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| Granny and Iris. |
It’s been two months now since I posted on this blog. I have been on one hand living a great life at home in County Clare with Fiona, whom I was so fortunate as to marry 56 years ago today; also with three sons and their children near at hand. There’s a lot to be said for being a retired grandfather! Yet on the other hand I have been in something of a state of paralysis on various fronts.
The most basic is the task of figuring out the way ahead with the Anna M. A robust plan of campaign was elusive, but we do seem to have achieved it now, and I should after all have the resources to get her back in the water next Spring . However, if she is not paying her way within two years, she will have to be sold. The short slide presentation here lays out the plan.
Meanwhile I continue to wrestle with more existential problems. For instance, how come it is so difficult to talk honestly about the excess deaths that are occurring especially in the most ‘advanced’ countries of the world? Or even about the covid pandemic itself? It was shrouded in lies from the beginning, with all that talk of coming directly from animals in the wet market, and with anyone who mentioned the Institute of Virology up the road being dismissed as a ‘conspiracy’ loonie. Then came all the obfuscation and downright lies about the vaccines.
It seems sometimes that the Mainstream Media and our entire democratic set-up have finally taken leave of Truth. Major casualties are the UN and the WHO, though the latter’s power grab seems to plough on regardless of any accountability. The longer this situation goes on, the more radical is the breakdown of trust, the less tenable is any middle ground and the more radical the disintegration that is in danger of tearing democracies apart.
Had the autocrats and oligarchs of the world invented a weapon to do so, they could not have done better. What they thrive on is the fear of death, chaos and social disintegration; nothing suits them better than to be able to point at democracies unable to form stable governments, democrats at each other’s throats and unable to protect their citizens as they struggle on in a state of isolation and confusion.
There are other candidates for the prize of maximum divisiveness and confusion, notably the Ukraine war and climate change. Perhaps I will be virulently condemned for even suggesting that these may not be clear-cut issues, and much as we would love to see Ukrainians living in peace and security, there may be better ways to achieve it than through war, and likewise we will not stabilise the climate and our way of life by attempting to decarbonise too fast and by demonising CO2.
Such is the balancing act of those of us who continue to occupy what seems an ever more precarious centre ground. To those who claim that we are merely ducking the issues, refusing to commit one way or the other, I would like to quote the words of Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, spoken yesterday as he opened the current Synod in Rome, of which he is the ‘Relator General’:-
‘ When we walk, Christ is the centre. There are people on the right, on the left, there are those who walk further ahead, there are those who take longer and stay behind: it is normal when we walk together. We must learn that certain tensions in the Church are normal: it means the Church is close to the people, because not everyone thinks in the same way on all continents, on all issues. So it is important to listen with a lot of respect, also for different cultures, seeking God's will, to decide together the way forward…..
‘Since there are several people who ‘place’ me on the left, let us say that I am walking on the left. If I take Christ as the centre and look at Him from the left, I do not see Him alone, I see Christ with the people walking on the right. I cannot see Christ without also seeing them: that means that those walking on the right are also part of my community. It means we have to walk together. I hope the same experience happens to those who are walking on the right side, those who go forward, those who go behind….’
Surely here there is a moral for us all, though of course the Cardinal with his ‘if I take Christ as the centre’ is assuming that we look at Him with love and revere Him as the Truth. If we try to substitute some abstract version of the Truth, a mere intellectual construct, it just won’t work. One is likely to find oneself with no alternative to looking at some strutting tin-pot dictator, who insists that we believe his version of truth, or else jumping into an abyss.
I believe that those guys in funny clothes in Rome represent our chief hope of saving democracy and indeed civilization,- so God help us, and them! Some will find this an outlandish idea, and others will be only too delighted if they can portray the Synod as a major bust-up and a failure; but for myself, as St Peter had it, there just ain’t no other place to go!
ps, Robert Kennedy for President!
