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!