Travellers on the Gannetsway, with FFFVI.

A brief sojourn in that alien dimension,

Ger Kavanagh, who took the photos for this post.

inside a jet, brought me back across Biscay to the south of the Iberian Peninsula with Ger Kavanagh from Cork. We travelled on by train to Vila Real de Sto. Antonio, and were picked up by another Irish Ger with my shipmate from the sail down last autumn, Anna Legge. Back in Guadianaland, the problem is to tear them away for the long and bumpy road back. The very good news here is that our

The 'Mew Gull'.

neighbour Chris on the Mew Gull, battling cancer with his own battery of alternative treatments, is in fine form and doing well.

Anna Legge.

We head off on an utterly different 'plane', one that challenges us, brings us alive to each other and to nature; not your dull passive package merely being humped over the miles! It's a good shake-up that I feel I need a couple of times a year, to stay in some kind of trim, both physically and spiritually! I'll be bringing you the story of how we fare this time. Meanwhile, below is Chapter VI From the Fractal Frontier.

The writer.

From the Fractal Frontier, VI.

To my father and many of his generation, the Britain of the 'swinging sixties' was actually rather like the cruise ship Costa Concordia, after she hit the rocks, but before she was finally wrecked; still looking fine, but fatally holed below the water-line; sophisticated, equipped with all the wonders of technology, her passengers given over to vacuous and self-indulgent entertainment, her captain oblivious to his hubris, as she steams along proudly with an illusory self-sufficiency. How much more apposite is this image in these days of Brexit, even if she didn't quite sink yet!

As for Catholics, we have long harboured the thought that the image of a big gash under the water-line applies to human society in general, calling it ‘original sin’, which is as old as humanity. Some used to consider that those of modern times who carry on as if it hadn’t happened, enthusiastically celebrating the wonders of their ship, were guilty of ‘modernism’. If only they would realise that God had arranged a special rescue boat for Catholics, namely the Barque of Peter! The best one can hope for in this world is to take to get safely into this lifeboat (and perhaps if one is lucky find a way to live out one's days here below as comfortably as may be).

Looking wistfully from his sinking ship into (what I think the likes of my old man tended to regard as) that happy place of comfort and consolation, a rose garden wherein Catholics are wont to claim that they may swan around in God’s love, he clung to his rather grim stoicism. The idea of anyone thinking that God should favour His chosen ones in that way did have a tendency to outrage him, and this was perhaps the principal reason he never became a Catholic. But I mention the above caveat in brackets because he failed to admit that it might be easier to go down with the ship than to face the rigours of the sea in any alternative craft, that the 'rose garden' image was far from the truth, as anyone who gazes upon the Crucifixion of Our Lord must admit.

In fact opening one's heart and mind to God involves opening it also to the whole of his creation, especially all those other difficult human beings, those unfortunate refugees and foreigners in general. This can actually put one in the way of much trouble and pain. But there was my mother to bring into my life the warmth, the actual trust in that famous love of God’s, which was what made it actually liveable; however she brought this from some place very far removed from most contemporary culture, and it was questionable whether it was serviceable at all as a viable alternative in that stormy sea.

My father, though by no means oblivious to the gift she brought, still never tired of perversely trying to make her see that her faith, above all her trust in God’s providence, was on dodgy intellectual ground, not to say 'for the birds'! What possible evidence was there that God cared for anyone? If He exists at all, He is guilty of a sublime indifference to individual human beings and their sufferings. Anyway the whole thing was unscientific and incredible to a stolid, 'realistic' modern mind, and besides He certainly hadn’t helped the faithful of Ireland and Poland over much….

Into this deadlocked situation, Dom Luke, struggling with his own parcel of pain, brought le P. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose faith had been tried and tested during the four years he spent as a stretcher-bearer and priest in the trenches of World War I (where he earned the Croix de Guerre for bravery under fire). He had reconciled his faith not alone with the horror he witnessed there, but also with his scientific training and the theory of evolution. He foresaw the global civilisation that was coming into being with modern technology, and offered us a way of engaging with its scientific and technological culture, even up to a point vindicating and embracing it in God’s name.

He was aware that it was in danger of coming to grief, but his attitude was quite different to those old Roman clerics grumbling away, complaining of the dangers of modernism; equally to the likes of my somewhat dyspeptic and cantankerous father, and again nowadays to those Brexiteers. It is a strange turn-up that they should all evince a similar attitude, and we find the old collision showing up in yet another acute form in contemporary politics! Now in the year 2017 we surely need to get a handle on this; to find a language that can reconcile these old conflicts. Our culture might even have to revisit theology!

‘Ambiguities’, the revered Fathers of the Holy Office had complained of, and I do not deny that they did have a point. Teilhard does not seem to have properly thought through original sin, just as progressives tend not to recognise it or indeed sin in general. In their enthusiasm they are inclined to pass it by. Perhaps for instance it is true to say that Teilhard failed to acknowledge the simply diabolical tendency of humanity. Nowadays however it is rather the so-called conservatives who do not seem to understand what danger our race is in.

Meanwhile those of us who believe in the the future must seek to apply (with Pope Francis) a more profound and exalted commitment to it. For those who must search for an intellectual basis for this, a good place to start is indeed the Pope's fellow Jesuit, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Here we may find new grounds for commitment and indeed for exaltation, and the fact is that such ecstatic involvement is something we must have, or else we are liable to die of boredom and despair, quite probably destroying the world with our own hands. Could this be what God wants?Anyway, for of all the ills that afflict humanity, is not boredom the worst and most intolerable? And conversely, is not beauty the ground of our salvation?

Waiting to Go!