'The Revolution in the Revolution'.

In May 1968, I was about to finally leave Cambridge, and in Paris at the time.... To this day, when I see the nice cobbled streets of Portugal, I occasionally ask myself if cobbles are an essential feature of a democratic society - the people's weapon of last resort! Nonetheless, I never saw much future in battling riot police with them. As subsequent events showed, no great forward movement resulted, from the political point of view. The whole jolly show dissipated in a cloud of drugs and promiscuity. Somehow or other Fiona and I, already married at the time, were spared the illusion that this afterlife of the 'revolution' represented any genuine kind of liberation. Politically speaking, one may ask whether its prototype, the French Revolution proper, was really any more successful, let alone its many derivatives such as the Russian one.

Over the Cobbles.

Fifty years later, our attitude would lead many people to dismiss us as 'socially conservative old foggies', or worse. However, insofar as there was something special in 'the spirit of the times' of the late sixties, a genuine revolution in the air which evidently failed, I claim that we remain basically true to it. This leads me to ask myself what, if anything, that essential 'it' was, and is it perhaps coming around again at last today? 

Maybe the feeling that 'things just can't go on like this', the sense of an opportunity for humanity to take a great leap forward, perhaps circles our planet on an elliptic orbit, coming closer every so often. 1918? Maybe then too! But then it trundles off into outer space, and only a few 'dreamers' are left wondering, what was that? Will it ever come back again, that wonderful sense of opportunity? The heart of the matter is the belief that human beings may be finally freed from fear and oppression, freed to be their authentic selves.

These opportunities come with the rumble of  empires crumbling down, the smash-up of the status quo; and with that comes much carnage and general horror. It takes a while for the dust to settle, so that we are able to figure out what still stands and what is gone for good, and so to get our bearings again. In some gilded halls, it is possible to carry on as if nothing has changed; but after all, bit by bit, things do!

We are inescapably members of some kind of greater whole; however, successive emperors are but passing attempts to personify it, and their turn comes to lose their clothes. We put up with them so long as they deliver the necessary modicum of bread and circuses to keep the show on the road. After all, so long as he manages to 'hold the ring' in the midst of the swirling masses of competing tribes, maintaining the conditions  wherein at least the more enlightened (not to say privileged and influential) can trade, travel and generally do their thing, then he will be forgiven whatever demands he may make. But when this breaks down, the costs becomes too exorbitant and the price too onerous, he is a goner! So we have to look around for some new formula to integrate life's seething possibilities and demands. All too often, it is indeed the old case of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose!

It is curious how personal morality gets bound up with the whole political and social order. Life becomes increasingly impossible on the personal and family level in step with political and social disintegration; it's almost as if we were all living at the Emperor's court. And when the court is one of those gilded halls that manages to hang on despite everything, quite out of sync with political and social reality, it's like being caught inside a circus tent that is in immanent danger of being blown down. For such reasons, I'm glad I 'escaped' from England when I did.

What of the Irish Revolution? Where has that got us? From one empire to another? A big question now is, how viable is this new 'empire', the European project? There are those who claim that Ireland's escape (and my personal one) will prove of the frying-pan to fire variety. We shall see, but meanwhile, here are a few signs that will give grounds to hope for the best: a successful Europe will lead the way in convincingly tackling the environmental crises on all fronts, including the human facets of migration, war etc, and also in reversing the tide of gross inequalities in wealth and power. Democracy and accountability will be more than empty catchwords; patient communication will replace braggart bullying. It will mysteriously, but as a matter of fact, be more convincing if accompanied by a renewal of personal integrity and morality. Banished words like adultery and fornication might even make a reappearance in the English language, not for reasons of oppression or repression, but because it is realised that they point up snags in the way of such genuine human fulfilment as is possible in this world, not to mention the next!

Yes, we also have to rediscover that this world is on a trip to some magnificent destiny beyond us all, which nonetheless is coming by way of increasing and more sophisticated integration, on both the personal and social levels. This is what we Catholics mean by 'the coming of the Kingdom', the establishment of 'his body' which we celebrate at every Mass, the 'true vine' of which we are the branches.... Any particular society succeeds or fails to the extent that it reflects such reality, and I remain convinced that the Irish version of revolution was relatively benign precisely because it did not altogether fail to

do so. Let us hope that it is not about to turn its back on that precious heritage!

C'm'on there Robert Mueller!

The game is on; we’ve a big wedding coming up in West Clare, and the only decent place there for a reception there Darling is… the Trump International Hotel at Doonbeg on the Atlantic coast. My first reaction was NO, but the locals who run it take the line that it’s their outfit, and it doesn’t really matter who the capital comes from; after all whoever that is may be here today, but will be gone tomorrow, and meanwhile God knows where the money actually comes from, and why should we care? After all, we have to find some way of living with the present dispensation in America; maybe we even have to try to butter up the Duckie*, while doing our own thing as firmly as possible, à la Macron. This old sailor has to fall into line again!

Meanwhile that other old man goes from bad to worse. He doesn’t seem to bother with trying to address people with some modicum of intelligence, and gives no reasons in his public addresses for his apparently insane, ridiculous and horrible decision to withdraw from the Iranian nuclear deal, not to mention from the Paris climate treaty, other than hurling just such epithets at it. What can one make of his contradictory denunciations? Nowadays Iran is the world’s “leading state sponsor of terror”, but in 2015 he described Saudi Arabia as “the world’s biggest funder of terrorism”; that country “funnels our petrodollars – our very own money – to fund the terrorists that seek to destroy our people.”**

I suppose the get-out is that it’s not the Saudi state as such, whatever that may be, which for example sends ‘our very own money’ to ISIS, but this doesn’t really wash. The only relevant difference between the Saudis and the Iranians that I can discern is that the former send sufficient quantities of petrodollars back to buy arms and know how to flatter a certain fragile ego. The Sunni/Shia business is beyond me, but from what I can make out the Wahhabi Sunni version of Islam of Saudi Arabia is particularly obnoxious, and rather like the Puritanical version of Christianity. One is inclined to contrast it with the Sufism, a more spiritual and a non-violent version of Islam, which has a history of being persecuted by Wahhabis.

It has always been a struggle to arrive at some kind of objective grasp of contradictory narratives, which are by no means new to this so-called age of post-truth. I grew up as a boy in England being led to believe that the British Empire was a great bearer of progress, the rule of law and general enlightenment to the world. I was not long finding a different narrative, especially when it came to considering the history of Ireland. Russian communists were continually complaining about ‘imperialists’, even while they sent their tanks into Eastern Europe. For some the big enemy is communism, for others capitalism, but clearly there is no monopoly of virtue either on the Right or the Left. In the end most people tend to plonk for one narrative or another for primarily tribal reasons. So-and-so may be a liar and crook, but isn’t he ‘our’ crook? Where can one find some kind of objective criteria?

‘By their fruits shall ye know them’ seems the most promising line. Does such and such a proposition or policy or approach result in denying opportunities for life or promoting them? Of course, everyone will try to argue that their crowd are the ones doing the promoting; one can but examine the rival claims and try to find out how they work out in practice.

Brexiteers claim to offer some wonderful global role for GB in the future. Looks like humbug to me, a mere chimera stemming from dreams of past glories. Europe actually offers a much more plausible route to a meaningful global role for GB, as this present crisis about Iran demonstrates. One thing is reasonably clear: the life opportunities of millions of British people are going to be curtailed, once they lose their European citizenship.

On an opposite tack, our Irish Government, no less, is asking the Irish people to give their assent to the taking of uncounted innocent and vulnerable human lives. This undeniable fact is dressed up in a narrative of compassion for women in trouble which is, to say the least, of extremely dubious validity. One thing is certain: many more babies will be denied the opportunities of life if ‘Yes’ prevails in the forthcoming referendum.

The proponents of Brexit and those of abortion, especially in America, are generally supposed to belong to opposed tribes in contemporary politics, so one can only conclude that said politics are overdue for a thorough reboot. This side of the end of the world, we may be sure that nobody's politics or tribe will entirely accord with Truth, but wherever one lives and whatever one does, it is our duty firstly to attempt to become more aware of our own tribalism and of its limitations, and secondly to do all in our power to communicate with opposed tribes. The methodology is clearly set out in the New Testament, and probably every major religion has made some attempt to do so. It’s no use merely trying to counter tribalism with Liberal Enlightenment, which sometimes seems to have established a tribe with as little awareness of its own limitations as any.

Tribalism, like language itself, is a constituent fact of our humanity, though it takes very different forms, and some of them are indeed better than others. We have to examine, to interrogate the basis of our own tribe, and transcend its limitations without necessarily abandoning it. Every attempt to do so, every bit of real human communication and accountability, has its value, even if it involves going to a wedding in the Trump International Hotel; maybe that's on our side of some kind of transatlantic bridge? And the better a tribe can come to terms with 'the other', and get to know itself in the process, the stronger it will become. Meanwhile, more power to Robert Mueller!

*http://gannetswaysailing.blogspot.ie/2017/02/eh-duckie-hang-on.html

**https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/is-iran-really-the-worlds-leading-state-sponsor-of-terror

Round and Round the Garden.

One day I was banging nails into the Anna M in Nazaré, Portugal; soon after I was at a book launch in Westminster, London, then again working in the garden here on Sherkin Island; the possibilities opened up by modern travel are all very wonderful. However, it does rather makes the head whirl; how can they possibly fit together? No wonder we are sometimes tempted to think that all this freedom is a bit over the top, and though we do not admit it, some of us undoubtedly actually fear it.

It is very nearly half a century since I had been involved in such an event as that book launch in London, and how life has whirled along since! Young bright sparks like me, who had been brought up in the mindset of the British Empire, were struggling to come to terms with the new realities. Just to think, of all the weird little implications, that in the world which was passing away, gentlemen did not type! Was it considered demeaning, or could they not be expected to catch up with such newfangled gadgets, or what? Anyway they all had female secretaries with neat little hands to do it for them.

The book was ‘On Governing Europe’, subtitled ‘A Federal Experiment’, and it was launched by its author Andrew Duff, a Cambridge based retired Liberal MEP and 'distinguished commentator'. It is a good, clear book, telling the story of the birth and development of the European Union. What a complicated and tortuous process it has been, which Brexiters think, or rather thought, they could so lightly cast aside! The quotations at the chapter heads tell a lot. From Barack Obama, ‘They’ve got 17 countries that have to agree every step they take. So I think about my Congress, then I start thinking about 17 congresses and I start getting a little bit of a headache.’  What was driving them on? From François Mitterrand we have ‘Le nationalisme, c’est la guerre’. From John le Carré’s character George Smiley, ‘If I was heartless, I was heartless for Europe. If I had an unattainable ideal, it was of leading Europe out of her darkness towards a new age of reason. I have it still.’ From Jean-Claude Juncker, ‘We all know what to do. We just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.’

So there we have it! At the book-launch I commented on hearing Messrs Cameron, Johnson and Farage talking before the Brexit referendum, and thinking it was the Brexiteers who won hands down when it came to finding some bit of resonance that the great British people might get their imaginations round. Even still the twilight of Empire lingers, and the truth is that nothing much appears to have taken root since except weeds, like our garden in our absence. Fortunately in Ireland one is inclined to hear the other side of those echoes from the past, which is perhaps the principal reason why I came to live here; but whether the Irish would actually vote in full awareness to be part of a federal Europe is doubtful in the extreme, yet, as Andrew Duff demonstrates, that is the logic of where we are going, despite the farce of Mr Farage solemnly standing up in the European Parliament and hectoring them about 'their project being over', while he draws his fat salary from them and even hopes for the pension!

If the federal Europe is to be attained, it will have to find its heart; no amount of mere rational discourse will get us there; the numinous will have to be revisited, but actually this can enhance rational discourse rather than destroy it, though I reserve my belief as to how the numinous and reason may be reconciled. Let the world get there in its own time, if it can. Meanwhile religion is eschewed by some as a cause of division, but in fact it is so only when it has been corrupted by idolatry. Those springs of life must be revisited; and there is a surprise in store for those who do so, for a lot of work has already been done by believers, struggling to refine the gold from the dross of falling empires. ‘Assemble, come, gather together, all you who have escaped from the nations!’ (Isaiah 45:20)

It is not however my religion or anyone else’s religion I am insisting on. We can agree that God is always beyond any finite human possession; and probably we can agree that the deepest requirement of a human being, which everyone is looking for, is love, even poor Mr Farage. We cannot come straight to the end, the consummation, but we can start wherever we have an opportunity to take responsibility for each other and for the world, to care and to communicate about all those things that some mystery causes us to recognise as true and good. How could this possibly mean pulling up our drawbridge, lowering our portcullis, and hoping we can have a reasonably enjoyable party before things go to Hell altogether? No, it means getting out of our bolt-holes and doing whatever we can to take those opportunities. It's a pity my particular little way of doing it has such a long way to go before we can set sail again, but we have to learn patience, and we even have to learn what it was about empires that held many people's imaginations for so long, and why in the aftermath of their collapse there is so much carnage, with surviving nations tending to be thoroughly dysfunctional. Hey-ho, there's something for another post!

The March of Technology

Battersea Temple of Power.

A cold rain is dripping on London, but I am in a warm, modern flat looking over the Thames and Chelsea Bridge. Below are the same old multiple railway tracks that I quite often trundled over in the days when the power station actually turned coal into electricity. It's resemblance to the Liverpool Anglican Cathedral was no mere coincidence; they were both designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott. Considering what a massive construction the power station is, all built in brick, it did not actually serve its original function very long,- forty years in the case of the first half, and only 30 in the case of the second, which was built just after WW2.

Since electricity generation ceased in 1983, we have had as many years of faffing about plans and money, before the iconic ‘Temple of Power’, with Arabs to the rescue, is realising a new lease of life as commercial and residential property, and a tourist attraction. I wonder what old Denis Guilfoyle would have made of it? Born in Co Kilkenny, he worked here in the power station for years, before retiring to Glencolumbkille with his Donegal wife.  Tourists used to stop and take pictures of him with his donkey and cart, bringing turf down from the bog. “Well then bruvver, doddlin’ along awright today are yer?” he would greet me, with an incongruous Cockney accent.

Even Cockney accents seem to be hard to come by here in London nowadays, though of course they can come out of the mouth of a West Indian as well as that of an Irishman or even of your real Cockney. Into the melting pot we have all gone, strangely enough along with the grand confidence in technology of the second half of the 20th Century. Not that all of us shared this confidence! We contrarians at least half twigged the crises coming up, although actually it was the exhaust fumes in the streets, and the tobacco fumes in the office, that chased me from London as much as anything else. Things have improved since I suppose, but there’s still a long, long way to go. Thank God we were able to rear our family with good air and food!

All nine children! Sometimes this exclamation comes in tones of reproach from the 'environmentally aware'. I am inclined to answer that in this part of the world, it’s not too many people that are the real problem, but too many cars; and indeed we have managed very well without owning a car for four years. One does have to organise one’s life accordingly; living in Horseshoe Cottage only works because we can get public transport to our gate, and especially because this is free for pensioners in Ireland.

There remains the little matter of the Anna M and her diesel engine. I have long thought about some kind of hybrid power for her, as I mentioned in the last post but one, The Rot Beneath the Floor. As things stand, I tie off the prop so that it doesn’t spin uselessly when we are sailing well, thinking meanwhile that it would hardly cause more drag if it were charging a bank of batteries. How lovely it would be to do without noisy, dirty and vibrating diesel engines, quite apart from the exhaust! Such micro considerations should help us address those maxi ones like climate change.

I have plenty of social and psychological objections to the cult of the motor car too, but leave them for another day. I hope that the lifespan of internal combustion engines will prove almost as short as that of coal-fired power stations,- and that our grandchildren will enjoy correspondingly long ones. I am here in London largely to meet our 22nd, Ella. Meanwhile, I also need to find some rich Arab, interested in non-polluting ways of getting around by sea. It would only be a drop in the ocean compared to this Battersea project!

Liberalism's Mortal Sin: Being Undemocratic..

I am penning this post in response to a short opinion piece on the Guardian website by Hugo Drochon, a Cambridge academic, entitled ‘The anti-democratic thinker inspiring America's Conservative elites’, and with the sub-heading ‘In his new book, the Catholic writer Patrick Deneen launches an attack on pluralism – and the Conservative establishment is cheering’. I consider that this article propounds some very important and common misunderstandings about Catholicism; I have not however read the book it reviews, so I have no idea whether these misunderstandings stem primarily from the original author (Patrick Deneen) or the reviewer (Hugo Drochon). Indeed I allow that they reflect misunderstandings on both the liberal and the traditionalist sides of such arguments.

Firstly, let us cut to the core of Drochon’s case, the two reasons that he gives for dubbing Deneen anti-democratic. ‘First, Deneen believes political decisions should not emanate from within the community itself – the democratic ideal of self-government – but from an outside source, namely God (and a Catholic God at that).’ There are a couple of obvious objections to this statement, such as the lack of real life examples where this democratic ideal is actually realised anywhere except in the imagination of what one might call the Liberal Cosmopolitan Church, and hence the question of what that most heinous of mortal sins that we hear so much about actually means,- being undemocratic. Are we seriously expected to believe that the mere act of voting now and again indicates ‘decisions emanating from within the community’?

However, I will allow that the latter do indeed represent a noble ideal, however other-worldly it may sound. Here I come to a much more radical critique of Drochon’s thought; he has evidently failed to study either the New Testament or Catholic theology. Christ said indeed that ‘No man can come to the Father except through me.’ But where do we encounter Christ? In our brothers and sisters, in our neighbours and in strangers who need our help, especially the poor, beaten up and outcast ones. God is by no means merely an ‘outside source’; though He does indeed transcend this world, He is only accessible to us through it, through our brothers and sisters, at the very heart of the human community, wherever people actually manage to love and care for one another; indeed He is the heart and soul of life itself.

It is the failure to understand the above which leads to Drochon’s second objection:- ‘Deneen believes the Catholic community has a privileged access to the truth that the rest of the political community – which has already made up its mind on gay marriage and premarital sex – does not. From this perspective, the national community is wrong, and democracy is mistaken.’

This is broadly true, but are we to believe then that the great Liberal Church, with its priesthood of media pundits and academics and their ‘democracy’, is infallible, rather than the Catholic Church? And after all, not just the Catholic Church, but in the case of homosexual marriage, just about the entirety of humanity’s religious traditions, and previous generations to the year dot, along with any previously known humanistic understanding of marriage, seem to me more credible than any bunch of contemporary politicians. Are we to believe that democratic majorities are not subject to manipulation and mistakes, that their decisions are not to be subject to any objective critique, and that notions of any natural law are merely Catholic hocus-pocus? Evidently Mr Drochon has forgotten that, for example, Herr Hitler established his power on the back of democratic votes and referenda; and on what basis did the small minority who continued to oppose him within Germany  take their stand? Again, does he consider that those of a European bent within Britain today should just shut up and abide by the majority democratic decision on Brexit?

The attempt to write such concerns off as merely those of the Conservative Establishment, and to pretend that it is only the Left that is interested in building bridges, is grossly misguided. It is a commonplace to say that you can only build bridges from firm ground. The political ideologies of right and left both are much more inclined in practice to consider that they have a monopoly of truth than practising Catholics who, believing they have indeed a good handle on truth, and that truth is ultimately indivisible, are prepared to look for truth everywhere and to respect it when they find it, be it in a Muslim, a Hindu or even a Liberal!

Which brings us to a place where we might look to build the odd bridge. Ideals of democracy after all were transmitted from the brief experiments in the Ancient world to our own by way of those very monastic communities that our columnist decries, but which were enduring democratic institutions in their own right.

Surely you do not have to be a member of the ‘American conservative establishment’ to believe that there is a very grave crisis going on for the credibility of democratic institutions everywhere, and that one way to address it is by reinvigorating democracy at the community level, and building on that to ensure that the macro institutions are much more rooted in and answerable to these communities? Perhaps our friend would consider taking a look at the teachings of the Second Vatican Council and at Catholic social doctrines, notably concerning solidarity and subsidiarity, before he goes preaching at us again?

 

The Rot Beneath the Floor.

A 'floor' comes out and the keel bolt is good!

Whether it’s a boat that leaks too much, climate change, the war in Syria or the war on unwanted babies, which is currently in danger of spreading to Ireland…;  they all contribute to a rising tide of anxiety. We may refuse to acknowledge it, and many are the resources available for us when we just want to drown it out and float away on a tide of addiction of one kind or another, junk food for the belly and the media circuses like football for the mind; but the fearful anxiety is there, and it fuels all tyranny as well as poisoning our own relationships and perceptions. The less it is confronted, the more dangerous it becomes, distorting and obscuring all perception of truth.

The struggle for peace is the struggle for truth, which is however, as George Orwell pointed out, the first victim of war. Our first move, if we hunger for truth, justice and peace, is to combat our own addictions, ‘remove the plank from our own eye’. For example, a society which counternances in late term abortions the killing of the baby by lethal injection would do well to think about that before getting too self-righteous about other forms of chemical warfare. Which said, the very blatant lies from the murderous thugs who run the Syrian and Russian Governments do have to be confronted.

The West’s ability to do so effectively has long been compromised, especially since the invasion of Iraq. It’s not, as seems to be commonly accepted these days, that the rationale given for that war was necessarily a lie, since no weapons of mass destruction were eventually to be found there. Saddam Hussein had already used them, and according to an Iraqi Airforce General whom I happened to hear on the radio, at the time UN inspectors were looking for them, they had been sent over the border to Syria. The fundamental hypocrisy involved in the decision to invade Iraq was again a matter primarily of the West’s addictions; in this case, I refer to the addiction to oil.

If we are serious about trying to take the burning heat out of the Near and Middle East, and about also tackling our own anxieties, above all and first of all we have to recognise that our use of oil is very often as a destructive addiction, and it is causing havoc on all sides. We try to assuage our anxieties in all kinds of hidden ways, some of them perfectly reasonable, like for example going to sea in small sailing boats. When anxieties take immediate and concrete form, such as whether our boat might sink, then we can confront them and do something about them, thus perhaps assuaging the more fundamental ones in relation to which we feel completely powerless. Sometimes, in times like these when the rockets are flying, our little finger in the dyke is overwhelmed and our strategy breaks down.

Aboard the Anna M, not content with rooting out the rot beneath the steel floors to which the keel is bolted, I’m taking the struggle to a new dimension! Having talked about it for years but never in a position to act, I’m going to take a final swipe at my oil addiction, and see if I can possibly avoid reinstalling the fuel tanks and the diesel engine. Instead, I hope to install an electric drive that will derive its power primarily from the sails when we are sailing well, with sufficient surplus power to recharge the batteries by turning the propellor and the same alternator/motor. Solar panels as well as shore power will also feature, and possibly a back-up diesel generator or even fuel cells. Hmmm, we shall see!

Confronting Anxiety by Fiona.

Dancing at Easter.

There are indeed some lovely old churches in

Nazaré, but the Easter Vigil was held in the large functional square hall in the Pastoral Centre. A lot of work had gone into decorating it and setting things up for the celebration: a huge square table for an altar, and also an enormous font with warmed water in it. All were festooned with flowers and the table was adorned with a Jewish-style lamp or menorah with nine lights, giving to the occasion the atmosphere of a Passover Seder, which of course is at the origins of the Catholic liturgy.

It begins with the blessing of the fire, from which the Paschal candle is lit and processed into the darkened church, where all our little candles are lit from it, the Light of Christ. It is plunged three times into the font where the holy water is blessed, and then we proceeded to baptise a clutch of babies. No half measures here either, the naked infants being dunked three times, entirely immersed on the third one. They were none the worse for it, an atmosphere of fun prevailed, and then we all had the chance to renew our baptismal vows in song.

We proceeded to the narrative of the escape of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt and journey through the sea and the desert to the Promised Land, so fundamental to just about any account of our common human vocation. In Ireland this often gets shortened; not so here, where on the contrary, not content with a leisurely reading of all nine readings, we had little contributions from all around when people witnessed, saying what the reading meant for them personally, in the tradition of lectio divina.

Having started at ten o’clock, it was after two by the time we got into the Mass itself. Nothing was hurried, psalms and everything that could be sung was sung, with much rhythmic clapping and music. Communion was an elaborate affair with big chunks of unleavened bread and huge cups of wine. The love feast finally ended with dancing, everyone together doing a rhythmic  four-step while they rotated slowly round the altar. It was half-past three in the morning, and a good time was had by all!

As Psalm 49 says:-

Sing a new song to the Lord,

His praise in the assembly of the faithful.

Let Israel rejoice in its Maker,

Let Sion’s sons exult in their king.

Let them praise his name with dancing

And make music with timbrel and harp.

Whence comes the urge to forsake the churches for this occasion? Part of it surely is the desire to get back to the origins, which involved the exodus of the Israelites from relative comfort, though in slavery, for a hazardous journey in the wilderness on a vague promise, and then the early Christians, living an intense experience of community frequently in danger as well as discomfort. But there is more, and particularly in traditional Catholic countries with beautiful old churches.

Those churches were built in the context of a very different world, which certainly had a grace and beauty about it that we find it impossible to emulate, but which went with a degree of structured authority that, while we may be unwise to criticise it too much, certainly had many shortcomings and eventually decayed into authoritarianism, and with a lack of personal autonomy that today is not acceptable. The authoritarianism worsened as the spiritual inspiration became attenuated and secular authorities of various stripes sought to usurp the place of the divine one. The original inspiration of the Church was frequently resented by the secular powers, though they sometimes sought to coopt it into the various secular forms, notably into the nation states.

But this ain’t working anymore! Our personal identities tend to have outgrown any one nation, just as technology and the world economy have done also. Meanwhile the authorities can say what they like, but are rarely able to deliver; hence the general panic and all sorts of half-baked efforts to resuscitate nationalism. Mere cosmopolitanism is not of course an answer either. How right the Church is to seek renewal in more vibrant and genuine community! If what we witnessed here on Easter morning is happening on a widespread basis, we may indeed expect some exciting and encouraging surprises.

The nation states themselves will find renewal if they learn to act within a continuum between local communities and supra-national organisation, which is the only way any of them can hope to address the major problems of war, migration, international financial banditry and environmental breakdown. Meanwhile, the costs of failure mount and threaten ever more devastation…. And as for myself?

The work on the boat seems endless, and the costs are mounting. In my weariness, I draw indispensable support from the Lady of Nazaré and her community here. The fact is that the alternative of simply letting the boat rot is not a good enough reason to go on. Why bother with an old wooden boat? This too involves a turning away from exploitation to love; a going out into the desert armed only with that elusive transcendent Promise! The work is an act of community, as in any real boatyard and with all work of human hands with natural materials, not produced like most modern boats with noxious synthetic ones in a factory, and orientated to a transcendent purpose, to setting out again on the Gannetsway. So thanks to Alec and all the other people more or less involved! But I am sadly missing sailing the sea….

photos by Fiona

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.