DOGS AND BAD NAMES

by  Bill Stephen

People watching is more than a pursuit, more than an obsession, it is a kind of appetite, part of our evolutionary inheritance to help us to survive. Establishing the potentiality of the other person, identifying the type, placing him or her on our defensive scale, threat or no threat, rival or no rival, benevolent or dangerous is an instinctive reaction to every new person we meet and the reason for our untiring observation of other people, and not just of people we meet face to face, but we extend it to everyone that comes within the range of our awareness, people in books, newspapers, magazines, on television, even people who have died thousands of years ago. Consider the enormous concentration upon the life and character of Jesus of Nazareth, or of Mohammed or Buddha or Confucius, not to mention the fascination that attaches to the hellish biographies of Genghis Khan, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot and their murderous crew.

Where we place individuals on our bipolar scale of nice and nasty, will be influenced by our own moral philosophy, that is by how we think we ought to treat other people and how we expect them to treat us, based upon our assessment of their likely motivation.

 For instance a recent survey, the event which prompted these speculations, discovered that a majority of twenty-year- olds interviewed thought that people are motivated entirely by selfish ends, that benevolence is an illusion and altruism a guise to conceal a self-serving aim. While it is depressing that young. people should apparently hold such a jaundiced view, and presumably anticipate little unsolicited kindness or sympathy from their fellow beings, it is a point of view that can claim a long and respectable ancestry in philosophical literature. Thomas Hobbes, the seventeenth century English philosopher, a materialist who had little time for notions of the soul and other numinous or subliminal essences, had no doubt that human kind is governed solely by the desires for pleasure, preservation and power. The natural condition of humankind is one of egoistical striving; "a war of all against all". Feelings such as sympathy or compassion for other people in distress are no more than imagined or anticipated pity for oneself if one were to suffer a similar catastrophe. Human beings cooperate with each other and show concern for each other out of self-interest only, otherwise, he claims, human beings would live in a condition 'of continued fear and danger of violent death and the life of man would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short' which he claims is its natural state. (The warfare between gangs of knife carrying youths in our major cities comes very close to justifying this opinion.) Hobbes's fellow countryman, Joseph Butler, however, takes issue with him. Writing some decades after, Hobbes's death, Butler is much more optimistic, claiming that human beings are neither totally self-regarding nor totally un-self-regarding but all partly selfish and partly benevolent, but that in any particular individual benevolence may be the dominant characteristic and in another, indifference or even cruelty.

When I was in my early twenties, I left the safety of the ivory tower that had nurtured in me a love of literature and philosophy, and armed with a quiverful of high ideals, stepped into the world as innocent and as unprepared as Don Quixote. I believed implicitly in the perfectibility of humankind in general and of the basic decency of each individual of the species. There were, clearly, exceptions, such as Adolph Hitler and his minions who had faced a just and final reckoning at the Nuremburg trials, but these were unlikely to occupy the desks in my classroom. ...Oh boy! No nation or race, I was to discover, holds a monopoly of human depravity.

I started work after Easter. I had a class of fifteen-year-old boys whose sole ambition was to leave school at the end of the term totally unaffected by ten years of compulsory education. At least, that is what I was told in no uncertain manner by my new colleagues, and after my first bruising week, I was tempted to agree with them. "Get them before they get you! Never turn your back on that lot! The slightest sign of weakness and they'll chew you up. Got a Lochgelly? No? Then get one! And use it!! Otherwise, better join the Commandos, they've got it easy, compared with this place." One old campaigner, meeting me one day in the corridor where I was vainly trying to keep order said, "You're a decent, well-meaning lad, but you've got the wrong idea of human nature. You don't know much about people do you? Look, these kids are just plain evil. This", he said, shouting above the uproar and sweeping his arm around in a gesture that embraced the whole chaotic scene, "is original sin in the raw!" Most of my colleagues had seen military service in one or other of the 20th Century wars and had a vastly greater experience of human nature than I, but I could not believe that they were as cynical and pessimistic and people as depraved as their comments seemed to suggest. However, a few weeks later, I found myself changing my mind. I was involved in running an after-school club. One day I was approached by an elderly man, of stiff, upright bearing, smartly dressed in a tweed suit, who said his name was Douglas McEwan, and that he operated the Karuna animal refuge centre on a small croft at the edge of town. Some of our pupils had taken to tormenting his animals. That weekend past, they had let loose their dog in an enclosure where injured birds and farm fowl were housed and several had been killed and others had escaped. The police had been informed but he asked if he could talk to the members of our club about why he had started his animal refuge centre and the kind of work he did there, on the principle that education would be a more effective deterrent than retribution. We agreed, and the following week he stood in front of a hundred pupils in the school hall, a confident, commanding figure, who had an enviable knack of gaining and retaining his audience's attention. He'd been a civil engineer employed by the British Government and his career had been spent building roads and bridges in India and Burma. When the Japanese invaded Burma he had been surveying possible sites for a military airstrip in a remote area. He was escorted by a small detachment of Indian soldiers mounted on elephants. Inadvertently, they wandered into a war zone where scattered units of a British and Indian forces were fighting a rearguard action against a large Japanese formation. They had just come across the smoking ruins of a Burmese village on the banks of a river when suddenly they were assailed by a hail of bullets. They had stumbled into an ambush intended for the British soldiers. His elephant was hit and immediately plunged into the river, bolting down stream. At the same time a searing pain stabbed through his shoulder and down into his left arm. He was thrown from his chair into the bottom of the howdah which incredibly remained strapped to the elephant's back in spite of the animal's mad career along the river bed. He lost consciousness for some time and when he came to, he was being lifted out of the howdah. The elephant, now quite calm, was standing in a compound before the ruins of a small pagoda. Under the shelter of the walls, people were lying on make-shift beds, Burmese villagers, British and Indian soldiers and next to the pagoda, in deep shadow, two forms clad in Japanese battle-dress. Tenderly, he was placed on a bed of leaves beside the inert body of a British soldier. Somehow, by design or accident, the elephant, an old lady called Myrtle, had found her way to a Buddhist temple, where the priests were doing their utmost to care for the casualties of war irrespective of their nationality. They discovered a bullet had passed through his shoulder chipping the bone. They cleaned and treated his wound with traditional medicines, fed him, reassured him, prayed over him and made him as comfortable as possible. They did the same for all their patients, including the two Japanese soldiers who had come to enlist them as slave labour and who were now dying of some unnamed jungle fever. As his strength returned he became aware of the temple routine. Day by day, with untiring devotion the priests said their prayers, dressed wounds, distributed food  and water, shaded their patients from the sun, comforted the dying and disposed of the dead with sensitivity and reverence. Day by day, a train of village women would arrive with baskets of rice, fruit and vegetables, donated by the local inhabitants from their own meagre store. Day by day, the thunder of gunfire would echo around the forest and day by day, in one's and two's, the sick and injured would appear at the gates of the temple.

Within the mud brick walls all was peace and compassion; but beyond, total strangers from the ends of the earth were hunting and killing each other. Love and hate, compassion and cruelty, nurture and destruction, virulent opposites, competing for control in the same being. He challenged his young audience. "How do we make sense of this?" Not a sound did they make. They sat spell-bound. "That village deep in the forest was called Karana. Now there is a Sanskrit word, 'Karuna'. It means compassion and compassion means relieving suffering and distress, every kind of suffering and of all living creatures. One of the central truths of Buddhism is compassion. Those priests were exercising their religious faith by relieving our pain and misery. It occurred to me that what they were doing required more courage, more commitment, more effort, more strength than it does to kill a person. You can hide in a bush, fire a gun and kill another person in a second without any effort. Nursing a creature back to health over many weeks is a real challenge. Something noble for a person to do. Then, one day, I had a terrible thought. I had never once felt any concern for the elephant that had rescued me. I had been so concerned about myself, concern for her well-being had never troubled my mind. What had happened to her? She had also been shot, at least once. I could not speak the local language. I tried to discover her fate but failed. I felt disgusted with myself, disappointed that I had been so callous. I felt so guilty that I vowed that if I survived to return to Scotland, in her honour, I would do something to help creatures in distress. And so five years ago, when I retired, I converted my grandfather's old croft into the Karuna Animal Refuge Centre." He finished by asking them to seek out the compassionate part of their nature and treat all living creatures with consideration and respect. His talk proved to be by far the most engrossing we ever had at our meetings, and it had clearly moved and influenced his audience.

Unfortunately, George Porter, 'Tinser', (his father was the local scrap dealer), was not of that audience. The following Saturday, Mr and Mrs Porter went off to Glasgow for the day, leaving Tinser to look after himself. Bored witless by early evening, Tinser and his cronies, descended upon the Karuna Animal Centre, climbed over a gate into the paddock where three elderly pit ponies and two donkeys were spending their retirement. The plan was to race the animals. They set off in pursuit of their mounts. Tinser eventually trapped a donkey in a corner of the field, tried to straddle its back, but missed and landed hard on his shoulder. He shrieked with pain and then fell silent. His pals immediately disappeared over the gate abandoning Tinser to whatever fate the donkey might have in mind for him.

Alerted by his dogs, Douglas McEwen, found Tinser, still very groggy, in great pain, cradling his right arm in his left hand. He helped him to his car, drove him to the local surgery where a dislocated shoulder was diagnosed and treated, after which Douglas drove him home, via the chipshop. When his parents returned early next morning, Tinser claimed he had inadvertently strayed into a field and been attacked by a rabid donkey and that Douglas McEwan had tried to buy his silence with a fish supper. The police were informed. The Porters claimed dangerous animals were running loose all over the Centre and were demanding that it should be closed down and the donkey destroyed. There was an investigation, the facts were established, the Porters were cautioned about wasting Police time and Tinser found it convenient to avoid school for the rest of term.

There was a tendency in the staffroom to regard this as yet another demonstration of original sin, of the view that human nature is essentially base and depraved, but then an extraordinary thing happened. Two or three weeks before the end of term, Tinser arrived at the Animal Refuge, somewhat apprehensively to be sure, his arm still in a sling ( more for appearances' sake than medical need), leading on a piece of washing line a dog so emaciated, each of its ribs was visible through its skin, and so weak, it could hardly stagger along behind him.

Engaged upon one of his foraging expeditions on someone else's private property, he had entered a wash-house where he discovered three dogs tied to an old cast-iron mangle. One dog had died of starvation and thirst, another was too weak to stand, and having given each a drink of water and a few biscuits, he left taking the strongest-looking one with him. Douglas McEwen quickly saw to the needs of the animals and reported the matter to the police.

This display of compassion and disregard for self -interest on Tinser's part not only astounded his erstwhile teachers, who had long since labelled him as one of the irredeemably bad guys, but also prompted what at first seemed to be a slightly more enlightened re-assessment of the staff-room view of human motivation. As my venerable colleague said, "Well, there is no fathoming human nature." Then, his cynicism gaining the upper hand again, added, "Mind you he probably did it just to prove us wrong. So he did have an ulterior motive after all." Tinser I am sure was as genuinely moved to relieve the suffering of the neglected dogs as the Buddhist priests and the villagers were to help the victims of the hostilities which had engulfed their community, compassion which would have endangered their lives had the invaders been aware of it.

How we regard our own and other people's motivation has deep philosophical and spiritual consequences. In claiming that the promotion of self-interest is what decides our behaviour, Thomas Hobbes denies the possibility of there being any absolute or universal moral standards. We live in communities for our own protection and find it prudent to make and obey laws aimed at maintaining the security of our community but beyond that each of us makes up his/her own mind about what is good or bad. Morality is a matter of personal taste and convenience. Hobbes died in 1679, yet he would recognise the views of our contemporary twenty-year olds as revealed in the survey, as coinciding with his. If the survey reflects a majority view of human nature then we are, indeed, living in a totally materialistic, Hobbesian world.

Joseph Butler, who considered his own 18th. Century to be largely materialistic, . claims that morality is not a matter of convenience to ensure the smooth running of the state, but an inherent human characteristic, of which the principal feature is conscience, a view not dissimilar to that of James Martineau, the 19th. Century Unitarian theologian. Butler readily concedes that self-interest is a constant and ferocious rival to conscience and that it overcomes conscience from time to time, more frequently in some people than in others, but that conscience which places the interests of others above self when the two are in conflict, shows humanity achieving its true destiny within society.

This suggests that if we see ourselves as purely selfISh creatures unleavened by love and compassion for others, then our moral and caring expectations of ourselves are severely reduced, and if we persuade ourselves that we and everyone else are aiming at unnatural and quixotic ideals if we try to act unselfishly, then that is how we will act and our pessimistic view of human nature becomes a self-fulfilling one

 I find it hard, however, to believe that each of those twenty-year-olds saw themselves as ever being incapable of acting generously or compassionately when circumstances required or when looking at their loved one's or friends that what they are seeing a remorseless depraved rival intent upon their destruction. Surely that way leads to paranoia and the kind of life Hobbes describes as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short".

Better by far, surely, like Joseph Butler, to acknowledge frankly oar feet of clay but to seek our destiny among the stars.

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STARLIGHT OR MOONSHINE?

By Terence Skene

A review of 'The Gospel and the Zodiac' by Bill Darlison

This book sets out to refute the orthodox view of St. Mark's Gospel as being an unsatisfactory, Cut-and-paste version of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, (St. Augustine's opinion) and to re-interpret it as a sophisticated and profound work of spiritual guidance, organised according to the principles of the zodiac. In the process, the author, currently Minister of Dublin Unitarian Church, raises important questions about the status of Jesus as a historical figure. At the outset, Bill Darlison identifies two separate attitudes to exploiting the Jesus phenomenon, the Gnostic and the historical, the former condemned as heresy by the early Christian leaders, while the latter they adopted as orthodox.

Gnosticism associated the world of matter with evil and the spiritual world with goodness. It was, therefore, concerned with a person's interior life, with his/her search for spiritual enlightenment, to be acquired through prayer, meditation and the observation of certain rituals to overcome the intemperate appetites of the body. God was to be experienced within the individual rather than as an omnipotent presence beyond, participating actively in human affairs. This experience was achieved through deep self-knowledge, won by means of intuition rather than reason. In time, self-knowledge would lead to an enlightened understanding of human nature and of human destiny.

A historical Jesus, a man who lived, taught, was crucified and rose from the dead, and who was also the Son of God, sent to redeem the sins of the world, is essential to Orthodox Christianity. God lived and suffered as a human being in the body of Jesus and involved himself directly in human history, therefore, it is vital that there should be no doubt about the factual truth of Jesus' existence. Liberals, who may deny Jesus' divine parentage and miraculous career, also seek the historical individual who may be the enlightened revolutionary who delivered the Sermon on the Mount. However, establishing the authenticity of such a figure is fraught with difficulty. There are many events described in the Gospels, which when viewed as history, conflict sharply with what we normally accept as being natural. For instance, the virgin birth, the miracles, raising Lazarus from the dead and the resurrection. Furthermore, the Gospels tell us little about Jesus the man: there is no physical description, no account of his early life, of his marital status, of his character, his likes and dislikes etc. and they (the Gospels) differ over important dates in his life. Was Jesus born in the reign of Herod the Great (died 4 BCE) (Matthew) or during Quirinius' census in 6 CE, (Luke) ten years later? Did Jesus cleanse the Temple at the beginning of his ministry (John) or at the end (Matthew)? Did the crucifixion occur on the day of the Passover (Matthew, Mark, Luke) or the day before (John)? Did the crucifixion begin at 9.00am (Mark) or at noon (John)? By referring to this and other evidence and to the work of contemporary, liberal scholars Bill Darlison argues that the case for the existence of the Jesus portrayed in the Gospels is very thin. There may have been a person called Jesus executed for blasphemy during the administration of Pontius Pilate and aspects of his life and teaching may appear in the Gospels, but this is not sufficient to accord them the status of history. Indeed, he claims that attempting to sift through the Gospels to expose the genuine utterances and deeds of Jesus is a vain undertaking and one which distorts the original intention of the works which was to establish the principle of spiritual illumination and the awareness of the divinity within each of us.

This is certainly so in the case of St.Mark's Gospel, which Darlison claims is a skilfully crafted literary artefact, portraying a Hero called Jesus and drawing inspiration and material from many literary sources including Hebrew and Greek. For instance, the account of Jesus calming the storm while sailing on the Sea of Galilee, (Mark C.4, vs.35-41) appears in Psalm 107 vs.23-30, composed about a thousand years earlier, and a yet earlier version of the incident occurs in Homer's Odyssey. Mark's description of John the Baptist (Ch. 1 v.6) is similar to that of Elijah in the 2nd Kings (Ch. 1. v.8). Mark's account of the crucifixion (Ch. 14) echoes accounts in Psalms 22, 31 and 41. It has also been argued that Mark's description of the execution of Jesus may have been influenced by Homer's account of the death of Hector, the Trojan hero, in the Iliad. That Mark was aware of and influenced by the intellectual climate of his age is most effectively demonstrated by his exploitation of the elaborate apparatus of the zodiac, which provided him with a ready-made structure for his work, as well as an allegorical and symbolic system which, being generally understood and respected, would give his message the authenticity and authority to carry it deep into the minds of his readers. Astrology had penetrated every aspect of intellectual life for centuries before the writing of the Gospels. Religion, philosophy, architecture, science, social and political administration as well as mythology, art and literature were all influenced by the predictable movement of the constellations which to the unreliability and impermanence of all things human gave a promise of stability and perpetuity. The behaviour of the Heroes of ancient literature is similar to that of the sun in its annual voyage around the zodiac. Gilgamesh, Hercules, Theseus, Perseus are all obliged to overcome a series of obstacles (usually 12, in keeping with the twelve signs of the zodiac) - the Twelve Labours of Hercules, for example - before returning to their starting place n triumph. Furthermore, many of these heroes, although born to a mortal woman were fathered by a God, usually Zeus, himself.

Darlison examines the extent to which the Hebrew world was also influenced by astrology. The floors of ancient synagogues unearthed by archaeologists depict astrological pictograms. Isaac, (Genisis Ch.2 v.1), Samuel (1st Samuel Ch. 1) and Samson (Judges Ch. 1 v.2-25) all owed their presence on earth to divine activity, like the ancient Greek heroes. Samson's career, indeed, echoes that of the Sun, dying as he does between two pillar (like Jesus, between two thieves) similar to the death of the sun in the winter sign of Pisces (the fish). The Bible is ambivalent about astrology. Jeremiah (Ch.10 v.2) and Isaiah (Ch.47 v.13) are opposed to seeking prophetic guidance from the stars, but God made the constellations, " God made the sun, moon and stars for signs and seasons" (Genesis Ch.1. v.14) and the star followed by the three Wise Men (Matthew Ch.2 v.2) clearly has an astrological function. Psalm 19 declares the stars to be a symbol of God's transcendence and the orderliness of the constellations a reflection of God's harmony, a clear sign that human life should be similarly harmonious and well-ordered.

This lengthy and closely argued discussion is intended by the author not only to validate his interpretation of St. Mark's Gospel in terms of the ancient mind-set, but more particularly to reassure his reader that this approach is not a gimmick, has nothing in common with fortune tellers and tabloid horoscopes but is a serious attempt to recover for our own times the spiritual guidance available in this work of 2000 years ago.

The Zodiac is that region of sky that the sun seems to traverse during its yearly circumnavigation of the earth. As it travels around this circle it passes in order twelve different constellations, arriving at each constellation at the same time of the year, of course, from Spring, through, Summer, Autumn to Winter and eventually onwards to Spring again. Darlison, retracing the steps of the Gnostic scholar Valentinus (2nd Century CE) claims that St. Mark's Gospel uses the sun's annual circuit as a metaphor for the spiritual journey from ignorance to enlightenment. The Hero who makes this journey is Jesus, but he can only make it for himself. Others who seek spiritual enlightenment must make their own journey, as such knowledge may not be acquired by proxy.

Starting at the Spring Equinox, when the sun is in Aries, with the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist (Ch.1 v.1 - Ch.3.v.31), Darlison claims that the Gospel of St. Mark, refers to each constellation of the zodiac in order until it ends at Pisces in late winter (March) with the crucifixion and resurrection (Ch.14 v.17 - Ch.16 v.18). Each Zodiacal Sign receives a chapter to itself in Darlison's book. His method is to give some account of the sign, its history, its mythology, its characteristics and most importantly its appearance and significance in the particular Chapter of St. Mark, before discussing its spiritual import. Occasionally the zodiacal link is obvious. For instance the reference to the "man carrying a jar of water" (Ch.13) is a clear pointer to the symbol of Aquarius, the Water-carrier. The association between zodiac and gospel may appear tenuous, however, on other occasions, as in the case of Scorpio where the link is the descent into Jericho, the lowest place on the planet (Ch.10 v.46), the justification tell being that the Scorpio message is we have to descend first in order to ascend spiritually, we have to experience suffering before we can attain enlightenment. At other times the argument seems to rely on principally on coincidence and similarity.

The process of spiritual transformation described, step by step, throughout this Gospel as interpreted by Bill Darlison, starts with commitment and follows an increasingly severe and painful course of self-examination, leading to self-responsibility, self-knowledge and self-denial, until eventually every shred of self-consciousness has been stripped away and the enlightened spirit is exposed utterly to the entire universe.

This book consists of three major sections, an extensive Introduction which provides the justification for his approach, the detailed analysis of the Gospel's astrological material and thirdly the author's own translation of St. Mark's work, conveniently divided into zodiacal sections. The reader, needs to develop a strategy, therefore, for studying the work. I read the Introduction, then the version of St. Mark, in the King James's Bible, and then in order, the zodiacal analyses along with the relevant sections of Darlison's translation, while occasionally referring to the King James version. This took some time, not only because of all the page turning involved but because this is a very closely argued and detailed piece of scholarship, with many footnotes and cross-references. Finally, I read through the author's translation again to gain the total effect and was impressed by the result. Stripped of its status as a 'History' and accompanying scepticism about its authenticity, and regarded as allegory and mythology instead, the work comes alive as Tragedy, profoundly moving as the plays of Sophocles, setting the human aspirant at the centre of a universal drama in which he/she is tested to the limit by competing moral choices and obligations.

Thus far, although I have no interest in astrology, I found the case well argued. I was impressed by the author's account of the 1st century CE intellectual background and of the mind that conceived St. Mark's Gospel. The gnostic approach seemed entirely valid and I agreed that it overcame the problems created by a literal or historical reading. As allegory, as poetry, the work engaged my emotions and instincts. However, I became aware of a subtext that seems to undermine the author's commitment to the gnostic provenance of St. Mark's Gospel. I am aware that Biblical interpretation, like any exercise in literary interpretation, no matter how well argued, is hypothetical and provisional upon stronger evidence becoming available, but I have the impression that at heart Bill Darlison finds it difficult to desert entirely the historical position. He seems to prefer the view that St. Mark's teaching has accrued around the figure of the historical Jesus. He writes, "Mark has given us a textbook of the spiritual life, a life lived in harmony with the universe, a life of holiness, wholeness, which can only be attained with great effort and at great personal cost. There is also the possibility that as we learn about these universal principles, we are learning about the career of one about whom history has bequeathed us little more than a name, whose life embodied these principles and whom we call our brother and exemplar" (my italics) (p.47). The use of the words life, embodied and brother presupposes the existence of a living person. I find this statement confusing, in view of what eleven he has already explained of the gnostic position. Is he interpolating a historicist view into a gnostic document: or is St. Mark's Gospel a spatchcocked version combining both points of view or is it after all an incomplete biography of Jesus? Or am I mistaken in thinking that the gnostics did not reject a belief in a historical Jesus? The confusion deepens when he writes, "While I would want to argue for the objective presence of a zodiacal scheme in Mark, I do not think for one moment that in describing this we are exhausting all dimensions of meaning within the text(p.48)". His use of the subjunctive mood in while I would want to argue (my italics) implies some doubt as to the security of his c it lahatims. Are we being told this is a gnostic text or simply that it is possible to demonstrate it might be? Is this an attempt to "make the gospel relevant to contemporary people" (p 47.) or is it principally a literary exercise in interpreting a text in terms of the zodiac? What was uppermost in the author's mind, the Gospel or the Zodiac? Is it perhaps the case that the author finds the claims of the orthodox view just too powerful to be ignored altogether?

To a readership chiefly interested in this book's astrological content, the answer to these questions may not be important, but to anyone with a Christian background seeking spiritual guidance, the status of the Gospels, history or poetry, is vital. It is unfortunate that in spite of the author's impressive scholarship and concern for detail, the reader may be left worrying whether this path to enlightenment has been illuminated by starlight or obscured by moonshine.

("The Gospel and the Zodiac" by Bill Darlison is published by Duckworth Overlook)

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LAW & LATERAL THINKING

By Sue Good

My theme is law, or perhaps rules if you prefer. When I was about ten I cherished great hopes of being a writer, creating my own fantasy worlds, just like Enid Blyton, but sadly my imagination was not up to the job and I could neither conjure up original storylines, nor produce mental images of characters or settings. It was to be another 40 years before I discovered what my imagination was good for and that is that it's good for making links. Rather like making a patchwork quilt, I enjoy taking disparate facts and joining them all together, or cutting down old favourites and making them into something new.. In fancy "management speak" this kind of imagination is called "lateral thinking", but in plain terms I have a "Grasshopper mind", which describes rather well my style of composition, hopping forward from fact to fact, never going into too much depth, but hopefully managing to keep connected.

Even a grasshopper has to have a starting point and mine is a book called "The year of living biblically";' Esquire', a men's magazine in the States and he comes from a Jewish background, although he has never really practised the faith. He suffers to some extent from obsessive compulsive disorder and is inclined to take up very large projects, which he pursues, some might feel, to excess. In this book, he decides to explore his Jewish inheritance and he undertakes to live according to the Bible, literally, for a full year. His aim, which he admits is a naive one, is to peel away the layers of interpretation and find the true Bible underneath; to do exactly what the Bible says and in so doing, discover what's great and timeless and what is out-dated. His first step is to read the whole Bible straight through from Genesis to Revelation, which takes four weeks, reading for five hours every day. As he writes, he notes down every rule, every guideline, every suggestion, even every nugget of advice that he finds, which amounts to more than seven hundred rules. Some of them, he feels, will undoubtedly make him a better person:- no lying, no coveting, honour your parents, love your neighbour, but there are others that he can see straight away that will either cause him a lot of problems, or that make very little sense. Strict observance of the resting from work on the Sabbath rule means that he is prohibited from carrying anything outside the house, which gets him out of having to empty the garbage. You can imagine how this goes down with his wife, who has a toddler to look after and who is also expecting twins. There are very stringent rules for contact with women and AJ often finds himself in uncomfortable situations, as when, for instance, female cashiers give him change and he has to ask them to lay the money down rather than deliver it to his hand and risk a touch. He also finds it almost impossible to avoid some degree of lying, if only to avoid giving greater offence to people. He perseveres with a whole host of disparate rules, including blowing a ram's horn on the first day of each new month, paying the wages of their young babysitter every day, wearing mostly white clothes with tassels at every corner and growing a beard, which must never be trimmed. He also perseveres with praying for at least ten minutes, three times a day. There are some commands which are difficult to fulfil, like not eating fruit from a tree planted less than five years ago and some that would actually involve breaking the law, like killing magicians and sacrificing oxen. In amongst all the most perplexing rules for AJ is the one that says he may not wear clothes made of mixed wool and linen fibre and he discovers that there are special orthodox testers, who will check, using a microscope if necessary, that clothes meet the specifications. He asks the tester the obvious question: "why should God care if we wear mixed fibres" and the answer is simply that we don't know, but that we have to follow even the most inexplicable commands, to demonstrate our faith in God. During his year AJ meets many groups of people for whom the Bible is sacrosanct, including the Christian fundamentalists who are opening a creationist museum, the Amish who live in communities set apart and without electricity where possible and the modern day Samaritans, just 700 of them with their own version of the Bible, similar but with some important differences.

At the end of the year he observes "It's impossible to immerse yourself in religion for twelve months and emerge unaffected. As with most biblical journeys, my year has taken me on detours. I didn't expect to herd sheep in Israel. Or chase a mother pigeon from her nest so that I could take her egg. Or find solace in prayer. I didn't expect to confront how absurdly flawed I am. I didn't expect to discover such strangeness in the Bible. And I didn't expect, as the Psalmist says, to take refuge in the Bible and rejoice in it. I'm still an agnostic, but I'm now a reverent agnostic. Life is sacred. There is something transcendent, beyond the everyday. It's possible that humans created this sacredness ourselves, but that doesn't take away from its power or importance. I'll keep on saying prayers of thanksgiving. I'm not sure whom I'm thanking, but I've become addicted to the act of thanking. "

I said that the orthodox view of unfathomable commands is that we must follow them anyway, and this was something that AJ constantly struggled to accept. The concept of implicit obedience is now almost completely alien to our individualistic society and causes much conflict when we come up against it in people from cultures where it is still practised. But it wasn't always like that and in biblical times the psalms especially are full of praise for the law. We have "the law of the lord is perfect, it revives the soul" and "My God, I delight in your law in the depths of my heart" and "Teach me the demands of your statutes and I will keep them to the end. Train me to observe your law, to keep it with my heart". That last quote is from psalm 119, which is often entitled "The law of the Lord". So it was important to know the law and also to learn to love it. In Matthew's gospel, Jesus appears to reinforce the importance of the law and says he has not come to abolish it, but to complete it and that not one dot will disappear from the law until its purpose is achieved. He goes on to make much more stringent demands on what it means to keep the commandments than would appear from a first reading. Not only must you not kill, you must also not lose your temper or fight. And yet elsewhere we are told that to love God and your neighbour is really all that is necessary. The parable of the Good Samaritan is full of side swipes at those who kept to the letter of the law, like the priest and the Levite who would have been made ritually unclean by touching the wounded Samaritan and therefore wouldn't risk contamination. Perhaps the law has to develop and that is what Jesus meant when he spoke about its purpose being achieved. As always, the Bible is difficult to interpret, and impossible to reconcile if every word has to be regarded as inerrant.

If we think of laws as organic, gradually developing entities, there isn't really any reason why the expression of them can't be altered and adapted as time passes. I can think of one set of laws that I've seen changed within a fifty year period, to reflect modern ways of expression. I'm speaking about the Girl Guide Law, which I learnt in the fifties. The Guide law was a mirror image of the Scout law and consisted of ten clauses.

Nowadays this has evolved into a six clause version:-

Interestingly, the Scout Law has evolved differently and has seven clauses

So what are the concepts that we've lost from what was basically an Edwardian set of values? Well, the Guides have shed loyalty, which I think is rather a pity, even though it's partly covered by the new clause "A Guide is a good friend and a sister to all Guides". The Scouts have kept the term "loyal". The rather old-fashioned term "courteous" has been translated into "polite and considerate", which is undoubtedly easier to spell and to define and the word "thrifty" could be understood to some extent in "A Guide takes care of the world around her" and rather more clearly in "A Scout makes good use of time and is careful of possessions and property. The Scouts keep the idea of courage in difficulties and also update the idea of purity into respect for self and others. The Guides translate courage into the rather more nebulous "facing challenges and learning from experience" although they then fail to face the challenge of updating purity by jettisoning it altogether. The one concept we have lost completely from both versions is obedience, a shift of values that has happened over just 50 years. Both sets of laws have moved on, although the Guide ones take a rather wider view and the Scout ones stick more closely to Baden Powell's original vision, giving a conciseness that's probably easier to understand and to convey across a wide age range. So far my discoveries about laws seem to suggest that the fewer rules there are, the better and that as we develop, the number of laws may shrink but those that are left will encompass more ideas. One area where rules change very rapidly and where nobody seems to be in charge is that of language. At least, that's the case for English, where so many different varieties are spoken and the written version is also changing as rules that were once much more rigorously applied are no longer recognised. Written English is a pedant's paradise and I don't suppose there's anyone that hasn't said "Good grief, what are they teaching them nowadays?" on receipt of many an official letter written by someone under 30. Just this week I heard on Radio 4 that there are moves afoot to reform spelling and eliminate silent letters. I don't think I would go that far, but it would be great if the rules of English were few and simple, without any exceptions, rather than a higgledy-piggledy mess that just evolved over many centuries? To get to that happy state you have to turn to Esperanto, which has just 16 fundamental rules of grammar, to which there are no exceptions whatsoever. There are no silent letters, only one way to write any sound and one way to pronounce any spelling. You form parts of speech by adding appropriate endings to root words and the endings are themselves totally regular and consistently applied. Best of all, at least half the word stock is familiar from either English, Latin, German or French, so there's not a lot of learning to do. Sadly, its very simplicity seems to tell against it and English is still regarded as the universal language, which is a pity as it's so much easier to write a clear, correct sentence in Esperanto than it is in English, if it's not your mother tongue. If Esperanto survives, it will be interesting to trace whether its laws will be modified and how, given that in theory it starts with all the desirable features of a language intact. As with every other piece I've written, this one is not what I envisaged when I started out. Writing is an organic process and this article has developed as I have gone along. I think what I've ended up with is the notion that we need laws and these laws don't actually change but evolve into something more relevant for the time and place we live in. Their complexity may also depend on our own stage of development. For instance, when it comes to working out any sort of mathematical problem, however simple, I need a rule to apply. Working a solution out logically is something I can't do with any confidence. In that situation, you might come to the conclusion that fools need clear rules, while the competent can function just with an outline. While I was thinking about that, I had a quotation in the back of my mind that seemed to fit in well here, although I had no idea who said it. I was surprised to find that it was Douglas Bader, who acquired the status of a national hero in the 30's and 40's. I've always had a sneaking suspicion that although he was undoubtedly courageous, if Kenneth More's portrayal of him in the film that bears his name was even half way accurate, he must have been a pain to live with. But this time I think I would have to agree with him. This is what he said :- 'Rules are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men.' Of course, it could just as well be the other way round.

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NEWS FROM THE SCOTTISH CHURCHES

THE MINISTERIAL SITUATION IN SCOTLAND

In view of the current shortage of Ministers in Scotland and throughout Unitarian Britain, we in Scotland intend to harness the wealth of talent that rests in our congregations. Retired Revd. John Clifford will run a preparatory course starting in the autumn, for people who consider undertaking the G.A. Training for Lay Preachers course. John has a long history in Universalist-Unitarian and Unitarian circles. He was Assistant General Secretary of the General Assembly before going as Interim Minister to a group of churches in Wales. He was Minister in Dundee and Glasgow in the 1970's. The S.U.A. Executive is calling a meeting of key people from all the four churches with the aim of organising an exchange of Speakers to ease the burden of responsibility for taking services that falls on some shoulders. Currently Dundee employs our only Minister, and his time is divided between his duties as Vice-President of the General Assembly and his own church. Next year as President, he will be even busier. Edinburgh has enjoyed a short visit of the Universalist-Unitarian Minister, Revd. Roger Fitts, from USA, and a longer Interim Ministry by Revd. Louise Ulrich (also from USA), since their long-serving and popular Minister, Revd. Andrew Hill, retired. They have hopes of finding someone to fill their vacancy on a permanent basis. Glasgow and Aberdeen have been sharing the services of Revd. Cathal Courtney and were surprised and dismayed at his sudden return to Ireland.

ABERDEEN 

The Aberdeen Congregation keeps up an admirable programme of social and fundraising activities which help to maintain a sense of community, as well as holding a service of worship every Sunday. Unfortunately they are having great difficulty in getting a slater to agree to fix a hole in the roof that was not too noticeable until the onset of this summer's rain.

DUNDEE

Dundee church hosts an enviable number of weddings and baptisms, both of its own members' families and from the local community, not least because the Rev. Bob is well known in Dundee for his regular spiritual radio broadcasts. A group of teen-aged girls is following the the Chalice Award Scheme, under the tutelage of Mary Wightman, and they are preparing to complete their Silver Stage with a fashion show featuring re-cycled items. Recent vigorous fund-raising has empowered a comprehensive schedule of maintenance and renewal.

EDINBURGH

In addition to normal congregational activities and lively participation in the spiritual life of the city, Edinburgh's church is able to host performances from the annual, summer Fringe festival. It bas recently formed a company, artSpace, to handle bookings and to coordinate the development of the building so that it can be put to better use. It will host some 17 groups offering about 50 performances during the Festival as well as a week-long Jazz workshop during the Edinburgh Jazz Festival.

GLASGOW

The Glasgow Unitarian congregation does not have a traditional or even a modern church building. It meets on the top floor of a 1960's office building, and rents out spaces underneath to various enterprises. About that a compensation culture is growing up and that regulations are being tightened, they invited someone from the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations to look over the building and to advise on the recommendations of the 2006 Scottish Charities Act, which is implemented by the Office of the Scottish Charities Regulator (OSCR). A comprehensive reshuffle and modernisation programme is now being contemplated. Happily, at the same time, several members are offering to contribute to community life as lay preachers, running an Engagement group, taking care of the occasional child visitors and restarting a branch of the Women's League.

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THE CHENNAI UNITARIAN CHURCH

Edinburgh and Glasgow congregations collaborate in collecting money to support the flourishing Unitarian Church in Chennai (formerly Madras) and its night school in Ammanabakkum. The 200 year-old church is beyond repair and needs to be rebuilt. Recently, £20,000 was sent from the 'Madras Fund' so that building can be started. It is estimated that the whole project will cost around £30,000. Information can be obtained from Jon Bagust in Edinburgh or Violet Bremner in Glasgow.

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S.U.A. MEETINGS IN 2008-2009

Saturday 27th. September, 2008. S.U.A. Executive meets in Dundee, 1l.00am for 11.30am.

Saturday 18th. October, 2008 11.00am for 11.30am. in Dundee. 'Future Ministry in Scotland'. Office Bearers of all four churches and other interested individuals..

Saturday 7th.March 2009.  S.U.A. Executive meets in Dundee, 11.00am for 11.30am..

Saturday 25th.April 2009. Queen's Hotel, Dundee. 12.00pm for 12.30pm. Party and subsidised lunch for new G.A. President. Guests to include Chief Executive and E.C. representative.

Saturday 6th.June 2009. 11.00am for 11.30am. in Dundee. S.U.A. Annual General Meeting, followed by optional adjournment to nearby Dunlaw Hotel for high tea (at own cost).

February/March 2009. Glasgow will host social day. Details to be announced.

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SIGHTSAVERS WOMEN'S LEAGUE NATIONAL PROJECT

The Women's League National Project for 2008 - 2009 is to raise money for the SIGHTSAVERS Charity which for the past 50 years has worked to combat blindness in developing countries, restoring sight through specialist treatment and eye care. Irreversibly blind people are helped by means of education, counselling and training. The beneficiaries are the people who need it most, patients living in poverty in the poorest countries of the world. Last year SIGHTSAVERS treated 23.2 million people for potentially blinding conditions and restored sight to 244,909 people. Cataract, Trachoma, River Blindness are some of the diseases treated in 2006.

The Women's League will do its utmost to raise funds to facilitate the work of this humanitarian organisation. In the past 20 years the U.K. Unitarian Women's League has raised £145.800 for various good causes.

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WOULD BE A UNITARIAN MINISTER?

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MOON THOUGHTS FROM EARTH

EARTH THOUGHT FROM THE MOON

By John Robinson

As a symbol of fun, romance, mystery, magic, superstition and power the moon captivates humankind's imagination. As small children we laugh, along of course with the little dog, to see the fun of the nursery-rhyme cow 'jumping over the moon and the dish running away with the spoon'. As childhood fun gives way to more complex emotions there is the romance of the moon as portrayed in the lyrics 'Moonlight and roses bring wonderful memories of you'; 'By the light of the silvery moon'; 'Carolina moon' and many others. There is the mystery of the moon at harvest time appearing bigger than at any other time of the year, and there is the magic of the moon eclipsing the sun. The impending misfortune of viewing a new moon for the first time through glass is just one of many moon-related superstitions. To sea-farers, there is the moon's prophetic attribute as in 'I saw the new moon late yestreen, wi' the auld moon in her arm, and if ye gang to sea maister, 1 fear we'll suffer harm'. And then there is the power of the moon as captured in 'the power of the moon can hold a spell, the ebbing tides, the waves that swell, the power of the moon both full and new, it steals your heart this dance of night, it frees your soul within its light'.

From the beginning of time the moon has been an object of worship. Within Christianity, the timing of the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus, Easter Sunday, reflects its pagan roots, occurring on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring equinox. Biblical references to the moon, first described in Genesis, as 'the lesser light to rule the night', and in Psalm 72 : 5 as an eternal object 'enduring throughout all generations', reveal the perceived influence of the moon on mankind's soul. For those who put their trust in the Lord, 'the sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night' (Psalm 121 : 6) and if they do with the predicted Biblical consequences of violence and lunacy, the remedy according to Matthew 17 : 21 is 'prayer and fasting'. Many of the Biblical references to the moon are in the context of prophecy regarding the last days and the return of the Lord, as signalled by the moon 'becoming as blood', before complete darkness falls upon the earth. And out of that darkness the promise of a new heaven and a new earth in which, according to Isaiah 30 : 26 'the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days, in the day that the Lord bindeth up the breach of his people, and healeth the stroke of their wounds'.

Viewed from a quarter of a million miles away the moon has influenced every known human emotion and if Biblical writings are to be taken literally, should have generated enough awe and fear to make this celestial body untouchable by nd. So what Space missions. Twelve men have walked on the moon and Andrew Smith's recent book, 'Moondust', provides a fascinating account of the impact it had on the 9 of them who are still alive. Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the Moon, is by far the least informative about how it affected him. He rarely appears in public and, despite his famous description of the event as being 'one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind', he refuses to talk about the impact of his place in history on either himself or the world in general. His comments are reserved for matters of fact, not opinion. In contrast Buzz Aldrin, who followed Neil Armstrong down the steps of the lunar landing module displays, in the book, a frankness that dismays. During the moonalk he admits to an eerie mixture of emotions that, on the one hand embraced the presence of the whole of humanity, yet on the other, left him detached and isolated.  Retirement fromght clinical depression, alcoholism, family break-up, two divorces and a third marriage; not bad, or perhaps more appropriately, not good for a Presbyterian church elder! Yet one gets the feeling that his personal problems were not solely the result of his experiences in outer space. Rather they appear to have come, at least in part, from a sense of frustration at not being the first man to walk on the moon and his struggle, throughout the space missions, to become accepted by his fellow astronauts who were mostly test-pilots. Although he had been a fighter pilot with active service in Korea, in their eyes he was an intellectual, always thinking several moves ahead and therefore more qualified to be a champion chess player than an astronaut. One astronaut said of him, 'he thinks so far ahead that if you don't understand what he is talking about today you will tomorrow or the next day!' Yet Aldrin himself would put a lot of his personal problems down to the massive public relations exercise that he and his wife and the other astronauts on that first moon landing were subjected to when they returned to earth; the diplomatic receptions all over the world and the sudden realisation at one of these that he was being used for nothing more than propaganda and was about to be discarded, made him feel a fake and a fool. Also the nightmare memories of a childhood science fiction story in which voyagers to the moon returned insane had stayed with him on his real-life space travel and in his half-conscious moments he imagined the Universe was coming to inflict its wrath on him. Could it be too, that his Presbyterian upbringing had instilled in the subconscious of his heightened intellect that Biblical impression of the moon as untouchable; plausible perhaps, yet not in keeping with his seemingly greater dissatisfaction with not being the first man to walk on the moon than gratefulness for being the second.

For Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon, retirement from space travel triggered a new aim, that of reconciling science with religion; the bridge linking the two in his view being the greatest of all mysteries, consciousness. His experience and philosophy fascinate. His argument is that we are quantum matter, not just classical matter, thereby giving us the ability to recover non-local information with prayer being one of the oldest forms of 'information intended to be received non-locally'. This, he feels is what happened to him on the way back from the moon; 'he was in resonance with the Universe', it was as if he was linked to a 'huge hard disk in the sky' which to him is what we refer to when we speak of God. Because we are conscious the Universe is conscious; it learns because we learn. It is Mitchell's view, driven by his experiences of outer space, that with his understanding of the cosmos 'we can create a world with more tolerance, satisfaction and openness' in which spirituality and science, which in essence are looking for the same thing, find it.

Of the other Apollo astronauts to walk on the moon, Eugene Cernan and the late James Irwin both felt that, for them, space travel enhanced the presence of God. For Cernan it was one of the deepest, most emotional experiences of his life; he had seen 'too much logic, too much purpose for there not to be a God'. As the last man to leave the moon his words as he mounted the ladder of the lunar module signify his trust in God 'we leave as we came and God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind'. But for me it is the views of Alan Bean, the fourth man to walk on the moon, that are most interesting and valuable. Following his moon trip Bean took up painting and became a professional artist, selling his paintings of the lunar landscape to space enthusiasts. His first description of the surface of the moon in the crater region where they landed was 'sculptures in a garden of stone'. Finding it difficult to focus on the tasks that he was to perform he watched the Earth wax and wane in the sky like, as he put it 'a blue-and-white eye opening and closing' muttering to himself 'This is the Moon, that's the Earth; I'm really here, I'm really here'. It has been suggested that the reason he turned to painting is that in his excitement he destroyed the TV camera by accidentally pointing it at the sun, and thus, in the absence of a photographic record, had to resort to painting as a means of recapturing his mental images of the great rocks, tan moon dust, blue and white winking earth and, above all, the reality of the very surreal experience.

His primary goal is 'to preserve his great adventure', 'to preserve the feeling too' and to make sure by talking to his fellow astronauts that everything about his paintings of it remains authentic. Bean, by his own admission, is not a religious person, yet he makes comments regarding his walk on the moon and his view of the earth from outer space that, to me, fit comfortably into a religious setting. Of his time on the moon, he says 'we were so focussed on doing the science that we missed out on the humanity'. Of the Bible writers he says, 'when they said the Garden of Eden and thought it was the Tigris Euphrates river valley, 'cos that was all they knew about, I think, really, the whole Earth is the Garden of Eden. We've been given paradise to live in. I think about that every day. Now, think about this for a minute: we've been looking out of telescopes for more than three hundred years; we've been sending probes into space, and we have never seen anything as beautiful as what we see when we walk out our front door. That's why, when I came back from the spaceflight, I was a different person.'

Charles Duke, at the age of thirty-six was the youngest astronaut to walk on the moon. On his return the euphoria of seeing, from the moon, the earth as a 'luminescent jewel in a world of darkness', and the feeling that he could 'reach up, grab it, hold it in his hands and marvel at it for the precious thing it is', turned to boredom. He set up a beer-selling business and became, in his own description, a remote husband and a brutal, alcoholic father. Interestingly his identical twin brother, a highly respected medical doctor, strongly disapproved of his hero brother's behaviour yet could do nothing to influence him; rather it was the unconditional love of his own wife, guided in her view by the hand of God through prayer, that slowly proved to him that the only solution to his problems was also to turn to God; he did.

It is perhaps naive to think that one can provide an accurate overview of the effect of being to the moon on the human mind and spirit from a handful of individuals who, despite their differences were all specialists in the same discipline and from early in their lives were exposed to very similar environments. Nevertheless, the book, 'Moondust', captures all the emotional elements that were part of the astronauts' unique experience and no doubt would have been part of ours if we had been there; the stress, the strain, the awe, the wonder, the elation and depression, the euphoria and despair. When it was all over family breakdown and divorce were common. Religion played its part either as cause or cure. But for me the most remarkable revelation in the book was the heightening of the senses of the astronauts in general, and Alan Bean and Charlie Duke in particular, to a level that gave them a much greater appreciation of the beauty and wonder of the earth than hitherto. For Alan Bean that appreciation was so succinctly expressed in the phrase 'we have been given the Garden of Eden'. For Charlie Duke it was the feeling that from the moon he could reach out into darkest space, take the luminescent earth in his bands and 'marvel at it for the precious thing that it is'. This heightened awareness by the astronauts of the unique beauty and precious nature of the earth and the privileged position we are in to be here sends a powerful message from outer space to all mankind.

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THE ART OF GARDENING

A METAPHOR FOR MEANING

by Gladys Minty

The Generaliffe

Tea-pots, green-houses, power-stations and jumbo jets are all objects manufactured to answer a specific human need. Raw materials are harvested from the earth's mantle, moulded, manipulated and combined to create a tool, a piece of furniture, a vehicle or a work of art, whatever may be deemed necessary for us to live our lives. Gardens are also artifacts shaped by the human will, employing the techniques of Evolution and Nature to fulfil its wishes. The products of Nature's essays in private enterprise, weeds, fungi, mildew, slugs, snails and other pests are not welcome and are subject to instant eradication. Gardens, being products of the human mind, reflect the spiritual and intellectual profile of their age. The designers' knowledge and understanding of the universe, their moral, social and spiritual values, as well as their artistic and gardening skills are clearly portrayed in the gardens they create. Interesting as this may be historically, as human .nature remains the same whatever the era, although we may emphasise different aspects of it from age to age, by studying garden design over the centuries, we may also learn a great deal about our species generally and about ourselves in our own time. It is the contention of this article that the objective of every garden path is to lead us eventually to the meaning of life.

In the Middle Ages, the whole point of existence was to spend eternity in Paradise. The Moorish rulers of Southern Spain, knew exactly what they were looking forward to. One of the finest gardens ever conceived, and in the view of many people, the most beautiful ever created in the history of humankind, was laid down in the early Middle Ages by the Islamic Emirs of Granada, and known as the Garden of the Generaliffe, the garden of the Architect or Designer. The architect's brief was, quite literally, to create Paradise on earth, not a semblance of paradise, not a toy or make-believe paradise, but beauty beyond description, perfection beyond imagination, gratification beyond any earthly or heavenly desire. In this sacred place, the Emir could enjoy all the exquisite pleasures of Paradise without having to die first. Providing sensual pleasure is the abiding function of this garden. Its colour, its shapes and textures, its delicacy, its proportions, its fragrance, the reflecting stillness of its pools. and the music of its fountains seduce the senses and steal the mind, so that self and memory and the world beyond melt away and we become one with the garden. We are transformed as if bathed in the waters of forgetfulness. If, however, there is magic, there is also philosophy. Paradise has meaning and so human life has meaning. And that meaning is here understood as structure. This is a garden of regular, geometric structures. Nothing is left to chance. Planning, fore-thought, design, measurement and control are the tools that created this paradise.

Rules empower prediction, which in turn generates security. One is safe in this garden. Beyond its high walls, the rest of the world is chaotic, unpredictable, incontrollable, outwith the range of human knowledge and understanding. Within the regime of this Koranic garden, however, one may live a meaningful life. Every eventuality has been thought about; for every human problem there is a solution; the garden will provide for every human need.; every single foliage fringed path will lead to happiness and fulfilment. 'Follow the path of righteousness and all will be well,' that's the advice of this garden.

The gardens of mediaeval Christendom are also oases of beauty and pleasure in an ugly and toilsome world, a place of safety, where the perils and mischances of ordinary life cannot penetrate, a refuge where gentleness, art, love and even frivolity may be cultivated. This is a fairly relaxed scene, illustrating the convention of courtly love, a chaste relationship between the sexes conducted according to a fixed etiquette which demanded courtesy and honour on the part of the knight and a modest acknowledgement of his adoration on the part of the lady. Behind the tall walls, nothing is left to chance. Orderliness, uniformity, symmetry, harmony dictate the layout of the flower and herb beds, the placing of the fruit-trees and the siting of paths, walls and hedges. This is what life ought to be like, highly structured, designed for security, predictable, a pattern which allocates each individual to a place in the social hierarchy and allows each individual an opportunity of fulfilment in keeping with his station in society, be they' aristocrat, merchant or peasant. This is God's intention, a place for everything and everyone; and allotted place. The Devil, however, attacks this harmony, bringing disorder, unrest, war, famine and disease. Strict adherence to the rules as handed down by the church is the only defence.

The height of the walls and the defensive architecture portray a society that believes it is under siege by forces, natural and supernatural, that are beyond its comprehension and strength. The dominant figures of the Madonna and Child with saints, angels and the Holy Ghost in attendance, emphasise its faith in supernatural deliverance.

This is an absolutist approach to dealing with the human need for reassurance and fulfilment, of coping with moral and spiritual problems.

The two principal claims of Christianity, that Jesus is the son of God and that he rose from the dead, the incarnation and the resurrection, the Christian version of the insoluable mind-body problem, created major problems for mediaeval philosophers and would-be scientists. Was Jesus spirit or flesh or a mysterious combination of both. Christian teaching claimed that the spirit world was the true world and the physical world, a temporary illusion which would dissolve with the second coming of Jesus and the establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven. In the opinion of the best religious authorities, the Second Coming was at hand and would happen at any moment and so there was no point taking an interest in the material world and its mechanisms because the whole universe would very soon disappear for ever. However, by the middle of the fifteenth century it seemed clear that the Second Coming had been indefinitely delayed and thoughtful people began to study the material world with greater urgency both to understand it and to find answers to the many problems that had bedevilled the human race for thousands of years. If God could not solve the problem of disease, famine, natural disasters and injustice, then it was time for humankind to take up the challenge. Gradually a feeling of self-confidence developed. The natural world was an exciting and rewarding object of study. Observation, measurement and experimentation would persuade it to give up its secrets. The earth was a sphere. Christopher Columbus sailed off Westwards in order to reach the East. Copernicus and Galileo proved that the Sun and not the earth was the centre of the solar system and that the planets travelled around the Sun, contrary to the Church's teaching. The works of Greek and Roman philosophers, poets, scientists and mathematicians were being read for the first time in hundreds of years and suddenly a great many alternatives to the Biblical interpretation of the world were available. The very randomness of life, so terrifying to mediaeval commentators, encouraged greater and deeper research into how things happen. The world had become a much bigger place, much richer in possibilities, much more meaningful.

The great renaissance gardens of the 16th and early 17th century reflect this exciting, expansionist mood. The architecture is now domestic rather than defensive. There is a sense of freedom, of airiness. The gardens are larger, much more open, the walls are fewer in number and lower in height. The planting design is innovative, much more complex, acknowledging that the world has suddenly become a much more complicated place. The structures have become elaborate and the engineering daring. Although the planting is symmetrical and uniform, there is much greater freedom in the design. Rigidity has given way to fluency and rectangles have been replaced with circles and five-and six-sided figures which combine to form squares.

The attitude towards nature is more relaxed. There appears to be no limit to its possibilities. Designers now begin to think of their planting metaphorically. Each of the flowerbeds represents a flower, probably a rose, each petal outlined in boxwood., a whimsical conceit or pun, that reveals the gardener's sense of humour. Human personality is now acknowledged as being worthwhile. You can even turn your garden into a living coat of arms and write your motto in topiary.

As the 17th century gives way to the 18th, and the Baroque style begins to dominate; artifice, ornamentation and histrionic display dominate garden design. Nature is much less important now; aestheticism is the presiding influence and the garden has become a grand chamber in which the owner exhibits his exquisite taste for the appreciation and envy of his guests, or perhaps a rich tapestry or carpet, consisting of polished stonework and carefully sculpted shrubs and trees. Symmetry and balance are essential because we are entering the age of reason, of David Hume and Immanuel Kant, who have dethroned God as the absolute authority and installed human reason in his place, as the sole arbiter of human behaviour.

Sir Isaac Newton has explained the operations of the universe; they are no more complicated than clockwork, a simple matter of complementary forces, on a much grander scale, but quite comprehensible as a self-perpetuating mechanism. There is nothing supernatural in its operation and it certainly does not require God's constant presence to keep it going. Human beings may indeed have a spirit but they also live in a material world which has an immediate bearing upon their well-being. The more one knows about this world the better prepared one will be to overcome the many obstacles to happiness and fulfilment it presents. The material world, therefore, is now to be the focus of intellectual endeavour and that search for meaningful purpose.

During the latter decades of the 18th century the human spirit came into its own. There was no end to human creativity, ingenuity, enterprise, exploration and ambition. Human curiosity was rampant. The thirst for knowledge, new experience, adventure and sensation was insatiable. The world was a treasure house of exotic lands, cities, races and cultures. Explorers laboriously traced great rivers to their source, plodded across empty continents, charted new-found coastlines and brought home thousands of samples of strange insects, drawings of exotic birds and collections of seeds of wonderful new plants. The old walled garden was too confining for this ebullient mood.

This pulsing, thrusting vitality required space to fulfil its creative dreams and so gardens gave way to whole landscapes. Villages were demolished and relocated elsewhere to clear the way for a broad, parkland vista. Hundreds of labourers were employed to dig artificial lakes and ornamental canals;, rivers were diverted to tumble into ravines excavated for the purpose; hills were created with the spoil to carry the sweeping parkland up to the skyline so that the only visible boundary was the horizon. In this noble setting were displayed the treasures of the owner's travels or of his reading and pursuit of novelty. Costly follies were erected to add scale or proportion or interest to the landscape. Beautiful bridges, ancient abbeys, castles, mausoleums, gateways, grottoes all romantically dilapidated, like a jewel in its setting, delight the eye of the stroller as he or she unexpectedly encountered them on the banks of a stream or isolated on a craggy island in the middle of a lake. Exotic plants, particularly trees and shrubs, were brought from the ends of the earth and induced to grow in and enhance the parkland and reputation of the great landowners. The landscape artists riffled the whole of human experience for their exhibits, such was the craving of their masters to possess whatever they coveted.

During Victoria's reign garden design takes an unexpected and ironic change of direction. Walls, flower-beds, symmetrical planting, paths all on a domestic scale are fashionable again. The garden becomes an extension of the house, an outside room, private, even secluded, where one may meditate undisturbed or chat with a close friend or so, and although still a carefully tended ornament, certainly not an area of public display. Nature is allowed a little more freedom. The relentless pruning of the baroque garden is relaxed a little, Plants are more thickly congregated within the beds and are given freedom to overspill on to paths and to stray into a neighbour's space. The garden once again has become a refuge from the world, that world created by human energy, ingenuity, ambition and industry, the noisy, choking, smelly, polluted world of factories, mines, steam engines, smoke, festering slums, unremitting toil and bleak, miserable lives. Appalled by the collateral consequences of the industrial revolution while\ enjoying its benefits, the affluent move out of the towns and cities into the countryside, to listen to birdsong, admire nature's brightly coloured profusion and savour the fragrance of the garden at twilight. There is more to life after all than making money. Indeed these gardens mark a major change in attitude towards industrialisation and the values of the factory system, which were seen as dehumanising and soul-destroying, reducing human consciousness to the same level as that of a machine,

The Arts and Crafts movement set out to recover the dignity of the craftsman not only by emphasising the superiority of the hand-made artifact above the mass-produced article, but also by insisting upon the level of job satisfaction gained from making the hand- crafted article. This disenchantment with the industrial age gathered momentum in the 20th century, particularly after the first World War. People increasing turned to nature to seek solace and spiritual fulfilment.

One of the major achievements of the 20th century garden art was the development of the flower border, both as a distraction from the modern age and more positively as an aspirational comment upon developing international society. The garden is again a refuge from the world outside, this time a human-made, materialistic world, over which we seem to have diminishing control. Global warming, pollution, racial and political tensions, economic and commercial inequality, financial and administrative confusion, extremism, poverty and disease' present us with problems that seem beyond our capacity to overcome. As with the situation in the early middle ages, we seem to be a global society on a knife edge insecure. uncertain of the future.

Creating a border on the other hand is a wholesome and fulfilling thing to do. Modern horticultural genetics gives us access to every colour shade, leaf-shape, texture, height, spread we may wish in the flowers we use for our arrangement or composition, combinations of co-ordinated colours or of contrasting colours or of different species of plant bearing the same colour of flower or leaf, or creating rhythmic effects by repeating a certain colour or texture or shape. Planting a border is an exercise in democracy. Each plant is the equal of every other and is allocated its own space. However, there are no boundaries; neighbours are encouraged to mingle so that there is a seamless mantle of foliage over the soil, producing a rainbow, a harmony of colour, a unity created out of diversity, which is the vision of an inclusive, world-wide society that millions of enlightened people would wish to implement.

What the Art of Gardening tells us about our humanity is that our instinct to find and create patterns is our principal weapon in our struggle against meaninglessness and chaos. In our minds we live in eternity while our bodies exist in time, our mind body problem. The mortality of the body defeats the eternal aspirations of the mind, apparently rendering it impossible ever to find meaning in existence, the ultimate absurdity of the human. condition, claim the existentialists. However, this is to miss the whole point of searching for meaning. We search for meaning to compensate ourselves for the knowledge of death. If we feel there has been some point to living, then, the thought of returning to oblivion may be bearable. Finding order in chaos, making patterns, being creative is our way of making the meaningless meaningful. Evolution has bequeathed us this great boon, to seek to make sense of whatever situation we find ourselves in, so that we will never be without hope that sooner or later a resolution will eventually emerge.

Traditionally, Paradise is the place where personal fulfilment is eventually achieved. The Moorish Emirs of the Alhambra conceived of it in purely materialist terms; we, however, understand paradise to be a spiritual state, in which each of us contrives to find a pattern, a vision, an ideal, an. approach to existence, which will make sense of the meaningless confusion and disorder that is our contemporary world. That ideal surely includes a compassionate reaching out to other people.

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