Jimmy Burns's Blog, page 36

Thought for Today: Belonging

I'm introducing a new occasional item to this website. A thought which I hope may resonate with some of my readers as it resonates with me. This is a short verse from a wonderful book called 'Eternal Echoes' by the Irish philosopher writer John O'Donohue. This meditative tome is dedicated 'for the ones who inhabit lives where belonging is torn and longing is numbered.'

I arise today

Blessed be all things

wings of breath,

delight of eyes,

wonder of whisper,

intimacy of touch,

eternity of soul,

urgency of thought,

miracle of health,

embrace of God

May I live this day

Compassionate of heart,

Gentle in word,

Gracious in awareness

Courageous in thought,

Generous in love.

On Greene's trail

My book of the month is Tim Butcher's Chasing the Devil published by Chatto & Windus.

Subtitled, The Search for Africa's Spirit, this is about a continent I rarely touched as a  foreign correspondent, still less as an author. However Graham Greene, who inspired Butcher's journey across Sierra Leone and Liberia, has formed part of my life since, as  a young boy, I was introduced to him for the first time by my father at the Garrick Club. My father was one of Greene's early editors, and a life-long friend. In WW2 they both worked in propaganda and intelligence.

In 1935, the author Graham Greene, aged 30, set out on a journey to West Africa, accompanied by his young cousin Barbara, in the first of his journeys to wild and dangerous places. These journeys were motivated partly by psychology- a need to escape from his inner demons and to search for a resolution to his life in risk-taking. This in turn provided material to fuel his literary imagination.

Greene, faced with having to support a young family, was desperately looking for ways of making more money from his writing. As Tim Butcher discovered in some long ignored Oxford University archive, Greene was lucky to have his trip sponsored by the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, although he sought and failed to obtain further support from the Foreign Office who considered the author something of an oddball at the time.

Greene  would have to wait for the outbreak of World War  Two to be recruited by MI6 and posted to Sierra Leone from where he drew further material for The Heart of the Matter, perhaps his best ever novel.

Butcher uses Greene's travel book Journey without Maps, and Barbara Greene's own long out-of-print dairy of their shared journey, as his main reference point and guide when setting out his long trek across Sierra Leone and Liberia.

After twenty years of working as a journalist for the Daily Telegraph, much of it as a foreign correspondent, Butcher is motivated by his own 21st century existentialist anxiety. Unlike the young Greene, he is well paid as a senior reporter with a major multi-platfom broadsheet, and seems happy enough with his family environment.

But he has tired of the inherent superficiality of his profession – a world of rolling, ever changing  news and instant judgements, not least in West Africa where the reporting of the bloody upheaval and civil war have left him with more questions than answers. With Chasing the Devil Butcher is now pursuing a serious career as an author with this sequel to his best-selling Blood River (in the steps of Stanley in the Congo.)

Unlike the Greenes, he is not accompanied by twenty-six porters, three servants and a chef and various clef sticks. Nor for that matter are Nazism and Revolution threatening the world as they were in the 1930's , forcing writers to take ideological sides or seek comfort in their Faith.

 Butcher has a satetellite  phone and his only companions, are a native guide called Johnson and David, a young white theology graduate whose father is a military attaché and might come to their rescue if ever needed. Seventy years on it is not just the daunting climate, terrain, and tropical diseases of West Africa that remain unchanged. The main challenge is presented by the pervasive culture and customs.

This leitmotiv of Butcher's latest book, as the title suggests, are the dark spirits and rituals that endure in the region he  returns to as explorer. It is this world of devilry that casts a long and enduring shadow across a tortuous path.  More than seven decades after Greene reported how he had found a certain virtue and purity in the primitiveness of  Africa,  Butcher dispenses with such romanticism and feels only horror at being confronted by the enduring cruelty fuelled by the dark forces , including ritual sacrifice and cannibalism.

Along the way Butcher finds   the remnants of the mission houses that Greene encountered. The prayers of hope and human engagement shared with Butcher by a missionary brother, and, later, an African woman provide the more positive book ends to his journey, as does a biblical encounter with Christian fishermen when Butcher finally reaches the end point of his journey, on the Atlantic coasty.

Butcher writes sympathetically about the Christians he meets but questions their capacity to win over hearts and minds as they struggle to compete with the influence Devils and their witch doctors that have dominated certain tribes for centuries. As for aid workers, they struggle, just as Butcher does, to persevere amidst the rampant official corruption that further drains Africa.

In trying to understand Africa's failure to transform itself into a continent of productive democratic nation states, Butcher recalls Conrad's description of a French frigate pounding the coastline, and the abandonment of a railway construction programme by a  major multi-national following the 2007 banking crisis. The two episodes are separated by almost a century and symbolise the long-standing failures of colonialism.

And yet Liberia is a country once populated and governed by liberated black slaves who went on to enslave and butcher other local natives. Sierra Leone's violence was temporary halted by a peace-keeping force sent by Tony Blair, although as Butcher recently pointed out during a public talk about Chasing the Devil, the former prime-minister fails to accurately record the various warring factions in his recent memoirs. It would seem that this region is taken less seriously by some than say Palestine or Northern Ireland even the loss of life and brutality has been so much greater.

Butcher is not a Catholic and his book lacks the theological tension and finely drawn human characters one finds in Greene's novels. What a pity that Butcher's egocentricity does not allow for Johnson and David to be given a bigger role .The book also takes a bit too long to get going with an extended and somewhat self-indulgent prologue about how the project came into being.

Thankfully the book gets into his stride wants the trek itself gets under way.   Taken as a whole, Chasing the Devil, provides us with a fascinating account of an expedition into another heart of darkness which benefits from the author's journalistic flair and self-evident passion for the African continent. It should be required reading for Greene fanatics,  students of  under development, and those bored with their desk jobs and urgently in need of inspiration born from  the bravery of other people's adventures.

Chemistry

 

Interesting observing Real Madrid and FC Barcelona  play in their respective Champions League games this week. Both teams frustrated by the defensive tactics of lesser  mortals. But there all comparisons end.

What I find hugely striking is the tension and poor chemistry that is evident not just between Mourinho and his players but among the Madrid players themselves. The Madrid players seem not to be enjoying themselves. They also show signs of genuine fear of what Mourinho might do to them.  By contrast Barca  players , even under pressure, seems to have lost none of that camaraderie that has been forged over two seasons, with Guardiola respected rather than feared. I am told that Pep spends as much time behind the scenes ensuring that his players are happy as he does developing tactics. Mourinho wants only to win  and tactical substitution is one of the tools he uses best to ensure that his team gets that critical late goal but I dread to think the bullying that goes on , away from the cameras.

Meanwhile, while we are on the subject of psychology, it is also interesting  to compare Messi with Rooney. Both players have suffered similar ankle injuries of late  and yet while Messi has come back to the team with speedy boarding, Rooney still languishes as a temporary  exile, his future with the English squad also in doubt, a question mark over his  future as a player, as well as a  family man.

There was a time once when Ferguson was regarded as the kind of manager that could make a player walk on water if he wanted to. They used to write essays and books about his inspirational style  of management and how players like Beckham considered Ferguson a father figure. But Ferguson seems to be struggling to keep Rooney on the straight and narrow.

By contrast Messi has been carefully nurtured by Guardiola  from the very first day he took over as manager at Barca and read the Argentine star the riot act. I am told Pep warned Lionel that if he wanted to be the greatest footballer since Diego Maradona, he had to ditch his long night outs, and focus instead on turning up for training, on time. The result, as a Barca  insider told me, is that "Messi exists only on the pitch".

Barca without Messi

A good source of mine at FC Barcelona told me a few days ago that he was convinced that Barca will win La Liga and the Champions League this season.

But that was before Messi got injured. I wrote not so long ago on the paradox afflicting Guardiola's Barca. Its current greatness and potential weakness lay in the Argentine star. With Messi firing on all cylinders, Barca  as a  team is inspired  to greatness , with all the other key parts- Xavi, Iniesta, Pujol, Villa- contributing  to a...

The Labour candidate who caught Fire

An interesting story reaches me about one of the candidates for the Labour leadership from a party insider.

Not so many years ago the aforementioned candidate was at a celebration party organised by a centre left leaning think tank when he accidentally caught fire off a candle. For a few seconds the poor man (well it wasn't  Diana Abbot, I can tell you) looked like "a chicken on fire, all puffed up and seemingly nowhere to go" my informant tells me.

With the help of nearby comrades, the fire...

Why vote for Miliband the Younger

Voting for Ed Miliband

After four days following the Pope around, I am back in the near-secular world, convinced that faith has still a party to play, along with reason, in our society, just as the newly beatified Cardinal Newman always hoped for.

First on the agenda- opening a backlog of mail. I find, inter alia, a Christmas catalogue from my favourite charity CAFOD, unsolicited mail from my local Pizza take away and Sushi bar up the hill, and a plethora of material from Labour party...

Newman: The Necessary Saint

My online Book Review of the Month is dedicated to Newman's Unquiet Grave by John Cornwell (Published by Continuum)

I have two reasons for picking John Cornwell's biography of Newman as my latest book of the month.

First on the personal front, my own recently published attempt at biography, Papa Spy , reminded me of how much its subject, my father, the late Tom Burns, owed to Newman, as a leading Catholic publisher (and wartime spook at odds with those Marxists who had infiltrated British...

The wise Jesuit

I cannot recall ever having been present in a congregation that greeted a sermon by a Catholic priest with more deserving spontaneous applause, not in England at least.

But applause was what Fr William Pearsall the Jesuit priest at the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Farm Street got this Sunday after speaking with sensitivity and wisdom about the upcoming Papal visit.

Fr William began by telling us how a day earlier he had opened his office window and listened to the raucous song...

Not in harmony with Catholic Voices

I'm listening withy difficulty

I came away from last night's debate at the Conway Hall on the upcoming Papal visit with an uneasy feeling I found myself quickly trying to dispel, drowning a pint with a sympathetic friend at a local pub.

I write as a journalist, author and Catholic who found myself poorly represented by Austen Ivereigh and Fr Christopher Jamison OSB, coordinator and patron respectively of Catholic Voices before a packed audience, in which a majority appeared less than enamoured ...

Barca: beware of The Transalator

A long season ahead

Barca has got off to a good start this season, winning the Spanish SuperCup and beating Racing Santander  0-3 , but it would be foolish  for cules to get over excited at this stage.

It would be foolish in the extreme to write off Jose Mourinho  on the basis of a somewhat lacklustre draw for Real Madrid in Mallorca. Mourinho has signed up an exciting crop of talented young players led by Mezut Ozila. He will be relying on the experience of  Kaka and Cristiano Ronaldo while...