Good Friday in Fatima.

Leiria

Fiona and I took a bus to Leiria on a chilly and blustery Good Friday morning; after coffee there we came to the cathedral just as they were beginning to sing Lauds, and after that little treat it was time for the bus on to Fatima. The day continued to fall into shape very well, with the commemoration of Christ’s death on the cross in the new basilica there in the afternoon

The Basílica da Santíssima Trindade was dedicated in 2007, and built since our previous visit to Fatima on the occasion of Pope St John-Paul II’s going there in May 2000; it was near the end of our first wintering in Portugal in the Anna M. A bit of internet browsing shows that to traditionalist Catholics it is a monstrosity, symbolising all that has gone wrong with the Church since Vatican II. I have to admit that I was taken aback by it myself, since it does have something of the atmosphere of a glorified aircraft hanger. It was not helped in that our first port of call was the Blessed Sacrament chapel, which is austere and functional like everything else there, with an odd altar that was hard to take to. Neither did we like the huge crucifix that confronts one above the altar in the Basilica; however, when we attended the Good Friday liturgy along with some few thousand other pilgrims, the church came alive as a good liturgical space.

It has 8633 seats according to Wikipedia, and they are comfortable ones where everyone should be able to see what’s going on. Maybe our traditionalists would rather one was in discomfort, but considering this service went on for 2 hours and 20 minutes, I was grateful for the bit of comfort. Perhaps they would have been impressed to witness about 6000 people going up to venerate the Crucified One,  in four orderly files and reverent silence, apart from the excellent singing. I was anyway!

Perhaps they would rather old style choir singing, but I love the way the Portuguese are inclined to sing in church - actually sing the liturgical prayers rather than somewhat jazzy hymns, with the choir leading and the people joining in. There was a priest/cantor helping them to do so, and they seemed to mostly know what to sing without the need for books. The whole proceedings have a humane and relaxed dignity, that is indeed somewhat lacking in reverence on occasion, but I fear that’s a price that has to be paid if one seeks authentic participation in a world that hardly knows what reverence is! But what on earth do the traditionalists imagine it would have been like in a medieval cathedral?

When I was a young lad, I well remember how there was a deal more reverence about, but we have since had to recognise there was a lot of rot lurking behind it. It makes me think of the Anna M as we sailed into Nazaré last June. She was sailing and indeed looking fine, but when we stripped out the furniture we found the bad stuff. The trouble is, you don’t see it from the outside,- but it’s those rotten and fractured ribs that have to hold the planks together on the inside, have to give them their shape and strength.

So much is like that these days, in the Church and in society too. It’s bound to take a lot of disruption to sort it all out, and we just have to be patient. ‘Behold the wood of the Cross, on which hung the salvation of the World.’ Instead

of giving off about the failings, along with all our miseries and weariness, it is better to leave them to the One who offered Himself to bear them, so that our sins may be forgiven and ‘all things made new’ - not of course that this absolves us from attending to that rot!

If there is indeed a 'message' that Our Lady of Fatima sends out to the world, surely it is one of encouragement along such lines, but yes, it is also something of a rebuke to our heady, superficial and irreverent culture; if only we could perceive those inner things, in the spirit of those shepherd children, Jacinta, Francisco and Lucia!

Happy Easter to you all!

photos by Fiona.

Whatever About an Old Boat, How to Fix Democracy?

The work on the Anna M  goes on slowly, for a variety of reasons, leaving me plenty

Menu do dia, 8eur.

of time to reflect on the difficulties of bringing the simplest of projects to completion, and the best way to structure the processes involved. It also leaves me time to read the news; leaving all the tragedies to God, because not to do so would make life insupportable, I generally focus on the issues in which I feel able to exercise some degree of agency, however small; and of course, this business of Facebook and the internet is right there whenever we try to do anything these days.

It rather seems to me that that outfit is confronting us with the nature of contemporary society and modern democracy in ways that make it a lot easier to blame the techies than to confront the real issues. After all, for all the shock and horror, it seems that they were mainly doing, at a new level of sophistication, what democrats are generally supposed to do: find out what ‘the people’ want and give it to them, or to put it more accurately, what buttons to press in order to get what one wants and press them!

Of course, as the process becomes more sophisticated, it also becomes more expensive. ‘One’ has to have deep pockets, but it doesn’t take such a big shift to get a result, and hey presto, ‘the people have spoken’. Thus democracy degenerates into plutocracy, or worse. But on what basis do we suppose that politicians seek power and influence? It happened that the Duckie got to use the newest techniques just in time to help him make the right quacks or tweets or whatever they were about ‘crooked Hillary’. Would the liberal establishment be equally outraged if it were the other way round?

So what can we do about it? Change is not going to happen by way of deleting Facebook, though that might be a little step in the right direction; neither by revolution or sweeping dramatic reform; there is no easy fix and no great leader will get us there; what is required is change in attitudes. For a start, we have to realise that what we ‘like’, certainly at the superficial level touted by Facebook, is not the point; the most important truths are just as likely to be disliked. On the whole, responsibility and having to pay for one’s needs are not that pleasant; but any real democracy begins and ends with the willingness to take responsibility and to meet those costs.

Only love can enable us to do this, and that is an interpersonal affair. It is the very absence of a real human context to their lives that makes people so vulnerable to the pseudo context offered by mass media and mass politics. If we want democracy to survive in any meaningful way, we have to take as much responsibility as we can at an immediate, human level. Let those who prove themselves in little ways go on to represent us at ‘higher’ levels. Once they do so, make sure they stay in touch with their base, but let them make the decisions appropriate to their responsibility.

Democracy does not thrive by way of the tyranny of a majority, nor that of you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. Let everyone's real voice, the fruit of their experience but not their vanity, be heard, and let decisions be reached by consensus. If one must make decisions by vote, insist on a two-third majority. It’s better again to choose who is going to take decisions and let them do it, like the skipper of a fishing boat!

Forget about left/right, and referenda especially where a simple majority ends up as ‘the Will of the People’. If everyone involved were to genuinely pray, to plug into the Divine energy, decisions would take themselves, as in a good marriage. Real polarity, with the energy flowing between the poles, is about the inverse of a binary ‘either/or’ where the flow between them is blocked. I do believe that if a critical mass of people refuse to settle for comfortable blocking mechanisms, forgetting about what they like and dislike but finding ways for their energy to flow even in the most unpromising little channels, the world will change amazingly.

Photos by Fiona.

St Patrick's Day: Time to Call Out Snakes.

From our window.

It's always a tough time of year, but St Patrick bids us celebrate the coming Spring in the midst of the hardships that are its essential precondition. In Portugal the heavy rains are not enjoyed, even as they fill the empty reservoirs. In such a way does truth come into the world, an unwelcome guest. But how the world needs it! Somehow we seem to be afflicted with leaders who have a particularly strong aversion to it at the moment. Not to be outdone by Moscow and Washington, in Ireland we have our own version!

“Pope Francis has said that the issue of women’s ordination isn’t up for discussion, that women are permanently excluded from priesthood…. I believe that women should be ordained, I believe the theology on which that is based is pure codology. I’m not even going to be bothered arguing it. Sooner or later it’ll fall apart,  fall asunder under its own dead weight.”  -Ms Mary McAleese, as reported in thejournal.ie here.

Such is the pitch of the lady who is looking for ‘radical, innovative, strategic ideas’ for the inclusion of women in the life of the Church. As she slides along on the slime of such buzzwords, I would rather she scrawled up No Popery! But why  doesn’t she just show us how it’s done in one of the Protestant churches? Asked why she stays in the Catholic Church, she replies: “I stay because I choose to stay part of an institution that has no equal on the planet in terms of its outreach. No NGO does what the Church does. They inspire me.”

That’s about as bizarre a statement of faith as they come; it also seems about as two-faced as Mr Nigel Farage drawing his salary from the European Parliament. The Vatican was quite right to exclude her from the ‘Why Women Matter’ Conference in Rome, when that is her attitude. But if she did bother to make an argument, she would find that even many protestants would not agree with her. Has she read the essay on the subject of women priests by her countryman, C.S.Lewis, for instance?

I am not denying that there is a lot of work to be done in the matter of the role of women. I just don’t think Ms McAleese has got it right. Meanwhile, there have always been many smart people saying of the Catholic Church words like:- ‘Sooner or later it’ll fall apart, fall asunder under its own dead weight.’ When she uses that trendy little word ‘codology’ to describe the Pope’s teaching, does it not give her any pause for thought that the Gospel has been referred to as ‘pure folly’ ever since St Paul’s day? And meanwhile, that this same Folly has done far, far more for the dignity of women than the feminists will ever do? Has the world ever heard a more truly radical statement than Our Lady’s great hymn, the Magnificat?

In fact, the ‘codology’ on which the male priesthood is based is too big a subject for me here; but  I will attempt to give a personal account of my own reasoning. Attending Mass here in Portugal always renews my conviction that the preponderantly female congregations would not like to have priestesses presiding at all, and as for myself, I would not participate if there were.  

It was D.H.Lawrence who said that the Pope knows more about sex than an army of sex therapists. What might he have been getting at? In the most delicate and dignified way possible, Catholic liturgy as well as theology is laced with sexual imagery. Lawrence probably would have argued that it was the sex that was at the root of it all. However this matter of polarity in dynamic power  is reflected all through reality, in electricity for instance. It is built into the very structure of life, which in the end constitutes one big harmony; both the ding and the dong are absolutely necessary to this, and the one cannot do without the other. Struggling with the limitations of language, we may call, in electricity for instance, one pole ‘positive’ and the other ‘negative’. Is the former better than the latter? If one isolates one pole or the other, the whole thing shuts down.

In this respect, I would agree with Ms McAleese. The problem is that in her ‘advanced nations’, in the LaLa Land of modernity, differences have to be suppressed in the interests of ‘equality’, even between ‘positive and negative’ in more usual meanings of the word. None of your subjecting poor little snowflakes to the fact that their work may be plain bad, or even that if they turn to the right, then they cannot turn left! But poles are essential, two parts of any single transaction, and they cannot exist except in tandem. Such is the admittedly ultimately mysterious structure of reality. Concept begets conception.

In the basic transaction of the sexes, men give and women receive. Even thus, the Word of God came as a divine seed from without our world. Fundamental to our Faith, and in opposition to much contemporary

Photo by Ger K.

culture, the assertion stands that we do not find the means of salvation within ourselves or within Nature and that the focus of our lives needs to be beyond their daily round, if that same daily round is to discover its meaning. It is in their very immersion in ‘drudgery’ that so many women realise such truth, and thus on the whole tend to be better and more spiritual human beings than men. It is the humble among us who are closest to God’s heart, and the Pope’s too! But if you find sufficient meaning in Nature alone, well then priestesses are for you.

In contrast to the Latins, the English set out to enormously reduce if not eliminate the role of gender in their language. It is surely not a coincidence that now Anglophone culture is obsessed with ‘equality’ between the sexes, by which it tends to mean ironing out the differences between them as much as possible. A true feminism would rather, to my mind, celebrate them. A glance at contemporary culture hardly gives one confidence that it is producing much in the line of happiness or fulfillment; ‘barren’ seems a pretty good word to describe it in these times. Rather, how sweet it is to light up our lives with the ding, dong of sexual feelings! To do so, however, they need to be properly wired, as in marriage between a man and a woman. Again, by no mere coincidence, Ms McAleese does not agree. The Catholic Church and Faith however is clear, simple and coherent; she hopes and intends to take the words of the Prophet Isaiah to herself-

‘as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride,

So shall your God rejoice over you.’

The Sea, He/She/It?

How did it happen that somewhere along the line the French opted for ‘la mer’, feminine, while the Spaniards and Portuguese for ‘el mar’ or ‘o mar’, masculine? Very likely it simply sounded better like that, once they had settled on ‘mer’ and ‘mar’. But could it have anything to do with their respective attitudes to the sea, and does the fact of ascribing a gender to things impact on one's relationship with them, one's culture and way of life?

I think it is fair to say that the French are more inclined to ‘love’ the sea than the Iberian nations; anyway the latter mainly leave yachting to the rich people frolicking round marinas, while their serious sailors generally only go to sea for serious reasons like catching fish. On the other hand frugal long-term French yachtsmen are to be met with anywhere, while France is the only place in Europe where sailing is really a national sport. Whether all that has anything to do with the matter of the sea's gender is anyone’s guess, but at least ascribing gender to things implies dynamic relationship. Even the English ascribe gender to ships and boats!

It’s really hard to be indifferent to the sea. She/He/It invariably calls for some kind of response. If one thinks of it as ‘It’, is one not more inclined to discount one’s personal relationship with it, to treat it merely as a challenge or a thing to be dominated? But people who live close to it know that it has its own moods, personality and intrinsic discipline, which have to be respected, as of course does life itself. Any civilisation must have a system of red lines that express such discipline. That marriage is the union of a man and a woman for life, and that human life is sacred from conception until natural death, would be such red lines to my mind. If society abandons them, it signs its own death warrant; it becomes a mob that destroys itself. Suddenly one finds everything from great political projects to the local supermarket being torn down!

It becomes more and more difficult for conscientious people to invest their loyalty in such a society. Well, you may mess with laws, but you won’t get away with messing with the sea for long; hence the attraction of it to the disenchanted; and when the likes of me find ourselves thus alienated, we must see if we can shore up our bases. So it is that I increasingly invest my imaginative loyalty in the communities along the western seaboard of Europe, the Gannetsway. The sea provides a start for a new civilisation, a renewed Catholic faith may provide the foundations. Meanwhile what I would love to see growing up, before I set sail on that definitive voyage into eternity, is a network of associated communities, as self-sufficient as possible, from Scotland to the south of Spain. They will only do so if they put prayer at the centre of their communal life. Sunday Mass here in the Sanctuario is a great start!

Ger surreptitiously witnesses some ladies in the Nazaré Spar.

'Winning' wars.

Portugal is getting the rain it needs so badly, so the blue sky is gone and there have been heavy downpours and blasts of wind. Still it’s not so bad, giving everyone a chance to slow down and catch up with themselves. I took a spin down to the Algarve to see if I could track down copper nails there, and catch up with Ger Kavanagh, who took this week’s photos. His flight home was cancelled and he came up to Nazaré with me instead. I nearly lost my cap in Faro, and soon after we left, I see there was a mini tornado there that did a lot of damage round the dock. Sailors have to be very grateful if their boat is in a safe place this weather, and they can relax.

Still to do so is difficult, if for example one stops to read about explosives being rained down on Syrian civilians, and even hospitals targeted. One is grateful when one gets to sea, and all such stuff is driven from the mind by one’s immediate concerns. However the least we owe those unfortunate people is to be aware of them, not shutting them out of our minds. That such things go on happening on Europe’s doorstep brings shame on all of us. There may seem to be little we can do about it, but a start would be to get behind those politicians that look as if they might try to do something effective. That means, for a start, behind committed Europeans, for obviously, if anything effective is to be done, it will have to be on a European basis.

If Britain, instead of wasting all that energy on Brexit fantasies, were to be concentrating on working with France and Germany and the rest, something sensible could surely be done. For a start, it should be possible to put manners on that dodgy Russian bear, in nonviolent ways such as setting seriously to work to find

In Leroy Merlin, Loulé.

alternatives to Russian gas, which would be good also on the climate front. It's looking as if the Russians will be lucky if they don't end up with an Assad of their very own! Now that remark will wake up the bots in St Petersburg; it’s amazing how many hits suddenly come from there when I hit their spot!

Which goes to highlight, in cyber warfare, another way in which the Russians have to be stood up to, besides their military bullying, and of course the same thing goes for the Duckie with his ‘easily won trade war’ and ‘bigger nuclear button’; both of them delighted to have the EU in disarray, which is proof itself of its value. In spite of everything, the world still looks to Europe for leadership, mainly because they know, as every sailor knows, that to get a good position fix, you have to triangulate; the more bearings the better, and that is just what the unwieldy combination of different nations provides, especially considering that they were slaughtering each other not so long ago, and just might still remember how foolish it is to even think about winning wars of any kind!

Portuguese lesson with my landlord, Luis.

The Language of the Sea.

I left Dublin early the other morning, and was in Nazaré in good time for lunch, all at my ease and at little cost. That such a thing is possible has to be accounted a massive triumph of technology, capitalism and indeed enlightened politics. I might even sum it up as a triumph of the ‘New Puritanism’ that I was giving off about last week, understood roughly speaking as the doctrine that ‘we are ourselves grace and to Hell with Nature’.

I would very much rather effect the same journey in a contraption made of pieces of wood held together with bits of copper, taking about a week, in considerable discomfort, with a lot of effort and costing a fortune. The first way is boring and the second enthralling. I am these days back to enjoying myself banging copper nails through the planks of the Anna M. Am I mad or what? What’s going on?

Well in contemporary culture we tend to think we love pleasure, and never was there ever so much desperate seeking for it, but the truth is in puritanical style we don’t really ‘do’ it at all. There really is very little of it in an aeroplane; we just hang in there buoyed up by the thought of getting where we reckon we will at last catch up with that fugitive pleasure; and to tell the truth, very delighted I am to be suddenly delivered from the agonisingly slow spring of Ireland to the warm, bright sunshine here, where I can work away in the open air in a t-shirt.

And the fish are drying.

There is another drawback to that flying though,- the guilt of leaving a trail of co2 injected into the atmosphere, of realising the environmental cost of producing that lovely aluminium (as anyone who knows Aughinish on the Shannon estuary will indeed realise), and also of zooming past all those people without relating to them as fellow human beings. Guilt is a funny business, but those who  refuse to recognise it are the ones who suffer from it most of all. What chance have they of changing their ways? And yet Nature is in the way of taking very serious revenge for our failure to treat her with due respect!

‘I doubt the end o’the world is in it!’, our old neighbour in Donegal used to say. ‘The day of God’s wrath is at hand!’ is the cry that echoes down the ages, but nowadays we have a new and scientific version, based on facts and all that. What on earth can we do about it though?

Well, we can try to minimise our carbon footprint, work with natural materials, relate to Nature as much as we can and all of that. Slow down a bit, and one’s relationships start to come to life again. Even taking the local bus both in West Cork from Baltimore to Skibbereen, or as I do here in Nazaré going to the boatyard, one finds oneself welcomed back by the same old handful of people. Better again is the camaraderie one finds at boatyards, especially working at wooden boats. But what is the inherent quality and indeed morality of working with them, rather than ‘planes for instance?

Proper order, something people need and indeed crave more than they realise, is to be found embedded in the use of natural materials and the ends to which they are being put. I don’t say there isn’t a sense of order required to make a ‘plane do its job properly, but it is not something that the individual operative has to ‘sign up’ to; he must just follow procedures as ordered. As for results, well, enough already said above!  

Mother Nature, at close quarters on the Sea, may rock you tenderly sometimes, but she is a hard mistress too, and quickly punishes any laziness or shortcoming or foolish notion. Anyone connected with the Sea has some understanding of this. We are all the subjects of that Queen, but look, there is real pleasure and satisfaction and companionship in such subjection, which is actually egalitarian in that none is spared her rigour and the lash of her anger, and it also calls forth every skill, strength, ingenuity and adaptability that any of us can possibly muster.

Sound tradition, respected though not slavishly followed, remains an important factor in the lives of real seamen. Related to it is the understanding that every successful human undertaking has to begin with a good concept. The concept must come first, whatever the mechanics of implementing it. The vital, dynamic interplay between concept and construction is full of fascination. Every proper craftsman and creative people in all walks of life know of this, and hence should have little difficulty in believing in God, so long as He is not associated with that dreadful alienation our culture is suffering from. ‘In the Beginning was the Word’.  

However we have become estranged from It; neglecting the concepts that we take for granted,  we leave them to ‘experts’, and allow them to be drowned out with mere noise. This saves us the trouble of responsibility and commitment, and saves us from the terrible realisation that we are merely treading air, while we do our best to enjoy ourselves, on the whole rather unsuccessfully, for we are thus threatened with becoming outright zombies.

There could hardly be a greater condemnation of Brexit for instance than the simple lack of an honest, convincing or even plausible concept behind it. The best the Brexiteers can come up with appears to be Mr Rees-Mogg blathering on about Trafalgar, Waterloo, Agincourt and Crécy! Now we are hearing it will be a matter of ‘Ambitious Managed Divergence’. But Convergence, the establishment of genuine human solidarity, is the prime project to which we are summoned by the Word, not to mention by the very conditions of life in this our modern world. As for the ‘ambitious’ bit, it looks more like arrogance to most people, and the ‘managed’, well if what we’ve seen so far is anything to go by….

Concepts are mediated by language, which is our principal means of getting handles on them. Every language is of course important, but there is an immediacy and vitality about the special language of the Sea, making it high in the interests of a true seaman. Communicating across language barriers involves clarifying our concepts, hence the great value of working across them. It is a big part of the real interest and fun of travel. Anyway if we want the good ship Earth to come through the coming storms, we have no choice but to look anew to our concepts of what we are supposed to be at aboard her! Unfortunately it’s the one thing some people just hate doing, and will go to any lengths to avoid having to. Well indeed, I sometimes do wonder about this trying to be true to the 'concept' of the Anna M!

Anna M's galley, and a lot of new copper.

The New Puritans

As I contemplate the political psycho-drama unfolding in England, it seems to me that there are forces at play way beyond the usual semi-rational discourse of contemporary democratic politics. I mean one expects politicians to prevaricate, dodge uncomfortable truths and make outlandish claims such as Mrs May's 'carrying out the Will of the People', but since WWII we have generally managed to hang on to a semblance of rational discourse. In the case for Brexit, this seems to have evaporated. However, I must beware of the ‘Cambridge Syndrome’!

I was reminded of it on my recent trip to England, when I spent a few hours in Cambridge and briefly visited my old college there, Jesus, for the first time since I left in 1968. It is an intellectual state in which one assumes a detached and superior attitude to all those benighted people who actually believe anything at all, with the possible exception of what may be posited as scientifically proven. It being difficult enough to grasp one’s own subject properly, one should be very chary of expressing actual convictions of a more general character, and anyway, one must not give hostages to fortune when it comes to the serious matter of cakes and having them or not! At the risk of making a fool of myself, however, I am going to attempt to lay out my understanding of some of the historical factors at play in the aforementioned psycho-drama.

Let us go back to the medieval set-up, that among other things created those ancient universities and their system. The king who ruled the temporal set-up did so in the name of God, who, whether or not one actually believed in Him, was certainly the archetype behind the kingship. His Majesty claimed to rule in the light of universal and transcendent truths. In the knowledge that there was a mighty gap between the divine order and its pale earthly image, the Church tried to insure that the latter did not stray too far from the former; she spoke in the name of Christ, the door through whom alone the Creator could be approached.

With the Renaissance, the earthlings became intolerant of any such constraint; the tension between ‘grace’ and nature was strained to breaking point, and the culture began a long process of fragmentation, occasionally outright disintegration, as when England fell into civil war (which, let us recall, was precipitated by an Irish rebellion). Admittedly simplifying matters, we may say that the Cavaliers were catholics (with a small c) trying to hang on to the old alliance of nature with grace, with the puritanical Roundheads claimed to embody grace themselves, while nature could ‘go hang’.

Oliver Cromwell’s lot may have laid the foundations of English democracy, but meanwhile they disgraced themselves most viciously in Ireland and Scotland. Here in Sherkin Island we have a monument to this, in the form of the despoiled friary. While England managed to row back on his extreme puritanism, to this day it constitutes a dominant note in English and indeed perhaps more strongly in North American culture, many of whose founder members were Puritans. Somewhat similar forces erupted on the Continent with the French Revolution.

While such a culture is in theory committed to individual liberty, in practise it tends to control such liberty with savage repression; lacking a means to access divine grace, it conceives some arbitrary Deity who deals out His favours to individuals and nations alike according to his inscrutable will. Nowadays such a Deity is likely to be conceived as evolution, genes, d.n.a. or suchlike, but the principle is much the same, though there is even less point in trying to engage in a loving relationship with It! ‘Sauve qui peut!’ becomes the rule of life, - the survival of the fittest.

The notion that ‘if God wants something done, He sends for an Englishman’ was deeply ingrained in the days of Puritan ascendency; the English were the new chosen race. The Americans caught the same disease, possibly an even worse case of it, though of course 'the Anglo-Saxons' are not alone in it. If we are to seriously address the problems the whole world faces today, this attitude is a serious handicap. We can only do so on the basis of equality and partnership. The New Puritans of today have come to the conclusion it is not even worth trying, though they try to cover their tracks with spurious talk of partnership. What a nerve, when rejecting all the work that has been going on for the last 50 years! Once again, Ireland may become the first and biggest victim of their march to some New Jerusalem! Still, there may be an answer, like Spring!

 

The End or the Beginning?

So dear Patrick Pye has died, and as Noirin his widow says, we hope he is being led by his artistic master, El Greco, to his encounter with the Lord. So instead of heading for Portugal, Fiona and I have to change course back towards Dublin. I am tempted to say, ‘greater love hath no man….’

A Consultation with Patrick Pye.

It was Rory who introduced me to Patrick, having announced his intention of doing so as we yarned on the roof of the Liverpool Simon Community, in between the odd bout of trying to fix the leaks. The original alcoholic Jack-of-all-trades, Rory had also spent whiles helping Patrick with his stain-glass windows; he hailed from Boharnabreena at the bottom of the hill that led to Patrick’s studio at Piperstown, and he quickly perceived the common ground between Patrick and myself, in that complex territory where English, Irish and Catholic identities meet.

When I was young, we English Catholics and our frequently Irish priests used to pray regularly ‘for the conversion of England’. Such prayers quietly fell by the wayside when we came all over ‘ecumenical’, inclusive, progressive and all things cuddly. Maybe such a miracle was quietly deemed impractical anyway. As a teenager, my father pointed out Moonraker to me in Fowey Harbour; newly in from the Azores, Patrick's father Peter Pye had bananas slung up the back-stay. Unfortunately Patrick's mother was not the sailing type, and was by then bringing up their son by herself in Dublin. Her family had come to Ireland to try to convert the benighted Papists into Protestants. As it turned out, painting turned Patrick into a Papist. When in due course I got around to climbing that hill into the Dublin Mountains, and to sharing with Patrick our common aversion to the ‘plastic’ culture of modern England that we both reacted against, the big question was whether Ireland and/or Catholicism actually offered any viable alternative.

It had occurred to me anyhow that it was a much more inviting prospect to rear a family within a society that was on the way up than in one that was on the way down. A little bit either way may make the difference between spending life relishing new possibilities or kicking against contracting ones. I was asking myself if Ireland might offer a way out of spending my life banging my head against the brick walls of England! It turned out that the English, with their remaining grace and resilience, actually held on to civilisation with better success than I anticipated. However, it happened around this time fifty years ago that Britain started to do away with its babies, and losing a fifth of a nation's population is hardly a recipe for success. Now there are signs of decline everywhere one looks.

In Devizes, where we have just visited, the pavements are still deep in last year’s leaves, ‘because the Council hasn’t got the money to pay anyone to sweep the streets’. In Bungay, the lead story in the local paper is about cuts in health facilities. The cuts are making outright oppression necessary. Here in Hertfordshire, I heard from a parent about the system of fines for ‘unauthorised absence’ from school, the legacy of one Mr Michael Gove's time as Secretary of State for Education under Mr Cameron.

Who, one might ask, is entitled to authorize children to be absent from school? The child’s parents? Apparently not in this society, for they are the ones being fined ‘£60 if they pay within 21 days, £120 if between 21 and 28 days’; otherwise they face prosecution. Well how about doctors? No, apparently they are too busy to get involved in playing Big Brother, indeed refusing to do so. Anyway, how are harried parents, having to keep down two jobs to maintain the roof over their heads while also trying to look after sick children, supposed to find time to wait for hours to see a doctor in order to get a bit of paper?

It all gives a taste of the kind of society that one of the leading Brexiteers advocates! We are pretty much back to the days of putting people in prison for the crime of not having a roof over their heads at all. Maybe not quite there yet, for a notable feature of London in this cold, damp weather is the number of people sleeping rough; but we shall get there if they have their way. They won't have to have those pesky Continentals muscling in on the Welfare State; just get a load of 'guest workers' in, suck the life out of them and then send them home. All sold to the public on the ticket of 'controlling immigration'!

As far as our Irish national culture is concerned, it is all too probable that Ireland will follow a similar trajectory to Britain's,- I would say especially so if abortion becomes legal. In such a situation of decline, politics becomes a matter of codding the people into believing things are going to get better, while the politicians become servants of the smart crowd who think in terms of command and control, and slipping away into the sunlit paradise of wealth. It remains however just possible that with the rest of Europe we will remember the basis of our Catholic culture. Patrick showed how it may be done!

Meanwhile, I play my little game of turning the dream of sailing boats and exotic places on its head. That too can play a part in our redemption! I did not succeed in selling it to the extent of making the Fundit scheme work, but the offers for sailing on the Anna M still stand, somewhere on the Gannetsway between the south of Spain and Ireland. Email me direct if you are interested on the said Way at gmail.com.

Robins

There was the odd fine and calm morning in Sherkin lately, with a touch of Spring in the air; daffodils bravely budding and a robin chirping out perkily from a tall branch, with its funny little intermittent bursts of song: ‘Here I am still…, I stuck it out..., I SURVIVED…,  Spring is coming…, Bring it on…!’ I wonder where he was hiding through the vicious long, wet and windy nights?

Some species of birds have well established migration routes, others are committed to staying put; even members of  the same species may follow a different strategy; I read, to my astonishment, that some of our robins head for southern Spain for the winter, though most of them tough it out at home in the north. Out at sea, one encounters the odd brave little migrant, some landing exhausted on the deck. Small song birds like robins fly with the same bursts of energy as their song, taking them up and down as they fly. What possessed them to head out across the waves? What informs their reckless instinct?

Neither option could be called the easy one; each calls for a different kind of courage, which seems to boil down to different temperaments. Do individual birds actually make such drastic choices? How can a little Irish robin know that there is another, warmer land across that bleak, unfriendly sea? It seems one might have to consider quantum mechanics or something, to begin to find an answer!

Or maybe we might even look within ourselves to do so? For me there is something very special about that ancient ding-dong between Ireland and the Iberian peninsula, promising release from the suffocation of dreary northern weather and dreary northern quarrels too, with their ghastly politics and their spiritual aridity; a realignment or rebalancing that might even help us to get creative again, instead of apparently being stuck in unmitigated negativity!

Such toing and froing has been working well for myself and Fiona, but I would hate it to be completely dependent on squashing into those wretched aeroplanes! We are on the wing again now though, in London before we head for Portugal and take up the battle to save our big bird, the ‘Anna M’, and make her fit to sail up and down for another while. If you would like to associate yourself with this effort through the Fundit scheme, there are only a few days left….

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https://fundit.ie/project/restore-the-anna-m-1