I’m not feeling very good about our country right now. And like many of the other politically walking wounded, I sense a dark force at work. For those of you who don’t share this view, I’m sure this sounds dire and melodramatic. But, in my heart, I sense something very bad taking place, and it makes me afraid.
I could pour out my feelings in this weblog. But there is no need. A better man than I has expressed it before:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming” 1921
Those of us who care about the seventh generation, those of us who have looked clear-eyed at the footprints we have left upon this land, know that we dare not remain silent much longer, seeking spiritual satisfaction within the solipsistic comfort of self realization.
We must find a new moral center, alive to the presence of God, but free from the ideological fervor of those who would close the doors on others who do not share their way of belief.
The game may now be in motion, and it may be bigger than we think.