guilt culture you know you are good or bad by what your conscience feels. In a shame culture you know you are good or bad by what your community says about you, by whether it honors or excludes you. In a guilt culture people sometimes feel they do bad things; in a shame culture social exclusion makes people feel they are bad.
Crouch argues that the omnipresence of social media has created a new sort of shame culture. The world of Facebook, Instagram and the rest is a world of constant display and observation. The desire to be embraced and praised by the community is intense. People dread being exiled and condemned. Moral life is not built on the continuum of right and wrong; it’s built on the continuum of inclusion and exclusion. Trump is a perfect example of this: he lives for praise, for acceptance. And so does his constituency, his millions of followers.

The ultimate sin today, Crouch argues, is to criticize a group, especially on moral grounds. Talk of good and bad has to defer to talk about respect and recognition. Crouch writes, “Talk of right and wrong is troubling when it is accompanied by seeming indifference to the experience of shame that accompanies judgments of ‘immorality.”
No longer are there permanent standards, just the shifting judgment of the crowd. It is a culture of oversensitivity, overreaction and frequent moral panics, during which everybody feels compelled to go along.
Here’s what I confess as a Christian. We must hate sin but love the sinner. But that rule has gone by the wayside because there are no more permanent standards. Anything goes. Gone are the old criteria, where people are treated as ‘images of God’, as persons entitled to an alternative view and valued for their contribution.

I occasionally watch TV. Last week I saw Peter Mansbridge, the CBC news anchor, interview David Suzuki on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Suzuki has been the most visible environment defender in Canada. He admitted that in his many decades of fighting for clean air, water and soil – the essential ingredients of our own bodies – matters have gone from bad to worse. He admitted that it is almost too late to turn the tide. He is cautious there, probably really thinking that it is too late, but a public figure cannot say that. That polluting is a sin, is something the Church is not ready to admit, adding to the religious confusion, typical of all of life today. Disobeying the laws of creation generates anarchy.

Fact is that t here’s no greater danger in this world than anarchy. Now more than ever the world has to come together to combat the great dangers, of which Climate Change is the most prominent, because it will trigger massive people relocations, the likes of which the world has not experienced since the Fall of Rome. Even the millions that moved after the war in Eastern Europe, retreating with the German armies, fleeing before the Russians, will be a mere tribal affair compared to the masses that will be driven from their natural habitat due to drought in the Middle East, in Africa and Asia and the rising seas that will threaten most of Florida and even cities such as New York, Boston and Los Angeles.
Where will they settle? The trouble is that the world is full already. We have gone far beyond our natural population limits, perhaps by as much as a factor of 3-4, which means that our present population of 7.3 billion far away exceeds what the earth sustainably can support which is perhaps no more than 2 billion. We have experienced exponential growth due to the use of chemical fertilizer, and fossil fuel. We now are exposed to the revenge of Gaia, as James Lovelock put it. Anarchical weather with too much rain in some places and not enough in other locations will test the best of us. It seems to me that this coming summer will provide the answer. If February was 1.35 Degrees Celsius above the normal what will the outlook for the summer be?

There already is ANARCHY on the political front. Europe is at its wits end how to deal with the influx of Syrians, while the current outlook for the US elections in November looks totally terrifying. There always remains the VISION thing. “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” That perishing is both a spiritual matter as well as physical. No longer is there a God-consciousness. God has disappeared except in the OMG expression.
ANARCHY everywhere. People in China cannot stand any more pollution, so more growth will simply mean more dirty air and water. Too many laborers in developed countries are being marginalized by globalization and by competition with ever more intelligent machines that can replace much of the function of humans. None of this would be a problem, except that we have a huge amount of debt that needs to be repaid with interest, and we need commodity prices to rise high enough to encourage production. If these problems are not fixed, the whole system will collapse, even though there seems to be a surplus of energy products.

Our world needs new standards, needs new moral rules.

Of course the Bible has given these. Take Jesus’ great commandment: “Love God above all and your neighbor as yourself.” We love the great artists, Bach, Mozart, Rembrandt, Leonardi Da Vinci, van Eyck, Shakespeare, by paying millions for their paintings, by listening to their music and seeing their plays. We hardly ever specify how to love God, which most effectively is done by sincerely loving his creation and so ensuring the health and welfare of all that lives.
To me this is such a fundamental matter that it is beyond me how Christians by and large fail to implement this basic truth. By paying only lip service to ‘loving creation’, it really denies its validity. That too is anarchy of the highest order, wrapped in a false form of piety.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

We have painted ourselves in a corner. Repeatedly the Bible tells us that “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”. As so much in Christianity it’s not the words that count, but the deeper meaning. “The fear of the Lord” basically means being in deep awe for what God has created, marveling at his infinity as evident in the ‘needing eternity to learn everything of all the treasures of creation’. That’s what the New Creation is all about! It requires a great deal of intellectual curiosity, a real desire to never stop learning.
Today we live in the un-creating of all things, exactly the opposite of what God intended as to do. Yes, admit it: un-creating means taking matters apart, creating anarchy. Creation was a beautiful WHOLE. Once we eliminate one part, all other things fall apart and anarchy ensues.

In the chaotic anarchy we have created, it is almost impossible to find the Source of Order, the Creator of it all. We have sown the wind and now will reap the whirlwind (Hosea 8: 7).

MARCH 13 2016

“I CANNOT DO A THING UNTIL YOU GET THERE” (Genesis 19: 22)

Curious title, isn’t it? Even more curious: that’s God speaking who declares himself, well, sort of powerless.

He is referring to the Lot family fleeing from those godless cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. God cannot proceed with obliterating these towns until this small family is safely settled. God’s action depends on human cooperation! Perhaps we are more important than we usually portray ourselves.
How did Lot come to live there in that evil region? When he, as Abraham’s nephew, had followed his uncle to The Promised Land, obeying God’s command, these two extremely rich families, were competing for grazing grounds. Even then, in those then so pristine regions, with still a very sparse population, space to accommodate the large herds of these two plutocrats, became so tight that they decided to split up, rather than get into each other’s ways. Abraham, more the gentleman of the two, and wiser as well, left it up to Lot to choose where to go, knowing full well what Lot would do. Lot, the more greedy one set out for the fertile plains where the decadent cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were situated. Abraham wanted to stay away from there because being bad is contagious. Did the prosperity there cause them to become so degenerate? I believe so. In that regard they resemble our world today, a world almost entirely dominated by the root of all evil, the desire for money, usurping all that is precious on the globe: air, seas, soil. God then did not want that evil to spread, at least not yet. Now, I think, evil is out of control: that’s why we too will suffer that same fate as Sodom and Gomorrah. God then rescued that little family, saved them because of their connection to Abraham. When the coming global holocaust hits – and it is coming – God will again rescue his own, you can be sure of that, thanks to their connection to Jesus Christ. Let’s face it: God will not forever condone evil in his Holy Creation.

Back to the Lot clan, a greedy lot, these four persons, who with his wife and their 2 daughters are consorted out by God in person to a safe haven. They, are cautioned not to look back, are warned not to regret their forced exit. Lot’s wife does and this one look paralyzes her. Lot would like to stop and help her on, but, and here come God’s remarkable words: “I CANNOT DO A THING UNTIL YOU GET THERE” (Genesis 19: 22). Get where? Get to the little town that is their safe haven, their refuge, where they will not be affected by the fiery quake that will swallow all their riches, their barns full of cattle and their homes full of treasures: all gone in a twinkling of an eye.

We are still stuck with these remarkable words, telling us that God cannot proceed with destroying these wicked cities until Lot and his two daughters are safely within the confines of that tiny town called Zoar.

Suppose they had refused to go on. Suppose they had said, “No, our treasures are too precious, our herds and pricy possessions are worth more to us than safeguarding our lives”, then evil would have triumphed, then God would not have had the power to destroy these cities. Then SATAN would have scored a major victory: evil would have prevailed because the Bible says that “I CANNOT DO A THING UNTIL YOU GET THERE” (Genesis 19: 22). Strange words. Lot and his daughters are not independent of God here, but nevertheless these three people do have quite a bit of power.
Conclusion: we have more influence on GOD than we realize.

That becomes plain when we skip from Genesis, the first Bible book, to Revelation, the very last part.

A word about the Bible. The Bible is no more than beautiful ancient literature unless we connect it somehow to ourselves and to contemporary happenings: sermons that fail to tie the Bible into what goes on here and now with us and the world around us, are a waste of time. The fact that this is happening all too frequently is the main reason why the church is not going anywhere, suffers a slow death, actually. By now everybody in church already knows the basics: God created; we fell for Satan instead; Jesus made it right again; we are saved by grace.

It is exactly at that point where the church usually goes wrong. Most of the ministers preach that we are destined for heaven, explaining the Bible wrongly, having no notion of the renewed earth, while others often ignore the Bible altogether and present some sort of sociology lesson, which is equally useless. Karl Barth has said: the newspaper, TV, Internet news, whatever, combined with the Bible must guide us in life on our way to the Kingdom. Failure to do so has often caused the church to become a hindrance for understanding the Kingdom, yet the great paradox is that, even though the church may be an impediment for gaining a Kingdom vision, “there is no salvation outside the church”, or as Bonhoeffer puts it, echoing the Roman Catholic church with its love for Latin: Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Savus.
This makes me jump from the first Bible book, Genesis, to the very last one, Revelation 8: 1, where it says: “THEN THERE WAS SILENCE IN HEAVEN FOR ABOUT HALF AN HOUR.”
It seems to me that today we live in that 30 minute period of silence.

That silence is significant.
Here’s what is happening up there in heaven, before God’s throne. There seven angels are standing poised, each having a trumpet at the ready, eager to announce the greatest event of human history: the arrival of the New Creation.
BUT……………….
Nothing happens.
Everything is silent.
Progress suspended.
History takes a pause.
Development stops.
Everything comes to a standstill: no singing, no praising God, no angels reporting back about their activities as guardians for the believers. There is silence for 30 minutes. Why? Why has all celestial activity been stalled?

“I CANNOT DO A THING UNTIL YOU GET THERE” (Genesis 19: 22)
Something happened similar to what took place with Lot’s small family. Sodom and Gomorrah could not be destroyed until the Lot clan was safe.

Now the church is holding things up. The cruel truth is that the arrival of the Kingdom, the ascent of the New Creation cannot proceed as long as the prayers of the holy, the words arising from the pious men and women on earth have not been placed on the altar before God. Heaven is not able to reveal its full authority and majesty as long as the earth has not prayed for it.
Everything has its prescribed time and so also the last happening before the final end can only begin when the proper time for it has arrived. And one of the factors which determine that the time has come is that the church on earth must have sent up her prayers to God. Failure to do so stalls the arrival of the Kingdom.
What this really comes down to is that in the leading up to the great universal denouement, the final reckoning, the church on earth has a very particular and important task: her task is to pray, pray without ceasing. The space of 30 minutes of silence in heaven, that half an hour of suspense, is there to give the church time. The grand finale, the point in time for which the church lives and has its purpose can only take place when what the church has to do on earth and what takes place in heaven click, are on the same wave length. The return of the Lord in all his glory depends on his body below. If the church is not ready then there is silence in heaven.

And that time of silence in heaven is now. The church is not ready. Her prayer lacks power. Her conduct is not sufficiently intimate, not mature enough. The churches everywhere on earth are far too preoccupied with secular affairs and not enough with the earth itself. The church is too much involved with the ferments and foments here in the affairs of the world, too tied up with her own state of affairs and not sufficiently geared to the final ending, not enough yearning for the completion. Her clock is slower than the heavenly timepiece where everything is in place, where the seventh, the last seal, has been broken. And still nothing stirs in heaven where the silence is deafening. The waiting is for the earthly voices. The waiting is for the church which, amidst this world, has her place and calling.

There’s where the mighty element of delay is to be found. That interlude does not lie in the lack of power of Jesus Christ, because that power is sufficient to make the END come speedily. Neither is the coming of the Kingdom postponed because the world itself is not yet ripe for the judgement. If only the church would confess more ardently, pray more fervently, were to look forward to the coming of the King more eagerly, then it all would fall into place because then God is capable to make all other matters come to pass. The church’s primary task is to look forward to the coming of the Lord. Failure to do so is the real reason why these seven angels are waiting, with their trumpets at the ready. That’s the reason why there is a breathless silence in the heavenly palace. That’s the reason why in the infinite majesty of God’s heavenly temple there is that almost unbearable tension lasting for a specific short time. How long? Who knows. It will last as long as the church clings to its own ineffective ways while the world around her is frantically trying to keep matters from going out of control, with millions on the run toward Europe, and many more millions in America in revolt. With the climate changing and China collapsing, with droughts and floods, the church goes her often irrelevant ways. Now that the very last happenings are knocking at the door, she is not ready, no longer knows how to pray. The Bible tells us to wait on the Lord, but now the rolls are reversed: the Lord is waiting for the church.

THE LORD CANNOT DO A THING UNTIL THE CHURCH ACTS.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his CREATION AND FALL wrote in his introduction: THE CHURCH OF CHRIST WITNESSES TO THE END OF ALL THINGS, IT LIVES FROM THE END, IT THINKS FROM THE END, IT ACTS FROM THE END, IT PROCLAIMS ITS MESSAGE FROM THE END.
Does it? No. The church will not change, and I will not leave the church. I believe in One Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints. Fortunately I find that in the church I attend, a small church, as churches should be, an imperfect church as all churches are.

We underestimate ourselves vis-à-vis God. God could not act until Lot was secure. God will not return until the church sees it real task, praying for the Lord’s return.
The real task of the church is to prepare the people for the Kingdom to come. Jesus’s coming into the world always was centered on that goal: the pearl of great value: all we possess to acquire the Kingdom. All his parables had to do with “Seeking first the Kingdom”, Jesus’ prime message, but the church has different priorities.
A thought struck me while walking in my sugar bush, carrying two pails full of sap. Perhaps the trees whispered it to me. Could it possibly be that the 30 minutes of silence in heaven somewhat resembles our One Minute of Silence remembering a famous personality, in this case a silent tribute to the church that died. I don’t mean the one holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints. I do mean the instituted church with its pope and cardinals, its preachers and doctrines. After all the Old Testament church ceased to be when the curtain between the Holy and the Holy of Holies ripped from bottom to top when Christ died.
What is sure is that everything is changing, including the church, now succumbing to Gnosticism and the Pursuit of Prosperity, while the main-line churches have become a fading gathering of gray-heads.

Can the church’s mantra still become MARANATHA, Lord come quickly?

MARCH 6 2016

WE ARE ON OUR OWN: GOD HELP US!

I got an e-mail with the message: A SUPREME LOSS. I expected to read about the death of a dear relative, but, fortunately no, instead it was a memo forwarded from FOCUS ON THE FAMILY, a right wing movement, I believe, lamenting the death of Antonin Scalia, a judge on the US highest court.
Scalia. I don’t like extremes. Scalia did. Scalia was an advocate for women having lots of kids. He and his wife had nine, 5 sons, 4 daughters. He evidently, hated birth control and, of course, abortion. That’s why FOCUS ON THE FAMILY called Scalia death a Supreme loss, a play of words on his being a judge in the US Supreme Court.

Scalia’s death is not a supreme loss in my opinion. True the Roman Catholic Church, at least its conservative wing, lost a fervent promotor of male supremacy (he died far from his family in a hunting camp, a singularly male time-passing), and is, I am pretty sure, not an admirer of the current Pope.
This devout Catholic, so revered by the church, in 2000 cast his ballot for Bush, and his appointees, especially Cheney and Rumsfeld, both supreme war mongers, who have been the primary cause of the chaos we now see in Syria and adjacent states, and co-responsible for millions of deaths and maimed, and also to blame for today’s refugees. Yes, he is the main reason why I, in faraway Tweed, head the finance committee to pay for one single family out of the millions now fleeing that once stable region.

This devout Catholic, an icon of the FOCUS ON THE FAMILY, was also co-responsible for the Supreme Court favoring corporations to funnel millions of dollars to the pockets of the preferred candidates who favored the rich, and so indirectly promoted supreme disparity, which, in turn, created the current revolt of the ignorant masses who, en bloc, have rushed to the fascist Donald Trump, the blustering demagogue on par with Adolf Hitler.
Supreme Loss? I’d say good riddance. It’s exactly men such as Scalia, who know exactly what God wants, who have God in their pockets, so to say, that have brought us where we are today both religiously and economically. Fact is that God cannot be known. To claim such is to be like God, and thus a form of idolatry.

Today, more than ever before, God’s face is hidden. Nothing is really black and white anymore: everything is sort of gray, because basically, God has disappeared from influencing human actions. In other words: we are on our own and God help us!
It was not always so. It seems that every 600 years or so a major religion is born. Moses and the birth of the Israelite religion belong to the Thirteenth or Twelfth Century before Christ. Then God was a visible presence. Zarathustra, also called Zoroaster, founder of the religion by his name, is traditionally located in the sixth century before Christ. Confucius, in China, also dates from that period, and so does Buddha. Six hundred years later, in what we call the first century, God revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ, the start of Christianity. In the seventh century Mohammed appeared (563- 632) who died almost 600 years after Jesus. Perhaps due to the dramatic effect of the Black Plague which killed as much as one-third of the European population, the onset of the Protestant Reformation, a new form of religion inspired by Martin Luther, did not occur until the beginning of the sixteenth century (1517), preceded by much religious ferment.

We now are at the waning of all Christian thinking. We are entering THE AGE WITHOUT GOD. I do not count Pentecostalism as Christian since it is an offshoot of Gnosticism, basically having no regard for Creation, with speaking in tongues, uttering inarticulate sounds being a prerequisite for salvation and regarding Rapture, an escape from the earth, as its crowning achievement. It’s also the fastest growing form of worship. One of my good friends told me on the phone that he now is a pre-tribulation rapture believer, convinced that Jesus will dispatch him to heaven before all the real trouble in the world such as pandemics, wars, earthquakes, whatever, occur. He’s got a surprise coming!

WE ARE ON OUR OWN: GOD HELP US!!

And God will. He will not abandon his own. Jesus in John 17 foresaw this situation. His words: (verse 15) “My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one.” God’s guidance is still there, somehow, but on a personal level.
Let me trace how God dealt with men and men with God from the very beginning.
Adam and Eve. God had to even provide them with clothing as their fig leaves, or whatever they used, weren’t very effective. They were like children. Noah received explicit instructions how to build the Ark which, when finished, was personally closed by God. Next: Abraham. He dared to challenge God. When Noah was told by God that he was bringing the flood, Noah did not argue or question God’s decision. Abraham dared to argue that it would not be right for God to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah for the sake of the righteous there. “Let my Lord not be angry…” as he bargained with God. Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, fought with GOD and prevailed.
So there is progress: Adam disobeys God, Abraham argues with God, Jacob fights God. People are confronting their creator. And then there is Moses, who more than once successfully persuaded God to relent and actually change a divine degree. Exodus 33: 11 tells us that Moses spoke with God “the way a man speaks to another man”.

All this leads to our day and age, 2000 years after God came to us in Jesus Christ. Bonhoeffer, while in prison, in a letter to a relative, uses the term “mündig gewordende Welt” translated as a ‘world come of age.” In a sense it indicates the situation where we are supposed to be mature enough to meet our Savior as the redeemed of the Lord. For that to happen we have to have the condition as outlined in Deuteronomy 31: “I shall hide my face from them. I shall see what their end will be.” The word ‘end’ indicates ‘their distant future’ on the way to eternity.
Jesus in John 17 alludes to that condition. In the prayer to his father he asks him to protect them from the evil one, with the help of God’s spirit which came on Pentecost. God is like a wise parent who allows children to become independent, to learn from their mistakes and so slowly mature. That stage is necessary in order to be fit for eternity.

Of course this does not mean that you and I are no longer guided by God. On the contrary, as churches fail to educate people for eternity, fail to see the intimate connection between the created Word – the world we live in – and the written Word, life in general becomes more and more an encounter with the divine in any form, miracles, prayer, spiritual revelation, all matters not shared or witnessed by the masses.
Yes, it increasingly looks to me that we are on our own. The day and age for personal conversion is not over – but is becoming more and more unlikely, because the church no longer has a clear-cut message. Rehashing biblical stories does not do the trick anymore. Only a direct translation into concrete action involving the betterment of all of creation, including the human part, must take its place.

The real SUPREME LOSS today is not the death of a conservative Catholic who, in spite of being Pro-Life, was indirectly instrumental in causing millions of death and growing inequality. The SUPREME LOSS is the failure of the church to prepare its people for eternity, for making them ready for the New Creation.
That the USA – the most ‘religious’ Western country – has lost its God is plainly evident in voting for Trump, the perfect symbol of overweening pride. Without God all is permitted, something that clearly applies to today. Revelation, the last Bible Book, tells us that, prior to the Lord’s coming, everything will become more chaotic.

The rise of an anti-establishment mentality reeks of a rudderless revolution and is a sign that all institutions are in danger. All this will generate an Antichrist figure who appeals to humanity’s basic sinful desire for greed, easy living, something for nothing: chaos, as opposed to cosmos.
Admit it: increasingly the world is becoming ungovernable. Increasingly institutions are failing us. If fellows like Donald Trump can generate such a following, then it seems to me that the days of the Antichrist are not far off.

Already the scene is set for global disorder. What we see today in Europe with millions on the march to a better life, is only the beginning. The world is radically splitting in two camps, the few ‘haves’ and the overwhelming ‘have- nots’.
The Bible warns us that The End will be chaotic, symbolized by that number 666, a number understood only when it is about to come. If you follow the current financial news, you will have noticed that many important people connected to both big government and big banks are calling for the abolishing of cash, for the simple reason that credit and debit cards leave a record, so there is no cheating on tax there. In the next few years when governments everywhere will need the maximum tax revenue, the call for abolishing cash will become more pronounced. It will leave each citizen who buys or sells at the mercy of the big machines, which all operate via numbers. Then nobody will be able to buy or sell unless they use the government or bank sanctioned card. The machines will use either use the hand, via finger prints, or the head, an eye scan, for verification, exactly as Revelation portrays it. With security measures increasing all the time whether there is reason for it or not, we will quickly lose all freedom. I am not paranoid, but I see that what the Bible now already mentions may soon become reality. Better start preparing for a barter economy.
Friedrich Nietzsche foresaw the coming of the Antichrist. He wrote a book by that name. He predicted the coming madness, now evident in Climate Change, money mayhem and the Trump phenomenon. Nietzsche wrote that the loss of God entails madness, which has implications for a society which has lost God. A society that prefers a Trump has become mad.

The entire world is already godless. When in the next few years the world economy falls apart due to excess of monetary and environmental debt, and severe hardship will be the result, the disasters so plainly stated in the book of Revelation of John, will not be far away.
Basically we are blind to all this. We prefer a willful blindness, generated by false optimism and a wishy-washy religion that fails to consider the implications of what it means to be a Christian.

I repeat, it is the failure of the church to “seek first the Kingdom’, and to strive first and foremost for the welfare of creation, and so be prepared for the New Creation to come that is at the heart of the problem. That’s why Christ died on Calvary. John 3: 16, says it all. This text is almost always abused by the church to read that “God so loved humanity etc.” No, it says “God so loved the cosmos” for which he gave his life. The cosmos includes all that lives and moves and has a being. “The Four Living Creatures” representing all animals, plants, trees, natural beauty, so prominently featured in the book of the Revelation of John must become central to our lives, because without the animals, the trees, the coherence of it all, “The Kingdom” is not possible.
A thought: in the Lord’s Prayer the plea to ‘forgive us our trespasses’, refers to our ‘sins against creation’. Think about that and act accordingly.

Ora et Labora, Pray and work.