‘THE CENTRE CANNOT HOLD’. . .

As I settled in at my favorite coffee-bakery shop this morning my mind was sorting through a number of potential topics for today’s posting.  What emerged with clarity into my consciousness were the words from Yeats’ powerful poem, The Second Coming.  More specifically, what took center-stage in my mind was Yeats’ first stanza.  Yeats is speaking to us today:

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. 

We are living in a world where the centre cannot hold.  We human beings can no longer hold the growing contradictions and paradoxes that we are continuing to emerge from within.  The chaotic forces lying within us, individually and collectively, are being loosed upon the world.  In a sense we have not chosen this, for few choose this path, yet it is a reality that we cannot any longer afford to deny-avoid.

For thousands of years the great faith and humanist traditions and their wisdom figures have cautioned us – or powerfully warned us – that we humans are susceptible to ‘spiritual depletion.’  More recent prophetic voices have declared that we are now in a profound global spiritual crisis and this is the root cause of our dilemma.

Our spiritual crisis is manifested largely in desperation, cynicism, violence (especially self-violence), conflict, self-contradiction, ambivalence (think: What is ‘truth’?), paradox (think: fear and hope; doubt and belief; creation and destructiveness; progress and regression; and evolution and devolution, etc.), our growing attachments to images, idols, and slogans (think: seeking to treat the complex simplistically) and programs that do not sharpen but dull our capacities until our core begins to crack – the centre cannot hold.

We are immersed in a growing confusion.  We do not know if we are building a ‘better world’ or if we are destroying the world we have been entrusted with (think: pipe-line in the Dakotas).  We are immersed in powerful forces of good and evil, of virtue and vice, of light and darkness.  We are striving to save ‘our world’ while we are contributing to ‘our world’s destruction.’  We are seeking ‘peace in our time’ while we are supporting and encouraging world-wide violence (in the state where I live our state government is seriously considering allowing anyone who wants to buy a gun and openly carry it to do so – no checks and no gun-license needed).

In this scenario, evil pretends to be good as it reveals itself in the most dreadful atrocities, justified and rationalized by the purest and most ‘innocent’ intentions.  The great temptation in a spiritual crisis is for us to think of ourselves as god; to believe that we are all knowing, that we are all powerful, and that, worst of all perhaps, that we are all light.

Our spiritual sickness is the sickness of disordered love – the self-love that is, paradoxically, rooted in self-hate or self-loathing.  When turned inward our self-love suffocates our inner fire of love (the love that all great faith and humanist traditions talk about; the fire-love that nurtures rather than consumes) and we suffocate from within; when turned outward this adulterated love becomes a major source of universal, indiscriminate destructiveness – a destructiveness perpetrated, ironically, in the name of love.

I conclude this morning with the last few lines of Yeats’ poem:

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?