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.