‘The Second Coming,’ W.B. Yeats
Advent season has begun. It is not all sweetness and light. There is too much at stake for that. It begins not looking back to the manger, but rather looking ahead with a sense of solid foreboding (now and then not so bad a gift).
The Second Coming
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?
[Source: The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, W.B. Yeats. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.]
Remembering Dorothy Day 42 years after her death
The founder of the Catholic Worker movement died November 29, 1980. A woman of faith, conviction, prayer, and steeled steadiness, she remains an inspiration and a beacon to any who recognize the Gospel of Christ as a call to action. A call to life. A call to live. On her gravestone on Staten Island there are just two words cut into the stone:
DEO GRATIAS
THANKS BE TO GOD
Rest in peace, you blessed provoker of blessed unrest.
What a guy!
Seditious Conspiracy
https://apple.news/AkgEG93dQSKeqp0zUGzRGFQ
Jury convicts Oath Keepers leader, 1 other of seditious conspiracy in Jan. 6 trial.
Be in touch!
McGinty@writeme.com
Believe it. 