Whose For Old Men's Dreams?

The waves wash in, a storm out to sea. How do the rocks survive at all? .... There's a disturbed and oppressive world out there that one would rather not think too much about, but which nonetheless tugs at everyone's nerves and saps our energy.... Myself straining to jump through the last hoops for getting the old boat out next year, and wondering whether we shall be even more lashed by world events totally beyond our control than we are already, and where the Nazaré Project will stand then! But how does one dare to hold out any hope at all when so many people are suffering so much?

    Probably most of us know people, old and too frequently young as well, who one way or another are cracking up under such strains. On the personal level as well as the macro, it seems like a race against time, to see if we can get to some sort of sanity and viability before the whole situation is lost; and that's rather the way it is with the Anna M. 

    Where is that crucial tipping point, between where one can reasonably expect to turn something round, even an old car, and where one just has to write it off? Perhaps this is the crucial human dilemma, and one just has to hope that one knows how to respond and decides correctly when each crisis comes up! We all like to think we are rational, but how inadequate our reason is! And as for when we reach that final crisis which we all have to confront sooner or later.... But then perhaps we don't have to, and they are right who spend the best part of their time trying to ignore and avoid ghastly reality!

    Still, it is by confronting all these crises that we grow, and there is no other way. For example, in the midst of his  many crises, it is interesting to see how Donald Trump has grown. He was all over the place in his first term as President, about covid and the vaccines for instance. One moment he was calling the pandemic a hoax, and the next he was boasting about how promptly he rolled the vaccines out, though one had the impression he was only playing politics in the latter case. Now he seems to have acquired some ballast, especially since Bobby Kennedy signed up to his campaign. His courage, resilience and determination have also been impressive. I could not have imagined, four years ago, that I would now be hoping for his election.

    President Biden lost me in the moment he stood up and said 'I promise you, the vaccines are safe and effective'! And that's something the Dems are not going to retract, either, no matter what evidence emerges to the contrary. They have revealed themselves as fully paid up members of the global corporate mafia. On the other hand, the Trump clinched matters for me with his answer to a smart MSM interviewer who asked - 'Do you want Ukraine to win the war?' - 'I don't think in terms of winning wars. I just want to stop people dying!' 

    'Foolish old man with his simplistic populism!' the 'sophisticated' types will say, and the possibly more honest of them may go on to say 'Too bad about those people dying, it's the National Interest that counts etc. Forget about morality! The only reality is Power. It's them or us. Too many people on the planet anyway....' In both the cases of the war and the vaccines, this is sadly the logic of the Dems, with Harris as a decorative mannequin to veil the reality with progressive, 'philanthropic' ideas. Pity she wouldn't go away and read 'War and Peace' and a few other great Russian books, but she seems to be proud of her ignorance of Europe and our literature. Meanwhile the authoritarianism and disdain for freedom of speech of 'the Left' stands revealed in all its horror! 

    So, the race is on. Either way, the chances are, for the time being, that we shall shamble on through our crises, hopefully even our failures will contribute to a final victory. Things will get more and more messy, until and unless we manage to order our lives and our societies with new priorities and ways of working that do not depend on the 'Powers', the big 'industrial complexes', those that would enslave us as isolated minions to Big State and consumerism.

     Trump may be able to turn things round somewhat, Harris definitely won't; meanwhile they keep us entertained with a good morality play, but let's remember that it's in our own lives that we can really make a difference! The worse the level of threat, the more urgent it becomes for us to build resilience and autonomy. The greater the looming horror, the tighter we must stick to bright dreams. As we see death coming nearer, the more we must polish up our hope; and for all its elusive nature, we may find that hope does burn brighter with age! At all events, let us keep our heads up, and cherish beautiful little things!

    So anyway, the Anna M  is becoming pleasant to live in again, the carpentry is pretty well finished, and I'm hoping Alec will have the electric motor running by Christmas and she will be in commission again next year. We have clarified the structure of the whole Nazaré Project, which is based on these three legs:-

    a) Aston, Lammas Research and Development (ALRD) is the investment path for the commercialisation of the prototype. As of now it is an aspirational company to be registered in Ireland, though funds and time have already been invested by Alec Lammas to the value of €50,000 (via NazaréNautica) and Joe Aston to the value of €5,000 (not counting approx €65,000 in Anna M - see below).

b) Alec’s company, NazaréNautica, provides the workshop and engineering services in Nazaré, Portugal, which are currently producing the prototype.

c) The 13.6m schooner Anna M has been completely renovated and prepared for the installation of the prototype. She will be used as a test-bed and demonstration vessel, while sailing the West
coast of Europe showing the motor off and selling it. It is intended to refine the concept to the point where newbuilds will incorporate it, for both leisure and commercial fishing purposes, and eventually to transfer ownership of Anna M to a Gannetsway Sailing Association (GSA). 

If you are interested in 'getting in on the ground floor' with an investment, please contact <gannetsway@gmail.com>

    

    

Base Communities of the Gannetsway?

I will be heading back to Nazaré shortly in the old Citroen, for yet another session getting the Anna M ready for sea. The big uncertainty remains as to when we will manage to get the electric motor finished and installed. As has been increasingly the case, I am under pressure  to convince my wife (and my own conscience) that the expense of money and time will not be in vain. Probably the best argument for Fiona is that at least it helps to keep the old man active, engaged and generally compos mentis,- but frankly that does not satisfy me. The hype about that kind of life-style concern may not be without merit, but I need better motivation than that. So why should an old boy like me put himself through all sorts of contortions, physical, financial and the rest, when he could just stay parked some place in a deckchair? 

    Human motivation is a funny, fascinating business, and we do well to constantly question our own. We may agree with Viktor Frankl that mental health depends on our sense of meaning. A quick Google search confirms that for him, 'meaning comes from three possible sources: purposeful work, love, and courage in the face of difficulty'. That still leaves us with plenty of queries, for instance what might constitute 'purposeful' work and what happens when it appears to clash with 'love'? Maybe I should get around to re-reading Frankl, but I'm thinking that in the end, everyone has to answer such questions for himself. 

    A little voice will say in this case that the only sure thing about an old wooden sailing boat is that she will end up at the bottom of the sea or rotting in the mud. Well, at least the Anna M now has a good chance of outlasting myself, by quite a few years. I hope to eventually pass on the ownership to the long-cogitated Gannetsway Sailing Association, if ever it becomes practically and financially possible, combining opportunities for members to sail, to engage with whales, dolphins and other sea-life, as well as developing and demonstrating the concept of an autonomous boat.

    I have some big ideas in connection with this concept. Most people have at the back of their minds these day that we urgently require more harmonious relationships with nature and with each other,- a more intense and responsible engagement with other people - less consumerism and more activity. Our economies as well as our societies need to be rebuilt from the bottom up, with much more localism all over the globe, perhaps with a beautiful mosaic floor such as the Romans loved, complete with dolphins in there, but I have in mind a mosaic of communities! 

    The Roman bit is important to me, and not just because it happens to be roughly my part of the world, culturally and spiritually speaking.  For all its faults and despite the fact that it crucified Jesus, the Roman Empire provided the physical and political basis for the eventual development of His Church, and indeed Western civilisation. If we are going to avoid the Brave New World of two dystopian, totalitarian blocs everlastingly at war with each other, an alternative has to emerge here in Western Europe, the nations of which are wonderfully complementary.  There are so many lessons to be learned from the past! The psychic and spiritual splits are there to challenge us and to be overcome. Maybe the tension between the northern and southern cultures is a pretty good place to start,- and imagine the effect it could have in America!

    When it comes down to politics and the forthcoming American presidential election, since I have expressed support for Bobby Kennedy jnr, I must say I think he is right to throw his support behind 'the Ducky', as I used to disdainfully refer to President Trump. I still have reservations about him, for instance about his attitude to the EU and Brexit, but I think he has grown in stature and understanding of his basic mission, which is to oppose that descent into dystopia which is sponsored by 'the Blob' and sadly by the modern Democratic party, as was revealed so clearly in the pandemic, with the censorship and suppression of dissent that President Biden presided over. Combined with his toughness and basic if sometimes crude straightforwardness, it seems that Trump and Kennedy really do hold out the possibility of a new start. A very short interview clinched it for me:- a smart msm lady asked Trump, 'Did he want the Ukrainians to win their war?'  He replied 'I don't think in terms of winning wars. I just want to stop the dying!' 

    How practical this is, without pushing the Ukrainians under a bus, I hope we shall soon find out. Trump & Co will probably get it into their heads eventually that we need European solidarity as never before. For all the talk of 'draining the swamp' in Washington, presumably they would not want to do away with the federal Government? In Europe we need federal institutions too. In Britain the Government had to employ an extra 80,000 or so civil servants to cope with Brexit. That doesn't sound like down-sizing the State! But we don't need to get rid of the institutions which have been built up painfully with time, just to make them transparent and truly answerable to their members and electorates. This is not something that any president or political party will be able to bring about of themselves, though they may be able to facilitate it. How about a massive campaign to develop base communities? With solidarity we must have subsidiarity.

    We each have to make a start by bringing responsibility into our own lives, but sometimes the whole paraphanalia of the political and media establishment seems structured to prevent us from doing so. We might understand it as 'saving our souls', and yet it is still meaningful to speak of, for example, 'saving the soul of Europe'. A good place to start may be in demolishing the left wing/right wing narrative, which to my mind mainly serves to divide and disempower people, while diverting our attention from the issues where we really could make a difference. Just imagine how the establishment would hate left and right wing 'populism' to combine! If one must think in dialectic terms, perhaps to be or not to be might suffice? 

    Sailing boats, especially wooden ones, have souls too. Their shape is determined by the elements and the struggle of men with them, as well as by the material of which they are made. I can think of no more exemplary human accomplishment than sailing the sea, nor better combination of skill and endurance, of utility and aesthetics, of immediate practicality and dreams, nor of any better school in all the things that make life really worth living! In other words, sailing the sea is a great training for the anti-zombies so urgently required if we are to escape totalitarianism, and it emphatically should not be left to the mega-rich to play with in their spare time. Not that nature is not capable of looking after herself, and for instance taking out the odd tycoon who thinks he has her taped! Meanwhile, let's keep trying for alternative means to access the great mysteries of the sea.  

       

Springs of Living Water

My old laptop has been sitting on my desk at home, unused and neglected, for over a month now, and is only clunking into life again slowly and reluctantly. I was living in the Anna M in Nazaré for the best part of the month of July, mainly working with my Siberian friend Anatole to finish reconstructing the cabin; a good job for two old men! Meanwhile Alec works on the electric drive in fits and starts, and seems to be slowly getting it together. I just have to take one day, one job, at a time, and do my best to enjoy every moment. After all there are very many infinitely worse places to be, and worse ways to pass the time!

    I cannot say this is not a challenging situation, and I have had to work quite hard to overcome my impatience and even despair as to whether the old boat was ever going to take to the sea again, complete with her autonomous electric drive. I have to keep reminding myself that our bright idea is only like a bucket that we offer to the river of life to fill; when we think we can fill it ourselves, we are quite likely to find something wrong,- rust, holes etc. Yet it is the drama of this very situation which interests me, the interplay between the water of life and our own little attempts to do something with it!

    It is odd how difficult it is for all the world to grasp such universal symbolism as that of living water. Considering how we must all constantly use water and how all life depends on it, one might have thought that it was simple and natural to carry on to the concept of 'living water' with that special quality which cleanses and enables growth - divine grace, the very stuff of life - so unlike stagnant water stuck in some bucket! Instead we are inclined to obsess about whatever ways we may adopt of attempting to subject it to our own purposes. We confuse the water and the bucket, which I am using as a symbol for our own self with all its extensions and accoutrements. The Devil's supreme achievement is to make religion itself one of our ego's or super-ego's self-aggrandizing projects.

    Of course, our buckets are important, but what really counts is the water with which we fill them. Each of us is our own bucket, we must maintain our own vital integrity, but the water is the Thing! This may all seem very abstract, but has very practical application. Jesus applied the term 'living water' to Himself. If we draw our water from His spring, we are likely to be surprised at the results. If we pray to Him and His saints, especially Our Lady, and go to Mass regularly, sincerely offering ourselves to Him, we will find He waters the tender plants of wisdom, justice, peace and joy in our lives.  The same is true for 'our neighbours', the other people in our lives; by genuinely turning to our brothers and sisters, we may find Christ and His living water through them, and thus come to God, who welcomes anyone who turns to Him with whatever bucket that they can lay their hands on, though it may look very different to ours. This is God's way of making us realise that we do not own the water, and must set aside our lethal desires to own and control it ourselves. 

    None of us can begin to make good use of the water  by ourself, so we develop all kinds of more or less conscious systems which we tell ourselves will do so, if possible under our own control; but such systems have developed in complexity and power in lock-step with human societies. When God is left out, they fall into the power of minorities who reflect current paradigms for better or worse. Now and then, they threaten to sweep away our individual buckets in a torrent. The tensions between the individual and society, and between the authentic free water of life and human systems for the application of it,  have existed since the dawn of civilisation, but lately the threat of, in biblical terms, false gods carrying away our true Holy City has become totalitarian and existential on the global scale.

    Something has changed in these last few years, even while the Anna M has been sitting on the land at Nazaré! I think the few big corporations that dominate the modern world have been reaching their apotheosis, even while the realisation is dawning that they are false in their promises and pretensions, to, for example, champion health, freedom, democracy etc. 'Put not your trust in princes'! Unfortunately, the governments of what we like to think of as 'the free world', along with their health 'services', now stand discredited. They preach about 'threats to democracy' and 'disinformation' while engaging in censorship and the suppression of dissenting voices to an unprecedented degree. The medical profession, in its official capacity, though it was one of the few that retained widespread respect, now stands apparently more interested in their own interests and reputation than in the interests of those they are supposed to be serving. The faith of citizens in their 'democratic' governments when it comes, not just to health, but to war and peace, to the handling of their economies and of climate change, has been very severely undermined. In my little world, we see allegedly well-meaning policies resulting in life being made just about impossible for the archetypal skipper/owner fisherman, and coastal fishing communities being destroyed.

    How are we to reverse this dynamic? Where do we begin? Wherever we are, with whoever is around us! One universal feature of evil systems is the way they have of 'depersonalizing'  people. Their victims feel powerless and isolated while free and open communication between them is shut down. We may counter this by renewing our own efforts to think clearly and especially with self-awareness, and to communicate openly and honestly with the other people in our lives. 

    That last bastion of personal relationships, the nuclear family, is under unprecedented pressure; surely it thrives better when not subjected to such cooking, but rather when all kinds of inter-personal communication thrive, across generations and families of different kin. We must put aside the chronic individualism that pervades the world, developing a different idea of personal fullfilment, realising how radically it depends on our relationships. A massive movement to rediscover basic communities is called for, and on such a basis even our politics and whole culture might be revived, with our politicians made genuinely accountable and responsive, and their actions rendered transparent.

   A base community is to my mind one of less than a hundred people, in itself small enough so that everyone can really know each other and eat together now and again, yet in co-operation with other such communities, mutually enriching each other and pushing that accountability and communication upwards, according to the principle of subsidiarity.  Bearing in mind ee cummings' famous saying,- 'new worlds, i suggest, are born and not made, and their birthdays are the birthdays of individuals', it is critical to avoid sacrificing individual autonomy and responsibility, but fundamentally we do have to renew our whole culture.  

   Our basic communities would do everything that they can to produce their own necessities, food, housing, power and heat, and would trade with each other when it comes to commodities, such as wood, wine or olive oil, that on one hand they produce to excess and on the other cannot produce themselves. They could even do their own banking; I don't see why they can't use the common currency, but what a great thing to be able to choose what to fund and on what terms! They would inspire each other when it comes to the higher aspects of culture,- art, music, literature and religion. They may amuse themselves with the very business  of sailing back and forth on the Gannetsway, building boats and so on. What better way is there for people to really get to know each other, to trust each other and work together?    

    We are currently witnessing an interesting political inversion. Forget about 'the revolution'; we must start with ourselves. You could say that the most effective revolutionaries are in fact conservatives. I might say that I have been working at these ideas for over half a century.  I am watching and waiting and working for 'the revolution in the revolution' to happen right now, though I am well used to being accused of romantic idealism,- I persist in restating them. In my remaining active years, I intend to 'give it the welly'!                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

Hoping to be back off Culatra this autumn!

              

    

In Search of a New 'Epistemological Paradigm'.

It's over two months since I last posted, during which time Alec has been struggling on to get the famous electric drive made and fitted. I myself spent a little over three weeks in Nazaré in May. I return on July 9th in the hope that the Anna M's long sojourn there is finally coming to an end, and she may even possibly be able to return to the Shannon Estuary this year. We are actually contemplating establishing our administrative HQ in this shed of our John's:-

    In the month of May, our grandson David married Danielle from California, having met while they were both studying in Galway. They had a tremendous wedding here in Carrigaholt, a real village affair with the dances in barns. Now they are in America, which is fine, but what I would like to see is our little community here achieve a thriving economic base that is useful, relevent, interesting and fun, and may attract some of the rising generation to live here. Perhaps I should try, once again, to elucidate my ideas of  'community', to use that much over-worked and ill-defined term.

    Fiona and I came to the West of Ireland half a century ago, as refugees from a society which had lost its spiritual roots and which sought to fill the resultant void largely with various forms of individualistic consumerism. Some people attempt to fill this void with a return to nationalism, which is even less appealing! Was it possible that Catholic Christianity could really find the grace of spiritual renewal? Well, it still hangs in here, with an age-old tradition of community living that could be said to reach back to the fairy rings or raths that abound round about, and from which our townland takes  the name Rahona, or Una's Rath. I cannot think of any better way to prepare for the coming storms than to build self-sufficiency and community right here, though it has to be said there is a terrible lot of work to be done before such aspirations could be widely described convincing and widely applicable.

    Occasionally I feel the need to look around and see how other attempts are faring. In such a spirit, I betook myself to a day of encounter organised by EcocongregationIreland at An Tairseach in the Dominican Convent at Wicklow, on the day of the summer solstice. I was rewarded with a very fine lunch from the produce of their own farm and garden, but we were there to reflect on how our response to Pope Francis' encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si', was getting on. The answer seems to be that in the tumultuous decade since it was published, our faith communities do not seem to have got far beyond 'actions to help pollinators', recycling, tidy-towns etc. This is all very well, but hardly responds adequately to the challenge implied, for instance, in para 107 of the encyclical:- 'It can be said that many problems of today's world stem from the tendency, at times unconscious, to make the method and aims of science and technology an epistemological paradigm which shapes the lives of individuals and the workings of society' !

    Why is it so difficult to bridge the gulf between theory and practice? I find myself taking issue with the way the theory is presented, on all kinds of levels. The subtitle of Laudato Si' is On Care For Our Common Home. The trouble is that so many people, perhaps everyone in some way, do not feel 'at home' in this world at all; hence, when their attempts to do so fail as they so often do, they tend to become discouraged, bored, dejected, disillusioned and in the end downright nihilistic and destructive.  As for those communists who set about establishing an earthly paradise, how terrible were the results! It is impossible to care for that which one does not love, but how does one get to love life and be at peace in this troubled and transient existence?

    When I was a boy, we Catholics used to say a prayer to Our Lady, 'Hail, holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, Hail, our life, our sweetness and our hope. To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve, to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Turn, then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy towards us, and after this our exile, show unto us the blessed fruit of they womb, Jesus....'  One heard a lot less of this exile in a valley of tears once the sixties and the Second Vatican Council got into their stride, but the sad fact is that nobody really got any happier as a result of the overdose of optimism; quite the contrary in fact.

    When one looks around to see who has really brought more happiness and beauty into the world, not to mention peace and harmony with Nature, one finds a curious paradox.  It is those whose hearts are set on the hidden world, the Great Beyond, who are most likely to bring beauty into the world, in the forms of little hints, reflections and gleams of that Other Reality. Yet it was a mighty thing to rediscover that Beyond as after all the actual goal of our earthly pilgrimage, the harvest that is being prepared against the end of time, as Jesus set out in his parables. We recall St Paul's stunning words in Romans,8,22 - 'From the beginning till now the entire creation, as we know, has been groaning in one great act of giving birth.'

    It turned out that it was not impossible to reconcile faith in God with science. Behind this sea-change in attitude, behind Laudato Si' and also as acknowledged by the Dominican sisters at An Tairsach in the booklet I was given the other day about their efforts, entitled 'In Communion with the Sacred Universe', there looms the presence of Teilhard de Chardin, - the 'first person in modern times in the West to attempt a synthesis of science and religion'. However, we didn't even get to say a prayer to the Holy Spirit to enlighten our Day of Encounter. The only prayer we did get was one of thanksgiving to 'Our Mother the Sun', since it was the summer solstice. Some people, in rediscovering the holiness of the cosmos, seem to have gone a full circle and reverted to worshiping the Sun! (If they must assign that celestial body a gender, they might however run with any language I know of... le soleil, el sol....!)

    There remains the problem of that radical discontinuity which besets our human condition, leaving us alienated from our inner selves and bedeviling our rather pathetic attempts at community and genuine stewardship. Something seems to have gone wrong, and one might have thought that humanity had discovered that making gods out of Nature does not work very well. We are alienated from Nature, each other, and God. The resulting crisis seems to get more acute with every passing year. 

    Teilhard never really got his head around Original Sin; it was the main reason why the Jesuit authorities suppressed his work for a number of years; indeed I witnessed the havoc caused by his ideas, which bear some bit of the responsibility for the destruction of the once great monastery at Downside in England. Perhaps the Pope might help by spelling out the problems with 'the method and aims of science and technology' as 'an epistemological paradigm which shapes the lives of individuals and the workings of society'?  How is it to be distinguished from the Science that Teilhard and Christian environmentalists purport to have reconciled with their Faith?  We witness the effects of that idolatrous paradigm, which I label Scientism, not just in the management of the environmental crisis, but also in the repeated attempts to achieve 'peace and justice' with weapons of mass destruction. In the  Covid affair, it has been said that we witnessed the death of science, in the abject failure of the official response of the 'men of science', while genuine scientific debate was stifled. 

    This reflects the intriguing sympathy which is liable to spring up between those who oppose the official narratives, for whatever reason, and however muddled they may or may not be. Exactly what is this commonality between them? It is hardly a matter of religion or ideology, though it does call for some pretty fundmental detachment from official narratives, the 'legacy media' and even mainstream education. A common thread is the rejection of the attitude that claims to address our problems with methods of command and control, that in the era of artificial intelligence threaten to escalate into an horrendous global totalitarianism.  Commitment to personal autonomy and responsibility is a rational response, as is a willingness to improvise and experiment as one eschews the tyranny and over-specialisation of 'experts'.  

    When such rebels do succeed in working together, the difficulties of doing so may be overcome by a remarkable fellowship which springs up between them. We may indeed even encounter Jesus in our brothers and sisters, and through him, the Father. The Dominican sisters are on the right track with their leaning into both community and self-sufficiency, but, like all of us moderns, surely need to get a better grasp of the collision  between creation and our fallen nature. The current crisis of science, which demonstrates that collision so clearly, perhaps provides the key to really getting to grips with our other problems!

    I hope my old boat can provide an example; doing fun things, rebuilding on an old foundation, with limited resources; not starting from a grand and flashy plan, but working prayerfully and cheerfully with whoever shows up and the materials that come to hand.  I may say the greenhouse that I've just built in the month of June was made in a similar spirit. It certainly makes one realise the power of the greenhouse effect! It will be a tragedy if the environmental movement becomes another victim of scientism. There are little ways available on all sides for us to respond effectively to the Holy Spirit, but to do so we have to break out of the dictats of that 'epistemological paradigm'  of command and control!

Back aboard 9th July

               

Golden Yellow

 At a time when we are all oppressed by the appalling wars and threats of greater wars that dominate the world's attention, we are confronted with a choice between trying to reconcile such realities with our own peace and sanity, or simply attempting to block them out. After all, who are we to imagine that we can get any kind of sound understanding of all the terrible things that are happening, let alone do anything about them?

I write in the conviction that they cannot be blocked out, otherwise they are likely to break into our lives with all the brutality of the letter I came across the other day, informing my mother's uncle of the death of his son, Paul Smith, in WWII. For all our inadequacies, even for our own sanity, the horrors have to be addressed. Here, there is no exceptional  knowledge or expertise which can possibly provide the answers. 

After all, experts are people who specialise, and there clearly is no speciality that can cover the issues raised. Furthermore, experts of any kind necessarily have their own hobby-horses, vested interests, and the first necessity here is to free our minds of such interests. How come, we may well ask, do ordinary people frequently have better insights and instincts than the experts?

Such are my excuses for writing about matters about which I merely have the benefit of what might be called a lifetime of intellectual browsing, in the context of a good deal of salt water and some prayer. I am far from claiming to be always right, but I can at least claim to be detached and as honest as possible. My being virtually without power or influence I take to be an advantage, which enables me to offer my thoughts merely as a challenge to my readers to figure out what they think. If we all did this, we might find that 'we the people' all have a lot more common ground, and hence perhaps more power to turn things round, than we realise. We  may also realise that for all the complexity, the basic issues are actually quite simple, while the human race has not been wrestling with them for thousands of years to no effect. Of course, there will also be those who will do their very best to prevent any such realisations occuring!

Three apparently separate matters have devilishly preoccupied me lately, and I suppose many other people too,-  covid, Israel/Palestine and Ukraine. The 'pandemic' aptly set the stage for the other two, in being an extreme case of governmental and corporate overreach, which finally convinced me that the world, democratic or not, was in the grip of powers which do not have ordinary people, their welfare and their rights at heart. This reality is also playing out of course in the above mentioned wars.

So what is wrong? For a start, governments on all sides are in a very bad place, with in most cases national debt completely out of control and chronically escalating, and with a frequently sick, declining and discontented population. What better way to get the people to fall in behind them, to knuckle down and forget about all those impossible problems like balancing budgets and addressing climate change, so we can carry on with old faithfuls like printing money and polluting the planet regardless? We 'the people'  have to insist on addressing the basic problems rather than allowing ourselves to be distracted from them. Giving Varadkar and his mates an emphatic thumbs down in the recent Irish referenda was a good start!

However, there is the very ideology of the nation state to be addressed, which is so  widely taken for granted that most people do not even realise that it is an ideology. Some people claim that the concept is as old as the will of communities to survive, but I think not, at least, not in the sense of these modern states that envelop the individual from the cradle to the grave and determine what he or she can and cannot do and even say, in a mode quite beyond inter-personal mediation. The Judeo-Christian tradition, on the other hand, places our destiny, on the personal as well as the communal level, within the transcendent revelation of the one and only ground of Being. 'My country, right or wrong' erects the state into a false god. Collapsing the tension introduced by an independent and universal church facilitated this. 

It was indeed unfortunate that this process managed to identify itself with a necessary process of emancipation, both for individuals and so that 'the scientific world-view' could develop. It was appropriated by the Protestant Reformation and subsequent Enlightenment thinkers. Then people started asking foolish questions like 'Does God exist?' Faith was reduced to theism, with the French philosopher Pascal proposing his famous wager (that we may as well bet on God's existence for obvious reasons) and Voltaire declaiming 'Si Dieu n’éxistait pas, il faudrait l’inventer'.

Even in France (fille ainée de l'Eglise) the remnant of the Church was largely subsumed into the state. English nationalism took a giant step down this road from 'Good King Harry' onwards, and much the same impulse seems to have driven on into Amerca, even as they all considered themselves 'chosen races'. The Catholic Church, on the surface of things, languished in the fight between these assertive nation states, each considering itself a kind of church. European civilization fractured as faith was separated from reason, spirit from matter. But nationalism and indeed science fed on war. Now that same science has rendered war impossibly destructive, with our societies disintegrating for all kinds of reasons but fundamentally because they thought that they could do without God, so we simply have to put our civilisation and culture together again by rediscovering Him!

A good place to start is to recognise that there is no sense to asking 'Does God exist?' One necessarily finds oneself discussing someone else's idea of God, and they are all very inadequate. But somehow we have to get our feet on the ground of existence. Some philosophers went on to question whether life itself exists. A slap of salt water should be enough to settle that. Then one can go on to discover that good and evil, true and false etc really do exist; they are not mere social constructs. On the other hand, nothing ever gets created unless someone starts with some kind of an idea,- I am scratching my head even in order to construct a bit of a greenhouse! 

What does it take to construct the Universe? But we do have a bit of a problem in acknowledging an intelligence so far beyond our own. It is tempting to avoid doing so, confining  our attention to the more manageable 'power fields', such as a rugby field or a company or even the family or the nation state. Forget God and the Church, let's just concentrate on our parts on whatever little stages we can act, where we have some hope of exercising our will to power! 

The problem is that life becomes so fragmented that it no longer works when the ineffable is shut out; each little part becomes absurd if it has no basis in the whole, and people keep trying to force it into little boxes which they think they can manage. Nationalism is the ultimate embodiment of this will to power, and genuine community is something else, which crushes noone. Perhaps the best we can do is to think in terms of direction of travel, but we must start on the road. This is part of the reason why I opted for Irish rather than British nationality. 

Nowadays however Ireland is facing a choice between following Sweden and Finland into Nato, or holding out for an alternative. Supposing a Russian fleet sailed up the Shannon to seize County Clare with Shannon airport? Unlikely, maybe, but we would look a trifle silly trying to dig out some of the old cannons for the 18th century batteries! But how about a massive cyber attack? So what might Israel's alternative be, to attempting to root out and destroy Hammas in Gaza, not to mention chasing Arabs from the land? And what is Ukraine's alternative, to fighting on against Russia?

One thing is certain, warring nation states are going nowhere but towards mutual destruction. 'Victory' is not possible any longer, in the sense that nation states understand it. So I think in the case of where I live in Ireland, we must hang tough outside NATO, indeed be more assertive about this and advocate its dissolution, on the grounds that it is rooted in the Anglo-American will to power. Maybe we will actually get a new American President who concentrates on getting his own house in order, which I would count a good thing, while hoping it will be Kennedy rather than Trump,- it is too questionable whether the latter is capable of concentrating on anything except himself. I'm hoping the American electorate will spring a surprise on us, just as the Irish just did,- noone foresaw that referendum result coming! 

As for Israel and Ukraine, in both cases, they could start by imagining a future state of affairs where the different ethnicities have their own cantons, free of outside interference,  albeit with appropriate cooperation,- just as indeed the whole world needs to, especially Europe, while throwing off its dependence on the USA.. It is difficult, there will be plenty of set-backs, but it's not beyond the bounds of possibility, and the alternatives are truly dreadful. Considering the technologies of control that are being developed, modern nation states of all hues are threatening to become hideous tyrannies, as they try to hold atomised, fragmented populations together. 

We all need to rebuild community from the bottom up, while developing 'energy fields' that do not depend on national governments in both directions, big and small. I am working at it particularly on the level of our mini community here in Rahona, and on the level of the Gannetsway,- and I am after giving the 'Anna M' a new colour scheme, replacing blue with golden yellow. I would like it to reflect a change in my state of mind, from despondency at the way the world is going, to hope in a new beginning! There's a big effort coming up to get her back in the water.

                                           

Fishing for Meaning.

It's now over 50 years since myself and Fiona came to live in Ireland. I had  despaired of my life in England. It had already become clear that stormy weather was ahead,- that the relatively cosy and complacent post-war period that I was born into was coming to an end - but this was not in itself a cause for despondency. Anyway things went on shambling along better than I expected. No, what caused me to despair of the set-up was an  endemic, institutionalised refusal to even ask the important questions, let alone to find answers.

    The 'Enlightenment' notion that first principles, religious quarrels and questions of principle and meaning could simply be set aside, while the adults in the room got down to addressing the 'real problems' of economics and power, albeit ideally in an atmosphere of tolerance even if this was not extended to those many people 'beyond the Pale',- this notion was already buckling under the strain. After all, that society did depend on many principles about what was right and wrong, true and false that had been forged in a sharper age, but had largely degenerated into unexamined assumptions.

    I was a confused young man who was presented with such insights mainly by a small group of Benedictine monks, and in particular by one who, himself buckling under the strain, took his own life. Graduating at Cambridge University, teaching in a lousy school in the Liverpool dockland, working on Fleet St, continually being told you can't say that, participating in the revolution that those monks attempted but failed with at Downside, - all pointed to a big sign saying NO EXIT, to quote the title of one of Dom Sebastian Moore's books. What was a bloke to do?

    Maybe I, as an English Catholic, looked to that Ireland 'beyond the Pale' through somewhat rose-tinted glasses, and also through the eyes of my special friend at school, an Irish lad who was exiled to that English boarding school. Unlike so many who were actually living in Ireland at the time, we saw it as a place that was free of at least some of the brain-fog that beset the antiquated structures of the British Empire,- a place of possibilities and a certain freedom of spirit. We were not however entirely naive. One helluva confrontation was obviously going to happen there!

    How would Ireland fare in the storm of modernity? How is one to reconcile the many and varied claims of the past with the advent of an ever more interconnected but troubled world? Having grappled so painfully with such problems, was it even possible that Irish people would once again ride to the rescue of civilisation and religion, as they did in the aftermath of the collapse of the Roman version?

    Back to the cave! I went hunting while Fiona minded it and the children. Besides the facts that I had to earn a living somehow and at least knew a little about fishing and the sea, and that I fell in with the right people, especially one John Maguire whose funeral I attended just the other day in Glencolmcille,- besides all this was the thought that it provided the ideal platform to confront many of the existential problems that were plaguing me.    

    The sea reflects so many aspects of the mysterious reality of God. We may contend with it, we may even on occasion confront it, along with enjoying its many gifts; but God help us if we fail to respect it, merely trying to rearrange it to suit ourselves. Going to sea, fishing, rearing a family with Fiona of nine beautiful children, all this not alone kept me sane, but to my mind this archetypal existence was an ideal environment for sorting out and hardening up the fruits of my education and early experience. Such is the sea, 'the common sacrament of Man', the counterpoint to that other fundamental sacrament which, as many a sailor could testify, has a difficult relationship with sea-faring,- marriage and family. 

    As I was coming to the end of my fishing career, the crisis of modernism seemed to be coming to a head. The referendum on divorce was hardly a promising basis to take up the challenge, but there it was and I felt called to fight it. Since then three of our five daughters have suffered divorce. I know plenty about the difficulties of marriage and the fact that it does sometimes fail. The big question is how to find our way to reconcile this fact with the imperative to assert marriage as the lifelong union of a man and a woman, which is at the basis of genuine family life and much else? I gradually came to understand marriage as the paramount icon of the Covenant between God and Humanity, wherein faithfulness and love embrace, and life itself should be transmitted. 

    The more that icon is obscured, the more society and the state become dysfunctional, unhealthy and unhappy. One only has to look around to see the results, as the proponents of no-fault divorce and as the current constitutional attempt to redefine the family as any 'durable relationship' refuse to acknowledge. Just imagine how much less expense the state would incur if families everywhere were functioning well! Instead we have atomisation and creeping authoritarianism, while the disintegration of families continues apace.

    Much else besides marriage and the family is on the line, many crises are apparently coming to head, yet I still find it difficult to raise such issues even in the circle of those whom I know and love. Is there a discernible relationship between the destruction of the family and the proposed WHO Pandemic Preparedness Treaty? In an astonishing line-up, national sovereingty, meaningful democracy, personal autonomy, freedom of speech and our very health and even survival are on the line along with the family as we know it. All too often, those of us who raise such issues find ourselves up against the whole gamut of methods used to shut us up. Well, we are told, 'stop ranting, if people are not listening you won't get through, there's nothing we can do about it, so why distress ourselves?' 

    Meanwhile the World Economic Forum, which somehow seems to have a whole new global generation of political leaders in its clutches, touts this historical moment as 'The Great Reset'. Their machinations are often referred to as 'the globalist agenda'. Among other things they openly propose that the world's population should be radically reduced. Indeed, how many nice, decent people have we heard say 'there are just too many people in the world'! Now of course they on no account wish to countenance the notion that the great and good could actually be doing something to rectify this little problem,- that they are all for bumping off a few billion people! A more drastic confrontation of pragmatism and principle can scarcely be imagined.

     One very understandable response is to withdraw, to pull up the drawbridge, let down the portcullis... or to sail off into the sunset! Would this be my escape route? I'm heading to Portugal again to get my old boat out  next week. But let me say, that just as I replied to those who accused me of escapism for going fishing in Donegal by saying 'I was dropping in rather than dropping out', I say it again now. I am not retreating, but going on the attack. I fancy myself demonstrating that we can actually have a Great Reset that is both fun and effective.

    Powerful ideas invariably take an aspect of truth and distort it, snedding it away from the universal body of truth that we Catholics identify with Christ and the Catholic Faith. It is nothing but the truth that the problems which confront us are both existential and global in scale, and they call for global responses. One way in which we part company with the 'globalists' is in thinking the rich and powerful are the right people to promote such responses. No, on the contrary, they constitute the problem, not that any of us with two pennies to rub together are entirely free of it. The exponentially growing chasm between the rich and the poor and the suffering of so many families are consequences of the love of money and pursuit of power; the antidote is very clearly promulgated in the Bible. What is special to this moment is the way in which the issues are lining up, the choices are clarifying, the stars are brightly shining and aligning!

    We have to rediscover that after all the Lord who created us and this whole amazing universe does actually know what He is doing. Our task is to liberate ourselves from our will to power, which we can only do by putting ourselves in His power, and let Him show us the way to go. This is far from doing nothing. There are whole libraries of books that purport to show us how to do it, and a multitude of differing approaches, but they generally involve closer relationships with our fellow travellers and with nature, and a willingness to live and to take responsibility. 

    This involves examining our lives, listening to the voice within, rejecting slogans, being ready to leave our comfort zones, seeking Wisdom and sound principles. One little technique that I have found helpful is voyaging up and down the Gannetsway on the Anna M - silly old me, but I stand by William Blake's dictum, 'He that would do good must do it in minute particulars'! At any rate, the experiences of family life, of community, of primary production and of nature are prime ingredients when it comes to appreciating first principles.

Back to Nazaré next week!

 

Some Place For Fun!

A Funny Place For Fun!

In such a stormy world, with so much suffering, I find myself sometimes asking whether one has any right to feel happy and fulfilled, to enjoy oneself, to make optimistic plans for the future? I suppose the inevitable answer is N0, we have no such right. Nonetheless, perhaps if we are capable of such feelings and plans, it is a noble and necessary thing to uphold them; but must we then close our minds and hearts in order to do so? Well, would it be better to leave the world to sink in a sea of misery? 

    'Something has gone wrong that absolutely requires us to fix it!'* But is there in fact a possibility of the radical alternative? If there is anything more depressing than the realisation that, for instance, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza are insane, and possibly the precursors of a general conflagration fatal to the whole of civilisation; that the Governments and media which conspire in the inept, incompetent and dishonest response to Covid or climate change are dancing to tunes at odds with the welfare of their peoples, or that the financial set-up  operates on the basis of Ponzi schemes that will inevitably collapse; if there is anything more depressing than such thoughts, I say, it must be the conclusion that there is very little indeed which we can do about it all.

    That may be so, and yet, hope springs eternal, like the Spring! After all, on a cold and wet day in Ireland in early Spring, the hope of it is, to say the least, elusive. Personally, I fall back on that old tale of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus; in fact, I cannot imagine how any joy is possible without that saving grace; this it is which enables me to look at my grandchildren and affirm, yes, you can have a great future, and it is indeed  worth all the trouble of living! The problem remains that it can seem improbable and remote. The only answer to this is the experience of death and resurrection here and now, in our lives.

    This requires that we submit to all the deaths in our lives, loosing our very dreams of life and letting go of illusions.  I might mention the power of governments or 'science' or big corporations to solve our problems, with their stock-in-trade rockets and vaccines, or the massive heaps of debt that go with them. This is easier said than done, but if, for example, doctors had simply been left to get on with following their experience, consulting with their contacts, experimenting on their own account - if we trusted to their genuine authority, born of actually helping people, rather than the malign influence of those who were busy making fortunes at our expense - how different things could have been!

    It also requires that we do likewise in all the minute particulars of life. It is actually a great thing that life cannot go on on its present course, so that we may enjoy the fun of trying to live differently,- not in fear for a change, but in expectation of great things to come! It just happens that I am engaged in a little rehearsal with my old boat. Things couldn't go on the way they were, five years ago,- she was leaking too much for a start, and anyway, the way diesel has got so expensive, with boats having to pay the same tax as cars, along with everything else, I had to give her up or find a new way of going on.

    So now the crunch is getting very close, even in my own little way. Will we manage to get that electric drive together, and all the other jobs that need to be done to get the Anna M back to sea? Will we even manage to get that company off the ground, making marine electric drives? It has to be this Spring! I shall be heading back to Nazaré early next month. Will I ever get to sail along with the dophins on a calm and sparkling see again? Watch this space!

  

*  Bret Weinstein https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLp9YMM7CI4

'O Rising One'.

 

November was a very productive month in Nazaré, with the hull finished except for the top coats of paint, and the interior getting into shape too. We are all set up for a big effort to launch in the Spring.

Along with improving life at home, it is remarkable what a hold this project has on me, after five years of uphill struggle. The more the world seems to be going to Hell in a handbasket, the less I find myself inclined to pay much attention to it! After all, as I see it, millions are dying before they ought to be, and the mainstream media only talk about those aspects of it that they want to. I have looked in vain for reference in the Guardian for example to the recent debate in Westminster about the proposed new WHO treaty. If they think they have to guard anything, national and individual sovereignty in such matters ought to be very high on their priorities. Well, I will settle for asserting my sovereignty as best I can, and for proving how good life can be in that little zone over which I have a degree of control.

Coming home in the old citroen with Fiona was fun. Here are some photos from the ferry leaving Santander:-

As long as we manage to keep the sense of fun alive, we must be doing something right. Chances are, if we play, we can also pray; and according to Fr Simon at his talk in Glenstal the other day, the two make the essence of the Lord's Day, which the longest of the ten commandments bids us to keep holy.

I have the temerity in fact to associate the renovation of the 'Anna M' with the rediscovery of such truths. Sunday Mass in the Sanctuario de Nossa Senhora da Nazaré has greatly helped me to keep at it anyway, and this Gannetsway, which the project celebrates, constitutes what for myself is the heartland of Catholicism. Transcendent notions do need to be grounded in physical realities like geography, by virtue of the mystery of the incarnation which we celebrate at Christmas, and which makes Christian faith so distinctive,- without it religious faith can indeed be very oppressive.

Meanwhile, since I cannot expect most people to share such ideas yet, the Sea, 'the common sacrament of Man' according to Hilaire Belloc, provides a challenge, a value system and a basis for authority that I hope they will find very difficult to deny. The sea, at least, does not suffer fools gladly! And either we deliver this project or we don't, but we shall try very hard.... Happy Christmas all!

Advent star from the gate of Glenstal Abbey,

O Oriens, splendor lucis aeternae et sol justitiae, veni, et illumina sedentes in tenebris, et umbra mortis.

O rising one, splendor of eternal light and sun of justice, come, shine on those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death.