Fly Away Ladybird.....

Simnel cake.

Fly away ladybird, your house is on fire.... What is this 'ladybird', and how could her 'house be on fire'? Yet what a memorable jingle it is - it must hit some mysterious chord. Personally, I associate it with childhood bliss and also life in the womb - my own Garden of Eden - that fleeting treasure, that as we grow up, life seems bent on destroying. The Dragon awaits to devour the child - see Chapter 12 of the Book of Revelation - even while, if we are fortunate, our experience of bliss expands to that of Nature, even to ladybirds and so on. If we are unfortunate, we are torn to pieces and expelled from our mother's womb before we are born, or perhaps we find no love to welcome us into this world - very shocking thoughts for those of us who cherish 'the bliss'. But we ourselves connive at our own exile, being embarrassed by those dim, subliminal recollections of bliss in the womb and the arms of our mother, even afraid of the vulnerability they betray, as we are determined to assert our own autonomy. We may well be pleased with ourselves for having thus established our individual viability - and yet, deep down, how we miss that bliss! So on we go to seek to retrieve it in the arms of a lover.

     Indeed I count myself most fortunate in that, having done so with Fiona when she was seventeen, here we are still doing so in our seventies, in spite of those times when, with the world weighing on us, the upwelling spring all but dried up. You may say this is just a matter of luck, but I am sure there would be no such luck, had we not somehow managed to root our personal bliss beside that upwelling spring. In fact doing so is surely the principal business of our lives. To succeed, we need to recognise that it is more than a mere idea or some impersonal force. As it happened, Fiona was greatly aided in setting out with me by a mystical experience of Our Lady's presence in the Lady Chapel of the cathedral of Notre Dame, no less.*

     Abstractions, or even cathedrals, are incapable of sustaining bliss in the absence of faith; we need to become worshippers rather than tourists. Yet we must seek understanding and employ structures also. Primitive people found spirits within their springs, trees, mountains, seas, everything. Eventually it dawned that behind the multiplicity, there was unity, and in the end, personal bliss is a matter of union, of grounding in a single cosmic reality. More, it is a matter of being drawn into relationship, which nothing less than personal love can deliver. This process culminated, for the plain people of Europe and many other places beyond, in identifying the 'well-spring of bliss' with Mary, 'Queen of the Angels, Queen of Heaven and Earth', while their special places were dedicated so frequently to her - Notre Dame de Paris, Nossa Senhora da Nazaré etc,etc.

     The penny only dropped with me lately how her name, Mary, may be identified with the sea; certainly it is reminiscent of the Latin mare and its modern derivitives like mer and mar. St Jerome and St Bernard of Clairvaux at least thought it meant Star of the Sea. A little research (a dangerous thing) tells of connotations of 'beloved' and also 'bitter'. Well the sea, as well as being in a sense the womb of life on Earth, has notes of universal love as well as of bitterness too, but of course so has love itself, it being ever threatened by 'the Dragon'. For me, Mary is 'bliss' personified, and indeed it was my own mother's name, while her sister, on becoming a Carmelite, took the religious name 'Sister Mary of the Resurrection'.

     Even while my father had so luckily been sent to England on a gas course, where he and my mother conceived a baby whom they named Joy, his fellow officers in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, out of ammunition in the rearguard of Dunkirk, were as he later discovered being massacred by the SS in France. He proceeded in subsequent years to fire words at the religion of my mother and aunt that, one might surmise, in some sense echoed the thought of the bullets and hand grenades tearing into the flesh of his comrades. He would undoubtedly have loved to share that female 'dream' of bliss, but he could not bring himself to do so. No doubt I was far from unique in growing up trying to reconcile the horror of so much of reality with the dream of bliss, but I was, if that is the right word, blessed in hearing the conflict so articulated.
     
     It didn't stop at home, as you may find out by delving into the despatches From the Fractal Frontier  in this blog. Suffice here to say that I finally became convinced that, besides being indispensible for humans to flourish, it is far from irrational to believe that God loves us, and to accept the idea that He should hang his plan to rescue the human race on the slender thread of a humble young woman's consent.  'The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary....' The whole of creation was hushed, teetering on the brink, as it strained to hear the quiet voice say: 'Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done unto me according to thy word.' For all her humility, she nonetheless announced:-

Yes, from this day forward all generations will call me    blessed,
for the Almighty has done great things for me.
Holy is his name,
and his mercy reaches from age to age for those who fear  him.
He has shown the power of his arm,
he has routed the proud of heart.
He has pulled down princes from their thrones, and exalted the lowly.
The hungry he has filled with good things, the rich sent empty away.

     So it was that the 'wild imaginings' of a young Jewish woman became the well-spring of so much art and beauty, one might say of European civilisation and much more. From beautiful churches throughout the continent, at noon and eventide every day, the Angelus bell rang out and work stopped while the people recalled the great mystery. The novel ideas of freedom, of a world not ruled by violence and strength, of power being conditional upon consent, were loosed upon the people. The memory of that 'lowly handmaid' forever confronted the cult of violence, which reached an apotheosis in the 20th century. Subsequently, by some amazing quirk, the European Union found the inspiration to put Our Lady's crown on its flag - as St John wrote in the Book of Revelation, 'a great sign appeared in Heaven: a woman, adorned with the sun, standing on the moon, and with the twelve stars on her head for a crown....'

     St John warned , 'for you, earth and sea, trouble is coming - because the devil has gone down to you in a rage, knowing that his days are numbered.' One would have thought that the great warnings of the 20th century should have sufficed to wake us up - but no, and now there are more. But even Science seems to be getting there - what with new insights about for instance climate change, life in the womb, quantum physics...! Will humanity find the strength and will to rise to the challenge? I find it hard to believe that we will do so until we learn to say again together:- Hail Mary.... 

Our brave Easter lily....

...confronts its dragon.

*Fiona writes:- I was in Paris for several weeks, at the age of 18 in the summer of 1966. I loved the feel and smell of the ancient churches and sometimes went to Mass, and was moved by the realisation that this same catholic Mass was being celebrated throughout Europe and to the far corners of the world, as it had been for the last two thousand years. I had been struggling with the idea of becoming a Catholic since I was fourteen.

     One time in Notre Dame, I came by the Lady Chapel. As I stood there the statue of the Virgin and the whole chapel was filled with radiant, golden light, in which I felt myself enveloped in her arms. I felt intimately the warmth her presence, and I knew then that I would become a Catholic and that she would show me the way onward. That vision has always stayed with me, and I realised when I visited again years later, and found the space quite normal, that I had indeed been blessed with a visitation by our blessed mother. 

An Easter Dream

Palm Sunday.

So that's the end of another Act in the Brexit Saga! Here I am in Alcobaça, Portugal, and most English people I come across dearly want to tune out. 'Why can't they just get it over with, so we know where we stand?' Well tomorrow I'll be back in Ireland, which brings to mind just one of the reasons why 'they' cannot do any such thing. Brexit has laid bare the bankruptcy of the present set-up, particularly in the North - a compromise that has fallen at the test.  The breakdown of the devolved power-sharing executive and the threat of a return to violence that this implies just might have figured more in the headlines, if the world was less fixated on the carry-on in Westminster.

     What else might the headlines have been about? Climate change, the millions suffering from environmental degradation, hunger and violence, or nuclear proliferation, trade wars, democracy under threat all over the place including the U.S.A., the world awash with money that doesn't know where to go while the poor are falling back? Perhaps, but most people would rather tune out that lot too, and it's hard to blame them!  

     In fact of course all this and the Brexit saga are interconnected.  In the face of chaos and impending doom, there is a very natural inclination to pull up the draw-bridge and dig in behind 'old certainties'. Prime Minister May and her Chancellor, Philip Hammond, the dude with a po face who generally appears  behind her at the despatch box in the House of Commons, keep on about the 'bright future' that beckons if only they would pass her deal - a reunited country, its ancient liberties and place in the world reasserted, will at last be able to resume the march to ever greater prosperity etc. Who are they trying to kid? A realistic appraisal of the fraught situation in this ever more interconnected world means that Britain will either be drawn into  even greater integration with the rest of Europe, or become something of 'an overseas territory' of the U.S.A..

     Ireland suffers from the same dichotomy, complicated by the relationship with Britain and much exacerbated by The Duckie. I know too well that it is a lot easier to cross the Irish Sea than the Bay of Biscay, or even the 'Western Approaches' to France - otherwise, history may well have been different. Yet they are all a lot easier than crossing the Atlantic. Meanwhile, the two island economies are pretty much 'joined at the hip'. There is no way that Ireland's relationship with Europe can thrive by trying to pretend that this reality can be totally overturned, much as I for one would sometimes rather like to. There will be no easy resolution of this situation.

     'Never let a good crisis go to waste!' This might be a much more fruitful way to look at things, though I don't suggest it will be easy. I have taken the line, for most of my life, that if the world wants to go to Hell, there's precious little I can do about it. The best thing is to do my thing as well as I can and leave the rest to God. However, the nearer I get to leaving this world, the more I am inclined to love it, to dream dreams of a future for my grandchildren, and to remember that I shall be called to account for what I have done or failed to do, or even have said or failed to say. Talking about things (not just chattering) is after all the first necessity if anything effective is to be done about them, and when people cop out of the challenge of doing so, because they find it difficult or uncomfortable, they are on the way to paralysis and break-down.

     So what of my dreams? They are likely to be rather different to those of Prime Minister May and Chancellor Hammond! I have criticised their Brexit project from the start as an unrealistic fantasy, though not as whacky as that of the likes of Mr Boris Johnson. Hadn't I better set down my own little notions? I will try, and I would have allowed that they too are probably unrealistic, were it not for the little fact that it is impossible to visualise a realistic future at all if we persist in trying to stick to 'business as usual' much longer.

     In England a prerequisite for real progress is to finally leave behind the dream of Empire. Interestingly, this is by no means a problem confined to Great Britain.* The European project is so important largely because it seeks to realise a new paradigm for the relationships between and within the nations, which is why the likes of the Brexiteers, The Duckie and President Putin dislike it so much.  But how could England finally sign up for this project, maybe even leading the way for the renewal of the EU?

     Perhaps one good starting point would be to dispense with the monarchy. It could be done quite gently. Let Queen Elizabeth live out her reign, and meanwhile consult with Prince Charles, who after all gives the impression that he doesn't have that much ambition to be King. He would actually make a pretty good chairman for the establishment of a new set-up, some kind of confederation of independent republics. Indeed he might relish active involvement, rather than being called upon as another stuffed shirt. Perhaps the President might be appointed, not without reference to the demos, but in some other way than universal suffrage, possibly by the House of Lords, along the lines of the method by which the Pope is chosen. After all the papacy is the institution that has endured the longest, and there is an example of the gentle deconstruction of an imperialistic set-up! In fact the heir to the throne might sit in that Upper House, along with some other heriditary members and other representatives of society. There is something to be said for having some there who owe nothing to any political patron, nor constituency of voters, but who are trained from youth to think about the big picture and also to cherish unpopular minorities and truths. 

     The new British dispensation could even be a trial run for a European confederation. Part of it would have to involve strong but inter-related levels of subsidiarity, actively involving as many people as possible in local and regional democracy, that anyone could participate in and wherein their representation worked from one level to the next. The achievement of such active and widespread collaboration should be one of our highest social aspirations - a new kind of sport, rather better than gawking at football on the tele, and more important than most 'work' too! 

     Just how this is to be worked out would involve regional assemblies, preferably going beyond the five nations (England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the Channel Islands, probably with Mann), to perhaps the four provinces of Ireland and a similar breakdown of England - Wessex, Essex, Northumbria etc. A similar reconstruction of France and Spain would also be good, so that Brittany, the Basque country, Galicia, Catalonia etc would also find their voices in more than name.  In the other direction, let's have a Council of the Atlantic seaboard nations, from Norway to Portugal. One could envisage some four such mega-regions in the EU. In this way, the European project would shed its remote, Napoleonic aspect, and a much more hands-on, immediate and dynamic kind of democracy could be applied both to the development and integration of Europe and to the immense global challenges of the Great Transition to a sustainable future. 
     
     It could be fun. Happy Easter!

Alcobaça Mosteiro.

  *https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/10/nostalgia-for-empires-lost-seductive-dangerous   

I'll be taking an Easter break from this blog too, and hoping there will be stronger progress on the 'sailing' side of things when I resume. At this point the 'Anna M' is slowly acquiring new steel floors, which hold the hull and keel together.

Citizens of Europe, Indeed!

When institutions that we love and admire, or even those that we merely take for granted while they shape our lives, suddenly crack and reveal themselves as dysfunctional or plain inane - be they families, political parties or whatever - when such events occur, there is naturally a profound sense of shock and dismay. Moreover, there is inclined to be a nasty 'domino effect', a collective nervous breakdown, though of course it is a crisis of individuals too. Such an effect seems to have broken out with particular virulence in England just now.

     Perhaps the best way of describing it is as a crisis of meaning; and it really does seem to have taken this long for the collapse of the British Empire to sink into the collective psyche there. This is by no means all there is to it - plenty of other places in the world are suffering an even more extreme version of it. The collapse of marriage and the family, and of the sexual mores that (more or less) prevailed when I was a child in the 1950s, seems to have some kind of mysterious relationship with it, something to do with the absence of a shared context of meaning undermining the foundation of a marriage, household and family, and also, paradoxically, one's very relationship with physical reality.

     The net effect anyway is for paralysis and disintegration to set in. Many of our contemporaries will try to account for it in economic terms. I would argue that, for all their importance, the economic effects are secondary. Human beings are rational animals, and human life simply does not work when deprived of a more or less viable spiritual and ontological context. If anyone cares to delve into earlier posts of this blog, they will find my account of a kind of collective nervous breakdown, though particularly in an individual monk, that affected Downside where I went to school, back in the 1960s. This launched me into the world with the sense of an approaching apocalypse.

     The world has lurched on since - our European part of it in relatively good health on the whole - but it has to be said that is not saying much. With the Lord, a thousand years is like a day, said St Peter, so on that basis we may think in terms of an hour since the 1960s. In conventional terms, it might be said that my life was spoiled, in that it became psychologically impossible to undertake the kind of career for which I was educated, and besides, if you kick the System in the teeth, you are rarely forgiven. Perhaps indeed my life had been a wilderness, unblessed by Fortune's smile, had Fiona not left her highland home and ventured forth with me! The fact is, difficult as our lives have at times been, we've had a great time and been looked after by a kind Providence whenever the chips were down.

     I suppose this is the reason why, while many people are getting upset, angry, depressed etc, and while indeed I too am not immune to such feelings, they do not really get to me. On the contrary, I am much more inclined to look for the potential human development that I hope to see come of it all, in spite of all the negativity. Alright, I have to admit it, in a sense I find it exhilarating and am thriving on it all; after all, isn't this process of drawing life through death what our Christian faith is all about? I'm very glad that I bailed out of Blighty when I did though, back in 1973. I can now, from a semi-detached position, afford to admit  that I find the present situation intellectually stimulating!

     Meanwhile, I recognise that it does take its destructive toll, even on our own little Nazaré Project. At least this prevents me from getting smug. Alec's initial application to Portugal 2020 for funding has been refused, and it is proving very hard to maintain momentum on the renovation of the Anna M. Perhaps what we need is a spot of Islamic Finance!* It really is sobering to realise how absurdly difficult it is to get a little enterprise going in contemporary Western society, even if it fits all the fine talk about financing the transition to a sustainable economy. 

     We are suffering at first hand the disconnect between what is promised and what is delivered. Why is the sort of thing that seems obvious, that there is a crying need to mobilise small businesses and enterprises in undertaking that Transition - why is it so very difficult? Really people all have the same basic needs - a living wage with a bit of dignity at work and joy at home - and when you think about it, even the political right and left hardly disagree about such things. Why then is it so difficult to deliver them?

     Sometimes it seems to me that the whole Left/Right business is but a case of distracting and dividing the mass of people, keeping them down. Certainly they look very similar, and nasty, at the political extremes. Closer to the Centre, is there much difference in fact, other than perhaps greater emphasis either on social effort to the left or on individual responsibilty to the right, both of which are manifestly necessary? But if it is a case of the people being deliberately kept down, one cannot but ask what are these dark forces? Perhaps it's enough to say that money may be a good and useful servant, but is a very bad master - which will rule us if we let it. 

     Instead of taking off into speculation, I'll try my hand at a bit of play-acting, recounting a meeting where a few contemporary pols meet in a London pub. Major Wheeze-Flogge's daughter, apparently, has just received her new British passport with the offending words European Union removed from the cover.** Larrie Larookar was visiting his native London, though nowadays he has a teashop over in Dublin.

Major Wheeze-Flogge :- 'Citizens of Europe' indeed! The young people these days seem to think they are entitled to go on the gad all over the Continent, instead of knuckling down to stacking supermarket shelves or picking cauliflowers. Damn lucky to have the work! Too much education is the problem. All the third level education they need is a couple of years in the army. Too bad for the army, mind you. I’ll give them ‘citizens of Europe’! Downright treason, I call it. Whatever happened to those Subjects of Her Majesty the Queen, anyway?

Larrie Larookar:- 'Struth, I saw a crowd of them on a trip-boat in Ibiza once, all drunk and roaring Rule Britannia. You're quite right, they really shouldn't be let out at all! But do you think we could all survive together shut up in our little islands, only let out on the odd coach tour as a golden oldie? And anyway, what about those shares of yours? Don’t you care about business at all? Maybe you still havn’t got over losing the Raj and all that, but Europe really is a pretty good club to be in, with the world getting so upset!

Jez Cobblin:- You'll be alright Wheeze-Flogge, got most of your money off our island anyway; but you and Mrs Maybe between you are doing a fine job of carving up the Tories, and with a bit of luck we lefties will get some of that 'cake all round', after all. As for all their nonsense about delivering stability and prosperity, well I might finally get my reputation for sweet reason and light back, just in time for an election. I've had enough of those bastards in the press trying to make me out as a raving unpatriotic commie, aided and abetted by the likes of you.

Wheeze-Flogge:- Yees, I thought that was your game. Well we have a few shots in our locker yet, let me tell you. I’ve a few friends you know, bit on the rough side, but they are well able to make plenty of trouble for you! We’ll soon sort out the men from the boys; don't you forget Agincourt, don't forget Crécy! 

Larookar:- Now, now Major, you should try living next door to that lot in the North. But let me tell you, by the way, that we have some really big friends these days!

Wheeze-Flogge:- No prob, old boy; and that lovely border of yours is just the ticket for sharpening up squaddies. Twice as long as it need be, wild old country, handy but not here, and still the best training ground in the United Kingdom! And you know, our lot need a little fighting now and again, and God knows when we’ll be needing them again for real, to put manners on red Jez here and his mates, and you never know who else. Anyway, the only way we’ll ever get any work out of the proletariat again is when they feel the sharp pangs of hunger, and that will mean trouble too. Meanwhile a few low level fights would be just the ticket, to keep up morale and in practice. It's very good for the economy too!

Cobblin:- You’re an old villain, Wheeze-Flogge, and Mrs Maybe just might work with me to dish your lot yet. If only we could concentrate on helping our own people for a change! There was plenty of money for bailing out your banker friends when they hit a spot of bother, and an awful lot of it seems to have ended up in the off-shore bank accounts of shady foreign globalists. Now that Canice Couldufakit character has some good ideas***. We must empower the people to make jobs for themselves, and save the planet while they are at it. The Great Transition has to happen at all levels.

Wheeze-Flogge:- Alright, go on, hand out more money all round, and watch the riff-raff destroy themselves with drink and drugs.

Larookar:- You're not exactly subtle, are you Major! We Irish know how to give just enough to stop the people from revolting, and to keep our banker friends happy too. Oh it's a great thing to lob the odd bit of jolly stuff like homosexual marriage in - it puts the Left and the Right at each other's throats, makes the Righteous Middle think things are Progressing, and they all forget whom they really need to sort out. If they ever happened to get together, they could do it, so Shhh, we don't want to make trouble for our monied friends, do we now, killing the goose and all that!

Cobblin:- Cripes, Larrie, never knew you had such perspicacity in you! Something to mull over on the allotment, surely!

On a wall in Vestiaria. 

See *https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/islamic-banking-ethiopia-offers-muslims-financial-inclusion-190404192204542.html

**https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-47833702

***https://www.thenation.com/article/yanis-varoufakis-diem25/

Orderrrrr!

As Mr Speaker Bercow's bawls of Orderrr echo round the world, there is much hand-ringing in England and general lamenting about the state of British democracy - 'democracy at its worst' commented a young German to me sniffily. I beg to differ. I see stirrings of democracy actually coming to life. Admittedly this is rather a drastic way for it to happen, but perhaps it's the only way it could do so. For too long we have accepted politicians who merely exercise their votes according to the party line. Neither their consciences nor even their voices were truly engaged. What hope for the rest of us?

     I have argued in the past that the only kind of democracy that works is like a fishing boat or a monastery, where you may elect the skipper or the abbot, but then you must do what he says. However, this only works properly where the crew, or the community, can find some kind of consensus, and then when authority is exercised in a consultative and collaborative manner. Mrs May's big mistake was to convince herself that her way, spuriously represented as the Will of the People, was the only way, and then to proceed to try to ram it through regardless.

     I am delighted to see the House of Commons asserting itself. It's a great pity that it wasn't done a couple of years ago, with a sensible and practicable course of action thrashed out then which the Government could get on with implementing; but life's not tidy, and better late than never. At least it should now be clear that the only real choice is between a 'common market 2' with a customs union, though I do not think this would be stable and sustainable in the long term, but rather an unsatisfactory way of buying time, or that of getting stuck into making a success of the EU. The rest is 'stop the world, I want to get off' sort of stuff.

     Of course, there are any amount of reasons why one might want to do precisely that, but they are vacuous in the end. Brexit represents to me a last ditch attempt to stay in the 20th century. The 21st is confronted by a host of challenges, both threats and opportunities, that absolutely require greatly enhanced cooperation and integration between the nations.

     I wish I could share what I regard as one of the greatest gifts of the Catholic faith, besides that of being catholic, namely that it enables the likes of me to be fully committed to this dark and troubled world, where everything seems destined to end in sorrow and death, and yet to hope and believe that we have both a future worth struggling for and an eternal destiny. They are but two sides of the same coin. The sting is removed from death and negativity - they are changed into a necessary right of passage to a fulfillment that puts the whole shebang into glorious light.

     To many, this will appear to be mere fantasy. Well good luck with that, I cannot see how you will avoid a life of disappointment and frustration; but I can assure you this particular 'fantasy' is reasonable, believable and efficacious. I have just been to Mass in the Monasteiro here in Alcobaça. The huge, gaunt old Abbey church has little decoration; on the sanctuary, besides the altar, the chair, the lectern and a great big crucifix that is undergoing renovation, there is only an unusual statue of the Virgin Mary, in wood, from the eighteenth century. She looks as if the Angel Gabriel has just left her; dumfounded and flabberghasted, she seems to be saying 'Yer wha, me?' as we might put it in Ireland. She was richly robed, as was the Church at that time, but she nonetheless is mainly facing empty space. No comforting infant, only the Crucified One....

     Not for the first or last time, it was hard to see where the Church was going, to the man who carved that statue. Fortunately, this does not depend on flawed humanity. For 'the Church', you may have to fall back on (to my mind) second-rate versions of Truth, Reality, the Great Tradition; call the opposite of delusion what you will. Let's say there are tell-tale signs of such fantasies as deny reality; all sorts of had things happen as a result of them. If we insist on following them to the bitter end, God will not prevent it. Yet there is always a price to be paid. 

     More power and all good wishes to those MPs who are trying to bring about a new kind of politics, fit to face the challenges of this 21st century!