November 16 2022
SAVE OUR SOULS
The concept of S.O.S is well known. This disaster signal certainly applies to our world today, as COP 27 shows, where it is actually, more a S.O.B affair: Save Our Bodies, while ‘Save Our Souls’ is allotted to the church, which separates the Body from the Soul, dispatching it to heaven. Today that Soul business is in dire disarray, with the future of the church as institute very much in doubt. The church, by proclaiming for centuries the ‘gnostic doctrine’ of separating spirit from matter, has created the impression that exploiting the earth, is permissible. I believe that the church’s ‘soul and heaven’ emphasis, implying ‘leaving the earth’, has abetted Climate Change.
The first law of Ecology is that “Everything is connected to everything else”.
Climate heating is more than a mere temperature increase: it is harming people’s health and causing weather disasters, affecting infrastructure and food production all over the planet. It also distorts people’s mind, as lower growth and bigger inequalities, intensify ideological extremism. And that extremism is making it harder to build national and international consensus around cutting greenhouse gas emissions, allowing the heating problem to steadily worsen.
Body, Soul and Spirit.
Yes, the first law of Ecology is that “Everything is connected to everything else”. This also applies to ‘body, soul and spirit’.
I have been reading a book written by the late Dutch Philosopher, Dr. C. A. van Peursen, professor at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands most prestigious school of higher learning. Its title: Body, Soul, Spirit: A Survey of the Body-Mind Problem.
I am interested in this topic because I struggle with this concept. Jesus refused to label ‘death’ as death. He called ‘death’ a state of sleep. My direct contact with ‘death’ is my wife who ‘died’ two years ago. According to Jesus she is asleep. I am inclined to believe that her ‘soul-spirit-mind’ is still active, even though her body is not. But, since we are a unity, something van Peursen affirms, if any part of the body/soul entity is still alive, then the total body is still alive. If that is true then we die only after the Judgement has taken place, when we either have eternal LIFE or eternal DEATH. I did not read that in van Peursen’s book, and neither did I find it in Dr. Telder’s book, “After Death, what?” It is merely my own reasoning, based on my reflections.
COP 27
It seems to me that the moment is at hand when Kairos and Chronos coincide, when human destruction and God’s healing merge, when God’s time and the Human hour melt away into eternity, when universal death becomes a transition to the fulness of God’s love.
Life and death are at stake at COP27 in Egypt, where 30,000 delegates try to iron out the problems caused by the steam engine, invented some 200 years ago, which made abnormality normal. They have come to make the current ‘normal’ abnormal again, an impossibility, of course, just as impossible for me, a 94 years old male, to rejuvenate myself and become a teenager again.
This past Sunday the congregation of the church I belong to, sang a song I had written:
Tune: All people that on earth do dwell.
The Twenty Seventh UN COP
Meets to avoid another flop
Meets to discuss world’s final choice
Meets to become earth’s healing voice.
Now every day new records break
Too hot, too dry, for heaven’s sake
We must reduce right now and here
Or lose whatever we hold dear.
The wheat crops failed in many a’land
So, food stuff is in high demand
The rice too is in short supply
Will we be able to get by?
War looms all over our great earth
Do pray to God for all our worth
War killing people, land and trees,
Do pray with force to bring his peace.
After this, I commented: “The Apostles’ Creed affirms: “The resurrection of the body, and Life Everlasting. That requires a new earth. That’s why we can sing with gusto”:
All people that on earth do dwell
Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice.
Serve him with joy, his praises tell,
Come now before him and rejoice.
Serving the Lord means serving creation. “It is specific to the Christian faith that God and his world are one, that life has its wellspring in this world in God, and in turn proceeds from this world back again to God”, to quote Bonhoeffer. The S.O.S is for our body/soul, for our earthly wellbeing. It entails the entire human being, body, soul, mind, spirit. The SOB in Egypt, the Saving of Our Bodies is, indeed, a ‘sob’ story: it is an exercise in futility, even though it must be pursued.