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!

Confidence

 ‘Don’t let the old man in,’ is the advice of my dear wife, Fiona. She also informs me that at the age of 79, I should not count on being able to take folks sailing again next year. However, aside from any physical problems, the real poison of old age is the decline of confidence.

Confidence of course is the basis of any human activity, not least of money. ‘Neither a borrower or a lender be’ is lovely advice, but the entire world economy depends on the delicate balance between lenders and debtors. Mysteriously, nobody expects all that debt (235% of world GDP) to ever be paid back,- not that the lenders ever had it in the first place - central banks print it with the simple proviso that the borrowers will be able to pay the interest on it.

When this becomes questionable, interest rates have to go up to persuade lenders to take the risk. When governments have to borrow to pay the interest, they are embarking on a dangerous spiral that is liable to end in hyperinflation. We may find even a great and productive country such as France as a rudderless ship drifting on the rocks. This cannot be allowed to happen, so the rest of the Eurozone, one way or another, will have to try to take her in tow.

In Ireland we experienced this in the financial crash of 2008. Now, however, our Government is swimming in cash, with a record surplus of about 23.2 billion euro in 2024, largely due to a bonanza in the corporate tax take and other revenues from a few huge American corporations in the tech and pharmaceutical sectors.

According to David Murphy, writing in RTE news today, ‘Pfizer has 4,000 employees in Ireland and is one of the largest corporate taxpayers.’ He further states,- ‘The pharmaceutical and medical device sector accounts for 65% of total goods exported from Ireland and 90% of products sold to the US’. Naturally, those who run Ireland Inc, and anyone else who considers such matters,  must get the jitters from President Trump’s antics, and it is small wonder that they would not want to upset the likes of Pfizer.

            Commission President Von der Leyen appears to be getting away with her failure to release her correspondence with Pfizer's chief executive regarding the purchase of billions' worth of vaccines, in spite of the ruling of the European Court of Justice to do so. No doubt her defence is that said vaccines were most urgently needed and saved millions of lives. I have been doing a spot of research on my own account, laboriously counting Co.Clare deaths in RIP.ie for the last 10 years. That represents a fairly stable demographic, since it is mostly the indigenous population that use it. This was the result:- 

Year    - 2015 - 2016 - 2017 - 2018 - 2019 - 2020 - 2021 - 2022 - 2023 - 2024

Deaths -885      896     909     1054    996     1003    1213    1259     1258    1268

It would take an enormous amount of careful research to pin down exactly what has happened here, but to me there are some fairly stark stand-outs: - there was not actually much of a pandemic here in Co Clare (see 2020), but there has been a surge of death in the wake of the vaccine roll-out, which has been sustained ever since. The fact that there is a widespread tendency to refuse to even consider such facts fails dismally to inspire confidence in the institutions that do so.

The whole covid affair has sparked a great deal of anxiety, along with the wars in Ukraine and Israel, the climate alarmism, the unpredictability of the American administration, and the unsatisfactory politics going on in Ireland and Europe etc etc. In short, if there was such a thing as a barometer of confidence, it would be very low at present!

Not alone money, as we have seen, but life itself depends on confidence. When this confidence loses its moorings,and we find ourselves tossed about on a stormy sea with no direction, all we can do is find other means of orientation. Such in fact is the human condition. Money in particular may be a good servant, but it is a very disappointing and unsatisfactory master, to put it mildly. The same may be said for any structure which bases itself on money, notably governments. When they are set up as ends in themselves, they become systems of idolatry, false gods. They say with Pontius Pilate, Truth, what is that? The question is raised ever more urgently, especially with the advent of AI.

     We are challenged to immerse ourselves in the quest for truth and thus the establishment of confidence more and more as we age, and if we do so, even as death draws nearer, this becomes the blessing of age. Relentlessly, we are pushed on toward finding faith in the one true God. The direct experience of the sea, including the genuine encounters with one's inner self and with other sea-farers which it involves, is a fine aid for this process. The sea has often been referred to as a mirror to our souls, notably by Charles Baudelaire. 'Homme libre, toujours tu chériras la mer! La mer est ton miroir...,'- but beware! It is dangerous, even while the authenticity of one's experience depends on exposure to this danger. It is tempting, though not a good idea, to defy this danger with a false confidence and with pride.

There is a reason why the first thing someone does, who wishes to establish that they have arrived as a billionaire, is to acquire a super-yacht. For that matter, if you happened to be a psychopathic monarch, acquiring a splendid flagship fits pretty well with acquiring a church! We need to eschew this tendency. For my part, I have found recent years fairly harrowing, but I have survived. I’m hoping to go to sea again in my eighties, with renewed purity of heart, and thus to pass on this plank of the heritage that came down to me!

The Mary Rose,- sunk under the King's nose in the Battle of the Solent, 1545.

 

                                            

No! Now!

 Rocks and shoals, gales and contrary winds, the whole business of staying alive at sea, not to mention just getting along with our ship-mates,- the multiple challenges to sea-farers, requiring an immediate response, actually mould our identity, our modus operandi; they inform our very sense of being alive. What’s more, the images they provide are so powerful that they permeate the language of anyone remotely connected to the sea. 

It’s all very fine living a (relatively) orderly and well-fed life, when one’s dinner sits obediently in front of one waiting to be eaten, but in the absence of those challenges life can feel flat and empty. Raising one’s eyes from the table, however, one may perceive that those images really do reflect wider realities,- but where then, when one is safe on land,  is the vessel that contains one’s life and must at all cost be maintained, demanding one’s care and attention? 

One’s family, perhaps? Yes, but when they have grown up and gone their separate ways? Rare indeed is the passionate solidarity of a crew fighting for survival. No doubt some actually go to war in search of it. An old geezer such as myself is supposed to sit by his fire and savor his past experiences, preparing himself for the eternal voyage, hoping that there ‘the sea it is calm and the dolphins do play’’, but I do not yet feel inclined to do so. I feel that the battle is at my door, though I also feel that it is all a bit too much for an old man. I would rather get back to struggling with the more familiar and immediate reality of the bloody old sea!

A spot of reverse imaging might be in order? What is that strange love/hate that one feels for the sea? Why does it summon one to engage with it? Is it simply a matter of proving oneself? I can imagine that those who set out on a single-handed round-the- world race are mainly conscious of such motivation, and indeed I’m all for proving to  myself my own resilience and competence, for 'being a man’, even an old one! Then it is good to savour that of other seafarers, and that of one’s vessel and the men who built her. But is this just a losing battle, a tale of never-ending ultimate defeat? 

As one extends one’s horizon, success assumes higher forms, as does one’s personal orientation to it,- but perhaps it is this very orientation that is the whole point. I still recall, over half a century after the event, the thrill of my first decent catch of herring. I hope that there is another, more enduring catch ahead of me, as indeed, in a minor key, there have been since. I find that there is an essential and enduring feature,- the conviction that God is good, infinitely merciful and generous, and He loves each of us personally.

This conviction, however, turns out to be the one thing that ‘children of the world’ cannot tolerate, especially once they get power and even may assume that theirs is the right to decide who is to get the good catches. Therefore, going to sea is a good antidote, along with anything that builds up one’s sense of personal autonomy. So when I find myself acutely distressed by the prospect of Ireland and the whole world falling prey to some digital tyranny, I think to myself that I had better get to sea again, and moreover as far as possible by means of technology that is within my grasp, that I can understand, and that cannot easily be shut down by some arbitrary act of control. 

That’s one reason why I am still hoping to find a way to install the famous electric drive. I don’t want to find myself in the situation of having to buy diesel again, with the Government slowly choking the supply, and very likely able to deny it to anyone they choose in a few years time. While there remains some bit of decency and respect for individuals and their rights in our world, we need to build it up every way we can. We need to tell those who would like to control us, whoever they may be, that we are not having it. Say NO, NOW, and get rid of potential pinch-points where they are likely to try to shut us down. It is great to reduce our dependency on money wherever we can, and let’s go sailing, and fishing, or at least go down with the flag flying. With that in mind, I am happy at present to be digging spuds or chopping logs!

Yet there is something else that I must add, at this particular moment. We have a special little opportunity to say NO in the forthcoming Irish presidential election,- NO to the Uniparty, the puppet government controlled from beyond our shores and no longer acting in response to the clearly expressed will of Irish people, who are slowly beginning to wake up. How can I say that? Because last year we voted down the Government’s attempt to redefine the family, based on the marriage of a man and a woman, into any group of people living together. At last the ‘progressive agenda’ ran into the buffers.

Prominent among the grass-roots movement that achieved this was one Mrs Maria Steen, who would have made an excellent candidate, but was successfully blocked by the Uniparty, along with some other interesting candidates. I fully support the Spoil the Vote campaign. I will add a few other reasons for taking every opportunity to say NO  to the Uniparty,- NO to top-down, command and control government, to the destruction of the traditional family and nation, to digital id and currency, to mandatory vaccines, to synthetic food and woke ideology in general. That will do for now, and SPOIL YOUR VOTE. I will do it by putting Maria Steen on my ballot.

Fishing with Paul Wright, 20 years ago, north of Cape St Vincent.

An Extraordinary Moment

 I am going to copy below a little piece which I have just written concerning the failure of Maria Steen to get on the ballot for the Irish presidential election. One may well ask what it has got to do with Sailing the Gannetsway and wouldn't it be better to leave politics out of it? Well, upstream of politics there are not alone physical realities, but spritual and religious ones as well! Dare I say that I was rather too far ahead of the posse in standing for the Christian Solidarity Party in a general election in 1997,- but there was something else that spoiled my campaign and has bedevilled efforts in this direction ever since, by which I mean disagreement about Irish membership of the EU. 

I am inclined to be as critical of the EU as anyone else,- it's just that my instinct is to work with those at home and abroad who wish to renew and reform it rather than to withdraw altogether - but I won't go into that now. The point is that in sailing the coasts from Scotland to the south of Spain, I seek to enjoy and to remind everyone of the ancient links that bind this heartland of Catholic Christianity, visceral spiritual links that seem to arise naturally from the splendid coasts, as indeed do the beautiful churches, cathedrals, calvaires and so on,- links that can actually be fostered by experiencing this wonderful environment and its cultures. There is no better or more authentic way to do it than under sail!

If real change is to be achieved, it will no doubt be in conjunction with others on the Continent and beyond. The same is true for 'the elephant' indicated below. Modern Ireland has a horrible habbit of waiting for others to lead the way. It is too bad that from what I hear, even such political discourse as is occurring on alternative media here about the presidential election continues to avoid this little matter,- but here is an occasion when we might make a useful little statement!

* * * * * 

The Irish political establishment was scared stiff of Maria Steen running for the presidency. There was hard evidence that she had a good chance of being elected, in the fact that she played a leading role in the rejection of their family law referendum. Now we are clearly under the communist and autocratic playbook, where you can only vote for candidates approved of by the Party.

I like to think, though I have no evidence to this effect, that Mrs Steen just might have been instrumental in bringing about some real transparency and accountability with regard to the whole covid fiasco. I’m sure the remotest possibility of this alone would have been sufficient to cause the establishment to make every effort to block her. This however is the famous elephant in the room, that has the credibility of our entire polis undermined. It should have been the starting point of every election since. They will have  to make more and more extreme efforts to suppress the truth, as the evidence, the death and injury pile up. Until it is seriously addressed, we are in mortal danger of falling into outright tyranny, with digital ids etc slouching along to meet us into the bargain. 

Our pols are meanwhile very keen on virtue signalling about the dire ills in a distant location which they know virtually nothing about and where they have no skin in the game, in Palestine. It’s a great distraction and some evidently reckon it makes them look good, standing up for poor mistreated underdogs like Hamas. In Ukraine, some even make Putin out to be a victim, provoked and betrayed by NATO,- at any rate they are equivocal about him. They don't care about, for instance, the continuing stream of ships leaving Aughinish here on the Shannon Estuary, laden with alumina for the Russians to make drones out of. I tried the political route to object a couple of years ago. A waste of time of course! 

Democracy  may be a nice idea, but when it gets in the way of making money…. Where would Ireland be today without, for another instance, the pharmaceutical industry? Covid was a master-stroke, in that it not alone made a heap of money for those behind Big Pharma, but heavily indebted us to the money-masters (probably the same crowd) who are now calling the shots. How long does it take to reduce any starry-eyed politician to compliance? A few tugs on the purse strings! It is because of Jesus’ example that some of us cherish the notion that genuine Christian faith may offer some hope of resistance,- there is that disquieting minority through the ages who actually chose God ahead of Mammon, following the truth within rather than tyrants without!

There is a very serious discontent building up within Ireland among  those of us who disapprove of the path we have been dragged down for this last twenty years or more. Now there is a very simple and non-violent course of action open to all of us. Simply write Maria Steen on the ballot at the presidential election! Even if you disagree with her on some points, and after all our president does not have much power, it will be a vote for real democracy, for justice and for truth, and if enough of us do it, it will send a message that, one might imagine, will be hard to simply ignore, even for that lot! After all that referendum last year did get rid of Leo Varadkar, though the incumbents are no better. We must keep trying to  build an alternative. 

Improbable Journeys

Here we go into another winter without the Anna M setting sail from Nazaré. I have been working there for the past six weeks of beautiful weather and I have to admit it's a very pleasant place to be, particularly with neighbours like Ian, Maria and Kevin. (see photo) That's the Anna M's bow in the top left corner. Ian's boat is on the right, which he built himself. He has a fund of knowledge of things that are of great interest to me, such as electric drives and Dyneema rigging.

    Ian hails from South Africa and calls himself an African. I see what he means and I love it! There is an open atmosphere about him of journeying, grazing and camping as he goes, at home everywhere and nowhere. As Progress overtakes the likes of Portugal, the places where you can live like this are getting scarce in Europe, but some of us will always seek them out. Even if we do manage to keep a footing in the property-owning, settled side of life, it does us such a lot of good to meet the folk who are out journeying. Migraturus Habita, 'live as one about to migrate', as my dear friend Ken carved on our fireplace back in Somerset a long time ago. We have after all no lasting home on Earth. I put the sentiment to Fiona these days by saying, ''Home is a good base camp, but not a great destination'.

    Sometimes though we do have to stand our ground. Life is full of such contradictions, and they can be creative. A lady from Estonia, with the somewhat incongruous name of Victoria (the Queen of that name certainly stood for standing one's ground, as well as on many other people's), showed up to go sailing with Kevin, who is on the right in the photo above. I asked her what it was like living so close to Russia. She said it's like living with a drunken big brother who is always annoying you. Sounds about right to me. Then we have dear Anatole from Siberia, who simply says of Russia that it is a mafia state. Yes, it's high time that we in the West got our act together and firmly laid it out that their behaviour is not acceptable.

   Kevin, who has sailed over from Massachusetts, says that the military in America are gearing up for war with Russia and China. Fighting them is of course to be avoided. The trouble is that autocracies thrive on war. It really should be possible to bring them to order without resorting to that,- especially if we got our own house in order! I say we should beware of running into war as an escape from our own problems. If the West were united and at peace with itself, we could handle the big international problems much better. Meanwhile, there's hope so long as we can keep doing things like sailing.

    Anyway Kevin and Victoria are now, against all sense of ease and comfort, heading north, and aiming to get to Kilrush for the winter. Some of his great-grandparents came from County Clare. I've told him we could still get a lovely Indian summer here, and I do hope it turns out to be true, and that he gets a good passage across Biscay.

    No sign of it as Ger and I came home on Brittany Ferries' Salamanca, although she was not particularly bothered by the westerly gale. Still I think they are a tad over-confident in their stabilisers, in not putting any little lips on any tables. I suppose they save a fair sum, but do they factor in the cost of broken dishes and the cost of clearing up the mess when trays go flying? Even the Salamanca gave the odd bad lurch, but anyway she was only half an hour late in arriving at Rosslare. Now, a week later, the weather in Ireland is looking up.

    Once I gave up the idea of getting Anna M afloat this autumn, the idea of an electric drive got a reprieve for now. When it came to the point, I hated the idea of putting the old diesel engine back in, and I decided to see if by some miracle our bright ideas can be revived in the course of the winter. Though there are still plenty of outstanding jobs, the Anna M is now a liveable-in boat again. At five minutes to midnight, maybe it will be possible to salvage our Gannetswaysailing project. Alec, for one, is a severe case of last-minuteitis!

    As I was leaving the Basque country, our Cristíona was arriving to tramp the Camino de Santiago. It is in the very same spirit that I hope to sail the Gannetsway again, celebrating hundreds of years of following Jesus in this part of the world, who calls us to abandon all notions of improbability,- as did those Celtic saints of old, who frequently come to my mind, as they plied the Gannetsway in their little leather boats!

On the Camino by Cristíona.

It's a great life if you can take it!

Ger enjoying the passage out with Brittany Ferries.

    The August post is overdue, because I have been down in Nazaré working on the Anna M, and much perplexed into the bargain. At this stage, I will just say that I have had to abandon the electric drive idea for now, and am going to put my old diesel engine back in. I will do it however in a way that will allow for a hybrid set-up if and when I eventually manage to get it together. Probably this would be ideal anyway, with the electric motor turning into a generator when the diesel has to be engaged.

    Meanwhile Ger and I have been working away with all those time-consuming footery jobs that one can be tempted to leave 'till one gets round to it'. Not a good idea, for frustrating as it may be to be stuck on the land, there will surely never be a better opportunity to get them done. After all, Ger and I have a great little way of going on here. The weather has been ideal, except when it gets too hot in the early afternoon. There is often a little misty cloud cover and a cool breeze off the sea.

winter heat!

With Tole

    Ger has been patiently laying on coats of Tonkinois varnish, and with every coat the brightwork looks better. With Anatole, our Russian friend whom we call Toley, I have constructed a wind shield, hand rails and a water collector on the coach-roof, and also at long last I have got the stove functioning, with a chimney. Preliminary test with a few sticks and a couple of fir cones was very satisfactory,- it will take little more than that to warm this little home. But it is amazing how long one can spend on such jobs, even on fixing a catch for a press door!

    This weekend, with the feast of the Assumption on Friday, the boatyard has been very quiet, but even at its busiest one couldn't call it hectic. It is very hard to get anything done,- whatever effort was made before covid seems to have largely collapsed for now. John the Baptist's warning that 'The axe is laid to the root of the trees' has never seemed truer. The whole forest is creaking and it sometimes seems that the best one can do is get out of the way of falling trees. This however was not Jesus' way.

    On Maundy Thursday, when he instituted the Eucharist, he was walking right into the heart of trouble, and he knew it. He was setting about turning things round, and had a way of doing so that only God could dream up. Yet I'm reminded again of Zorba the Greek and his saying 'Life is trouble, only death is not. To live is to undo your belt and look for trouble!' Well any owner of an old wooden boat is not short of trouble, but it is this very trouble that brings him into relationship with all kinds of people and challenging, interesting problems.

    I meet Catholics, both in the flesh and online, very often who grew up in the '70s and '80s, who look back to the pre-Vatican II church with nostalgia. Well, I understand them only too well, having enjoyed lots of Gregorian chant and fine liturgy in my pre-reform youth. Introibo ad altare Dei (I will go into the altar of God), from Psalm 43, the priest intoned at the beginning of Mass, clearly implying going apart into a sanctuary, a holy place set apart from the world. The likes of me serving him would reply Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutum meum (To God who brings joy to my youth),- where did they get that typical bland and debased translation 'to God, the giver of youth and happiness' from? The original is so much more personal and meaningful. Each monk would say his own individual Mass at the crack of dawn, so we boys in the school at Worth used to take our turn to serve them. On the whole, I loved it!

    Vatican II did away with all that. What were the monks doing anyway, each saying their own individual Mass at some little side altar? Did they not know that the Mass is supposed to reinact the Last Supper? With Christ we are called to lay aside our individual ego, to be broken as grains of wheat to make bread and grapes to make wine? We encounter Him not by going apart, but in our brothers and sisters don't we? Well the way I see it, the over-emphasis on the vertical dimension of the Cross, and an individual's relationship with God, gave way to an over-emphasis on the horizontal, finding our way to Jesus through others. It seems we humans are prone to oscillation from one extreme to the other. Perhaps at this stage we might give up such futile reactions and find balance! Personally, I feel a strong need to 'go apart' sometimes, and that the world very much needs people to do so!

    Here in the Santuario they have a pretty good balance. There are few hymns, but the choir is in action all along, leading the congregation in the various parts of the Mass, which they also join in with. Personally I would go a bit further, being all for Gregorian chant, and I have asked a son-in-law to make sure that the Gregorian Credo III is sung at my funeral. Meanwhile at home in Ireland we are lucky if any half-baked version of the Creed is even said at Sunday Mass. The communion is dished out as one old lady friend puts it 'like smarties'. Could the ministers of the Eucharist not don a stole and get some dignity into the proceeding? And yet, I still feel the receiving on the hand is indicative of a certain coming of age of the lay faithful. It's a painful business, as coming of age always is!

    Those who look back pre-Vatican II as to some Golden Age do not realise how claustrophobic and musty it sometimes became in that old Tridentine fortress church. The windows had to be opened, as Pope John XXIII put it. Catholics tended to be caught between two worlds that barely met, and there was much neurosis about this situation. I would no more want to go back to it than to become a cranky and embittered old man, complaining about his children and 'the times' in general. We have to get out there, look for trouble, go down fighting,- and after all, it turns out to be a great life if only we let the Lord lead us!

With the lovely pink stone of the Santuario, where Vasco da Gama came to pray before his voyage.
Photo courtesy of Ger Kavanagh.