Ross-well

I wouldn’t normally comment on the furor over the recent school boy antics of Ross and Brand (But did I laugh – like a good schoolboy myself I laughed AT Ross and Brand as they merrily got themselves into trouble. So carried away were they by their mischief making that they never saw the visit to headmaster’s office coming!). However, the incident has brought to my mind an interview some years ago on one of Jonathan Ross’ shows when his guest was a UFO abductee. Heck! I thought, Mr. Ross is going to have a field day here with some very cruel humor. Well, I didn’t turn out like that at all.

I was already familiar with abduction case in question and I could probably find it in my “Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters”: Two young men are travelling in car at night on a country road. They briefly see a strange illuminated object in the sky which disappears behind a shoulder of land. They round a corner and there it is right in front of them dropping a curtain of light onto the road. Too late to stop they pass into the curtain. They seem to come straight out the other side, except that whilst passing through the curtain, the interior of the car appeared to momentarily drop away into a silent blackness. Later they find they have ‘lost time’ and hypnotic regression reveals an abduction experience..blah.. blah..blah. The two men are deeply disturbed, sometimes returning to the site, taking measurements as they attempt to unravel the mystery of their experience and try to come to terms with what has happened.

So, Mr. Jonathan Ross now steps onto the stage of this mysterious drama. True to form Ross started with some rather jocular comment. However, from the demeanor of the abductee Ross was very quick to pick up that this was a man whose experience had left a very deep impression and was in state of extreme disquiet. Ross changed tack quickly and questioned his guest thoughtfully and sensitively. Ross' own demeanor suggested that he was now taking the man seriously, a man who perhaps needed help. Gone was Ross’ sly and knowing looks into the camera. In this instance Ross showed great sensitivity to the man’s plight. Whatever the nature of the experience it was clear that it was real in the sense that it was very real to Ross’ guest. It may not have been ‘real’ real, but the man didn’t look as though he was lying and Ross understood that. Ross as a presenter has, no doubt, very good person to person skills when he wants to, and his quick change of tack is a sign of Ross' ability to quickly size up a person . In this case his assessment is evidence of the genuineness of his interviewee. Perhaps Ross himself was taken aback by the gravitas of his guest.

This story does suggest that at heart Ross isn’t a cruel man; and does he need someone to put a good word in for him at the moment! However, more disturbing is the import of the story brought to us by Jonathan Ross’ guest. It is an apt Halloween story containing a dark warning that the demonic still marches on the edge of human consciousness and dreams, if in an altered garb matching the culture of our day. What is the nature of this mysterious world, this archetypical reality? If I could answer that one I’d know the difference between noumnena, cognita and dreams.

As Authur C Clarke once said in one of his books. “There are forces in the universe of which we know nothing ....such knowledge is not meant for man”*. If an atheist can say that, then on this Halloween evening the take home lesson is: stay well clear of the occult in whatever guise it is found.

*This was said by Clarke in connection with spontaneous human combustion in his chronicles of the strange and the mysterious.

A Visit to Fountains Abbey

We arrived at Fountains Abbey in the late afternoon of a cool damp autumn day. A somber brooding mood pervaded the ruin. To me these atmospheric relics of past human activity seem to be the clues in a cosmic puzzle, almost as if I were in some total emersion game punctuated with provocative cryptic pointers here and there as to the meaning of the human predicament: “Here is your next clue….”

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This vast derelict monastery was occupied for nearly four hundred years; the monks must have thought it would go on until kingdom come, but as with so many human endeavors they had no hope of foreseeing the vicissitudes of change. We look on the Abbey now and listen to the audio guide, barely able to connect with the motives and thinking of the men (yes all men) who built and maintained a community in a culture whose world and raison d’etre was so different from our own: in fact today we have all but lost the concept of a civic raison d’etre. Even a ‘believer’ like me finds it difficult to understand the highly civic manifestation of Christianity of the middle ages, although perhaps we can see the beginings of it in religious cults like the Mormons.

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The ruin of the Fountains Abbey is perhaps the nearest medieval equivalent of Stonehenge and Karnak, all being the product of a priestly class, a sign of a labour surplus, a sign of social wealth, but not just wealth, but also evidence of a civic weltanschauung. The monks of Fountains abbey started in a small way after a spat with the clergy of York minister. Like so many before them and many after them, these devout rebels wanted to clear the ground of the religious elaborations subverted by secular wealth and cares, and make a space for themselves to think and worship in simple rustic austerity. They yearned to get back to how they thought things should be, and in order to do so they imposed the time honoured monastic solution to worldly corruption: that of separation and, initially at least, asceticism. And so the Cistercian Abbey of Fountains got started in 1132. The monks lived following the monastic community Rule of St. Benedict. This rule was authoritarian and article driven, as has been the way of many Christian communities before and after Fountains. However, a successful disciplined community ethic is often the road to wealth and a subsequent and necessary involvement in economics and politics as a result. Fountains Abbey became an economic powerhouse and grew rich with the proceeds of the wool trade; ironically in this very material way they blessed the medieval world, increasing its wealth and standard of living; for themselves at least

It is ironic that the disciplined monastic separation of the monks at Fountains in time confronted them with the real challenge that a life of grace faces: grace is not expressed in some ethereal contemplative realm divorced from material reality but in the way we handle secular affairs and cope with the temptations these affairs throw up. Riches are not in themselves wrong and a naïve faith thinks abstinence and separation to be the way of salvation. In the uneasy relation between social riches and spirituality the fault is not in the riches per se, but in a wise and detached handling of them. But as a potential channel of temptation, they too easily become our master and idol.