Random…….resolutions.

Random Wednesdays, second post. (March)

Many years back I was in the gym of the ‘posh’ raquet sports and health club at this time of year doing my customary free weights workout and I was wondering why the gym was so quiet compared to a few weeks previously and the simple answer turned out to be that most of the new resolutions newbies had basically lost interest and if they were there at all then they were down in the bar.

I have mostly given up fitness related new years resolutions now – when I feel like it and have the time I throw on a rucksack and head out for a walk and if i’m really keen I might crank out a few sets of press-ups but that’s about it. I do however stick to other new years resolutions , for example that this year i’m deliberately spending less time on the internet unless i’m actually writing and also i’m having a more serious attempt at filming and producing video’s ; my main resolution this year though was to get back to regular and serious reading.

I’m a bit of an odd and eclectic reader though because I can have anything up to four books on the go at any one time, it’s not that I read one at a time or even all of them at once but that I read a bit of something for light entertainment when I need a break from the more heavyweight stuff. Right now for example there’s one of the late Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels open on the floor alongside the Pratchett biography which I have finished and must say was a good read…..I don’t normally read biographies but that one was worth the ride. My ‘serious’ reads this winter and spring are J R Tolkien’s creation story and pre LOTR epic The Silmarillion and even more seriously heavy going i’m still chewing my way through Roy Hattersley’s ‘The Catholics’, which, unsurprisingly given that Roy Hattersley was a Labour party minister is heavily political rather than theological.

Now, given that i’m slowly working through the New Testament of the Bible , as well as dipping in and out of the Old because at the same time iv’e been attending an RCIA class down at the local Roman Catholic church my selection of reading is a bit….’Catholic’ to say the least. In this post i’m going to say a couple of things about each book in isolation and taken together and both in their historical context and their relevance today so here goes………

But it’s not just about the reading the book right ?

What do I mean by that ?……well, to begin with lets start with a book that I first read as a teenager back in the 1970’s – i’m thinking of J R Tolkien’s epic novel Lord Of The Rings (LOTR). So, I first read it as a very immature teenager and I basically read it as a kind of fantasy/medieval war story which in a way it kind-of is because that’s the up-front story but nothing like the whole deal. Many years later, after having read and re read LOTR maybe a half dozen times I read it again when I came back from 4 months spent in New Zealand hiking lots of the scenery actually used in the film , saw one of the Peter Jackson films there and came back to re read the books as a difficult wilderness journey that included an epic mountain crossing and a river journey by canoe. If you’re wondering then I did think about what the Hobbits ate for ‘second breakfast’ and how they camped or bivouac’d out in the field because they were also the problems I dealt with.

My first point is that we all read books in uniquely individual ways and even that the way we read and understand books changes with time ; nowadays we can also factor in that we have better or worse film adaptations thus I always ‘hear’ Gollum as Andy Serkis and Gandalf of course as Ian McKellen. Reading isn’t just about reading the words though because even now I understand that there are several different methods of reading and understanding books like the Bible for instance ; if for instance we read the whole thing literally then we run straight into a 6 day creation and an earth that was created on a Tuesday afternoon some 6,000 years ago…..just in time for tea and biscuits !.

With the Bible for example we seem to need several different methods of reading because some of it seems to need a historical/critical technique to understand that the (human) author of the time would have been talking about cultural and social situations which are alien to us today. Then we need an actual/literal sense of reading as when say Jesus or later one of his followers is talking about something that was actually said or actually happened – after that I even get that at times we can read and compare the words as though they speak directly to our lives and our times as say the local priest does when he reads from ‘the word’ and delivers a ‘homily’ based on them. My slow and careful reading of the New Testament right now is a bit like that so i’d just like to share something that both jumped off the page and became currently relevant when set against two recent modern cultural events.

Firstly then here are the actual words spoken – this is Jesus, by the way and as recorded by Mathew.

‘So have no fear of them ; for nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known’.

In terms of reading that today, some 2,000 years after the event, I don’t have the training to know what the context of Jesus’s words were so my ‘take’ on that verse is if it is more like a prophetic one and it jumped off the page because of two things that iv’e been following this week so….

First : The Twitter files. I’m not and never have been a ‘twit’ because I always found the platform toxic in the way that it seemed to promote a ‘dive for the bottom’ in any argument – and it was always about opinion and argument – we have a pithy saying about opinions in medicine and nursing. Anyway, as you know, Twitter was bought out by Elon Musk and love the guy or hate him one of the things he has done is sacked the original executives and then released everything (we think) to online journalists to chew over. There’s so much here that I can only pick out one strand of the Twitter executive’s disgraceful behavior in banning or suppressing any comment of speech that questioned or challenged any of the many things that they, the Twitter executives, either stood against or were told to by their political masters ; the level of corruption and government agency corruption is stunning…….and it’s all ‘coming out in the wash‘ as we say in England.

Second : the Covid 19 mandates and the suppression of truth. Also this week iv’e been following the long-form interview/podcast between Dr Jordan Peterson and Dr Jayanta Battacharya. In this interview Battacharya, who is an expert in the area of disease and vulnerable populations describes how his and many other’s valid work and research was suppressed in the USA by those supposedly in charge of public health policy. Even when it happened back in 2020 I and many others felt that there was something deeply wrong about the lockdowns, the insistence that vaccination was the only way forward and the suppression of knowledge about ‘simple’ and cheap measures that people could take to protect themselves ; boosting immunity for Vitamins C, D and the mineral Zinc. Having come from a job where I had to know my way around clinical risk it also seemed that vaccination was ultimately being mandated for all people but weirdly for those at zero to very low risk – even to me this made no sense whatsoever.

The important thing here is the way that ‘the system’, by which I mean the government, it’s elected officials, compliant ‘scientists’ , the mainstream media and the social media tech giants all mounted a suppression and vilification campaign against anyone who. like Battaracharya challenged the establishment. Today we know that the lockdowns didn’t work in the way that was claimed but instead have caused massive and long term harm – especially in poor and vulnerable populations and even worse perhaps is that we now hear that the vaccines cause actual medical injuries and multiple vaccinations possibly create a weakened immune state.

Once again……what was secret and done secretly is all ‘coming out in the wash’.

Those pesky Catholics and ‘The Catholics‘ (Roy Hattersley)

The east Anglian market town that I grew up in was so staunchly protestant that it was almost Puritan – in fact our man Oliver Cromwell lived just a few miles away….not in my time of course. I can remember the churches and chapels in that town because there was an eerily Gothic looking C of E church with a super scary graveyard that I had to walk through on my way to the Cubs and Scouts hut (until I was kicked out), then there was the plain and bleak Baptist and Methodist preaching halls ; the thing is that I only have the vaguest memory of a tiny RC chapel about the size of someone’s house and when I checked even that isn’t there any more.

When we moved, as a family, to the big city there were definitely a few Catholic kids in the class because they disappeared somewhere else when we had RE. (religious education) class where I generally sat at the back and picked my nose while thinking about something else…..tanks most likely. So, the first time I ever consciously met some actual adult Catholics was when I started my student nurse training at Preston in Lancashire ; then I met a couple of lovely Catholic girls and totally failed to get off with either of them !. I didn’t realize until very recently that Lancashire was one of the few strongholds of English Catholicism even when it was dangerous to be an actual practicing Catholic – that will have been for most of the 16th , 17th and 18th century in England but especially after the actual reformation, the counter reformation and during the ‘great’ Elizabethan rule which was as bloody and violent as ‘bloody’ Mary’s.

If anything at all then I think I grew up unconsciously absorbing a strange suspicion and distrust of Catholics and Catholicism without ever thinking about why that might be the case ; until recently that is. Perhaps there is a natural anti Catholic English bias that was at one time certainly driven by those in power and egged on by both the English press and by fanatical English (and Scottish) puritans. The most obvious examples of that in history seem to revolve around Rome, the Vatican and the Papacy – this was certainly even the case when I lived up in Preston during the years of the ‘troubles’ in northern Ireland.

When I tried to think this out for myself I recognized that temperamentally I am a natural ‘protestant’ although that’s even the wrong word, because i’m far too individualistic to easily accept the ‘authority’ of say something like the ‘Magisterium‘ of the Roman Catholic church ; to me that always seemed more like a wealthy and power driven hierarchy with some nice buildings and some odd saints on the side. I don’t do well with pomp and authority which also makes me a bit of an anti Royalist too – i’m sorry but all I see is unearned privilege. I do better when it comes to Catholic orders such as the Franciscans whom I have a lot of respect for because they seem to ‘live the life’ and not just talk a good game. I sometimes joke that the only problems I have with the Franciscans way of life is their declared poverty, their chastity and their obedience to Papal authority…..aside from those three minor objections I think I could happily work alongside their order as a lay Franciscan say.

Anyway…..enough of this chat and on with Roy Hattersley and his book ‘The Catholics’.

Having bought the book during our pre- Christmas shopping trip and given that it’s the end of February I have to first admit that I haven’t finished yet and given that i’m normally a fast reader that’s a bit strange. Well, the first reason that I haven’t finished it as because it’s so painstakingly detailed as to describe it as ‘dense’ – by which I just mean a density and fullness of detail covering a complex subject over 500 years. The second reason is that I take my history seriously and I thought I knew enough about the Tudor dynasty to at least get started with the reformation – which is logically where the book begins given that it’s mainly the story of English Catholicism.

The simple fact is that I assumed I knew something about the main players at the time of the reformation, the Tudors that is, but like many I only had the ‘easy and cheap’ knowledge of two of them ; that’s big fat and murderous Henry VIII and one of his daughters (Elizabeth 1st). Well, even most of what I thought I knew was wrong and I still knew almost nothing about Edward VI and the other daughter Mary who also became queen almost as briefly as Edward. What that meant for me is that I didn’t have the basic background on Henry say or the main players of his court and who drove the main events of the English reformation – so I had to go looking.

For a lot of January I was reading a section of ‘The Catholics’ but as soon as I was on unfamiliar ground, most of the time then, I had to turn to Youtube and go watch something by historian David Starkey and then for ‘light’ entertainment go and watch Youtube clips of Edward burning the odd heretic or two. Neither Hattersley or Starkey pull any punches when it comes to the torture and death of assumed or actual heretics – and it was frighteningly, stunningly easy to inadvertently become or be seen as a ‘heretic’. One small example is that for example Henry VIII never actually seemed to make his mind up as one moment he’s attending six actual masses a day and acting as a server and then the next deciding that he is head of the new English church and burning anyone who disagrees with him.

So, I spent most of January learning about the actual reformation, the counter reformation under Mary and then the reversal of that under ‘bloody’ Mary ; even then it was a huge surprise that both of them started out wanting to be religiously tolerant and yet both ended up as heretic burning tyrants. In February I worked my way through the 17th 18th and 19th centuries but only by not also trying to follow up on the various dynasty’s and parliaments – then though I ran straight into something that I thought I knew more about because it’s something that partially happened during my own lifetime – that being that festering sore of British/Irish politics, the so called Irish troubles – basically a civil war just across the water from where I lived at the time.

Sometime between my reading of the Irish ‘question’ and Hattersley’s section about Catholic writers I took some time off to try and work out why I had a vague and poorly formed bias against Catholicism when in fact I had no good reason . It’s not just me either because one of the big things I take away from ‘The Catholics’ is an established bias in our government, our institutions and even our so called ‘christian’ church which seems to have only barely hidden their hatreds behind a smiling mask of piety. My other big take from the book is how easily the British public have at many times been led into an active hatred of Catholics by an unscrupulous combination of government, church and mainstream press and always it seems by those seeking power for their own ends.

So, I took some time off from reading ‘The Catholic’s’ to go and study Catholicism a bit more and mostly via the modern version of the Gutenberg press – that’s basically Youtube and internet sources. For a while I think I even began to see parallels between the 16th century and our 21st century in that we once again seem to have the same problem with knowledge and information just as people did during the reformation – then it was dangerous to even own a Bible and be able to read it while today it is ‘dangerous’ to have come to the ‘wrong’ conclusion about any subject, to express it and thus be declared the equivalent of a heretic. In a way I accidentally became the modern version of a heretic by beginning to realize that most ‘disinformation’ and ‘conspiracy theory’ related to the Covid pandemic was in fact the truth….and just as with Jesus’s words about things being done in secret it is all now coming out in the wash.

I just want to finish this overly long post with one odd observation about Roy Hattersley’s book (The Catholics) and this is after having read and re-read the book section about English Catholic writers – and I find a strange anomaly or omission in that J R Tolkien is completely absent – not even a mention in the index. Now, given that Tolkien was absolutely a Catholic and that Catholicism runs right through the Silmarillion , which I was also re-reading at this time, and the Lord Of The Rings which was several times voted the best story ever I do find the omission really strange. I was going to talk about the Silmarillion here and talk about the creation story in that book as compared to the creation story at the beginning of Genesis – in one we have creation starting with ‘The Word’ and spoken into being and in Tolkien’s work we read of it being magnificently and beautifully sung into being.

That’s it for this one though.

Best wishes Y’awl.