The Center Cannot Hold

We sat at the edge of brokenness, with a view of what wasn't right with the world: the tempo accelerating, how we worship speed - faster, faster, instantaneous communication, purchasing, travel (to Paris in just a few hours!); the constant thirst for information, driven by its constant production, from 24/7 news, to daytime talk shows, late night talk shows, Tweets, and Facebook feeds, the newest, the latest, the greatest, the Fear of Missing Out; how we pillaged and mined the earth for its resources, gluttonously feeding our ever-growing appetites, and to our own peril careless about the needs of other creatures and the planet's finely tuned equilibrium.

And then it happened, a pandemic of Biblical proportions as if out of an Old Testament story, something about a king, greedy, shrouded in gold, and dismissive of the needs of his people. Like the voice of a divinity, it announces to the people, who had lost their way, "There is something bigger than you!" A force, like the plagues of ancient Egypt, crossing boundaries of state and country and political divides, necessitating that we slow down and take stock. It awakens us from the whirling giddy miasma of modernity, and shakes us into remembering the timeless things that matter most -- our loved ones and communities, to breathe, and the beauty of nature and the world around us.

At the same time that we grieve for the loss of lives and economic hardship brought on by the pandemic, perhaps too there is a way this moment offers medicine for our times, medicine that supports the sentiments of Earth Day on its 50th anniversary.

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Things Fall Apart
By William Butler Yeats

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?

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