Creeping Corruption

I left the world, so to speak, on January 1st 1979, which is when I went to live in Bath to pursue a life more or less centred on the spiritual path. Over the next 18 years I lived in various places but mostly out of England. When I returned to England in 1996 it was an unfamiliar place to me but I still lived a fairly isolated life, not watching much television and only occasionally reading newspapers, so I didn't realise how much things had changed until my companion in this way of life died and certain events took place which made me decide to go back into the world. That was in 2000. 

Actually, I had a kind of advance warning of the changes in 1997. That was the year my father died, and it was brought home to me how much I respected him even though I often hadn't seen him more than  a couple of times a year since I left home. He was an embodiment of fundamental decency and, though he only went to church on high days and holidays and was not ostensibly a Christian, I think he was one in terms of his behaviour and morals. He had been raised by a devout Methodist mother (his father had died young) who had made him sign the pledge not to touch alcohol at the tender age of 15. Naturally he reacted against that kind of upbringing but the essentials of Christian moral behaviour stuck with him as they did with many of his generation who nevertheless had drifted away from religion.  Now, with every generation that passes, the connection to Christianity is weakened and our attitude to life suffers accordingly.

But it is not my father's death I am referring to. In 1997 Princess Diana also died and the country appeared to go mad, lamenting as though its own mother had gone.  I happen to think that Diana was a wholly negative influence on the national psyche, validating self-concern, sentimentality, emotional over-indulgence and fake caring, but that's not the point I'm making. At her death the English, egged on by the hypocritical media, showed they were no longer the English of yore, and had renounced their traditions for a shallow exhibitionism. It really marked the end of an era.

But it was only when I went back to live in London at the end of 2000 and reentered what you might call normal existence that I realised how the world had changed. I had no idea at how much old values had been overturned and new ones had replaced them. Now these new values have become assumptions and to question them is to show yourself to be a wicked person, at least it is in educated mainstream society.

When you live with a child you don't notice him getting taller, but if you only see him every now and then you do see the difference. I had not been completely ignorant of the changes in the world during my time out of it but I had not realised how thoroughly they had permeated national, indeed human, consciousness.  I sometimes wonder if part of the reason for my removal from the world was to protect me from this indoctrination until I was more able to withstand it.  Because, believe me, it is hard to see through the lies of this world unless you have a solid grounding in something else that shows them up for what they are. Even Christianity has been corrupted.  Not in itself, of course, but in many of the forms it takes in the modern world.

The old story of the frog that is slowly boiled and so doesn’t realise what is happening to it applies here. Humanity is being brainwashed, firstly by the denial of transcendent reality and then by redefining what is good in terms of that denial. The only protection against this is faith in the living God and his human face which is Jesus Christ. I do think it needs a realisation of the personal nature of deity to achieve this because an impersonal spirituality can be made to fit too neatly into modern ideologies, and so be insufficient to enable one to throw off all its lies and illusions