Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

-William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

I often turn to poets and writers who share my Christian faith for wisdom and insight but as I read the above first stanza of W.B. Yeats’ apocalyptic poem I am struck by the sheer power and accuracy of his vision.  Literary critic Harold Bloom has called Yeats, “an enthusiastic occultist,” and “fiercely not Christian,” he also notes that Yeats was, “politically a partisan of the extreme right.”[i]  Yeats, like most poets, had his foibles, and yet even in the description of his religious and political affinities, we find a great complexity.  Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot were notorious anti-Semites, yet both professed Christian faith and believed in a Jewish carpenter as the Messiah.  Yeats, being an occultist, a decidedly non-mainstream spiritual form, yet being politically conservative seems paradoxical to my mind.  This tension between Yeats the spiritual being and Yeats the political creature seems to have produced a truth of moderation, which speaks beyond who the man was and even what he meant.

            A little over 50 years later American novelist, Walker Percy, took Yeats’ line about the center not holding and reframed it in a tale of post-modern apocalyptic events called Love in the Ruins.  Percy, a Roman Catholic, southern gentleman, heard Yeats’ words as prophetic, even though Yeats would have denied any divine inspiration (though perhaps he would have admitted to a spiritual inspiration).  The content of this stanza of poetry describes, with extreme potency, the on going polarization of society.  It is not clairvoyant by any stretch of imagination; Yeats saw perhaps more polarization into left and right in his lifetime than we see now.  Remember that the birth of Communism and the rise of Nazism in Germany and fascism in Italy were essentially the ascendancy of liberal (communist) and conservative (nazi/fascist) extremes.  These ideological clash of these extremes in the wake of WWI was what inspired Yeats.  He saw the old order of aristocracy and elitism as the only bastion of hope against the chaos of the Bolsheviks.  The intensity of that drama would make Ted Kennedy and Newt Gingrich seem like best buddies.

            Yeats uses the falcon and the falconer, symbols of an extremely aristocratic sport, as a metaphor for what happens to a society that is experiencing polarization.  The bird gets out of range of its handler.  Once it cannot hear the directions of the falconer the hunt is lost, “things fall apart.”  A great many people, both in the church and in society at large, feel somehow that the falcon has lost touch with the falconer.  The large majority of people that you meet are of a moderate political and ecclesiastical notion, they do not want chaos or stagnation, they want the center to hold.  As things are progressing now in church and society most of the middle is being nudged to the right by the aggressive and successful activity of the left.  Yeats saw the activity of revolutionaries as “mere anarchy” and a “blood-dimmed tide,” which was what actually took place in the search for utopia through socialist and communist revolutions.  The center sees the activities of the revolutionaries and decides that they like their “ceremonies of innocence” and immediately the right begins to grow in power.  Balance proves difficult to maintain because, “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

            Walker Percy’s literary vision of the aftermath of this apocalypse seems to indicate that perhaps the best thing for our current situation is for everything to simply blow up. For those who survive the “blood-dimmed tide” to simply move on to a simpler way of life and find “Love in the Ruins.”  Leading up to, and now in the wake of, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA), I have heard an awful lot of “mere anarchy.”  There seems to be a greater problem in the system than either side of the Peace, Unity and Purity debate seems to realize.  The gyre is widening and the falcon cannot hear the falconer.  In the case of the Church the falconer is Christ alone, though many people would lay a claim to speak for him it seems that none of them can get the darn bird to listen to them alone.  We have not yet experienced a “blood-dimmed tide" but our “ceremonies of innocence” could certainly use a life preserver.

            It may be that the system has already weakened to too great an extent to return and that meltdown is inevitable but we cannot be sure.  There may yet be a chance for the center to hold but if it does not we should be prepared to pick up the pieces of this particular segment of the body of Christ and find Love in the Ruins.

 In the sense in which Liberalism is contrasted with Conservatism, both can be equally repellant:  if the former can mean chaos, the latter can mean petrifaction.  We are always faced both with the question “what must be destroyed?” and with the question “what must be preserved?” and neither Liberalism nor Conservatism, which are not philosophies and may be merely habits, is enough to guide us.

-T.S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society

The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) draws near and on a small scale the drama facing our entire culture is played out under the cover of parliamentary procedure and committee structures.  All Christians, perhaps even all people of the world, should pay close attention to what is happening to the American churches.  The Episcopalians have already turned a corner, Methodists and Presbyterians are not far behind; the churches of the United States are standing at a tense crossroads.  T.S. Eliot wrote his essays on Christianity and Culture when the world was in the throes of World War II.  But his voice now rings prophetic 60 years later as the world has fragmented and polarized into the extremes positions of Liberalism and Conservatism and the middle ground is sinking fast away.

            Liberal thought once heralded new human possibilities; Eliot himself was a shining scion of the liberal age of enlightenment, when science and human reason seemed ascendant.  Literature and art flourished, philosophy and wisdom seemed to walk hand in hand (at least in some quarters).  But as with any revolution it became institutional and in fact antithetical to its very nature and came to be called Liberalism (capitalization and the addition of the suffix “ism” is almost never good for a political, social or even religious movement).  Conservatism is a counteracting force but has, in its very nature, a strong tendency towards “petrifaction.”  If the two are not in balance then society is truly in trouble; the chaos of Liberalism and the cave-dwelling fear of Conservatism will simply rage and tear at one another impeding the “progress” that liberals idealize and causing the decay that conservatives fear.

            This situation has become a reality both in the church and the body politic.  Eliot noted in the postscript to this essay that, “The church cannot be, in any political sense, either conservative, or liberal, or revolutionary.  Conservatism is often conservation of the wrong things: liberalism a relaxation of discipline; revolution a denial of permanent things.”  The warning that the “church cannot be” these things seems particularly salient now as the church in America has become all those things to the detriment of its very being.  The Church must recover its balance, its center, if it is to survive.  One of my Seminary professors, a favorite among the conservatives, was recently quoted in one of the most conservative publications, referring to the Presbyterian Church (USA) as a “transient denominational structure.” (Robert Gagnon quoted in The Layman, Vol 39, Number 2, April 2006)  His description of a “transient denominational structure” reminds us that no matter what side of the current argument you happen to prefer, it is all vanity and chasing after the wind.

            The church cannot be too liberal, too conservative or even too revolutionary but it must be all those things at any given point and there must be balance between the forces.  The current rancor and lack of dialogue, the current sense that there is a “right” answer to the problems facing our denomination is a failure of all three mindsets.  The conservative approach of clinging doggedly to the past will turn us to stone.  The liberal approach of trying to accept everyone and every idea will simply cause us to dissolve quietly into the night of secularism or paganism.  The idea that revolution, change for change’s sake, will somehow lead us to a new dawn is a flawed combination of old school liberalism and new school materialism, the grass is not always greener.