The Rock We Stand On.

 

Sherkin Mass Rock

One may read frequently these days about the English public schools and how dreadful they are, including from many who reckon they were 'scarred for life' by being hustled off to some preparatory boarding school at a tender age. The Catholic ones come in for a slagging no less that the others, but I have to say that my experience at Benedictine boarding schools, from the age of 9 to 18, was on balance very positive, while I am sad that it proved to be but a privileged moment in time. In particular, I am grateful for having been given the tools to think critically, and challenged to think about the fundamental questions like 'what is truth?' and 'what is life for?' It was the radical commitment of some of the monks that above all constituted the challenge, not merely the ideas they taught. Where are the alternatives to mass education now?

     'You were well indoctrinated!' I was once informed by a Protestant clergyman. Such a charge is not easy to refute; I tried to explain why I thought that he needed to straighten out in his mind the difference between teaching and indoctrination. Was he never the beneficiary of teaching? Did he perhaps invent whatever ideas and opinions he professes out of thin air? Or did he absorb them uncritically from wherever? The encounter with another mind is essential to jog our own into authentic action!

     A good teacher does not impose his ideas on his pupils. He will respect the fact that each individual must arrive at truth in his own way. It is however essential that the teacher be convincing in the expression of his own convictions, otherwise he gives the impression that there are no grounds for conviction at all, no such thing as truth whatsoever in fact. The various views expressed in literature, as in life, are not represented in this case as possible pointers, if they are genuine, each presenting a different bearing on the truth, which can mean nothing however if it is not ultimately indivisible. Otherwise one is left with the canard of 'your truth and my truth'; at Cambridge I got the impression that it didn't matter much what one did or did not believe, so long as one did not really believe it, which leads to a highly corrosive state of mind. 'Religious studies' not rooted in a solid tradition are a nonsense.

     From my grandmother's knee, even in the 1950s, I imbibed the impression that our civilisation was slipping into irremediable decadence precisely because it was losing any sense of a shared conviction that, however difficult, it was nonetheless possible to access truth, indeed that there was any such thing as truth at all, and that it is the bedrock of civilisation. Being half German, she was no doubt particularly shaken by recent experience in that nation, which she in a lonely way continued to love and admire, even while it had so radically lost its footing in what was true and what was not. Neither however did she buy into the notion that the democracies necessariy represented all truth and light. Today this is much more obvious. But it was to the other Catholic side of the family that I had to turn for a convincing 'language of truth', which the Benedictines tried to build upon.

      Some of them naturally were more convincing than others. There was always that tension between the need to obtain good exam results and real education, which seems to have proved impossible to ultimately maintain at Downside. 'It is in the depths of minds that literature exists', wrote Joseph Joubert. It is in the study of literature perhaps that the conflict can become most acute; at least that is where I encountered it, but no doubt it can be equally so for real scientists. The depths of the mind actually need to be concreted over so that the trucks of commerce can run over its surface. This is how we have ended up with so many people who actually have no notion of truth whatsoever, and we even find ourselves apparently incapable of taking in and acting effectively on such truths as that our set-up is not sustainable and a radically new approach to life is urgently necessary, no matter how clearly they are spelt out for us.

      Where to begin? Solutions can only come by way of the human imagination. It is a steep and narrow way, but the wide and easy one has to be rejected. We have to start by breaking up that concrete, paying attention to nature and the depths of our minds. We are likely to find ourselves in a deserted wilderness, or to put it another way, at sea; hence the fact that a bloggeer who set off comfortably sailing from Baltimore can find his way without inconsistancy to these distant shores, whereon he now finds himself an intellectual stranger!

      While our imaginations must come up with answers, they will not come out of nowhere, nor should we set about ignoring science. Tired as I am of hearing mass vaccination being preached in the name of 'science', and Israel being held up as a good example of its benefits, I have a juicy anecdote from a niece who lives there. She is a student nurse, but just like everyone else, she was virtually compelled to take the vaccination. When she reported uncomfortable side effects lasting a month, she was told to forget it, it could have nothing to do with the vaccination, and no records were being kept of reported side-effects anyway. How's that for 'scientific method' in the application of a brand new therapy?!

     Simple questions remain unanswered. What are the reasons why covid passes so many by lightly, while it kills others? Why not put the emphasis on understanding and enhancing our immune systems rather that usurping their function, undermining them? What resources are being put into researching such possibilities? Oh silly, of course one could not patent them, and it is precisely the possibility of making everyone depend on something that one can patent that makes the monster capitalists salivate! Where does this path of depending on big Pharma (or Monsanto) to keep us alive end? Is it actually practical in the long run? If the vaccines are so safe, why are their manufacturers not required to take responsibility when they go wrong? Why are effective steps not taken to track side-effects? 13 people died in a Bantry nursing home within 10 days of being vaccinated. Why were there no post-mortems nor efforts to determine the cause of death? Why are there plans to vaccinate children? 

     Are there signs that our society is losing the ability to sustain criticism, let alone pay attention to it? Would we happen to be deep into the prioritisation of technology and 'scientific' experimentation, not to mention the commercial interests, over elementary human rights? Are we not treating our bodies in precisely the same way that we have been treating the rest of nature in this technological age, with the disastrous results that are only now beginning to be widely recognised after so many years of being known to science?

     What Irish government would want to fall out with Big Pharma, when it earns it so much tax, or for that matter, how many doctors' conscience would rise to forgoing that handy €60 a shot and falling out with the establishment? The Nazis and the Communists exploited such weaknesses to catastrophic extremes, but the insidious  alliance of high technology and market capitalism makes me particularly nervous, although I am not living in fear of the bang on the door, thank God, yet! Are we not however in danger of travel bans and what not?  More than ever, my mind goes back to those who tried to stand up to the 20th century totalitarians. Things may be more subtle these days, but who, I ask, is being indoctrinated now, and who is really thinking for themselves? 

     

The Alternative to Vaccination

Day after day, the miseries of the pandemic are paraded at the top of the news. Funny we hardly hear of many other plagues actually killing more people, wars, pollution, other diseases and starvation! Meanwhile the massive propaganda blitz in favour of vaccination presents it as the only game in town, as if it alone is capable of delivering us from all the miseries of the pandemic, while people questioning this are represented as purveyors of doom and gloom. Actually answering their questions or attending to the points they raise hardly features,- they are generally merely dismissed as cranks, conspiracy theorists, etc. Anyone would think that the world has not seen plenty of plagues in the past, albeit sometimes with horrendous loss of life, but we got through them! Since I have looked out in vain for an exposition in plain terms of a positive alternative to mass vaccination, I shall just have to attempt it myself. But how might I think I am in a position to do so?

     I have prided myself in recent years of being one of those elderly people 'qui osent, enfin, être eux-mêmes', though I would also like to think the effort to 'be myself' goes back a lot further, especially since I wrote across the top of my answer in a tripos exam, in 1967, that 'expecting me to write four essays worth writing in three hours is absurd - I will give you one good one'. The esssay I did write was about Baudelaire, and I'm sure he was proud of me. Meanwhile I shared digs with a medical student, who thought that the only realities one could be sure of were bio-chemical ones. I thought that if our lives were going to be run by such people, God help us, though I doubted if Baudelaire provided quite the best alternative. Anyway the fact is that while I am not an expert about anything, I have been thoughtfully present to this world for a good while, and I have no need to look over my shoulder at anyone telling me what to think! What is more, I am at bottom hopeful.

One thing that I have realised over the years is that everything is interconnected, and on the subject of hope, I would point out that we are faced with multiple much more serious threats than the pandemic. The pandemic is a mere squall before the coming storm; it might be described as a little challenge to limber us up somewhat,- to get us used to the idea that the normal notions of Enlightenment and the March of Science have had it, and what's more the entire human race is in one big dire mess together. Curiously enough, we may find that the very things that will sort out this pandemic connumdrum may also be what we need to do to prepare for that storm, so clearly delineated by David Attenborough in A Life on Our Planet!

First move must be to batten down the hatches and take in sail, quickly. An end to speeding about! Less flying, less motoring, less crazes and crowds! We must quieten down, be more thoughtful and indeed contemplative, though certainly not just putting our heads back under the duvet; we must look after one another, while also attending to our own health and food, where it comes from, how it is produced; we need to test our resilience and see to the things we rely on, which so often we have merely taken for granted,- to keep our heads up as long as we possibly can, while being mindful of the ground on which we stand, appreciating nature and the wilderness and comprehending the extremely dire damage which we are inflicting on it. Everything that is normally good for our own and nature's health, and so often gets ignored, will increase our resistance and resilience; but we have to decide, once and for all, whether or not we want to face reality, indeed, whether we really want to live at all.

This is not possible on the basis that we are merely the product of blind bio-chemical processes. Are we not called to anything more than keeping as cosy and secure as possible, to mere survival for a short while before the curtain comes down on a miserable farce of an existence? Is squeezing the very last drop out of our orange the supreme value? But even if we cannot get our heads around the idea that we are creatures of a loving God, indeed the very apple of his eye, and that he loves us and wants us to thrive, surely it should be possible to acknowledge that the human immune system, along with all of nature, is a most amazing phenomenon, worthy of our greatest respect, indeed reverence, mostly way beyond our understanding as it still is? Certainly we should seek to understand it better, but no doubt every answer we get will raise greater questions. Meanwhile a wise man will certainly not think, as Boris Johnson said recently in a unguarded moment*, that greed is a sound motivation for intervention, nor indeed that a clever new technological fix can do better than our immune system, or even foster it better than nature, enhanced as may well be with methods produced carefully and disinterestedly over time. Actually any really good fisherman could tell him that there is no luck in greed!

Let it be noted that I am not claiming that technology is necessarily destructive and idolatrous. Like capitalism, it is a good servant but a bad master, and we too need to see see ourselves as servants of the Supreme Good. If we confide our undertakings to God, he will indeed lead us into the fullness of truth and empower us to complete his creation. No doubt many medical practitioners of all kinds aspire to work in this spirit, but few express it as well as did the father of modern homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann, who is said to have had a notice on his desk stating 'I treat, God heals.'

Homeopathy today continues to attract the scorn and indeed opprobrium of the medical establishment, and one has to ask why? They claim it is a dangerous fraud, which anyway does not work, for the simple reason that it does not work according to their way of thinking. One can only reply that as a matter of definite experience it does work, but in a subtle way more in the nature of a work of art or indeed a sacrament. As a matter of fact the Eucharist, as understood by Catholics, provides a good approach to the understanding of homeopathy. If you put brain cells under a microscope, of course you do not find ideas, memories or thoughts, any more that you can find feelings, emotions or love by looking at a heart, or the body of Christ by inspecting a consecrated host. They are nonetheless really present, just as Catholics down the centuries insist that the Blessed Sacrament 'works'. The attempt to 'go straight to God' started out by denying this; away with papist or any other paraphenalia! But it is not given to us to comprehend reality directly, head on; it would probably destroy us if we did; we must work obliquely, as it were, and mainly content ourselves with images and symbols, while remembering that effective ones do actually embody what they represent....

We do not understand properly why homeopathy works, though it may be that quantum physics will prove enlightening. Meanwhile we see that it does work, and since it also works on animals and babies, don't go down the rabbit hole of placebo effects. Certainly, there is a chicken and egg dimension to it all, and Christ could not perform his miracles where there was no faith.,- but faith is not necessarily blind, rather it is a matter of looking at things differently. It by no means excludes reason, any more than love itself does; there is just a lot about it which is beyond reason. If one cannot accept that, one has to say goodbye to love, beauty, and as it turns out, health and life itself.

So having thus attempted to clear the ground, as it were, allow me to report that covid 19 has proved quite amenable to homeopathic treatment, and indeed there are prophylactics that appear to be as successful as any vaccine in preventing it. There are also other holistic treatments, ones that do not consist of arrogantly brushing aside our immune system, but rather of seeing what we can do, respectfully, to enhance it. Zinc, vitamin D supplements, among other things, have their place in overcoming the deficiencies of our own particular constitution and life-style. Collectively alternative therapies do however have the 'disadvantage' of threatening the interests of a multi-billion dollar industry, with very many interests vested in it.

It's not that I would necessarily rule out the use of vaccines, in the fire-fighting mode that allopathic medicine excels at. I do however much doubt if they constitute a viable mass method of moving beyond the pandemic, and Fiona and I agree that they do not offer either of us a desirable way out individually. People are not all identical bio-chemical machines, and the road to healthy living is different for each of us. We all have our problems, and we must also remember that none of us will get out of this world alive. What is important is living in a vibrant way; while we all should try to live our lives to the utmost, prolonging physical life in a fearful, zombie fashion when our vital force is spent and especially when our every move is commanded by a controlling Government, does not avail! Meanwhile, who would buy a new car from a manufacturer who does not stand over it, one that is likely to be obsolete by the end of the year?

Does a future beckon in which we must be taking shots for every disease and variant that comes along, while not alone depending on governments to pay for them, but also to pick up the tab for casualties? The Irish Government is already paying out millions in compensation for victims of the swine flu vaccine. What sort of a bill is coming down the tracks for covid ones, while we have to take more and more of them? But the homeopathic approach trains and strengthens our natural immunity; they say it is like training a horse to jump higher and higher fences, and will tell you how sickly children thrive better after overcoming a disease like measles, which our mothers used to send us around to the neighbours in order to catch and get over with, while we were young.

We have come a long way from 'sailing the Gannetsway', and with my poor old boat laid up and gasping for life in Portugal, I sometimes wonder why I keep on with the blogs. Yet they keep presenting themselves to my mind, generally in the early hours of the morning, and I know of no better paradigm for the voyage all of us must make on the seas of life, nor particular context more interesting to me than this west coast of Europe, nor opportunity to bring vibrancy and interest into my own life, nor any more likely place in which to keep the flags of joy and freedom flying.

I hope the blog will soar better than this old steamer called 'Gannet', which can't have been very gannet-like when my father as a student sailed on her from Hamburg to England on the 2nd August, 1932. I think it must have been much more fun that flying is today, or even going on a liner, but as my brother-in-law Anthony points out, who dug the photo off the internet, that was two days after the Nazis became the largest party in the Reichstag. My father's aunt had said to him 'This means war, Bernard. All they think about is war.' I wonder if he thought of the Gannet when, after long and difficult years when civilisation seemed to be dying, he and I sailed west from Rye in the Scoter, a 27' sailing boat, and our hearts soared with the first gannets which we met off the Dorset coast. I never saw them east of the Isle of Wight, where I suppose the water is too opaque for them, and presumably the southern North Sea is the same. Still, I expect that other voyage similarly felt like an escape!

As an 'anti-vaxer' one feels rather as a pacifist must have done in Germany in the 1930s, but as surely as we most urgently need to find an alternative to war as a way of coping with the difficulties of life, so we need to stop thinking about this pandemic as a war, with vaccines as our weapons. I do not underestimate its miseries, but this pandemic in itself is a less drastic challenge than that other one, and furthermore we need to see it as a potentially creative opportunity.

The good news is that I shall hopefully be back to confronting more immediate obstacles than the likes of the pandemic and Brexit soon, though they will still be there, and not in any abstract sense either. I am planning a trip to Nazaré next month....

*https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/mar/23/greed-and-capitalism-behind-jab-success-boris-johnson-tells-mps

Easter Proclamations, Old and New.

 Christ is risen! What can the original Easter proclamation possibly and practically mean to us, here in this tortured world? Could it possibly be an adequate response to all the suffering in the world?  What do I know about torture, you may ask, any more than of the historic sufferings of Ireland? Here the 1916 affair, that our President and Taoseach are busy commemorating, comes in. After all this Easter Sunday has been a most beautiful day here on Sherkin, where we are privileged to go about our lives in peace, tending our gardens in tranquility as life breaks out on all sides so exuberantly in this season so full of wonders. 

     So have we the right to proclaim the overthrow of  grief? No, but our proclamation is not in our own names, rather in that of Christ crucified and risen. Of all the human beings who have existed, he would seem to be the only one who might be said to have earned such a right. He alone meets our deepest needs, those of our hearts and minds, our imaginations and conscience, our individual and social existence; all that he said and did was just right, and so we believe in him and proclaim his death and resurrection. 

     There remains the trifling business of working out what this actually means, here and now! I say flippantly 'trifling' because perhaps in a sense this is possibly a lot less important than we like to think, while if we try to proclaim salvation in our own names, we not alone become obnoxious, but absurd. We are here today and gone tomorrow. Nonetheless, to each of us falls the responsibility of passing on The Proclamation, and if indeed it is what it claims to be, there cannot be any greater responsibility. 

      It may be claimed that the affair of 1916 was a genuine working out of what it might mean for us in practice. 'In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland,... In every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty; six times during the past three hundred years they have asserted it in arms.' Nowadays however, we look around the world and see the grim results of 'nations asserting themselves in arms'. We reflect that even here in Ireland the results were not exactly good, while it was not ultimately violence that achieved a partial national independence, but moral force. It was very hard, though it was tried, for Britain to continue to suppress it, having just allegedly fought the Great War to 'vindicate the rights of small nations'! Nowadays it is authoritively maintained that the taking up of arms 'in the name of God' is a contradiction in terms.

      We Catholics like to think that we meet our responsibility to the Easter proclamation by getting along to Mass of a Sunday, albeit along with the kind of example we set for the rest of the week; but this needs the Sunday effort both to give it point and sustenance. Now we are suddenly told we may not do it. We are told how lucky we are to be able to watch it on the internet, but of course it is not a mere matter of private consumption; it is a public proclamation. So how do we work this out? Are we not in a strange position, now that the Irish state, heir to the 1916 effort but alone among the nations of Western Europe, finds itself suppressing our Proclamation, our Sunday Mass?

      It will be said that this is different, merely a temporary expedient for the common good.  But havn't we heard this before? Must we keep reminding our Government that in the famous text, its claim to authority rests on 'the name of God'? Without that grounding, it will not stand, while the Church has shown that she is well able to exercise the constitutional right to worship with due care and responsibility,- of course she is, and more so than the State, which is heading down a road that is likely to alienate many hearts and minds, while losing real sovereignty to that web of powerful interests which is none the less real for all the difficulties of putting a name on it without descending into the realm of conspiracy theories!

     Some kind of a start was made (in finding a name for it) by President Eisenhower when he coined the term 'the military-industrial complex', to which he feared that Americans themelves might lose their sovereignty. Perhaps a much older term. 'the gates of Sheol', comes nearer to the mark! Anyway today we must at least acknowledge that we need a wider frame of reference than Ike's; consider how the current Government in London hands out lucrative contracts to their friends in connection with the pandemic, or that, according to the Guardian, 'Barclays analyst Carter Gould is predicting sales of $21.5bn in 2021' for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, while the Bio/NTech founders 'became multibillionaires last year, when the potential of the vaccine and the deal with Pfizer prompted the shares to surge.' Meanwhile 'the Serum Institute boss Adar Poonawalla has rented a Mayfair mansion for £50,000 a week'. Indeed there is obviously some serious wheeling and dealing going on! 

     So do we have to speak of the 'military-medical-industrial complex', not to mention other aspects of 'big tech'? How about pesticides? We have been told that they are essential for us to be able to feed the population. How do you fancy our chances, living in a world with no insects, butterflies, birds? After all, even the atom bomb was thought to do good at the time, putting a stop to that nasty war with the Japanese, and still a majority in Britain and America seem to approve. What chance of humanity's survival in a world depending on far bigger bombs for security? But is it remotely fair to associate vaccines with pesticides and bombs?

     As a matter of fact, I would not absolutely rule out their  use in strictly limited and emergency circumstances, which would also be my own attitude to guns and vaccines alike, - but it would be with extreme regret, and as a matter of policy to be strenuously avoided. Is vaccination to become a permanent feature of our lives, along with all the other horrors of the modern world? Meanwhile what you do not use, you lose, and our own immune system is surely no exception.

      As a gardener, let me take the less extreme example of pesticides. In order to avoid their use, one has to look for the flaws in one's set-up, to think organically of soil and plant health and avoid monoculture and over-crowding; remember beauty too, keep flowers and variety in there! Actually Nature is on our side; yes, it comes from God and he loves us, the Almighty One wants us to be healthy; he also wants us to learn how to overcome sickness, put aside greed, embrace justice. He wants all his children to have access to the land, to his gifts for us all. He would surely much prefer us to appreciate and cherish his gifts, in our own experience, than to depend on governments and remote agri-business for our food, or Big Pharma for our health! So might we learn wisdom, how to work with Nature rather than fighting it,- to be a lot healthier, while understanding at last, with all our faculties, and thus proclaiming that Christ is truly risen, Alleluia, Alleluia! 

Back to the Mass Rock?

      

'Woke'

      It's over a year ago now when, visiting our Cristíona in London, she announced that 'Daddy is woke'. I hadn't a clue what she meant, but it was not said unkindly,- I think I earned the sobriquet partly for my attitude to climate change, also for making some remark about black people having had a rather hard time, in defence of some Black Lives Matter denigration of colonial era statues and so on. 

     On the other hand, I got into fierce trouble for remarking to someone else that it was a bit of shock to find the streets where my Grandma once lived in south London chock full of 'darkies',-  and despite the fact that I was taking the mickey, immitating certain people - trying to be humorous on such a subject is evidently dodgy these days! Anyway I couldn't help being reminded of the time I got off the bus in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in an area where there was no other white person to be seen, and a big friendly man said 'Don't be here by yourself after dark, man!' I was looking up a priest from County Clare at that time who was running a busy parish, alone, in his seventies, having retired from running a school. He walked me back to the bus, being constantly greeted and often stopping to chat. Across the Gulf of Paria in Venezuela, I found in the eyes of local Indians a desperate spiritual hunger, especially in a mother struggling to get her child baptised because the Church has such a scant presence in those parts. 

     Then there was a hero of my youth, Dom Michael Smith, who when the mission he was on in Peru was closed down on account of the Shining Path insurgents, instead of retreating to Lima, headed off into the jungle with his knapsack and spent years travelling about bringing the sacraments to the Indians. Missionaries are often disparaged in 'enlightened' circles, as flag-bearers of colonialism, but sorting out the heritage of empires is not straightforward, any more than that of the scientific and technological revolutions which stemmed from them, and which by and large the whole world is all too eager to embrace.

    Until machinery seriously began to alleviate the heavy lifting of life, slavery was taken for granted in most civilisations; most people in a position to avail of it did so, whatever their race. Our modern civilisation has swept the globe, and even as it risks making it uninhabitable, there is little credibility attached to opting completely out anywhere, nor appetite for doing without its benefits, despite the fact that it was built on the backs of mostly black-skinned enslaved people. This was a vicious business, though kept out of mind when possible, but left its scars on everyone, particularly those who carry the memories of it in their heritage, and still frequently find themselves at a distinct disadvantage; but such scars also remain in the very structure of our societies and cultures; it is not after all just black people who were and still are exploited, and of course the slave driver was brutalised as well as the slave!

     Now however we find a veritable industry being made out of constructing narratives of victim-hood. It may be as well not to mention any names, but this is where the 'woke' business does become objectionable, especially when the 'victims' are parading wealth and privilege for all it's worth. Meanwhile, we do well to consider those scars, search those old wounds, rather than continuing to ignore them with the rationale of 'not opening old wounds'. Still we might be better off doing so quietly rather than on the biggest stage that we can reach, which is hardly conducive to any real attention to truth. There it is more than likely to become a big distraction from the serious work that needs to be done.

     The rush to 'speak one's truth' is as ever problematic. Anyone who kicks up about anything, let alone an oppressive system, is going to get into trouble, and the suppression starts early. What child has not been told to 'shut up', 'wrap up', 'dry up', 'put a sock in it' etc? The fact that we have so many ways of saying the same thing is surely significant. When was this ever appropriate, or on the other hand, when was 'oh darling, what's the matter?' the appropriate response? No doubt we need both, and maybe needing both a Daddy and a Mummy comes in here, which comment will earn me a another ticking off in some circles. Soon we will not be allowed to refer to Mummies and Daddies at all, the way things are going! The fact remains, coming to grips with the past starts in our own psyche, whatever our skin tone.

      Meanwhile to thine own self be true' stands, unless we give up on the whole idea of seeking truth and justice. Actually it seems that the Bard did not attach much psychological baggage to this famous injunction, it being tossed off by the mouth of silly old Polonius as he lectured his son. Polonius didn't follow it through anyway, ending up being run through by Hamlet's rapier as he hid behind a curtain spying for the King. But it comes just after 'neither a borrower nor a lender be',*  to which today we might be even more inclined to respond with Good luck with that! The kind of ontological angst we go in for today does not seem to have troubled previous generations to the same extent; even if they feared going to Hell, they tended to take the existence of their own soul for granted, along with that of God. In this matter of being true to oneself, Shakespeare seems to have been referring to the relatively simple matter of living within one's means and not trying to be what one is not,- just about the polar opposite of what our modern societies are mostly up to, one might add.

     If one did happen to be so fortunate as to live in a society  which lived within its means, ecological as well as economic, chances are it would present less of a threat to others,- would not be trying to make them pick up the slack, or indulge in flights of chronic imperial nostalgia, blowing billions on warships and silly adventures to the Far East while cutting aid to the starving and failing to run one's own society justly, concentrating instead on working constructively with one's neighbours. This would be the way to convince others that one is serious about finally leaving colonialism behind, while building up credibilty and respect, and the means to make helpful contributions to the world. One might finally discover how to live happily in one's own country and with one's own neighbours.

     One would likely also find in a sane society that, though undoubtedly there would still rich and poor, they would still be 'on the same planet', able to understand and respect each other; there would not however be a lot of claptrap about 'equality of opportunity'. Opportunity for what? Getting 'a foot on the ladder', and achieving the opposite effect of what is allegedly intended by very effectively segregating people into those who proceed to 'get a good job' and those who do not, each to their own miseries! Anyway there would be no shame attached to working with one's hands, indeed we might consider 'a real gentleman' not as someone who never got his hands dirty, but one who achieved a balance in his life between manual and intellectual work, and did his share of his own physical labour. Surely his intellectual work would be all the better for it! Then again slavery will only be definitely consigned to history when we do not have to sell ourselves, dedicating ourselves to that authentic vocation which only the mysterious relationship between the self and God can evoke, and which uniquely gives sense to ideas of being 'true to oneself' and free,- dare I say, really and truly woke.                                                     

Sunset over Horseshoe Cottage

*Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 3.

What Kind of a Stage is This?

 

'All the world's a stage....'

     I have to admit that this lockdown is rather suiting me, in a way. To be stuck here at home means I am more immersed in this place than ever,- now that the weather is picking up, I live in an extraordinary dialogue between the house and garden on one hand, and the sea on the other. In our faces the whole time, this sea is like a mirror held up to the soul, within us and beyond us, reflecting, beyond the grey ennui that sometimes engulfs it, now the turmoil and confusion, now the sublime beauty and serenity that together inseparably inhabit it. 

      Over there are the soaring seagulls and gannets, giving piquancy and depth to the little corner of peace and fertility which we try to nurture here in our garden, with our tits and finches, robins, wrens and dunnocks. They reflect the everlasting conversation of Father and Son, the transcendent and the immanent. Meanwhile the way those rocky outcrops defy the waves, attempting to shelter the bay within, remind us of the grim struggle that keeps the waters at bay, leaving us free to act for a while as if we had no need of their defence, even while we depend on them, both the rock and the waters, to maintain this stage, to keep this space open. 

      We tend to prefer to forget the threatening waters on the whole, but if we succeed in doing so, then our human dramas become mere affairs of play-acting and vacuous strutting,- we do indeed become 'mere players'! Some do believe this is all there is to the human condition, and more act as if it were. It is by attending to, indeed participating in, the above-mentioned conversation that we discover that actually truth and beauty do exist, that the stakes in our games could not be higher and that the ultimate prize is barely imaginable,- for humanity has eternal potential. It is Holy Baptism that initiates us into this conversation, in its full dimensions, and the other sacraments are there to give us the grace to follow through with it.

      To return to my own small share in the drama, in a much more limited dimension of it, I have explained before in this blog how in my youth I was immersed in the sea by crossing the Channel back and forth in a 27' wooden sailing boat, with no electronic aids whatsoever, other than a transistor radio, which gave us the BBC weather forecast, - Thames, Dover, Wight... was the litany.  At least it meant we should be able to avoid gales, but my Dad would be under pressure to get home for work on Monday morning; the biggest problem was fog. Those big throbbing engines, the swish of a bow-wave, the glimpsed looming dark shape with a white moustache.... Then there was the little matter of making a landfall in the fog, and the time when we mistook Le Tréport for Dieppe, or a man wading in the sea fishing for the beacon at the entrance to Rye Harbour!

     Yet more often than not, the one side receded and the other rose to meet and embrace us quite gaily. Two different stage-sets; different languages, customs, ways of doing things, mais plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose! Yet some things are different, and some actors reflect truth more authentically than others who merely parrot the lines. One all-too-common illusion in the England of those days (not to mention today?) that was soon exploded for myself was that the wogs begin at Calais! Didn't they have huge and magnificent steam engines there, that could pull trains all the way to Moscow, and such pretty girls! These days it might be expressed more subtly, but it is an illusion that all too often afflicts us, that our own stage-set is the true and right one. The moment we forget that our lines are part of a conversation with Another, then we are merely parroting them. By that immersion in the sea, that baptism, one learns to attend to the conversation, the Other, and so we may distinguish what really does grow and endure,- the green wood from the dead.

     Forever seeking the reality behind the appearance, one finds oneself a bit of a stranger everywhere, since all too many people settle for parroting their lines. Conversely, however, one learns the skills of being at home everywhere even as a stranger. In fact most people do respond to authenticity, and of course humour is a great help, as it hinges on and highlights the disparity between reality and appearance. But of course so many are actually possessed by the narrative in which they find themselves; they become defensive when challenged, and this is how we all tend to get into trouble. We do not allow for the possibility that what we see as Dieppe might in fact be Le Tréport, which has a shallow bar!

     It is the finding of other points of reference, preferably at right angles to each other, that can finally put us right. Hence the wonderful value of learning different languages and getting to know different cultures; yet this does not detract from the primacy of the Word of God. He, She, Them (dare I suggest we call them Heshem?) infuses all situations with the same ongoing dialectic, whereby we may discover Truth. Meanwhile, it is essential to believe in this possibility, even as we struggle with all the false narratives that plague and even appear to dominate the world! Heshem after all created us, completely understands us and our needs, wants to help us and is all powerful; however, He respects our freedom, above all wanting us to enter into a real conversation!

     It was poor Dom Luke, more than anyone, who alerted me to the possibilities of a fatal collision between differing narratives,- while the one outstanding thing he had insisted on was the vital necessity of paying heed to those gleams of light which penetrate our clouds from the Beyond, he found that the boards on which he walked could not tolerate the light within him. Education has a fatal tendency to tell us No, never mind such luxuries, such dreams,- you must learn the worldly talent of telling people what they want to hear! As a journalist, briefly, I saw even more clearly that this was the way of the world. It occurs more subtly and therefore more dangerously in our market economies as in totalitarian states, but Luke insisted that the very survival of life depends on people finding the strength and courage to be true to themselves,- to attend to the reality behind our games, the light within.

     Maybe, just maybe, one might hope that some rays of light are shining through the clouds of boredom and disruption that seem to engulf our youngsters in these lockdowns. Surely it should be obvious at this stage that the system of swotting to pass exams is futile and broken, and as in so many aspects of life, a big reset is called for! When we lose contact with the Everlasting Conversation, education in the humanities turns on its head, spoiling imaginations, undermining moral awareness and conscience, in the same way that the Church can find itself losing souls instead winning them, and allopathic medicine sabotages our immune systems instead of enhancing them. So besotted with our power and obsessed with our comms are we, that we seem incapable of paying attention to the simple fact that we are in immanent danger of destroying life on Earth itself. We have to learn humility fast. 

      It is a start to pay attention to Nature. Indeed there is much to be said for heading to the general territory where I seem to be finishing up, in a secluded and beautiful spot, with some bit of intellectual work set in the context of physical survival work like growing vegetables, doing the odd bit of building, and when possible doing some sea-faring. I think we have to help people who have the inclination to do so, and Fiona and I welcome guests to participate here. There is no shortage of things to do.... If anyone is interested, contact us by email, gannetsway at gmail.com .

  

Turning the Titanic

      Fishing methods that destroy fishing, 'husbandry' that leaves the land dead, food that does not sustain, 'defence' that would make the Earth uninhabitable, 'comms' that have people locked into their own silos and unable to communicate outside them, 'sport' that leaves participants physically wrecked, 'health-care' that leaves people with all kinds of pathologies, transport that chokes both itself and the people using it... - they frequently go under the name of Progress and their  enthusiasts will proudly state that 'they believe in Science'.

     Before you ask,- no, I am not a Luddite, merely a lookout peering into the fog! In a kind of a way I believe in Science and Progress myself - radar would have been handy on the Titanic - but as is generally the way when some ideology achieves the primacy, it promptly becomes a kind of parody of itself. What is wrong with us that we have such a talent for turning our triumphs into defeat? We may say, in shorthand, it is that apple we ate and the fatal tendency engendered by Original Sin to worship the work of our own hands; this however is rather 'old hat' stuff, and the fact is that the massive hubris attached to our pride in Progress has escalated exponentially with the power that science and technology have brought to us in recent years. When people are sailing along on the wings of power and prestige, we can surmise that idolatry has taken over; conversely, there ultimately remains only the one key to putting us right,- the worship of God through Jesus Christ. 

     Meanwhile, what little signs, what ignored warnings, should we be looking out for? The thing is, there are always disadvantages and snags attached to technological progress,- icebergs and rocks presenting dangers to navigation; we cannot know them all ourselves. The trick is to only listen to people who one has reason to believe really know what they are talking about, who realise the risks, lay them out and give reason to believe that they can be overcome. As the yachtsman said to the old salt in Baltimore, 'I hear you know all the rocks and can take me safely to Schull.' 'You would be right in the first point and wrong in the second.' 'Well how can that be?' 'I know where the rocks ain't'. Technology has put us in the way of making the world uninhabitable, so I suppose that it will have to come into play big time if we are to find our way forward, but how are we to get it back in its box - to be a good servant rather than a bad master?

     There is a clue in the question. Let us make sure it is a servant rather than a master in the first place. When we see, for example, vaccines touted on all sides, at the top of every newspaper, while intelligent discussion of their dangers is forced underground, alarm bells should be ringing. When we see the likes of the British Prime Minister riding vaccinations to glory and using them to vindicate Brexit, we are likely to be correct in smelling a rat. He's a classic Captain Titanic!  Poor people, who cannot afford a vaccine, may turn out to be the lucky ones!

     It is all very well for me, you will say, living away happily on my bitteen of island land,- and I will reply, well, difficult it may be, but there is nothing to stop many more people opting for such a way of life, while whole swathes of the Western seaboard of Europe continue to suffer massive depopulation. The biggest obstacles would be in their own heads, their education, attitudes, skill-sets and aptitudes. Perhaps the principle challenge in my life has lain in trying to realise a culture that is capable of overcoming such obstacles. Thanks to this pandemic, we have taken massive strides in recognising the power of the internet to enable us to do so.

     Then again, as regards the pandemic, I have no reason to doubt my homeopath when he says that he has been treating Covid successfully, with no serious problems and none of his patients having to go to hospital. This is no reason not to be sensible about avoiding it,- and homeopaths were to the fore in promoting hygiene in the 19th century- but I do object to the massive command and control effort to dragoon us into doing so. We will have to live with this disease around in the end, like all the others, and we will;  but it is not hard to foresee that there will be no lack of occasions for taking that authoritarian approach  to things, as we get deeper into these coming times. Can we envisage an alternative? What might it look like?

     I worked over this kind of ground in my 2005

novel, Wavedancing*. (I found few takers at the time,- the Celtic Tiger was roaring away. Remember that? Fortunately for us, I foresaw that it would go belly up, but try telling that to the world!) Getting there by a different route to what is happening now, I imagined at a critical juncture 'thousands of people ambling around rather like empty puppets, vacant and staring, unable or unwilling to do anything to help themselves, let alone others. They were suffering from a collapse of the very will to live.' (p.276).

     I would suggest this is already happening on a widespread scale, to people near you, and is likely to only get worse as the vaccines roll out. One thing one would like to avoid is for such opinions becoming the preserve of Trumpistas, so I shall conclude with a quote from p.386 of Barack Obama's book (A Promised Land) with reference to the 1976 swine flu epidemic,- 'President Ford (Republican)... had fast-tracked mandatory vaccinations... with the result that more Americans developed a neurological disorder connected to the vaccine than died from the flu'. There may be some circumstances in which the balance of risk falls in favour of being vaccinated, but if one would like to avoid those famous 'complications', and a command and control future to boot, I would recommend that by and large one should eschew the vaccines!                                                                                                                                                                                                

Cape Clear from Cow Strand.

   *If you would like a copy, send 20euro or pounds or whatever to me at Horseshoe Cottage, Sherkin Island, Co Cork, Ireland, and I will post it to you.                                                                                                                                              ps, if you would like to be notified by Signal, email or Twitter whenever I post a new blog, please email me - gannetsway (at) gmail.com                            

St Brigid and the Radical Centre.

It is St Brigid's day in the evening,- a sodden Sherkin lies under a heavy pall of cloud and rain, the sullen Atlantic heaves grumpily beyond a washed out and deserted Horseshoe Bay,- yet the sun is getting stronger, whether we can see it or not. In the garden the daffodils are pushing up strongly and the bushes are abudding. Some day very soon, the sun will come out, - and I shall be tipped into the Spring work..., 

     Meanwhile, this is the kind of evening when we must live on our dreams. Not the airy optimism  of a Boris Johnson promising his country that Brexit would bring 'a bright new future', or the Ducky talking up his disastrous presidency while promising 'the best is yet to come'; nor even the liberal version of airy optimism, which seems to imagine that the 'deplorables' will just go away, for in the words of the Guardian columnist and Berkeley professor Robert Reich,  'There’s no “center” between the reality-based world and theirs.... There is no middle ground between lies and facts. There is no halfway point between civil discourse and violence. There is no midrange between democracy and fascism.'  In spite of all the Ducky has said, does Reich imagine that all those millions of his supporters are about to 'see the light' or that they will simply be cowed into submission?

     'Speaking truth means responding to the world as it is and denouncing the poisonous deceptions engulfing the right.... It means protecting and advancing science....' avers Professor Reich. Granted that there are times when such people simply have to be faced down, nonetheless Professor Reich is on dodgy ground, for the whole difficulty and challenge of intellectual life is precisely that lies and facts do not in reality fall into such tidy distinction as he imagines, and violence may indeed lurk beneath the rhetoric of democracy. One might have expected anyone who witnessed the wars in Vietnam and Iraq to have realised that, and how about the French Revolution, that might be said to have put the democratic bandwagon on the road? Note also the element of 'scientific fundamentalism' at work here, which is frequently to be found on the political left. in spite of the apotheosis that it reached in Marxism and communist Russia. 

     Also in the Guardian, we find Dr Charlotte Summers of Cambridge University singing from a not dissimilar hymn sheet. In an article urging us to trust 'the Covid vaccine'*, she informs us that 'As a scientist, I firmly believe that scientific progress will provide the exit strategy from this pandemic.'  Sorry, but such words are far from reassuring to the likes of me. I thought Science was supposed to be strictly a matter of what one definitely can see, of evidence rather than of faith? Let it not so dazzle us that we have no perception of the much greater realities that we cannot see. She is welcome to her 'firm belief', but it's a pity she wouldn't take a leaf out of St Paul's book - 'If we could see God, we would not need to believe in Him'. 

     Or out of Pope Francis' for that matter, who addressed theologians at the Gregorian Pontifical University (10th April 2014) in these terms:- 'Philosophy and theology enable us to acquire the convictions that structure and strengthen intelligence and enlighten will; but all this is fruitful only if it is done with an open mind and on one’s knees. The theologian who is satisfied with his complete and conclusive thought is mediocre. A good theologian and philosopher is open, or incomplete in thought, always open to the ‘maius’ of God and of the truth, always in development. And the theologian who does not pray or does not adore God ends up sinking into the most repugnant narcissism.' 

     So here is the nubb of it,- theology remains the queen of sciences, and when scientists do not adore God, they become very dangerous. To an extent, one might say that if they only just respect Nature, it is a start, though far from adequate, as one can see by looking at the state of the world after a couple of centuries of 'scientific progress'.  Science may indeed be fine; the hard evidence, the technology and the insights that it can provide are sometimes invaluable, but elevated into a god, it is highly dangerous. 

     Thank God there are a few politicians about nowadays who understand this. Joe Biden seems to be there, and Ursula von der Leyen, who under attack for the cautious approach she and the European Commission are taking to the vaccine roll-out, said - "I remind you that a vaccine is the injection of an active biological substance into a healthy body. We are talking about mass vaccination here, it is a gigantic responsibility.” 

     Hereabouts is the answer to Professor Reich's question, -'How can Biden possibly be a “centrist” in this new political world?' This is how,- 'with an open mind and on his knees', and this is the way we should all be proceeding, and the only way to achieve steady conviction and direction. Are we really in 'a new political world' anyway? Only in that the exceptional period that the Americans term as 'normalcy' does seem to have come to an end. Pandemics, demagogues, along with disasters of all kinds, have frequently strutted the world stage, only somehow for most of my lifetime, we managed to think of them as relegated to other God-forsaken parts of the world or to the past, all because of that wonderful thing called Progress. 

     It has to be admitted that it was a fun time for those fortunate enough to be in a position to enjoy it. I myself was delighted to get the chance to swan around in sailing boats out of it now and again, but we must admit that it boiled down too often to complacent consumerism and  insouciant hedonism, which did not make people very happy. Though we knew about climate change and the ruination of so many natural systems for years, we blithely carried on living beyond the Planet's means as if it were someone else's problem. No more!

     This is the context in which we must find a way forward, though I do not imagine it will be achieved by any system of 'command and control', which will  no doubt be attempted, for it will not be easy. Governments need to work by identifying, encouraging and supporting the initiatives of those trying to develop constructive ways of coping. 

     If we simply depend on vaccines to 'get back to normal', we shall be sadly disappointed! Yet coping mechanisms like online working and living in bubbles are very likely pointing the way ahead. Let us hope that with some great leaders in place from the Radical Centre for a change, and stripped of much illusion by the pandemic, we will rise to the challenge of finding sustainable ways of living, which by the way, is the only real way to put horrors such as abortion behind us.

     So I come back to the kind of dreams that I have been dreaming for about half a century, of a new flowering of sustainable and prayerful community living, in respect of and in harmony with Nature, in an ancient tradition that in this part of the world goes back to the likes of St Brigid and St Columcille.  I was dreaming a lot about it even in the wheel-houses of little fishing boats, such as the Eiscir Riada here, second from the left, tied alongside Teelin pier in the early '80s. 

photo by Bill Vial.

     I was trying to find a way of living from the sea that would endure, but it wasn't to be. Those fancy Danish nets of mine on the pier caught plenty of cod, though the Rosses men who stuck with lead rope  rather than rings on the soles of the nets did better again. They got through more gear, and faster, but then they mostly had somewhat bigger boats, and were also used to fishing miles of salmon and crawfish nets. We all had to chase from one boom to the next, till booms became very hard to come by!

     Some day I hope, probably when I am gone, there will once again be thriving communities along the West coast of Europe, with fishing as a staple. They will have to carefully work together, in a spirit of husbandry rather than competition, for which online connectivity will be vital. I imagine they will reinvent sail power, while they will use electric motors powered mainly by hydrogen fuel cells. They will partly produce their own hydrogen on board, but ashore it will be produced  using wind and sun, along with all kinds of food, by small farmers who will sell it in much the same way as they used to sell churns of milk. The distribution of hydrogen will be big business for vessels large and small, using both sails and hydrogen to get around....            

*https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/03/the-covid-vaccine-trust-safe-works-political

     

After The Twitter Tiger

      The poor old Duckie, Donald the failed Duce, is looking like a Twitter Tiger now, without whatever it takes to become a proper fascist. It is amazing that so much of his presence could be simply turned off at the click of a mouse. I wonder however whether it is wise to take this as the last word on the matter. He may be pretty scattered himself, but the depth of his support should at least give cause for caution in completely writing him and his followers off, particularly if the latter come up with a more focussed and competant leader. 

     Like so much that is false, Trumpism nonetheless thrived on a few sparks of insight that the world, and particularly America, finds difficult to acknowledge. The first and biggest is that the old ideal of The City on a Hill is widely  discredited,  even in the subconscious of those who profess it, pace Barack Obama, whose tome A Promised Land I am currently reading. I note that the biggest set-backs that Obama encountered in his campaign were when questions bubbled up from the Black experience regarding the self-image of Americans as a Chosen Race; when Michelle blurted out that she was 'proud of her country, for the first time in her adult life', or when Barack's old pastor said that 9/11 was in part 'a matter of America's chickens... coming home to roost', - referring to 'our record of wanton violence overseas'. Even the Ducky in his presidential campaign averred that America's military interventions overseas hardly qualified as success stories.     

     What the USA in fact stands for in many minds is MONEY more than anything else, so there was a certain relief when that guy came along saying it out aloud, relieving the folks of their sense of guilt when he stood before his golden gates saying, Behold, I'm Mr Money, or even better, 'The King of Debt', and what's more, America first,-I'm here to unapologetically put YOU first'! After all that idealism of Barack Obama, which one might dismiss as a lot of hot air, it was a relief to get real again!

     If the Ducky had been left in peace to tickle up the feel-good factor of Americans, he would have been re-elected. It's the pandemic that popped that bubble. Yet even here, there is a strand in his narrative that scores. He was mad to call it a hoax, and I do not wish to imply that in the practical reality we are faced with lockdowns are not a necessary response, yet there is something that seems very wrong with them in practice, some element of a death wish. One obvious example of it is the fact of all these old people having to die in isolation, cutting across every human instinct (especially Irish ones). Beyond this is the horrible uneasy feeling that we are witnessing the onset of a ghastly totalitarianism, which is buttressed by the conviction some of us have, that when society loses touch with God, it inevitably falls prey to some kind of thralldom.

      A more immediate and empirical conviction is that the pandemic could have been tackled much more promptly and effectively were it not for willful mass blindness to the possibilities of homoeopathy. This goes back to the dawn of the 'scientific age' in the mid 19th century, when the 'gentlemen of the Medical Council' suppressed the results, strongly favouring homoeopathy, of a Government survey of the effectiveness of the treatment administered to cholera victims in the various London hospitals. In response to a parliamentary question, they unanimously asserted that 'That by introducing the returns of homoeopathic practitioners, they would not only compromise the value and utility of their averages of cure, as deduced from the operation of known remedies, but they would give an unjustifiable sanction to an empirical practice alike opposed to the maintenance of truth and to the progress of science'.*  

     There are none so blind as them that will not see! The pity is that these attitudes have not changed, while science has moved on to the extent that, in the age of quantum physics, there is the possibility of a better understanding of homoeopathy. However I readily admit to being scientifically illiterate, which probably has helped me to appreciate a good thing when I see it. I looked over Fiona's shoulder for years as she studied homoeopathy, practised for a while and used it en famille. Since I was diagnosed with prostate cancer last autumn, I have been using it myself, and am fairly confident of success. I admit however that we are sailing in the dark, and I learned long ago that the first rule of navigation is to consider the possibility that one might be wrong. I have difficulty, however, in persuading the medics to do the same!

     So to get back to where we started, for all the indignation about the Ducky these days, let us remember that but for the pandemic, we would probably be facing another Trump presidency. Much will depend, for President Biden, on how it goes now. Will the vaccine cavalry in fact ride to the rescue? Anyway, whatever did happen to 'Yes We Can'  and all that? Is there a torch that can be raised aloft again? What went wrong and how can America, and the rest of us, avoid being dragged, deeper, into the same old cycle? Will the Biden Presidency help rid us on this side of the Atlantic of the mendacious vandals of Brexit? And will we finally be able to walk the walk with regard to climate change?

     It is true of course that money talks, especially in American politics. One of the exhilarating features of the Obama presidency was that the underdogs appeared to be getting the better of the plutocrats. One did not have to be black to feel that. However, I think, if one wants to see the values of a Promised Land prevail, there are certain mistakes that the Democrats should not make again, possibly on account of big money too (from Planned Parenthood for instance), such as championing especially partial-birth abortion, which is impossible for many of us to distinguish from infanticide. It would almost make me vote Republican, if I were American. Why not do the right thing, and stop handing good ammo to the other side?

     Beyond this, there is a further reason why that famous flame of Liberty has nearly been  blown out. As St Peter said, 'God does not have favourites'. The real Promised Land is not the property of any nation, tribe or language, or even political party. If it belongs to anyone, it belongs to the poor, the hungry, the rejected, vulnerable and homeless. If President Biden can remember this, he should do ok. If the Republicans only remembered it, they might be a respectable party again. May they all succeed in reuniting their country, in humility though, without jingoism of any kind. Joe Biden is stepping off on a good note. For now at least, I wish the new President well!

 

God Bless President Biden, from the other side of the Atlantic (looking West from the Priest's Strand, Sherkin Island}!

     

*Click here for article from the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. 

     

Sorry Doc, I won't be taking the Vaccination.

 Sorry Doc, I won’t be taking the vaccination! The question is bound to come sooner or later. I shall seize the bull by the horns and set down in writing some of the reasons why this will be my answer, and in the process attempt to answer another question that comes my way now and again,- what do you think about this pandemic?

‘Science’ of course is supposed to answer such questions for us. Politicians and everybody else are generally expected to defer to her dictats. However there are in the case of the pandemic the mainline scientists, whose general approach is that we must fight Covid with lockdowns etc until the vaccines deliver us from it, and the fringe 'loonies' who insist that lockdowns are in fact counterproductive* and sometimes even dare to question the efficacy of vaccines. I cannot begin to pretend to get my head around charts and facts and figures, so how do I set about establishing my own position in any kind of a rational way? 

I cast around for experts whom I deem genuinely capable of setting aside their own opinions and drilling into the data to find out what stands up. It is a tall order. Meanwhile, for my part, I can only make a start by reviewing what I have gleaned from my own journey. I am allergic to endlessly sparring over ‘facts’; in the end one does have to situate the problem within whatever wider frames of reference one has managed to establish, while the test of integrity is our willingness to painfully interrogate them.

I have strayed from the question,- what about that vaccination? It’s not a new problem. My doctor has been trying to get me to take a ‘flu jab for some years. I pointed out that I knew several people who had had the jab and still had ‘flu. One exasperated response to my refusal was ‘well don’t come to me when you get pneumonia!’ He's a good man though, taking my jybes in good heart, and as for the medical 'industry' as I am tempted to call it, I recognise that there are many good people in it, and also that there are times when, like the Fire Brigade, they are vital.

 

Yet as it happens I have so far neither caught the ‘flu nor had pneumonia, though I do generally get a bad cold around the turn of the year that sometimes threatens to get on my chest, but which Fiona’s home brand of medicine - mostly homoeopathy and diet - has so far always coped with. Yet for a start, we do not ‘fight’ it, but rather regard it as a kind of annual revamp of our immune set-up, like training a horse to jump fences. It is one of the big theoretical objections to vaccinations, that they bypass and rather sabotage the natural workings of our immune systems. Are we supposed to get yet another jab for every kind of virus that comes at us?

There is the question mark over these substances that we fire into our veins so blithely. Neither the manufacturers nor their insurance companies are prepared to stand over them, and they insist on governments taking the responsibility for any ‘complications’. It is anyway of course very hard to actually prove when the vaccines are to blame. In the case of the swine ‘flu vaccine, it took ten years and much effort to pin the blame for narcolepsy on it, to the extent that the Irish Government had to pay compensation, though GSK still refuses to accept responsibility. The fact that the current crop of vaccines has been turned out under massive pressure does not augur well.

In the case of the pandemic, what is the alternative to ‘fighting’ it with lockdowns and vaccines? Pandemics in the past, though like the ‘Spanish ‘flu’ they were sometimes much more deadly, nonetheless passed eventually. Meanwhile, supposing we seriously take a look at ourselves and ask whether the ‘fighting’ posture is the best one? After all, in the cause of ‘security’, our leading nations are apparently willing to expend astronomical sums on weapons that would wreak unimaginable havoc, death and destruction, in a completely different order of magnitude to this pandemic. They do not exactly achieve peace. The attitude to health, out of the same stable, gets through vast sums of money forever ‘fighting’ this and that, without actually being very successful at building a healthy world.

There is a pattern of whacking molehills to be discerned. We wallop dis-ease in one form and it erupts in another; and of course we tend to forget that everything is interconnected, on psychic, physical, social, economic and spiritual levels. Supposing we ask ourselves, might the pandemic be trying to tell us something, even to help us respond to much greater threats? Might it have something to teach us? Let us look at it holistically. It is possible that Covid19 could have been brought under control months ago with homoeopathic prophylactics.**

Beyond this, were there by any chance apparently unconnected signs in differing modes that our way of living was unsustainable and in the gravest danger of breaking down? Had we any personal indications of the need to slow down, consolidate, integrate the various facets of life into something sustainable? ‘Progress’, profit, GDP, the very 'scientific worldview' have broken down as yardsticks by which to pace our lives.

In many ways we clearly need to go backwards, for an immediate and particular example, with regard to things like heating this house, in which we are fine and cosy after a long and painful change from dependence on large amounts of oil to warming ourselves mainly with two wood stoves. Such a move needs to happen, of course, in tandem with efforts to improve insulation and avoid the need for excessive heating. We might even need to wear thick clothes in the winter, instead of T-shirts!

Both Chimneys in Action.

There’s a lot of work involved in tending them in this cold weather, not to mention in the cutting and curing of firewood, but actually I enjoy it. No better exercise than cutting and splitting logs, and I even enjoy the little ritual first thing in the morning of kindling the embers for the stove in the west room, which stays in all night and heats those few of the old radiators that I have kept. It’s a great occasion for that prayer to the Holy Spirit,- Come Holy Spirit, kindle within us the fire of thy love; send forth thy spirit and we shall be recreated, and thou shalt renew the face of the Earth!’

Nothing reveals our need for renewal more clearly than the general paucity of ritual these days, reduced as it so often is to banal things like football. Ritual is the human way of pulling our lives together, in  the interaction of meaning and community. Again, we need to take a step or two backward in order to go forward; but can we call this renewal a matter of ‘making progress’ at all? I scratch my head trying to think of another word. I can only think of an old English West Country sailor's term for making headway against the wind - winnin’ . So that’s the best I can wish for you this New Year,- may you be a-winnin’!

*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_vAQyVlXzU&t=10s

**Preliminary results have emerged from the use of homeopathic immunisation (Homeopathic Prophylactic) in nearly half of the Cuban population. The Cuban government has utilised HP since 2007 to successfully control diseases such as leptospirosis, cholera, dengue, hepatitis and now COVID19. The effectiveness of their COVID19 HP is around 90%, which is totally consistent with the results from HP interventions in tens of millions of people worldwide. - Irish Society of Homoeopaths, 14/12/20