I would like to wish all my readers a happy New Year 2022 with my prayers that this world might become a better place for us all. After some thought, I have adopted a new name for my YouTube channel: Romantia Christiana.

As I explain in the video, the word Romantia has been used for some quite absurd things, but the people concerned adopted another name for their “thing” and since have disappeared from view. With its adjective Christiana, I very much imply the allegorical use of the name Jerusalem used in the Old and New Testaments.

These verses of Psalm 137, Super flumina, summarise the spirit of Romanticism like the idealisation of England in Blake’s Jerusalem.

By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept: when we remembered thee, O Sion.
As for our harps, we hanged them up: upon the trees that are therein.
For they that led us away captive required of us then a song, and melody in our heaviness: Sing us one of the songs of Sion.
How shall we sing the Lord’s song: in a strange land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem: let my right hand forget her cunning.
If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth: yea, if I prefer not Jerusalem in my mirth.

In this way, Romantia seems to represent a kind of world of ideas, an unattainable paradise at a spiritual and ideal level, Cockaigne and dreamland. It might seem futile to the realist of our day. Christianity is both a yearning for the Kingdom that is both beyond and within ourselves. A part of our mission is to bring heaven onto earth in the ways that are within our ability. Thus, Christian Romanticism as an “ideology” and as an alternative name for the biblical Kingdom of God.

I am particularly concerned for a more refined ministry through beauty and music. I am not in a situation to be able to build a mission or a parish in an increasingly church-weary population. I am not interested in political activism. Many have expressed the notion that Beauty will save the world or that the only read apologia for Christianity is the lives of the Saints and the beauty of sacred art. That is very much my calling as a priest.

I will be building up and improving my “vlogging” skills this year with the use of editing software. I also have some sailing projects this year on the Golfe du Morbihan and the Rade de Brest, perhaps also the gathering in late July in the bay of Douarnenez. My friend Roger Barnes has given me a lot of advice about doing sailing videos with short sections and voice-over rather than subjecting the viewer to wind noise in the microphone.

I have a video camera on order with a protected microphone. It isn’t the best or most expensive, but it should serve me well.