Summertime

It's now over a month since I posted on this blog. It has been a busy time, with good weather and family members coming to visit; one appreciates how lucky we are to be able to enjoy it all, with loads of lovely vegetables in the garden to boot.

It is a time of year when one needs to take a break from the Spring work, stand back, and reflect on where one is going. There's much to be said for the New Year starting, like the academic one, in September! I am booked to go on the ferry to Spain in that month, with my dear shipwright friend Steve Morris, for a big effort to get things moving on the Anna M  in Nazaré, Portugal.

I have additional cause for reflection, since I have been diagnosed with stage 2 prostate cancer, and am generally feeling my age. I am told that I will be dead within five years if I don't do something about it. Hopefully we shall do so, but at least it is yet another reason to make the best of whatever time is left.

The times are reinforcing the conviction that I formed over 50 years ago along these lines:-  our politics and way of life will go from bad to worse as long as we think that the interplay of market and state actors is capable of building a worthwhile future, but unfortunately the only way they may be put back in their place is by drastic upheaval; the antidote goes by way of a renewed sense of community and respect both for others and for nature; this will only be again discovered with the realisation that their existence is not futile, but has an immortal destiny.

I believe that the appropriate tool has been given in the Catholic Faith, but of course we cannot sit back and wait for people to find that out. We have to respect and work with everyone 'of good will', in other words, those who are prepared to work with us. Our respect must be genuine, for all those other precious insights that may well illumine truths we do not see ourselves. If our faith is indeed the 'real deal', then it will eventually become clear; meanwhile it is up to us to demonstrate that it works in our own lives.

For too long Catholics tended to withdraw into their spiritual fortress. I came of age as we were challenged by Vatican II to get out of it; I have found a great deal of difficulty and frustration in doing so, yet patience must be the name of the game. Much has been learned in this past half century; now at last we may seriously apply it, for the times are imperatively clamouring for the renewal of community, of sense of purpose and the faith that they depend on.

It is becoming ever more apparent that the kind of  Brave New World on offer these days, where a tiny minority of the Uber-rich pull the strings, while the mass of humanity falls into ever deeper desperation and misery, has to be decisively rejected before it kills us all. It is not just the obvious culprits we must contend with, the Duckies and Johnsons of the world; with the best of intentions neither politicians nor anyone working within the present paradigms will turn things round. The battle has to be joined on all sorts of fronts, but especially in our own minds and hearts, in our communities and the way we live.

The more we can meet our basic human needs from the resources of our own communities, the better, but we also need that community of communities, a renewed Catholic Church. We are most fortunate, who live on the western seaboard of Europe; the ancient stones may be scattered, but they are nevertheless at hand; and as the saying goes, how beautiful they still are!

West Cork shepherd.