Battling the Leaks in Olhao, and FFFVII.

We got as far as Olhao and the weather went on the bum; a strong WSW wind has been blowing here for 4 days. However the drying berth was free and the tides at the spring, so we haven't been losing time; we scrubbed her bottom and I had a session of one of my very favourite pastimes, 'battling the leaks'. Yes real ones. I might tell the politicians it's just one of those wars that have to be fought though they are never won! Here is 'Anna M' with her nice clean bottom:-

and here is the weapon I used for caulking-

It only cost EUR3.50, as a builder's chisel, and a friendly man in a workshop wouldn't take anything for doctoring its edge as the photo shows.

Meanwhile, apart from the wind bothering us, life is very pleasant here in Olhao, and there is an excellent eating house beside the docks where we can get out midday nosh for Eur 5 including plonk. But sadly, having anchored just off the markets for years, this time I was moved on by the maritime police. And so, little bit by little bit, our freedom is being taken away!
The forecast is not good for sailing north next week. We may have to go by the Azores.

Photos from Olhao by Ger Kavanagh.

As to politics, Felicitations aux Francais et bonne chance a M. le President Macron, but boy will he need it! The political question now is whether there is any chance of stemming the tide of reactionary nationalism in Great Britain? C'mon Tony, I'm afraid you'll have to do it, and maybe Ken Clarke will help. Let's have a Grand Coalition of those from any party who are opposed to Brexit, and make sure there are never any two such candidates in any constituency, even conservatives when they are committed bona-fide remainers! You can worry about how to form a new Government when you have won the election, and after all it is never more than a fairly small minority of the electorate who actually vote Tory, even when they get a so-called landslide.
These are dire times; it can and must be attempted. Anyway we need a new approach to politics, especially in England. The fact is that the Labour Party under Mr Corbyn hasn't a chance; he has too many people annoyed by ducking the central issue, besides which the whole style of old-hat socialism is not going anywhere. Meanwhile the USA under the Duckie is a menace; it is vital that Europe stands together to resist his bullying. One might say that Mr Blair is the wrong man for that, but after all he may well have learnt from his mistakes, and there does not seem to be anyone else around with the stature to do the job.



From the Fractal Frontier, Part VII   Teilhard de Chardin’s thought had been heavily influenced by Henri Bergson, who before the Great War had proposed a more spiritual concept of evolution than the dreary materialistic ‘survival of the fittest’ version attributed to Darwin. Bergson was half Jewish, and died of pneumonia as an old man, after being forced to queue for hours in Nazi Paris, in frigid conditions, to register as a Jew. In his will he stated that he had intended for some years to become a Catholic, but had not done so because he did not want to be seen as turning his back on the Jews; however he asked that a Catholic priest would say a prayer for him at his funeral, which was done. Also taught and strongly influenced by Bergson was the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis, whose novel Zorba the Greek came out as a film in 1964, that went down very well with us youngsters of those times, and indeed exudes a flavour of them.
We were enthralled at the affirmation of spontaneous, natural human life in the strong and autonomous person of Zorba. We were dying for the individual at last to be free to express himself, but we had all also been profoundly shaken and scared by the Cuban missile crisis and the strong possibility, as it appeared, that civilisation itself could be destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. This has been described as 'the world's most dangerous moment', though it seems to be losing any such dubious status these days; but occurring as it did just when I was beginning to think seriously, its effect on me for one was extremely profound. It greatly compounded the urgency and the poignancy of the situation of my generation, if they were any bit aware. Maybe there is any even more pervasive atmosphere of anxiety now.

So what of Teilhard and Dom Luke? I think the big deal about Original Sin was in the main cover for the fact that the Old Guard could not cope with a renewed Catholicism that actually affirmed our basic human aspirations, enabling us to love God and also His creation, including our own inner selves, in a single movement of the heart and mind. Stuck in defensive mode as they were, they did not take kindly to the opening up of their inner hurts and problems, despite the fact that it went with opening up both our minds and hearts to each other and thence to God. At Downside, those members of the community who 'came to grief' simply disappeared as far as the Establishment was concerned; they might as well have been thrown out of a helicopter like some South American dissidents!

Of course, one of the most serious charges one can lay against Catholic prelates was their tendency to cosy up to despots like General Pinochet; but Downside was to have an old boy who became a priest and suffered torture for getting on the wrong side of him. All that sort of thing rumbled on in the background of the 1960s and '70s. We remembered Franco too, but including the fact that if one was a priest or committed Catholic, one had little choice but to get on his side of the line, unless one wanted to be shot. This dichotomy cried out to be resolved.
In its essence, Teilhard's teaching was straight out of the Bible, the story of the opening up of our hardened hearts to God's love, of Jesus' teaching of the great crop or catch being prepared in our midst; it was elaborated most powerfully by St Paul in the letter to the Romans. ‘The whole of creation groans in one great act of giving birth’, as it ‘waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God’, of those who, steeped in the knowledge of His love, were to actively participate in the completion of His creation.
Here at last seemed to be a resolution of that old impasse, not to mention of my poor Dad’s problem about the Catholics heading off in their own little boat. “There is no such thing as individual salvation!” was Luke’s provocative phrase, which I eventually rephrased for myself “you can’t go to Heaven by yourself.”  There is just the one crop being prepared in the world, even though not of the world, which is to be gathered into the one barn, even if it was also described by Jesus as a mansion with many rooms. Then again, we were eventually offered it in the form of His body, the temple of God; we are to be built into it like stones, with Himself as the corner-stone. How many images it takes to try to describe such a mystery! It is beyond description yet so central and basic that images of it pop up all over the place; but the best is the one Jesus specially adopted, that of bread and wine, with ourselves as grains of wheat or grapes.

Because we are actually talking of a community of Persons, it is possible for each human person to find a place in it with no loss of true individuality. It is after all in relationship that we discover our personship; this is a most important principle. Teilhard indeed posited that the guiding principle of evolution was the unrolling of complexity/consciousness, and what is that but personalization? Hence the supreme importance of being true to oneself. Evil systems try to deprive us of our personhood, short-circuiting out the difficulties posed by human freedom and autonomy. Their ministers do not therefore consider themselves or anyone else ‘worthy of eternal life’, in St Paul's words;  God's servants on the other hand seek to help us all into it, so that every last scrap of loving humanity may find fulfilment in God. But should any prove devoid of all love, what can they do but fall away into the abyss of nothingness?

Rather to my surprise, I found many echoes of all this all through the literature I was studying, in French, Spanish and English. Myself and a friend translated a play of Camus’, Les Justes, for a drama group around this time. I don’t recall it very well, but I do remember being amazed to discover how even the writings of existentialists like Sartre and Camus, supposedly very far from Catholicism, in fact shared much common ground with it when one gets down to actual substance. However their starting point is generally one kind or another of frustration, the frustrations of humanity in their search for fuller life. They catalogue the many forms this frustration takes; how, baulked themselves, many people are apt to resent the flowering of others, seeking to stifle it because it evokes desires in themselves that they have had to suppress. But whether they bemoan its absence or celebrate its many forms, the writers of Europe are above all concerned with that very integral flowering of the individual-in-relationship which Christ lived and died in order to promote.

There was a truly extraordinary level of interest in that Religious Instruction course of Luke’s, but it has to be said that it had what was mostly seen as an increasingly whacky dimension. Breaking out of that rigid, buttoned-down way of life that indeed the whole of Western society was attempting as a new dawn of freedom and self-expression seemed to be dawning came with a new exposure to one's own inner needs and demons. Very often it was accompanied by the outbreak of emotions that were finding new scope; they were frequently disorderly. When good Pope John opened the windows, more of a gale came in than anyone had bargained for!

Dom Luke developed an inner circle of devotees who seemed to think that they were about to change the world. Among them one in particular evidently aroused emotions in him that he didn't quite know what to do with. Outside the 'inner circle', there were not a few like myself who were at once fascinated and repelled. He was becoming more and more 'wired'. I arranged to meet him to try sort out my conflicting reactions, but I was about three minutes late, and he had already been and gone. A few days later, he suffered the nervous collapse that led to his death.