This is one I recommend, called Openboat. It has 1534 members from all over the world, not just England. I have just joined it.
This is the official description:
Openboat is dedicated to the cruising of open boats in coastal or inland waters.
Run on behalf of the UK Dinghy Cruising Association, it provides a forum for discussion and the interchange of information and expertise on open boats and dinghies, cruising grounds, technical and safety matters related to dinghy cruising, supply of equipment suitable for such cruising, and a place to post information about rallies and passages organised by associations and individuals.
You don’t have to be a member of the DCA to join – any dinghy cruiser, armchair, would-be or actual, is welcome. Newcomers are moderated while they test the waters. Drifting off topic is tolerated within reason. Consider it the equivalent of the sailing club bar!
Sailing small open boats and dinghies for reasons other than racing is something that is coming into its own. Many have sold their yachts because they represented an unmanageable financial outlay for mooring in a marina and maintenance. They bought boats that could be transported on a trailer and towed by an ordinary car, rigged quickly and simply and made into a cosy tent with a sheet of canvas thrown over the boom with the boat at anchor or pulled up onto the beach for the night. When several people do this as a group, it can be a great way of building friendships and a sense of togetherness. Cruising with small open boats, nearly always under 16 feet, helps to take the snotty elitism out of sailing, and makes it a very human experience.
There are occasional clashes, as one would find in any community with a common interest. It isn’t just the religious forums and blogs? Nevertheless, we can get precious help and information on rigging, repairing damage to boats, navigation, meteorology, safety rules and just about everything. If we’re not arguing about Calvinism or Western Orthodoxy, we can debate what we call the bits of string or elastic used for tidying up the mainsail when its down! Kind of puts perspective on things…
I got to know about this forum through my correspondent David in southern England who sails his modified Mirror just about everywhere. Some of the members are distinguished French boat builders and teach ordinary people to build their own and save a packet of money. Isn’t the Internet wonderful when put to uses like this one!
I haven’t always published the Sarum calendar here, but here is the one that begins on the first Sunday of Advent (1st December 2013) and ends on Sunday 30th November 2014 (Advent I) which displaces the feast of St Andrew. It is nothing like a full ordo with instructions for the Office and matters like whether or not there is the Gloria or Creed, etc. at Mass. All that information is found in the Pie, and generally in the general rubrics and the propers themselves. The general rules are not that different from the Roman rite. One difference to note is the total absence of the Gloria during Advent and Lent, even on saints’ feasts and the replacement of Ite missa est by Benedicamus Domino.
I simply take the standard Gregorian calendar days and dates and put in the saints as they occur in the Sarum calendar (which followed the Julian calendar in the sixteenth century). I then put in the Sundays and other ferias. The privileges of some feasts over Sundays and other days is quite obvious, but I haven’t gone into the rubrics in great detail. Things become obvious as you open the missal in the appropriate places. Feasts that just could not take the place of a Sunday or things like Holy Week are either “crushed” or transferred to the nearest available day when important enough.
Octaves don’t always get a mention, so you need to see in the missal whether you need to commemorate them in the course of the week in question. It is a “bare bones” and practical approach to remind you of the essential, and that the rubrics to be followed are in the missal and breviary themselves. I have had a second pair of eyes look through for howlers, such as a Sunday of last year appearing on a weekday of this year, and none seem to mar this piece of work. If anyone does find errors, please let me know in the comment box of this posting, and I’ll make the corrections when all the notifications of errors are in.
I have also put in some feasts from the Roman rite that do not appear in the Use of Sarum, generally celebrated by Anglicans using the English Missal and Anglican Missal. They are always entered in italics.
See my page on the Use of Sarum. Additional material from out-of-print books can be found here. Otherwise, rare books occasionally turn up in second-hand bookshops in England. You just have to be lucky!
What seems to be the issue is that science has traditionally excluded life from the equation of studying physics, chemistry and biology, considering things in no more than physical or chemical reactions. For us religious folk, the afterlife seems so evident, a part of revelation and our desire to transcend the material world. It is usually for us a matter of faith and belief.
The afterlife entering the realm of science is an interesting development, and can only encourage us in our quest for the transcendent. Is time only something subjective? My having had the experience of general anaesthesia for a surgical operation a couple of years ago blew my mind. I didn’t experience the time during which I was “under”. The anaesthetist told me to count up to ten, and an instant later I woke up in the recovery room. If time is only subjective, then this has enormous implications.
I can’t vouch for Dr Lanza’s theory having any scientific validity according to the rules of evidence and repeatability. But, I have to admit that I’m fascinated….
A relatively new alarm has been sounded – ransomware. You open an e-mail purporting to be from a legitimate company, and a virus self-runs. It encrypts your files and offers you the possibility of buying the code to decrypt them.
See this Wikipedia article. This kind of stuff has been around for a few years, but the newest version is called “CryptoLocker”. When it has encrypted your data, CryptoLocker demands a payment with either a MoneyPak card or Bitcoin to recover the key and begin decrypting files, and threatens to delete the private key if a payment is not received within 3 days.
The best advice is keep your anti-virus software up to date, use anti malware software and be careful which e-mails you open or which links you click. Back up your data regularly on external hard disks, memory sticks or CD-ROM and isolate them from the computer you use with the Internet. From what I’ve read, if you catch this thing, you have only to format your hard disk and start all over again reinstalling everything and say goodbye to your data, unless it is backed up.
This appears to be sound advice. This too. It appears that paying the ransom ($300 in bitcoins) will work, as repugnant it is to let those crooks win. I hope the police get them, but if they do, will the keys be recovered?
Back up your data and don’t open suspicious e-mails.
Another nautical theme came into my search box. I have already written on the gaff rig in several posts. This one concerns the jib in the precise context of the gaff rig.
You don’t strictly need the jib on a sloop rig (single masted vessel whether gaff, gunter or bermudian). You just move the mast forward so that the centre of effort is in the right place, and you have a catboat rig. Please see this article on the sail plan. This is the naval architect’s basic design of the boat, which determines the balance between the weather helm and lee helm. A boat should have more weather helm than lee helm, so that you feel the vessel luffing to the wind rather than having to be actively steered into the wind. This is determined by the length of the hull under the waterline, the position of the keel and the centre of effort of each sail determined by the size and shape of the sails and position of the mast. When the boat has more than one sail, the centres of effort on the different sails (typically a mainsail and a jib on a sloop or cutter) compensate for each other. Thus, naval architects can play with various permutations according to the use the boat will be put to. A fishing or freight vessel needs to have free access to the hold, so this will affect the position of the mast – you move the mast forwards and compensate by having a spanker sail in a yawl or ketch rig. On the other hand, a boat built for speed, such as a pilot cutter, has to have a very large mainsail and two jibs to compensate, one of which is rigged on a bowsprit. Some of the old clipper ships had as many as four of five jibs and sometimes a jib between the foremast and the mainmast and another between the mainmast and the mizzen mast.
Briefly, the jib is all about balancing the boat, and setting it well makes all the difference for a sensitive helm, just as much as properly setting the mainsail. At one time, I thought sailing was so much simpler with a single sail, but that is not so. I have had hell with so-called catboats (though the Laser is a much more pleasant boat than, for example, the Topaz Uno) and its weather helm, having to hike right out just to balance the helm by keeping the hull flat in the water and to avoid ripping the rudder off! The jib makes all the difference and makes the handling of the boat so much more sensitive and easier on the sailor.
I got out on the sea today – not too cold but too little wind. In November it’s all or nothing, no half measures. After an anxious moment of rowing against the current in the absence of wind and getting swept below the port, I got a little 7-knot breeze, which solved my problem and took me upstream from the port. Sailing days are becoming rarer and rarer, and the weather forecast promises us some real cold for next week, with temperatures going down to 0 or -1°C. Brrr! Looking on the bright side, one can sometimes get out on the water in December before the real winter sets in. Who dares wins!
Fr Jonathan Munn has written some fine reflections on his recent experience at our recent ACC Provincial Synod. Broad Birettas and Canterbury Caps is not an article about clerical dress, sacerdotal boulevardiers or curés de salon – but about our Anglican tradition of tolerance and open-mindedness.
I sincerely hope it will be possible to attend the next Provincial Synod and meet those good people and clergy in America and from all parts of the world. We get very out on a limb in our parishes and missions. Internet, blogging and e-mail are truly a lifeline that keeps us together – if used sensitively and with awareness of the fact that the person on the other computer is a real person.
With my experience in life, I get as exasperated with conservatism as with “liberalism” or “political correctness”. We have to get behind the reasons why we react from what hurts us, and react mildly and sensitively. Fr Jonathan discovered the way Americans love English things, and don’t quite “get it off”. That might sound patronising but we can’t help being English. What is good is that the Americans are making efforts to keep the Anglican tradition alive in a world where, usually, only money matters. That is to their credit.
I have had dealings with those who felt that “low church” or Reformed doctrine should be the bedrock of Anglicanism at the expense of Anglo-Catholicism, whether by way of restoring pre-Reformation traditions or copying post-Tridentine Rome. I have to confess that I tend to find Reformation theology boring as with late RC scholasticism of men like Suarez and Bellarmine, because logic tends to be elevated at the expense of contemplation and mystical theology as in the Eastern Orthodox traditions. Perhaps this is where broadness can be discovered instead of the world of “You’re wrong – I’m right – here’s why – now go away“! I see here the importance of twentieth-century Roman Catholic and Orthodox theology.
How can we be broad? Certainly in terms of preferences of schools of theology. We all perceive the same revealed truth from different points of view of human understanding and cultural perspectives. Certainly, our broadness needs to be of a new kind rather than trying to reproduce the conditions of England in its most unstable and violent eras of history, namely the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There are elements to add to the old polemics, like the modern theological, biblical and liturgical movements and their acquisitions.
Liturgical diversity within the limits of what is recognisably Anglican or western is important. It seems undesirable to have liturgical uniformity in military lockstep and for everyone to be straining at the leash and angry with each other. I came to the ACC using the Sarum liturgy, but I agreed to use the Anglican Missal when serving congregations accustomed to it. That is pastoral common sense. I have never used the 1549 or 1928 Prayer Book rite, but it is a legitimate Anglican liturgy, and I would use it for pastoral reasons (certainly after a good rehearsal). I think most of us in England would have that kind of pastoral flexibility.
Our relations with other Continuing Anglican Churches is of vital importance. I transferred from the TAC to the ACC because the former will take a considerable amount of time to recover from the loss of many of its members to the Roman Catholic Ordinariates, and there are many questions to be asked about why it elected Archbishop Hepworth and kept him in office for so long. Nevertheless I respect and esteem the TAC and pray for its recovery over the years and decades. Their English diocese is sparingly communicative, and I can only hope it will grow and make the right decisions.
If we develop a sense of “broad church”, it will have to be such that those of more Reformed or Anglo-Catholic sensitivities and convictions will not be alienated either by polemics or the gueule de bois of equivocation. Indeed disagreements over doctrine occur, such as between fundamentalists of Calvinism or the milder versions of TULIP among Anglican reformers and those I would term as “Christian humanists”. Sometimes, we just have to agree to disagree and remain friends.
Also, arguing over sixteenth-century points of doctrine seems to be somewhat surreal in a time when Christianity is cracking apart along other lines of fracture and the world rejects Christianity altogether as something that is incapable of furthering political agendas and various ideas of social engineering. The more we argue over completely irrelevant stuff, the more we will miss the bus with the real issues of today.
As for sharing a cup of tea, my wife and I consume vast quantities of Earl Grey tea bags, but we usually have something stronger for when guests come. After all, we are living in France!
A couple of days ago, I wrote another musical entry about Joseph Rheinberger, and a comment led me to look at the world of Palm Court and Light music. I suppose I have taken a disdaining attitude to light music as to modern “pop” music, preferring serious music from the romantic, classical and baroque traditions.
Downloading a lot of this stuff from Youtube, with the idea of compiling a disk for use in my car, I remembered my days as a schoolboy in the late 1960’s listening to Friday Night is Music Night on BBC Radio 2 and The Organist Entertains, a broadcast for lovers of the cinema organ. Light music was on its way out in the 1960’s with pop replacing the jazz and swing of the 50’s. Sometimes, my parents would take the family out to a restaurant (where we wore jackets and ties and were on our best behaviour and table manners) and we would get some sappy Mantovani strings drifting in through a loudspeaker. The food was usually good. But, was it worth the effort of putting on an appearance in society? With most of my contemporaries and even my parents’ generation, light music was relegated to being something in the background for eating in restaurants, being bored to tears in department stores and working.
My own experience with music has been divided between my early tastes, my lack of taste for “pop” and love of churches, organs and church music. With my schooling, I had something of an elitist attitude for “serious” music, but I still enjoyed pieces with a good melody like Elgar and Walton. I have always been a firm believer of melody and harmony, and strongly eschewed atonal modern music as came into fashion with musical elites in the twentieth century.
British Light Music is a genre that acts as a kind of intermediary between late romantic music and the jazz and pop traditions that developed from the ragtime of the Belle Epoque and the Roaring Twenties. It was designed to appeal to a wide cross section of people and to remove the strongly elitist dimension from the world of classical music, orchestras and concert halls. It can be performed by a full symphony orchestra or by a small group of musicians. I was quite fascinated the other day by the outdoor concerts given in the parks of London, in particular the eccentric-looking Ladies Palm Court Orchestra. The tradition of British Light Music has been revived within little time of its downturn in the early 1960’s, and has become popular again.
With its strong emphasis on melody, harmony and rhythm, light music appeals to man’s sense of levity and optimism. It makes us feel “safe” and outside ourselves, almost part of a film in which goodness triumphs over evil. It certainly gets the dopamine going – so to be enjoyed in moderation!
Our light music tradition is based on a very serious degree of musical skill, both on the part of the composer and the performers. It required just as much musicianship and virtuosity as romantic music. Men like Frederic Curzon and Eric Coates learned their craft in establishments like the Royal College of Music. Some were church organists and choirmasters. There were concert organists like Percy Whitlock who filled in the space between the mighty Würlitzer and the fine symphonic instruments in our cathedrals and concert halls. They earned their living accompanying silent movies in the 1920’s and seaside ballrooms like Reginald Dixon in Blackpool. When we think if it, it was an immense popular cultural movement that spanned half of the twentieth century.
Some of this music exudes a worldliness that is difficult to imagine these days. The Boulevardier of Frederic Curzon evokes the worldly young man without a care, dressed as a dapper or a young blade about town in Paris or London. One would imagine the Roaring Twenties as England bounced back from the horror of the trenches. Here is a fine modern recording:
Were the between-the-wars years a “simpler age”? I have spent time talking about it with my parents who were children then. I have asked many questions of those born at the time of World War I and before. My maternal grandmother was born in 1884 and was probably the oldest person I had known. The problem is when you get on in years and see the world change, we begin to idealise the “good old days”. I can only take stock and think about my 1960’s and 70’s, and see that those “old days” were not so good after all. Films of the 1930’s and 50’s, even of the 60’s, had a naiveness that we see right through, though they impressed us as kids. We didn’t have the technology that makes many young people cynical and blasé about everything. At nearly 55 years, I begin to shrink from some of the newest things like i-pods and i-phones, and feel I don’t want to know. Just like my grandfather with a tape recorder or his father with a typewriter!
One has to think between the lines and compare our own experience with that of our ancestors who remember the 1930’s and the good things and bad things from those days. There were no antibiotics and the Great Depression was catastrophic for so many, then the rise of Hitler and the war. On the other hand, people were more religious and the liturgies in cathedrals and monasteries would delight many a traditionalist’s heart. My mother could cycle on the roads of Surrey without meeting a single car! The “old days” as a “simpler age” is a myth, but one that makes us feel good.
Like watching The Dambusters, light music brings us to a certain affection for the status quo, the official system and the established order. To one with “conspiracy” tendencies, this can seem to represent dangerous propaganda. Nazism made a lot of use of music, and not only Wagner and rousing marches. Music has a powerful effect on us. Light music tends to make us just fit in comfortably and not challenge anything. It is almost a kind of soma. Both Huxley and Orwell were writing in the “good old days”, in which they saw many evils.
I have myself enjoyed a certain amount of worldliness whilst living in London and when I was a seminarian at Gricligliano – priesthood for young dappers! I never had much money to spend on posh places, but occasionally got invited to the East India Club in London. A clerical suit was quite good enough, and smoking a cigar was more acceptable than a cleric smoking cigarettes. A groomed appearance is a must. The “feeling” was only superficial, and I saw through it. There is still a taste for conservative fashion among young people, and fashion designers have found a ready market. I learned a considerable amount some months ago translating a website of a well-known French fashion firm with branches in modern casual wear and formal / conservative town dress.
My time at Gricigliano was also quite a shot of morphine in the early 1990’s. We lived in a fine eighteenth-century château in the Tuscany hills and wore the finest cassocks, fringed cinctures and buckled shoes we could afford. On high days, we could wear the feraiolo and the Roman hat. Admittedly, we lived seriously, worked and prayed, and there were many down-to-earth things to do. In spite of the high camp, I found Gricigliano a good seminary where there was an effort to react against the dourness of many traditionalist institutions. In a way, we lived like Italian clerics of the early twentieth century – and enjoyed it.
But, vanity of vanities, that way just doesn’t attract me. The modern version of P.G. Wodehouse and Drones Club intimidates me. I will do and appear what society expects, the price of having friends and relationships with other human beings, but I don’t really like it. My wife is more of a townie than I am, and enjoys urban society. I tend to keep my distances, preferring the country and the great outdoors. My priestly vocation since Gricigliano has taken many twists and turns, but is now a part of the rest of me.
The Boulevardier is fun to listen to. Curzon wrote it during the war, but with a spirit of nostalgia for an earlier time in his life. It is programme music like no German absolute music would ever be. It evokes the confident young man in evening dress going to his club or a date with his sweetheart. Perhaps he is just taking a stroll in his favourite streets. The music is melodic and nicely scored. Has the young gentleman entirely disappeared from the scene? Some young men keep the flag flying. I have my own memories of Gricigliano and am thankful that life has moved on and that I can find a sense of wonder and depth in places where I now go, whether floating on water or on two wheels in the countryside.
We are called to beware of falling victim to illusions and a false sense of comfort and security, yet it is human and we cannot venture too far out on our own. I strongly identify with that age of just before my birth, and feel a great amount of sympathy for that age. I am often encouraged to connect with the present and the future, and I don’t even know where to begin. Perhaps I am trapped in the past like so many of our senior citizens, knowing that there is but one thing left as happens to us all:
It was in April 2012 that I wrote Absolute ordinations. I write again on this subject since someone has typed a question into my search box asking what “absolute ordinations” are. It’s a very good question.
The short answer is that the Church ordains men for canonical titles, usually a parish benefice. Current Roman Catholic canon law allows for two possibilities of incardination: in a diocese or as a fully committed member of a religious order or society of apostolic life with or without vows. There were / are also prebendary benefices for the decrepit old canons hobbling their way from the Bedern to their stall each day for the cathedral Offices. Everything was determined by how the priest would be financially supported. If this is the case, a priest who earns his own living doesn’t really need to be incardinated. Or is there a theological and spiritual dimension to being under a bishop’s jurisdiction?
What I call an “absolute” ordination is ordination conferred on someone who does not have a canonical title, who will simply do his own “thing”. One is a priest relative to the Church one is going to serve. There is a third possibility, that of a priest who has fallen “between the cracks” and believes he should be in a proper canonical situation, but which is made impossible by the concrete circumstances.
Only a couple of days ago a priest wrote to me about his concern to be in communion with a Church body, but was aware that actually doing something about it would disturb the delicate balance of the independent community he serves. In April 2012, a full year before I joined the ACC, I was also in a very uncertain position as a priest. I didn’t have the same issue as the priest who has written to me, but I was very concerned about the priesthood being exercised outside proper ecclesiastical jurisdiction. The gift of the priesthood is not the priest’s property but something with which he is entrusted by the Church for the sake of the Church.
As they said to us in seminary “You’re not a priest for yourself but for the Church“.
In one of the comments in the older posting I wrote, I found the words addressed to me:
I think you are in a particularly curious position, given your past history. You will never be truly a vagante priest.
Re-reading my old posts and the comment, I saw that I misunderstand the extremely fine nuance that was meant. It was not a question of whether or not I was under the jurisdiction of a bishop, belonging to an institutional Church or on my own as an “independent”, but whether I had the characteristics of many men who find themselves in the ranks of vagantes clergy. I have the credentials of a “professional” priest as opposed to the amateurism one finds here and there. I think that’s what he meant.
I wrote to the priest and included this paragraph:
I found with the Continuing Anglicans a smallness, intimacy and “personal” dimension that I could assimilate and accept, thus being in a communion beyond myself. It has given me a certain amount of “credibility” in France, since it is an “ethnical” option and not an act of dissidence. When I say credibility, it isn’t the kind that makes people want me to be their pastor, but which makes them consider me in other terms than those of the various “sulphurous” prelates here and there in France.
At least that was the reflection of my wife, who is aware of some of the less credible independent clergy in France. Naturally, the positive reasons for joining a Church must outweigh the negative reasons – though both may exist in someone’s motivation.
When I joined the ACC, our diocesan Board of Ministry asked me what use I would be to them. I answered that in material and pastoral terms, I would be of no use to them. All I could do was to go on with the Mass and the Office, blogging and corresponding with those who think I can be of help to them. Our Church has thus proven itself open to the notion of gratuitous contemplative life, interiority and the intercessory dimension of the priesthood.
There is another part of my response to the priest, which I think I can reproduce without betraying the said priest’s identity.
Things may be different for you – a choice between carrying on in your present situation with people counting on you to be their priest, adhering to traditional Roman Catholic standards of liturgy, doctrine and moral teaching – or joining a church body with its own interests and lack of care for your concerns, and risking destroying your community. There is clearly no solution for you with the official RC Church, the SSPX or “mainstream” sedevacantists. Many invent “foundational myths” for themselves. You are too honest and realistic to play such games! I hardly imagine you in the Episcopal Church with a much worse and deeper crisis than in the RC Church. The PNCC has its own problems, and my Orthodox Blow-Out Department is evidence of the difficulties faced by converts to Orthodoxy who want to be western rite. I found my place in Continuing Anglicanism, since there was no way I could return to the Church of England and I was never really acquired to the Papalist mind-set. For you to resort to Anglicanism would mean a lot of back-pedalling from the ecclesiology you have taught over the years and with its roots in your erstwhile Anglo-Papalism. Had you been on this path 7-8 years ago, the TAC with its pro-Ordinariate stance would have provided that justification. Where else to go without destroying your community and finding yourself having to find a new “job” and security in life?
I went on to suggest that the way ahead would be by way of “ecumenical dialogue”, by clergy and laity of the community in question and the institutional Church they are considering approaching getting to know each other on an informal basis. Only then would it be appropriate to go into formalities and official recognition of the priest’s ministry.
If that priest is unable to find a bishop or an ecclesiastical jurisdiction, what then? He has to exercise his conscience and discern whether “independent” ministry is justifiable in the absence of church bodies and bishops being prepared to receive and regularise a priest and community from outside. This is where the notions of “absolute” priesthood (without being relative to episcopal jurisdiction) and canonical regularity become blurred. What is to be gained by a priest giving up and telling his people to attend church where they are aliens or stay at home on Sunday mornings? Would any positive good come out of it?
We are living in a time when the old “mainstream” solutions are now impossible, or the requirement of jumping through hoops is so onerous to the priest in question as to be unreasonable. There will always be priests with tender consciences and a desire to do the right thing, and there will always be the charlatans and exploiters by whose example all are tarred with the same brush.
I am thankful to my Bishop for having taken me into his diocese and given me a canonical basis to my priestly life. I don’t lord it over others who go through the same agony as a went through in the spring of 2012, just as soon as my former TAC Ordinary was “out”. These are hard questions that bishops can only deal with case by case. It is particularly hard for a bishop to trust newcomers when he has already burned his fingers. Cardinal Siri of the Archdiocese of Genoa once said something to the effect of “I would rather be wrong twenty times than unjust one single time”.
It is a constant principle of law that “it is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent man to death“. A judge’s mind has to be clear and certain in ascertaining the guilt of each accused person brought before him, and not allow himself to pronounce guilt by association with the truly guilty, or on the basis of anything other than irrefutable evidence. This is also a part of a bishop’s responsibility when deciding which priests need a “break” and which ones should be told to be lay members of the Church.
My only advice to priests in this situation is to be humble, simple and completely sincere, open and totally honest. Make what the Jesuits used to call a “manifestation of conscience” so that no surprises remain. I think that such a disposition can go far with our Pastors who are concerned for the good of our Church and the flocks entrusted to their charge.
I have been meaning to write something on this subject for a while, which is resilience – psychological or spiritual, call it what you will. It is our ability to cope with adversity. One thing I admire about the people of my native land is how we got through World War II, all alone until the Americans finally came in and made the liberation of Europe possible. This was the experience of my grandparents and parents, anyone born before the mid 1930’s.
I have had many discussions with French people and the way they lived through the war. France was occupied from 1940 and came under the jackboot and the terror of the Gestapo. Some betrayed their neighbours for a food ration stamp! Resistance was rewarded by torture and a long trip to the concentration camp if you were not lucky enough to get a bullet right away! In England, they were generally in solidarity, led by the tough determination of Churchill and inspired by feelings of patriotism and national pride. The same feeling comes back year after year on Remembrance Day, even for those of us born after the war.
One way the English maintained the stiff upper lip was through humour and mocking the enemy. Litter bins were painted with cartoon pictures of Hitler with a wide-open mouth, so we could make him eat our rubbish! This video is a wonderful piece of testimony of this use of humour to get through those dark days.
But, the reality of war is something other than the patriotic films we had in the 1950’s and 60’s like The Dambusters. It was horror and destruction, pure evil. One has only to ask those who have been to Vietnam, Irak or Afghanistan in recent years. Many servicemen have been destroyed by post-traumatic-stress-syndrome and others have committed suicide. The nightmares never stop. Yet others made it through and rebuilt their lives.
One thing that brought me to this theme was reading something about St Theresa of Lisieux and her spiritual resilience. She had a very tough monastic way of life, and then she became ill with tuberculosis. Those were her physical trials, and there was her spiritual life. Her secret was The Little Way, one of simplicity and humility. Far from the sappy and sentimental image we often have of this Saint, reading her writings and about what others saw in her, she was tough. She wrestled with her faith and her impending death. Her simplicity was in reality down-to-earthness.
We all carry our crosses in one way or another, be it through ill health, war, famine, persecution and all the possibilities St Paul mentioned like being shipwrecked three times. It would appear that resilience is not a quality of some persons, but a process we all have to go through. Another extreme example I have seen in cinema is the famous film Papillon. The hero of the film played by Steve McQueen survives an incredible degree of suffering. His punishment may have been out of proportion with his crime. The French penal colonies of Guyana killed a large proportion of the prisoners. His will to live and escape remained intact. That is resilience!
We humans are generally very clever at finding coping strategies when faced with danger and adversity. I remember a few years ago overtaking a tractor in a van. The tractor suddenly turned left in front of me without indicating his direction. I was pushed into a trajectory towards a ditch in the other side of the road. As this happened, I remember being extremely calm, and only overcome by an adrenaline rush once the vehicle had come to a standstill, still upright and everyone alive and uninjured (two persons in the vehicle). It’s probably what happens to soldiers in battle and why many are totally fearless in the face of the enemy. It is partly their military training, but also basic human instinct. It also happened to me when I once rescued a person who tried to commit suicide by jumping into the Thames in London. You focus on the essential and forget your own fear or sense of self-preservation.
Here is a short quote from Guns of Navarone that has always particularly impressed me:
Cohn: Do you think they’ve got any chance at all, sir?
Commodore Jensen: Frankly, no. Not a chance in the world. I should be very surprised if they get even halfway to Navarone. Just a waste of six good men. However, I suppose that doesn’t matter, considering how many have been wasted already. I’m glad it’s not my decision; I’m only the middleman… Still, they may get there, and they may pull it off. Anything can happen in a war. Slap in the middle of absolute insanity people pull out the most extraordinary resources: ingenuity, courage, self-sacrifice. Pity we can’t meet the problems of peace in the same way, isn’t it? It would be so much cheaper for everybody.
Cohn: I never thought of it in just that way, sir. You’re a philosopher, sir.
Commodore Jensen: No. I’m just the man who has to send people out on jobs like this one.
Jenson described exactly this ability man has for finding a way. Some of the greatest inventions have been inspired by problems to solve, like Wallace’s bouncing bomb which was the only way to destroy the three dams in Germany. Necessity is the mother of invention. Get stuck out on the road with a broken-down car, and we generally find a way to get home. Sometimes, we absolutely need help, and sometimes we do a better repair job that we thought we were able to do. I have found myself out at sea in my boat and my mast down because of a rigging failure. Two possibilities: call for help or cope. I dismantled my rig and got to the beach holding the mast in one hand and the jib sheet and my tiller with the other hand. Once on the beach, a long way from my “home beach”, I was able to re-rig the boat and find something to hold the mast up – and get home. No heroism, just what any one of us in a fix has to do!
Resilience and resourcefulness are also things we learn. Scouting is a wonderful invention for kids. They learn to make things from very little and solve problems like adults. I found the same thing with the CCF and the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme. I my more recent experience, the Glénans made a big impression on me. The Glénans, founded on an archipelago of islands after the war in south Brittany, was designed to help young people after the trauma of the Occupation. Teach ’em to sail and stick together in a boat! I can’t think of anything better to make men and women of us. It all started with Baden Powell and Rudyard Kipling, men who really understood these human qualities that ennobled us and made us capable of realising our potential.
These human qualities are found in individual persons and whole societies, like England under siege before the Americans arrived. War is not the only adversity man has to face. We have only to look back a few days – and what is still happening – in the Philippines. First there were the wind and the waves of the typhoon, and now the total breakdown of civilisation as people try to survive in spite of the absence of humanitarian help (because helpers can’t get there or don’t have the boats, helicopters and planes). Many curl up and die. Others resort to pillage and crime, and others seek to remain within the bounds of morality and decency.
There is another story someone once told me about the bombing of Dresden. There was a mental hospital full of patients earmarked by the Nazis for euthanasia. When the city was bombed and the patients escaped, their mental illnesses went into remission and they helped other victims of the bombing like completely sane people. The insanity returned as “normality” returned. I don’t know how true this story is, and I have not read Slaughterhouse Five.
Resilience enables us to deal with danger and risk, keep our ability and competence under stress (like making the best of a vehicle out of control), recover from trauma – and take up challenges to deal with future hardship. We need to have a positive view on life, but not an illusory one that disregards reality. We can suffer greatly from traumas, anxiety, illness and obsessive thoughts, but we recover in time and become the stronger for it. It is necessary to be realistic for the future and build up confidence and self-esteem. With these in place, we communicate with others and keep our feelings under control.
As mentioned above, humour is very important in our task of coping. It is often a great help to take the mickey out of ourselves, which is often what elderly people do instead of complain about their failing health and lessened ability to do what they used to do. Again, we have the importance of a positive attitude, ability to solve problems and cope, but to have the humility to call for help when really needed (and not before). Belief and spirituality are essential. We take ourselves less seriously. However, there are aspects of religion that have caused a tremendous amount of harm. The guidance of souls needs to contain a notion of man’s essential goodness, even though we are all capable of evil.
There are various things most of us can do to build up our resilience. The most important is working on our attitude and chasing away alarmist and pessimistic thoughts. Only today, I was reading an article about the human race only having a few months to live before our being exterminated by radiation poisoning. Our planet is horribly polluted, but not to that extent. We need to take on the challenge of doing something about it.
Another thing is to get out and about, take up a sport within our physical possibilities. Above all, doing things like boating; hiking and mountaineering brings us into communion with nature and a sense of wonder. This helps the life of prayer as does the actual practice of prayer and spiritual reading. These things also bring us to see beyond ourselves and reach out to those in a worse predicament to ourselves. I think of the metal patients in the hospital of Dresden and how they became sane in the chaos and when they had other people to help out of the flames and rubble.
Land of our birth, we pledge to thee
Our love and toil in the years to be;
When we are grown and take our place
As men and women with our race.
Father in Heaven who lovest all,
O help thy children when they call.
That they may build from age to age
An undefiled heritage.
Teach us the strength that cannot seek,
By deed, or thought, to hurt the weak;
That, under thee, we may possess
Man’s strength to comfort man’s distress.
Teach us delight in simple things,
The mirth that has no bitter springs;
Forgiveness free of evil done,
And love to all men ‘neath the sun.
Land of our birth, our faith, our pride,
For whose dear sake our fathers died;
O Motherland, we pledge to thee,
Head, heart and hand through the years to be.
This is my personal blog concerning my philosophy of life as a Christian following the Romantic world view. I am a priest in the Anglican Catholic Church – Original Province and live in France.
The Blue Flower 