THIS WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS.

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This week reminded me of WAR. Visions of wartime welled up in me. I vividly remember May 10 1940, now more than 85 years ago, the day Germany invaded the Netherlands. That day I sat on a low brick wall, on the street corner where the large Reformed Church was situated. I had a beautiful view of the inner city’s skyline, silhouetting its contours, dominated by the 100 meters high Martini Tower.

The weather that day, was picture perfect, peaceful, and a lone single engine plane hovered in the bright blue sky: a German reconnaissance plane, I imagined.

I, a 12 years old boy, was alone there. Nobody else stirred. Everybody was indoors, clustered around the radio, listening for news and expecting the worst. What could tiny Netherlands do to stop Germany’s colossal war-machine?

My reflections on what happened in the Netherlands so many years ago, were kindled by this week’s headline in the Globe and Mail, Canada’s National Newspaper: MILITARY MODELS CANADIAN RESPONSE TO HYPOTHETICAL AMERICAN INVASION.

Will I again experience a foreign occupation in my life-time? I dread the thought, not for me, an old man approaching 100, but for my multiple offspring, numbering scores.

 

Prepared for hardship.

 

I was a child of the Dirty Thirties, the economic malaise that taught us to be frugal, and sparing, and economical, and self-sufficient. In that sense we were well prepared for the hardship awaiting us, already always mending clothes, always watching every penny, always praying, religious to a fault: “Trust and obey, there’s no other way”. The churches were packed. Living next to a large church – not the one my family attended (that one, equally large was more orthodox, also quite close) – on Sunday afternoon, for the second service, me, then a 5 years old, I noticed the many cigarette ends, discarded just before the men entered the church.

 

Back to the war, now known as WWII -1939-45. According Eric Hobsbawm, well-known historian, in his book, The Age Of Extremes :1914-1991, he posed that the WWI 1914-18 war never satisfactory concluded, and simply continued in 1939, ending in 1945.  

 

Back to my youthful observations.

 

When Germany attacked my ‘old country’, the defeat was quick. May 10 1940 followed by May 11. My younger brother, by 3 years, and I, in midmorning – no school, of course – rushed to the city centre – a mere 10-15 walk – and found there a German Army Brass band already playing Teutonic tunes, while long lines of motorized occupation forces – fierce looking soldiers – drove past, on the way west, toward the “Afsluit Dijk”, that long “Closing Dike”, connecting Friesland to the Dutch economic centre, Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague.

 

That occupation lasted 5 full years, almost to the day.

 

This week a turning point?

 

Now more than 80 years later, not only Europe, but the entire world is in an inescapable bind: at war, not so much among each other – that too – but fighting “The War of All Wars: Humanity against God: Technology against Creation”.

 

My mind goes back to the Scriptures, and to Jesus’ observation concerning “The End”.  He said, “Now learn this lesson from the fig tree: As soon as its twigs get tender and its leaves come out, you know that summer is near. ³³ Even so, when you see all these things, you know that it is near, right at the door.”

 

Did this week signal the beginning of the End?

 

We don’t like Jesus’ reference to The End. We are too comfortable. Yet Revelation 18 pulls no punches: “All the nations have drunk the maddening wine of adulteries.” We do well to read that chapter, and visualize the luxuries we enjoy – at the expense of God’s creation, which the author of the book calls ‘adultery’, aptly named, as they are abnormal intrusions.

 

Both Jesus and John on Patmos, tell us to be on the lookout for THE end, the Telos, of which the Bible speaks all the time. The signs are everywhere, as this past week’s events show: even the weather participates in the parade of perils.  No wonder the Atlantic Magazine claims: “Americans are entering the most dangerous world they have known since World War II, one that will make the Cold War look like child’s play and the post-Cold War world like paradise.”

 

Everything is connected to everything else.

 

The above law of Ecology, is also an important Biblical given: Our world face tough choices, as we have reached “The Limits of Growth”.

Now a new order has come, the fight for the rapidly disappearing natural resources.

 

Will the church sound the alarm?

 

Data from the 1950s record that over half of Americans were in the membership rolls of a mainline church in 1958. Today 8–8.5 percent of Americans are mainline Protestant, with the average age of about 60 years old. Will the church sound the alarm? Did it “In the week that was?”