Skip to main content

Becoming Something Together

"Things fly apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world . . ."

William Butler Yeats wrote that, more than ninety years ago.
The smell of the first world war was still in the air.

"Surely the Second Coming is at hand . . .", he said.
"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

Things are still flying apart.
The center is not holding.
The Second Coming is not coming.
It never has been coming.
And if there is a "rough beast" slouching,
it surely will not go to Jerusalem,
or to Mecca, or Rome, or Salt Lake City.

It is those things that are flying apart.
The rough beast does not wear vestments and silly shoes and hats.
That is the center that cannot hold.
There is anarchy at the center.

Once, there was a Holy Roman Empire, and it stretched across Europe, into Asia.  It rose and fell, but its aspirations held.  It sailed with Cortez, and followed Pilgrims everywhere.  I fondly recall a white steepled church in California that dated from God Rush days, when the tatters of that empire followed the smell of gold, too, and more rooted settlers to small towns on the frontier of that old empire.

There has been a time in human history when religions--not just Christianity, but Islam, and huge eastern religions built temples, and put on costumes to tell stories, that tied whole nations and continents together; that told them who they were, and what it was all about.  Religions gave them a center that held them together.  It gave them stories about where they had come from, and where everything was going, and how to be a good person, and a good neighbor, and to be great nations with great meanings.

Not now.  Those centers do not hold.

The Pope travels around the world trying to convince the remnants of the Holy Roman Empire to be strong and not to forget.  Rick Santorum is almost comic trying to become President by insisting on medieval ethics.  The Saudis and the arc of Islamic peoples stretching up the Near East to Iran and beyond, even to Indonesia, are wrestling with each other and with their own shattered centers, trying to remember; trying to become what they remember.  China is becoming, not what it used to be, but what population and brains and economics are going to make it.  India holds its old empires and wealth and poverties in one hand, and new electronic communities in the other.

The old centers were religiously defined and celebrated.  We do not know what rough beast will be civilized to sit at our sides, to help us to say, "This is who we are!  This is what we are like!", almost like cheetahs at the sides of the pharaohs.  

I think it will be something that gives us a common story; something like our origins, millions of years ago, something that helps us to understand how I became white and you became brown, how we traveled and came together, again.  It will explain how satisfying it is to belong together, and that will help us to know how to go, and where to go, and how to get there, together.  It will have to be a together-story much larger and better than the stories that have come to separate us; that are flying apart.

It will not be a Second Coming:  that is part of one of the old centers that cannot hold.  It will be a Becoming Something.  Together.  It will be rough, at first.  And that will be part of the story, too.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames.  We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves.  For instance, some  people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old.  Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old.   That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together.  But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer.  It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more