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.