The Second Coming...

I've been a bit obsessed these last two weeks with the Second Coming. My sense of Advent is exactly that it is a time to re-awaken myself to my inability to save the Creation.

OK. Duh.

But in a lot of churches, especially the peace and justice churches I grew up in, you'd actually think that political activism is the equivalent of the coming of the kingdom of God. You know, a re-distributive tax plan, an end to the death penalty, debt forgiveness for Africa, and POOF, the kingdom.

I tend to side with people like Cornel West, who in Prophesy Deliverance, an early book, talked about the utter necessity and utter realism of a belief in the Second Coming... nothing else can save us from the radical brokenness of our own history. Nothing else could save us from ourselves.

I've been coming back again to WB Yeats' poem on the subject. I leave it with you:

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?