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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.

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