August 17 2022
TRIPLE HOLY:
THE HOLY EARTH; LE MILIEU DIVIN; SACRED NATURE.
The Lord’s Prayer starts with “Hallowed be thy name”. In today’s language it translates as “Your name be holy”: using the subjunctive gives it more power.
However, it has nothing to do with God’s name, as God is beyond a name, beyond comprehension. What it really means is that God is holy in all his actions; everything done by God ‘in his name’, represents God’s totality. With, “Hallowed be thy name”, we ask God to make us see that his name is engraved on every feature of creation, now in extreme pain, a pain we too experience, as expressed in the song below:
O holy earth, receive our tears
Console us, still our deepest fears.
We now are aliens in your land,
When will we see your healing hand?
The people here are drunk with wine
In blinded daze see no decline
The nations’ rulers spread the lie
Insist all’s fine, the truth deny.
What evil thought gave life to birth
That made us kill God’s Holy earth?
For one day soon God’s wrath will come,
With death for many, life for some.
(Tune: The Old Hundredth: O people that on earth do dwell)
The tune is quite appropriate: this blog is directed to ‘all people that on earth do dwell’. Warnings galore! The ARCTIC NEWS last week had some disturbing news for us, earthlings: “sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic as high as 32.1°C or 89.78°F on August 8, 2022. Ten years ago, it was Zero Degrees Celsius in the same spot.
Temperatures near the North Pole regulate the weather world-wide. Once the methane buried there, breaks lose, all hell will break loose, ending life in 2025. Have a look at its website.
Last week I was reading in Hebrew 10, “It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” When we abuse creation – that’s how God presents himself to us – when we play dice with God’s work, we must expect his response: Global Heating is his revenge: it signifies falling into the hands of the living God.
Many sources.
Multiple books make that plain. Teilhard de Chardin, in his Le Milieu Divin, some 70 years ago, wrote that, “The day is not far distant when humanity will realize that biologically it is faced with a choice between suicide and adoration.” Now 2022, that day has arrived. This learned priest, devout Christian, great scientist with a doctor’s degree in Paleontology from The Sorbonne, echoes Bonhoeffer who, some decades before him, saw God and Creation as one. Teilhard’s biographer wrote, “If Teilhard loved God, it was through the world, and if he loved the world, it was as a function of God, the animator of all things.” A month before Teilhard died on April 10 1955, he wrote, “The joy and strength of my life will have lain in the realisation that when the two ingredient – God and the world – were brought together they set up an endless mutual reaction, producing a sudden blaze of such intense brilliance that all the depths of the world were lit up for me.”
Karen Armstrong, former nun, prolific writer, recently wrote SACRED NATURE. This past week I received her new book in the mail, all the way from London, England, where she lives. In it she described how “For most of human history, and in almost all the world’s cultures, nature was believed to be sacred, and our God or gods to be present everywhere in the natural world. When people in the West began to separate God and nature in modern times, it was not just a profound breach with thousands of years of accumulated wisdom: it also set in train the destruction of the natural world.”
Too late.
It is a sign of the last days, confirmed in the Bible’s very last book, that the final truth will be revealed, and confront humanity with the ultimate consequence of our current way of life. “The wages of sin is death”, says Romans 6: 23, “But the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus, our Lord.”
Not very popular, this explanation: it interferes with our idea of God, safely secured in heaven, where weare supposed to join him. It makes it easy for pastors to preach, and pew-sitters to live. Bonhoeffer calls this “Pious Secularism.” A holy creation calls for holy living. The Bible repeatedly says that – see John 3: 13, “nobody goes to heaven”. Jesus came to show us how to live LIFE: see John 10:10.
Teilhard de Chardin, in conclusion, writes:
One day, the Gospel tells us, the tension gradually accumulating between humanity and God will touch the limits prescribed by the possibilities of the world. And then will come the end.