Into the Abyss

Where this webblog is going: More on mystery, paradox, doubt, relativity and the necessity and impossibility of absolute truth. More on John Paul, the Church today, New Age … and the Christian Hermetic tradition. And more on love, feeling and facing the contemporary world situation. And other matters as well.

But first I want to pause for a single illustration of what I mean by a widening abyss, a void of meaning, into which destructive Forces could and would rush in, limiting our freedom. That situation which Rudolf Steiner, among others, saw so very clearly.

Recently here in Ireland, I watched a videotape an American friend of mine had sent me of U.S. television. Inadvertently, he had taped a news report of a missing child, presumably abducted, with a sexual intent in mind.

I saw then the heartbreaking plea of her father and mother for information that might hopefully lead to her safe return. And then I **rewound** the tape a little – and found an **earlier** commercial enjoining the viewer to stay tuned. Stay tuned and watch the news at eleven, where one would hear about the missing child and the parent’s ‘emotional’ pleading … all of this said with drama, as opposed to compassion or sensitivity.

The underlying context of this message then, was: ‘Stay tuned, American viewer, stay tuned to hear the drama, hear the drama. Can we **fascinate** you sufficiently, so that you will stay tuned – so as you will also stay tuned to our corporate sponsors, our corporate sponsors who will then pay us more money for the higher ratings received by our eleven ‘o clock news?’

I grew up in America in the 1960’s and 70’s. I do not recall such OBSCENITIES from that era. And I am gravely concerned what further and perhaps far greater obscenities, lay in store twenty to thirty years down the line … I am also not sure which should be more disturbing to us: that such obscenity exists or that it is apparently received with blasé indifference.

Our society desperately needs to be built on something ELSE.