What's in a Word?

Most days I go to visit my sister, these days, who is in extremis, as is her husband.  They give me good lessons in mortality and its implications. Since my wife and I are their only family living hereabouts, it is hard to go away at present, though I had hoped to be sailing the Anna M home by now. Anyway it is an important time of the year in the garden, and besides money is scarce, a common complaint these days, since it doesn't go nearly as far as it did ten years ago. However, later this year I will be eighty, I feel that my own time is short, and I am still hoping to be able to sail Anna M home this summer. 

Will we be there again?

    Whatever transpires, I shall keep up the monthly blog about the Gannetsway. I have plenty of memories to work from, and it should be an old man's joy and privilege to have the time to attend to them. I may remind you that the Gannetsway is my name for the geographic stage on which I have lived my life, conjoining the British, Irish and continental Atlantic coastal regions as the ground for a context, indeed an identity, that I hope you readers may find interesting. 

    Growing up, I used to spend the summer holidays fumbling around mainly its English, Breton and Irish parts, before the days of electronic aids to navigation,- we didn't even have a vhf radio. My father said that he did not want that buzzing racket in the boat. I think he also did not want what today we may call 'the Machine' aboard, though he would not have put it like that. This made for plenty of excitement denied to us lucky people who have GPS navigators and know exactly where we are, and it brought us closer to ancient heroes of my imagination like Saints Brendan, Patrick and Columba. Surely they are the very men to teach us to sail in the uncharted waters that we face today!

    It was part of the fun that wherever we were, we tried to get to Mass on Sunday,- it was another dimension to the joy of cruising, particularly in France. That was mainly on account of my mother, but my father, a lapsed Anglican agnostic, also did have a certain penchant for it, and even had the grace to say to me, 'if you're going to be a Christian, you may as well do it properly'! He had, after all, studied history and law at Cambridge; he rather wished he could bring himself to believe, but never quite made it; since he was happy to talk about this, it made for some interesting conversations in the cabin of a little sailing boat, usually in Rye Harbour, with a Channel crossing behind us, maybe with the sound of wind and rain outside, and the ebb-tide lapping on the planks. In those years quite soon 'after the war', submerged memories of it sometimes surfaced, which generally had little airing. I discovered that with a bit of help from  dutyfree booze and a congenial atmosphere, religion could be perhaps the most fascinating subject of conversation!

    I don't recall when I was introduced to the saying 'Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi' (the Law of Praying is the Law of Believing), but I started learning Latin and Ancient Greek around the age of eleven, and from my earliest years I was interested in the Liturgy. I loved serving at Mass, at the crack of dawn, answering some monk's Mass in Latin at Worth. However Latin was being withdrawn from the liturgy by the time I was a teenager, and at Downside I had a grandstand view of a great monastery tearing itself apart over such matters. 

    Since I have had over sixty years to ponder the matter, and while I am still by the grace of God compos mentis, I may as well set down my conclusions here and now. I have pretty firm ideas about it, and happily I think that I am more or less in tune with Pope Leo. In boyhood, I used to find it difficult to follow what was being said in church, at one remove through the missal, let alone to fully participate in it, and did not think it right that most people generally did not seem to bother,- many devout people were quite happy to say the rosary while the priest mumbled on incomprehensibly. I therefore became quite an enthusiast for the Novus Ordo, the New Rite, though I observed the distress it caused to some people whom I respected, including a cousin of my mother's who would drive for miles for a Latin Mass. Her sister just lapsed and didn't go to Mass at all. There was evidently a lot of work to be done!

    I brought my own family to live in the West of Ireland partly in order to live in a traditional Catholic community and to live out the drama here as old Ireland was dragged into modernity. How would a modern English-born Catholic fit in? Did the Catholic faith really constitute a viable basis for life together and how would it weather the coming storm? I am reminded of a sophisticated Pakistani emigré's account of visiting his Muslim grandparents in a traditional rural village. There was gulf of difference that could not be transcended. Fiona and I feel no such alienation, but curiously, there is nowadays a strange reversal,-  we find ourselves in a place more consistent with the older generation, as modern Ireland has lumbered into the desert of materialism. In church, we hear a lot about care for the marginalised and Nature, as all the Great and Good preach. When it comes down to the nitty-gritty of our own back-yard, such as the Aughinish alumina smelter here on the Shannon Estuary, money apparently rules over such considerations.

    Fiona, who has been a Presbyterian and an Anglican in her time, says it's getting difficult to see the difference in our Catholic church. This where the Lex orandi comes in. We can't claim to have done a great job bringing up our own family in the Faith. Is a part of the trouble in the way we attempt to express and celebrate it? The one daughter out of five who is a regular mass-goer drives her gang for miles to find a meaningful faith community. Every priest has to try to bring his community with him, and it's not my intention to try to lay down the law, but here is what I think about it,- hanging on to the exclusive use of Latin in the liturgy, partly in reaction to Protestantism, eventually led to a reaction that went too far in the opposite direction, and now is the time to restore balance.

    There aren't many of us left who grew up with the old Latin Mass, and what's more I had to study Ancient Greek and Latin from the age of about eleven. It was the last gasp of the old genuinely liberal idea of education, which involved getting a grip of the fundamentals of our civilisation, giving us the tools to tackle any problem in a rational and disinterested manner. Surely it is no coincidence that the idea of sticking to principles of truth and justice went out of the window along with the study of Latin, and no wonder that savvy people tend to think that in fact self-interest and power rule, though one likes to dress them up with one grand idea or another! 

    Does the Mass really point to an alternative? Perhaps, without trying to merely go back pre Vatican II, it may be helpful to recover some Latin for the landmark bits that are repeated with every Mass, which everyone can get to understand. We begin by confessing our sins, though now the very idea of guilt and sin is eschewed. You should not be made to feel guilty, says modernity. Cut out that waffle and try saying the Confitior Deo.... Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. You will even feel better in the end!

    Then I like the bit of Greek to remind us of the other ancient language in our heritage,- Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison. I retain the notion that ancient Greece was the power house where the basic questions of life were first posed and our most fundamental concepts emerged. Then the Romans came along, listened, and eventually knocked a practical and universally applicable response into shape, for which they had to draft in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The result was the Roman Catholic Church, with the primacy of Latin.

    If it is lost entirely, an awful lot more will go with it. To my mind Gloria in Excelsis Deo sounds a whole lot more glorious than the English version, especially when it is sung in Gregorian chant, and how sadly lacking in Glory modern life tends to be! Much the same goes for Credo in unum Deum.... 'I believe' in English generally translates as 'I'm not altogether sure, but I do rather think....' Credo is much stronger. The very idea of seriously believing anything was pretty much outlawed by the time I was at Cambridge. The 'Unum' nowadays is conveniently dropped from our English version. One God presumably entails one Church,-  maybe it is dropped out of deference to all the folks who see fit to go off and found their own 'church'. Anyway it sounds horribly exclusive to contemporary ears. In our church we are lucky if the priest says the Creed at all, even on Sunday when Canon Law demands it. It was carefully figured out long ago, and is the intellectual framework of the Faith. No wonder so many Catholics have such hazy ideas about what they believe, and King Charles likes to call himself 'Defender of faith' rather than 'Defender of the Faith'. What a  difference one little word makes!

    Holy Moses, does the English word 'holy' really carry the same punch as Sanctus? Dominus vobiscum, the priest was always saying, and we replied Et cum spiritum tuum. In the New Rite we just say 'And with you.' Really, even if we may well be addressing nothing but a bundle of vanities? Sorry, it's only for the real, essential, dare I say, the supernatural you, your spirit, that I invoke God's blessing. Is this distinction between the natural and the supernatural dualism? No, we believe in one God, one Truth, one consistent Reality, but the glory which is waiting for us remains as yet unrevealed, in the words of St Paul, and meanwhile creation can but retain the hope of being freed, like us, from its slavery to decadence. The supernatural is what it says it is,- not the unnatural! Is that what we have lost, the sense of the Supernatural- the mysterium fidei, which our old Celtic forebears had in abundance?

    The climax of it all is the Consecration. One can have a better shot at the mystery with the Latin version of Jesus' words,- 'Hoc est enim corpus meum', rather than 'this is my body'. 'My body' is generally construed in English to be the merely physical machine that supports our life, a lump of flesh and bone. It may include the brain, but the mind? Can a surgeon looking at our brain see that? The Latin corpus is more capacious. "He is not the God of the dead but of the living," said Jesus, trying to explain what we are in His eyes. What is the essential me? A vibe, a pattern or field of energy? Real, modern science seems to have things to say about this. Our bodies are certainly a lot more than the mere matter, the atoms of our bodies, which are here today and gone tomorrow! We do not start merely from some blob of cells, as individuals or collectively. We are called by name.

    'In principio erat Verbum', we used to be reminded at the Last Gospel. It was but a gloss, yet it was a good one. Who now remembers these most profound words at the beginning of St John's Gospel? We start from an Idea in the mind of God. C.S.Lewis in his Narnia stories implies that God sings creation into being, and it may be helpful to think of God's Ideas as musical notes. The note of a bell at the consecration is another big miss. That Word/Note, sent into our hearts and out into the world with the Eucharist at every Mass, gives us the base note, to get our lives in tune with God. 

    Whatever, He comes to us across the water to rescue us in our fragile little boats, to where we may be freed from decadence, storms and disasters, once and for all, to be chatting and singing jollily with our friends, remembering old times with its struggles and its triumphs,- and not just remembering, but reliving! What more could an old man ask for?

Ite, missa est!

  

Returning Kings?

 

Spuds are up!

   I spend the biggest part of my time these days in our garden. I have made a new vegetable bed and am reclaiming a wild part. We will be getting rid of a impassable tangle of briars, other weeds and dead or dying trees, planting new ones, aiming for a pleasing glade through which to approach the house. I would love to have it all done before the Anna M is back in the water. My personal little kingdom straddles sea and land somewhat uneasily!

    It's not that I myself will even see it with the trees grown tall. How is one to keep at it, even when the old knees would rather not do so and one may well fail to enjoy much of the fruits? So much for my kingship! However, there is sustenance in the very act of bringing order to chaos, which is very hard to live with, so we instinctively combat it. Yet we humans necessarily live tossed between order and chaos, in our own hearts as in the sea. Order in fact feeds on chaos, even as a king upholds his kingdom in combatting it, and a skipper has to struggle to keep his ship in order against the jostling of the waves.

    Christians have a special way of coping with this situation. Even while we tend our gardens for our families and the wider communities of which we are part, we do so in the hope of welcoming the King of Kings to them, whether in our own lives or at the end of time. We can abide the Cross, the everlasting dissolution, because it is necessary for Him to come that way in order to establish that eternal Kingdom, in which nothing good and beautiful will be lost, and we ourselves hope to participate. This asserts the value of the Present Moment and is the opposite of the despair that actually seeks to bring about the End Times, which certain gentlemen in Iran seem to be horribly entangled in. The cycle of the seasons teaches us to be patient,- resurrection follows death as surely as spring follows winter.

    Dear King Charles, who seems to reckon that being a Christian is simply a matter of being 'a good chap' and who wants to be friends with everyone 'of all faiths and none', is apparently reluctant to recognise the fact that there are some weeds in this world that unfortunately one simply cannot get on with. In this he speaks for the entire western, liberal establishment. Our media have been trying hard to cope with the Islamic Republican Guard Corps by pretending that they are at least half sane, and it's the people who go out and get themselves shot by them who are insane and should be ignored,- but this attitude will not endure.

    So, this is a time when we find ourselves particularly impelled to revisit the basic presuppositions of our lives. What about, for instance, the enduring symbolic power of kingship? Even today, King Charles manages to convey a sense of context, of meaning and direction, that actually had both Houses of Congress on their feet applauding him together, and very nice it was to see Republicans and Democrats united for a change! 

    As for President Donald J. Trump, it does seem that leftists are justified in saying that, rather like Presidents Putin and Xi, he would like to see himself as a king. When he manifests this, as in famous photos before the Trump Tower's golden gates, he proves very divisive and earns my sobriquet for him as 'the Ducky', and I am not even a lefty! So what is the difference between such vainglory and the kingship Jesus claimed for Himself, the Son of Man, and thereby for all who take up their cross and follow Him? Which kingship, by the way, is the very essence of democracy, which is based on respect for each sovereign individual, brethren of the Lord Jesus and therefore sharing His kingship.

    Reza Pahlavi is unsurprisingly finding it difficult to take up the kingship of Iran, though he promises democracy and this would seem to be the best hope of bringing the chaos there to an end. Since every war is at bottom a war of narratives, I find the deafening silence from Europe when it comes to supporting him, along with those in Iran who risk their lives in doing so, quite disgusting. I get the impression that such reticence even tends to the extreme in republics such as Ireland and France. 

    Well, kings did indeed let us down, but isn't it time to get over that? They do provide a reminder that our kingship by no means justifies us in thinking that we are ends in ourselves, entitled to homage on all sides! Kingship may prove to be an enduring archetype which cannot be replaced,- yet it still does need a makeover demonstrating that it is not alone compatible with democracy, but can provide powerful support for it, in the right hands!

Sea-pink time in Co.Clare.

Meanwhile, I'm still struggling to get over the bout of chaos that overtook my poor AnnaM! However, the plan is to sail her home with no engine, and see if I can find some way of financing an electric drive here in Ireland. At present it is very hard to raise even the €3000 that I need to get her out of Nazaré. Ah well, there's a good time coming!

    

Surveying the Kingdom, mainly the Kerry one!

Community and Resilience

Back home from the last session on the Anna M in Portugal, I have plenty of Spring work outside and other matters to contend with, but at least I am expecting the next trip to Nazaré to be the final one before sailing home. I finally had to give up on getting an electric drive there, so I'm going to sail home without a motor and see if I can manage to get the electric drive togrther here at home on the Shannon Estuary.

    In the 1990s, when the photo at right was taken, my hope was that fishing would provide a productive basis for our community here. That's my old boat, the Whitebank tied to the quay in the foreground. Nowadays you may see one or two small potters there. For years now, I have been thinking as to whether fishing based on sail and electric power could make a comeback. However when I retired from commercial fishing in the late '90s, I bought the Anna M with a view to taking dolphin and whale watching trips under sail.

    The latest global disasters should encourage such efforts,- that's if we don't get altogether paralyzed. It's dreadful that we have to take the uncertainties of geopolitics into account when we try to make plans these days! However, as I've always said, whatever about climate change and also the advantages of electric motors in the line of noise, vibration, instant readiness and so on, the biggest consideration for me is not to be at the mercy of the latest hike in the price of oil. It would be wonderful also to be free of the choke-holds all the way down the supply chain, which can be taxed or even cut in so many ways, and which at the best of times takes an inordinate slice of one's income!

    It seems a fair bet that this will only get worse in the foreseeable future. This next month will surely tell a lot. One must hope that the Iranians manage to establish a free society of sorts for themselves, otherwise we are in for a terrible lot of trouble. "There you go again!" I hear it said. "You have always been a prophet of doom!" Not the full truth, however, - I have also always seen the doom as offering great opportunities for fuller life, not to say, for fun! People don't like to admit it, but how would we like it if life just ticked along 'on an even keel' the whole time? Why do we go sailing at all, for instance, if not to manage while now and again being thrown about, in fear of our lives, and to enjoy the contrast, with the memory of the storms, on calm and sunny days?

    Which is not to belittle the hardships we are facing. There are always the two sides to life. For instance, one can say, not without justification, that 'the West' stands for freedom, justice, democracy, human rights etc. Then one can turn round and ennumerate all the ways in which we fail to live up to our fine ideals. Well, if and when we can honestly profess them, that is so much. Sometimes we even have to fight for them, which is not pretty at all, but at least shows whether we really believe in them or not. Meanwhile we have to do all in our power to avoid such dire necessity.

    So much has happened in the last decade to undermine our confidence in our own ideals. Our leaders are ever less credible, our politicians ever more inept, as they appear to mainly package and distribute power that resides in dark places elsewhere, rather than to honestly represent their electorates.

    Not to mention the covid affair, that Aughinish smelter is classic. It constitutes a massive environmental hazard, it has overstretched the capacity of its enormous tailing pond, everyone for miles around would love to see it shut down, but the politicians bow to covert remote interests. The Epstein files constitute an opportunity to glean much insight into how the dark powers operate, but this is very likely an intolerable prospect for our rulers. If they can't drum up another 'epidemic' to distract everyone, a war will do very nicely!

    And yet, an authoritarian and totalitarian block has been emerging, based on China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, which is a whole lot worse than our relatively free and open societies and needs to be faced down before it becomes even stronger. At least we in 'the West' are by and large free of the threat of being shot down in the streets or hauled off to imprisonment, torture and death! It is intriguing to observe how very alike the regimes in China and Iran are, in spite of their radically different ideologies.

    If the 'dear leaders' succeeded in their goals of conquering Ukraine and Taiwan, would they stop there? Maybe they would just fall out among themselves. This interconnected world in which we live today provokes all-too-credible dreams of world domination and control, but meanwhile those who aspire to them, including the Western/globalist dark cabal, have a certain attraction for each other. They don't care about the packaging of power, it's the reality they are after.

    While we struggle around in the Hall of Mirrors, we had better hold fast to the few clear and clean images that we have inherited,- Christ crucified and risen, and with his mother. As ever before, they have implications, which chime perfectly with the practical challenges we face. To honour them and live by them, we need Church, which calls for repentence and a continuous new beginning in the name of Jesus. This is how to confront chaos and dissolution and to build community and resilience. Whether we are talking about the old Celtic monasteries of the 6th century with their beehive huts or the great monasteries of the High Medieval Age, these are precious reference points we may refer to, in our present struggles, scattered all over the Gannetsway.

    Every age has its particular cultural circumstances. Our parishes today are but pale shadows of the old monastic communities, yet attempts to reproduce these in modern society have not proved very successful. Perhaps that is because we continue to attempt to function in our own little bubbles, with an illusory self sufficiency; yet as contemporary society becomes increasingly brittle and dysfunctional, many people are quietly trying to develop alternative approaches to life. I tried to lay out the general direction of travel in my 2005 novel Wavedancing. That of course was then, but I think we do need to step back from the immediate dramatic events of the last decade now and again, gaining a longer perspective.

    I live in hope that the upheavals will see sane people everywhere breaking out of the myth of individualism and the resulting isolation, which leaves us so vulnerable to attempts to manipulate and control us, not to say to impoverish and enslave us. I believe that in meeting each other in our needs, we will actually meet Christ himself. However this is a work in progress, not to be subjected to our own wills, but a gift from God. If we fail to see it like this, we end up manipulating and bamboozling each other in our own turn!

     Yet it's no good sitting around, wringing our hands and talking about it,- we have to find ways to become engaged, even if this means, for instance, attempting to renovate an old wooden sailing boat. I hope the Anna M will do her bit, sailing the Gannetsway in memory of those seafarers who of old carried the Good News around these Western coasts, provided a means of communication and encouragement for people quietly trying to do their thing in that tradition, and eventually produced a race of sailors who circumnavigated the globe, laying the foundations of our modern world!

    Now we are challenged to find out how the peoples can live together in peace, without blowing up the world. Not that long ago we were all living in our own separate bubbles. Some still try to do so, but in the internet age this is becoming harder all the time. In fact the bubbles have been popping all over the place even during the time I have been writing this blog. I tried to provide a commentary on this in my novel Wavedancing, and point to some ways we might respond. That was about twenty years ago. I am preparing a new edition, along with extracting a book version of this blog. Stand by for more news on this!

Shaking the Nations

St John's Island, from 'Anna M' in 2004

It is impossible to think, say or write anything much without reference to the dramatic events that have been shaking the world on all sides in this two thousand and twenty-sixth year of Our Lord. In Britain, America, China, Russia, Iran and many other places, there is a crescendo of existential stress which is fitfully exploding here and there. Who am I to add to the torrent of commentary? Yet to try to make sense of what is happening is a necessity for us all. We each have our own experience, and it seems to me that any spots of illumination which we think we have, we should share. 

    Until this last dump of material, I tried to steer clear of the Epstein files, considering them just one more dollop of sordid gossip that I would rather not bother my head with. Why would I want to besmirch my memories of the Caribbean, for example, by looking up that famous little island of Epstein's? Then I remembered that I sailed past the same Little St James' Island several times in the noughties, that Anna M had been repaired across the bay on St Thomas, and I had even tried to interest Fiona in buying a house on Water Island, further along the south coast of St Thomas, for use as a guest house and base for sailing trips.

    People, especially from St John's which is largely a national park, used to call St Thomas 'St Trauma', finding it busy and stressful. Perhaps its pivotal role in the slave trade back in the day did not help! Anyway that's where they had to go for their business, the airport, where the cruise ships went and a lot of people including myself tried to make a few bucks. At the other end of the south coast of St John's is the lovely Coral Bay, where I dropped anchor off a beautiful beach, swam ashore and encountered an old black dude working on a small boat. He squinted at Anna M, and enquired "Is that an Irish tricolour?" He responded to my affirmative by holding out his hand saying "Captain O'Kelly's the name".

    He ended up coming for a sail with me, doing a bit of fishing and telling me his story. I think the Irishman was his great-grandfather, who had settled in that spot with a black woman in the nineteenth century. He had owned a schooner, sailed up and down the islands trading, or sometimes did some fishing, while the womenfolk grew vegetables, made baskets and what-not. When I asked what his sons were doing nowadays, his face darkened. "You see them houses there? Million bucks apiece. They drive around in their big trucks, smoke dope and quarrel about the money!"

    This incident helped to clarify a very big issue in my mind,- how may we get back to some kind of sanity? Meanwhile, I wasn't to know that peak insanity was playing out a few miles away, on the 'Epstein Island'. Nowadays I feel that I owe it to the girls, whom I then sailed unwittingly past, to try to understand what was going on. However I tend to think that, horrible as their story is, it is a bit of a side-show and distraction from the big picture, which we are only beginning to understand,  though we won't get much further if President Trump and other big-wigs like Gates and Von der Leyen have their way. 

    The Ducky (as it seems I shall have to go back to calling him) has been desperately trying to move on, along with many of the most powerful men in America, but it seems he is tearing up his base, the genuine MAGA types who elected him on the promise of transparency and accountability. They are not going to be fobbed off with half measures. Neither are they going to be pleased if, contrary to his election rhetoric, he resorts to the Putinesque, Machiavellian tactic of distracting everyone with a war in Iran.

    Which criteria is he using, in deciding what we get to see, and which not? When it comes to names, it is fair enough to redact the names of victims, but not of 'players'. What was done seems arbitrary, however enough has come out to show us that there is more than ordinary vice involved. It is hard to believe that those big money men like Gates and the Rothschilds, not to mention Mossad, the CIA, MI6, Putin, the Chinese Communist Party, the Clintons, etc were so very interested in Epstein's girls. There was clearly some bigger play going on. What could it possibly be? 

    In recent years, one 'conspiracy theory' after another has turned out to be true. Who now believes that the CIA was not involved in President Kennedy's assasination? Who believes that the covid came from nature? Who does not think that the whole covid fiasco was orchestrated on a global basis, that somehow managed to coopt democratic governments, media and health authorities? Who could possibly have pulled it off? Who profited from it, enormously? The Epstein files have lifted only a corner of the fabric, so far. If democracy is to have any future, we must all press on with the demand for accountability. Fauci, Von der Leyen and Beourla, all of you, out with it! 

    The upset and level of stress surely has a lot to do with the new tech. In principal, our access to information is unprecedented. The rulers of this world are not used to transparency on the part of the plebs. Somehow we must be sedated and distracted. Let's not let it happen. I recommend two antidotes,- sailing the sea and prayer. Best of all, combined, as in the words of Fr Anthony Keane, a monk of Glenstal Abbey who has sailed with me:-

"Sailing around the South West coast of Ireland is an opportunity to

enjoy a THEOPHANY - the magnificence of our Creator made manifest

in the glories of the sea as they rend the rocks in their dramatic

power. Moses was granted a theophany on Mount Sinai as the Lord

manifested Himself in the elements and gave him the Law. On seeing

the drama of battle as written on stone in West Cork and Kerry,we too

may sing:

"Greater than the roar of mighty waters, more glorious than the

surgings of the sea, the Lord is glorious on high."(Ps93)

And we may ask who is He "whom winds and sea obey?"

From the chaos of the sea in storm, in the grim weather of early Spring, we look for the advent of a new Heaven and a new Earth! I'm heading for Portugal again shortly, intending to relaunch in a couple of months, but still severely hampered by lack of funds....

 

    

     

Knock, Knock Knockin' On Heaven's Door

        It's amazing how that song of Dylan's has stayed with me down the years, over half a century of them! That single, oft repeated phrase haunts life,- my own and, whether we acknowledge it or not, everyone's, though it might get muddled up with divers other daft doors! Still, Dylan's song is reassuring in that he was plainly not just referring to some mythical Heaven utterly beyond our experience. I do not mean any slight to Heaven as a metaphysical, transcendent reality outside and beyond time, but the fact is that this concept cuts no ice with me if I can absolutely not locate it in our own experience. What's more, we have our Saviour's assurance that 'the Kingdom of Heaven is among you'!

        However, the more fundamental reassurance, in fact the true revelation, comes when we realise that our tentative little knocks on that heavenly door are not some fancy or fantasy of our own, but our response to the much firmer knock coming from the other side. 'Behold, I am standing at the door, knocking. If one of you hears me calling and opens the door, I will come in to share his meal, side by side with him.' (Rev. 3:20) This meal can be any old simple activity, so long as it is indeed orientated to that Kingdom of Heaven! It refers to no prideful banquet, but to any humble celebration of God's gifts. It is a simple revelation, accessible to anyone who puts aside their pride, opens that door and keeps it open.

        It has been maintained by some who are close to me that it will be a miracle if I manage to get myself and my old boat to sea again. They could be right, but then it is a miracle that is getting close to realisation, and this through a succession of minor miracles that on my own I could not have engineered,- people, money coming out of the woodwork, just when and only when absolutely required, my health holding up also when it was needed. Not, let it be said, always when I would have wanted. I wanted to get to sea again years ago now. I could have done without cancer, covid, many little trials, but just gently, in God's good time, the job has been nearly completed and now I feel sure it will be fine.

        So last week, back again in Nazaré, Ian from South Africa was precisely able to give me the two days needed in order for him to share his knowledge about rigging with Dyneema rope, and we prepared the new stays. Ian prides himself on being an African, who gets on doing things with his own hands, rather than expecting to have loads of money to pay others to do our work for us, or merely ruling ourselves out of for instance sailing, leaving it to the billionaires while we get ourselves all wrapped up in regulations, taxes, insurance and the rest of it! Twenty years ago, I might have been able to even associate Ireland with the African attitude. However, Lulu from Belfast was also able to give me the help I needed for getting around and so on. She is making up a new bimini/hood set-up. The stove was wonderful in chasing the cold damp out of the cabin, and I was soon cosy aboard despite the rainy winter weather. I am confident of sailing for home around the end of May.

        They had a nasty storm in the east of Ireland last night and it rained plenty here, but this morning the sun is shining, just as it was on New Year's day, when we went for a spin down the peninsula. Coming to the shore this side of Kilbaha, we saw first a couple of humpback whales, and later a feeding frenzy in the distance with humpbacks and the unmistakable blow of a fin whale,- all very auspicious since this year I intend to bring the Anna M home for dolphin and whale-watching in the summer.

        When we were done with the whales, I spotted one of the alumina ships coming downriver from Aughinish. I confirmed her as such by AIS, as can be seen below. This is the third that I have seen in recent years, and these are just the ones which I spotted out on my little walks with the dogs. - 

    The aim will be to help the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group to monitor the health of the estuary's wildlife, keeping a special eye on Aughinish with its potential to cause an environmental catastrophe, as outlined in the film 'The Aughinish Incident' . The fact that our community runs this appalling risk in order to send war material to Russia (for drones, rockets, explosives etc) renders it simply intolerable. We will also do what we can to monitor and protest this traffic.

    It's not as if there is quite the same shortage of jobs these days hereabouts as there was in the 1970s, when there were still large numbers of people needing employment. In fact there are other large-scale industrial projects in the pipeline for the estuary, which we will hope also to keep an eye on. We may be sure that the workforce will be largely composed of immigrants, coming from far and wide and with no special interest in our beautiful estuary and the wonderful creatures in it.

        So now here's the thing. I need to get the Gannetsway Sailing Association up and running, and complete the fitting out of the Anna M, by asking people to join,  contributing €50 membership, and preferably to then prepay to go sailing on her, €50 per head for a 3 hour trip or €100 for a full day. Please email me, Joe Aston, if you are interested:- gannetsway@gmail.com  

        

        

Filioque

A lone surfer stalks the waves....

Joyful, spontaneous, autonomous, free,- that is how we would all specially like our children to be at Christmas, and indeed it is how our Father in Heaven would like all of us to be all the time. However, some will probably think it a tad self indulgent to think that way, 'when there is so  much suffering in the world'. As for myself, I am more than likely to be asked why I think fit to put every spare bit of cash and effort that I can muster into my old wooden sailing boat, let alone that I presume to believe that God and Our Lady actually help me in this 'wasteful' effort!

    What an absurd idea, that Almighty God hasn't enough trouble on his hands without going out of his way to care about an old boat and her eccentric skipper, a somewhat spoiled old boy who has had a good life and should be very content to live out his days looking after his long-suffering wife, en paz y en la Gracia de Diós! Wouldn't it be more Christian to give any spare cash he may have to feed the hungry and oppressed?

    In the coming June it will be nine years since I committed this project to Nossa Senhora da Nazaré, having asked Our Lady if I should go into the harbour there and put the old boat on the concrete, and received a clear answer. There are not a few people about who would have said it would have been much more sensible to let her to the bottom of the Nazaré Trench, the deep water that nearly comes into the bay there, especially as she was well insured. Well, the hull is good for many years again now. It has been difficult and frustrating, but also enjoyable and I have learned a lot. It may be strange, but one is never too old to learn, unless one is brain dead, - and after all, when one learns something, the other people in one's life learn as well!

    Had I been asked at the beginning, in all honesty, whether I had the resources to carry out such a project, the answer would have had to be no. It has been one little bit of fortune after another that has enabled us to come so far, in spite of many head winds, covid, my own bit of cancer, etc. The unexpected generosity of a friend enabled my recent trip to Nazaré, which wrapped up this year so that we only face the relatively straight-forward matter like getting the engine in and the rig up in the Spring. It has been disappointing not to be able to get the electric drive together, but we shall be keeping it in mind....

    Now at Christmas-time in West Clare, I have the luxury of taking it easy, and besides enjoying family and friends, I take the chance of looking up old friends in the form of books that I once gobbled up. Among them, Teilhard de Chardin, whose optimism has worn somewhat ragged at this stage. Still, amidst the torrent of somewhat high-flown language, one comes across beautiful expressions such as,- 'In the vast unknown of nature he (the seer) will strive to hear the heart-beats of the higher reality that calls him by name.' I suppose this knocks on the box of any sailor who goes to sea in a small sailing boat, though they might not put it in such grandiose language, and might want to refer to the special relationship that sailing puts one in both with all the vital practical bits and pieces of life, and with other people, where that higher reality is also to be found.

    With my thought taking a theological turn, the recent visit of Pope Leo to the site of the Council of Nicaea, which took place there 1700 years ago and where the Nicene creed was formulated, had me pondering yet again the mysterious controversy about a single word in it,-‘filioque’ - 'and from the son' as the wonderfully concise Latin has it, - the issue being whether or not the Holy Spirit should be said to ‘proceed from the Father and the Son’. How come so many illustrious men have put so much passion into debating the matter, and indeed been prepared to divide Christ’s Church over it? What on Earth is really at stake? Most of the argument seems to be derived from Scripture or what this or that Church Father had to say about it. I leave such matters to the professionals, and merely ask, could there possibly be any relevance to, or even resonance with, my own experience, and with the quest of contemporary folk to relate to 'the higher reality'?

Sixty years ago, Progress probably had a lot more credit than it has today; Teilhard was certainly a devotee of it, even as he toiled as a stretcher-bearer in the Great War. I suppose he would conclude that even that catastrophe helped to push Progress on its way, giving a great boost to the wonders of science and technology. Machines were on course to take the drudgery out of life; women, oppressed peoples everywhere were to be liberated. Eventually, even the atomic bomb would force mankind to move beyond recourse to war. Great institutions like the U.N. and the E.U. would prevail, and enable us to move to a wonderful new age of peace and harmony.

‘See the wonders of technology and evolution! Progress and Democracy will prevail! Onwards and Upwards we go!’ However, 'I'm not so sure about that!’ growled some pesky intellectuals or reactionaries; 'the Christian Church is dying and we are being enslaved!’ ‘No, the gates of Hell cannot prevail, Christ’s work cannot fail’. ‘Keep faith and say your prayers, Jesus will look after you and everything will work out for the best!’ said my mother. ‘Huh, he didn’t look after the Irish or the Poles very well!’ said my father. ‘The Lord is never outdone in generosity!’ said Fr Leander, an old Irish monk.

In any Catholic church, such paradoxes are reflected in the two icons which stand out,- the Crucifix and the Madonna,- the disturbing image of the crucified Saviour, and the comforting, tender and hopeful image of Our Lady with the infant Jesus at her breast.  ‘No one comes to the Father except through me,’ he was to say. Why does the Eastern Church, and likely enough especially the Russian Orthodox, have trouble with filioque? It may be said that they have a penchant for vertical power unmodified in the horizontal dimension. Further on in the same direction, Muslims utterly reject the notion of God becoming man, insisting that the transcendent Allah cannot by any means be represented on Earth. I think it small wonder that, as a direct result, they have a proclivity to sado-masochism. They also seem deficient in the kind of laughter and fun which to my mind underlay much of the strength of European culture.

    Perhaps it is simply because the land and the climate are more kindly, the soil more fruitful and life generally somewhat easier in Western Europe, that here we find it easier to believe in a benign God who took our flesh and nature in order to be one of us, and to show how humanity could be free and joyful. These days we can even envisage that our DNA is written in the language of His Word, thus giving startling new resonance to the first words of St John's gospel,- In the beginning

Elevation of the Gospel

was the Word: the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things came to be, not one thing had its being but through him. All that came to be had life in him, and that life was the light of men.

It is such words of power which enable us to believe that the Holy Spirit, emanating from the relationship between the Father in transcendent majesty and the incarnate Son, is indeed present and active in all creation. Yes, the Holy Spirit has to proceed from both the Father and the Son if we are to learn to believe that in spite of our rebellion, we have only to repent for All things to be well! We do have to acknowledge that rebellion, for it is the only way of accounting for all the things that go wrong, but though it is a very painful process, God found a way to turn the situation on its head. 

Our Lady was the only person to keep faith at the darkest hour that Jesus would indeed rise again, and she points the way to new life with her child. Those who believe in his resurrection are empowered to become children of God, and to believe that in spite of all the appearances to the contrary, love and life will prevail. Human development is not after all a farce, even democracy can happen, people can be free, because the Holy Spirit is present through the incarnate Saviour. God doesn’t have to ‘break in’,- He can just as well ‘break out’! He ‘breaks out’ in the vast processes of nature, evolution, the sea and the stars,- but He also delights to break out in humdrum, personal little ways that you and I can see and experience, provided we turn to Him. So we can pray with Isaiah (45.8):- Send victory like a dew, you heavens, and let the clouds rain it down. Let the earth open for salvation to spring up. Let deliverance, too, bud forth which I, the Lord, shall create.'

It all goes to show how important that filioque is! If we would only reboot, plugging firmly into that power emanating from the polarity between the 'Father' and the 'Son', we 'in the West'could revive our roots, renew our vigour and solidarity, stiffen our backs and face down all of the many and diverse bullies and tyrants who beset humanity,- and indeed we could hope to enjoy a Merry Christmas!

... with the Porto de abrigo so close by!

Christ the King

Today is the Feast of Christ the King, and also the hundredth anniversary of the institution of that feast by Pope Pius XI in 1925. In the encyclical with which he did so, Quas Primas, he recalled words of his predecessor Pope Leo XIII,- "What else is a nation but a number of men living in concord?" (back in the days when one could use the m word inclusively!) The Derry ones, for whom I have a particular soft spot since I visited Free Derry in August of 1969 - I love their liveliness and edge-, are celebrating this feast by processing the Blessed Sacrament through their city in wind and rain.

The Remedy for our Failures and Sins?

    Are they mad, parading the Blessed Sacrament on the streets and on the river that have seen such bitter division? Let us hear Pope Pius XI again. While recalling Christ's statement that 'my kingdom is not of this world', he went on to assert that 'On many occasions, when the Jews and even the Apostles wrongly supposed that the Messiah would restore the liberties and the kingdom of Israel, He repelled and denied such a suggestion.... It would be a grave error, on the other hand, to say that Christ has no authority whatever in civil affairs, since, by virtue of the absolute empire over all creatures committed to him by the Father, all things are in his power.' 'Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven', says the Lord's prayer.

    Whatever way one looks at it, we have a bit of a conumdrun here, which has indeed, literally, bedevilled the world for two millenia,- the Devil, father of lies, keeps cooking up false narratives and claiming the mantle of kingship for them, while men of power generally strive to usurp the frequently inconvenient authority that derives from God in truth. We have to start by getting rid of the lies, even as they strut about in their pomp, and then we may hope to live in peace with ourselves and the people around us. (Indeed a very good place to do so is in a boat, and the Derry ones took the Blessed Sacrament on a boat to bless the River Foyle with its three bridges, from which all too many people have drowned themselves!)

     If we wish to live, we must prioritise the quest for truth. On this feastday, what we are celebrating in Christ's Kingship is the primacy of Truth. One might have thought that this is not so very difficult to acknowledge, but from Pilate on, men of power tend to mock the very idea. The result, in Pius XI's words, 'is that human society is tottering to its fall, because it has no longer a secure and solid foundation.'

    Indeed human society had a very narrow escape from total self-destruction in the succeeding years; however a hundred years later we find it tottering on in a similar fashion. In fact the historical times when it appeared to have a secure and solid foundation may have been the exception rather than the rule, although there are also no doubt times when it is particularly precarious.,- but such times are not without their blessings, and the threat of wreck can even bring out the best in us.

    One Father Edward Cahill SJ, an associate of President de Valera's, published a great tome in the 1920s called 'The Framework of a Christian State'. I came across a review of it some years ago in The Irish Catholic by one Michael McDowell SC. He stated that 'Cahill urged De Valera to make a “definite break with the Liberal and non-Christian type of state” that had been “forced on us by a foreign, non-Catholic power”.... The threats to Catholic Christianity underlined the need for Ireland to adopt a new social system based largely on peasant proprietor agriculture.' Down to earth people, in touch with physical reality, are less inclined to cynicism about the very idea of truth, even if they like to play around with it!

    To promote his ideas, Father Cahill founded in 1926 An Ríoghacht, or the League of Christ the King. With a slight shock, I recalled lately that as a teenager at Downside I partook in the League of Christ the King, under the aegis of an elderly Irish monk, Dom Wulstan Phillipson, otherwise known affectionately as Wappy,- and I used to thoroughly enjoy his sessions in the Ford Library, which combined prayer with thoughtfulness. In the subsequent years his kind of thought was pretty much air-brushed out of my life, along with most other people's, only to come sneeking back with, for instance, Tolkein and 'The Lord of the Ring'.

    I can understand the confusion and indeed horror of our so-enlightened Irish establishment at finding attitudes eerily reminiscent of the likes of Fr Cahill being taken seriously again,- but they are most pertinent. In the hard times that are before us, the tradition of personal responsibility and ownership, combined with self-sufficiency and community, which to this day characterises life in the West of Ireland, offers something that we may build upon,- even as the present set-up becomes increasingly dysfunctional, and we have to combat the totalitarian tendencies of the cartel of big business and their cronies, by which we are unfortunately governed.

    However, quite apart from the obstruction of the parties in government, it was the same Michael McDowell mentioned above who was specially responsible for Maria Steen's failure to secure nomination in the recent presidential election, in spite of the two of them having been very prominent together in last year's referenda, when the Government's attempt to do away with the constitutional underpinning for family and a woman’s place in the home was soundly defeated. Judging by that defeat, and the huge amount of spoiled votes in the presidential election, she might have actually won. At least we would have had a proper electoral debate. Did McDowell lose his nerve, or what? He wouldn't be the first establishment figure to do so when revolutionary ideas which they espoused actually looked like happening!

    Acute polarization characterises our times, as one would expect at a time of special crisis. Many simply shy away from the resulting conflicts, but ‘no house divided against itself can stand’. How are we to 'live in accord'? When it comes down to politics, even in families, we will find conflicting views among good people. Unless these conflicts are handled in a constructive fashion, they will destroy any movement or even institution. How can we aspire to unite a whole society if we the people cannot even handle our own interior conflicts? 'The Cartel' will be quick to exploit these and use them to suppress opposition and debate.

    The Irish President has very limited powers, but is expected to provide a figure-head and symbol of unity for the nation. We are inclined to simplify the division in our country as one between ‘left’ and ‘right’, but the newly elected president was elected on the basis of the deliberate repression of any serious opposition to the official leftish narrative. We have seen a lot of such repression recently, for instance in regard to debate around covid and the government’s handling of it. It is probable that the debates around, for instance, AI, digital identification and currency etc will meet with similar repression, and the toolkit is available to make it more and more totalitarian.

     Politics, particularly the left/right business, and indeed confessional religion as in Ireland between Catholics and Protestants, seem increasingly irrelevent, but can we really be expected to sort out such issues on a purely individual basis? If a political movement fit for purpose is to emerge, I think it will have to do so from actual grass-roots efforts, though at the same time it will need to do so on a continent-wide basis. Ireland has form in such a matter, going back to the Celtic monks and missionaries. Let us adopt their tradition of community, based on the three-legged stool of prayer, study and physical work,- and let it all be pervaded by the spirit of fun that characterises the Irish at their best,- then nobody need be afraid of it!

    

Bloomin' 79th birthday!

    I'm off to Nazaré again next week, still determined to get the Anna M out again next year!