All Saints' Day, 2018.

October Dawn, by Fiona.

In contrast to the calm that prevailed as we looked out from our Sherkin retreat last week, rank on rank of shining but angry waves are marching on the beach in Nazaré, where the struggle to restore the Anna M goes on. When I arrived here yesterday the streets were wet with recent rain, and the wind had a winter chill. There was a waterspout out off a couple of days ago. Today, All Saints' Day, is however warm, and the afternoon sun, some 15 degrees higher than in Ireland, was almost hot.

This feast is still a national holiday in Portugal, thank God, and it was a great pleasure to celebrate it in the Santuario, with music, with down-to-earth people, and with the sun slanting through the incense to shine on all that gold paint. There was a time when I would have laughed at that. No more; today I truly had a sense of participating in that great eternal community which alone can satisfy our deepest needs and longings, and constitute a meaningful end to our troubled pilgrimage here on Earth; I know that sense would not have been so strong, even at Mass, in our dour northern cultures.

For years I tried to pretend that Heaven was merely a bonus, if it turned out to be true, and perhaps only a dream. But why 'only' a dream? Can anything be more important than our dreams? Are not dreams meant to be satisfied? Now I also vividly realise that humanity inevitably descends into gross darkness when the hope of that destiny is lost sight of. Silly modern Ireland, and all those who think that our poor efforts at work are more valuable than keeping that dream alive, especially now as we face into the winter.

It is not just the season that we face this day. It seems to me that our confidence in life itself, and the whole human project, is facing a time of most acute threat. It is not surprising in these circumstances that, to my profound distress, Ireland has recently voted to devalue marriage and human life itself, along with countenancing the cursing of God. Across the water in Blighty disintegration is seriously setting in, exacerbated by the decision to withdraw from the best ever opportunity for the nations of Europe to cooperate in attempting to bring our civilisation onto a new equilibrium.

Where does this leave those of us who opposed this whole agenda? Perhaps where in truth we always were, in a minority of 'nutters'! But we were able to compromise more agreeably with the world for too long, to pretend that there was not much difference really between those who kept the Faith and those who did not, that we were all much of muchness really, and most people were trying to do their best. Now 'trying to do one's best' in the same old way is not good enough. There are real, hard, difficult choices to be made if the human race is not going to destroy itself and the planet. It seems most unlikely that 'the demos' will take the right ones, on democracy's current form.

Yet in the Gospel that the Church reads today, the Sermon on the Mount, Christ lays out the path for us to take, if we are to partake in that feast with all the saints. It is not some holy war. It involves peacemaking and hungering and thirsting for justice. It commends patience and forbearance, especially when we run into persecution. So on we go, laying one stone of the Holy City on another, as best we can.

But why bother to seriously attempt to keep the roof on this our earthly home? Is it not blasphemous to equate our little struggles with building the Kingdom? What have sustainability, recycling, organic living and so on got to do with it anyway?

I say that reverence for life and for physical reality are inseparable from reverence for their Creator. I also fear that those who have no such reverence inevitably turn destructive; this is 'the other side' of the fact that he who does not love this Earth has no true love of God. Yet we may find, if we get down to work with them, that after all we can make common cause with people with whom we profoundly disagree; even if they do not know it, they too are children of God; let the falling out come from them if so it must be!

Rebuilding the fallen wall.