Sunday, May 22, 2011

Are We Still Here?

Minnesota Council of Churches Executive Director Peg Chamberlin had a good post yesterday at the Star-Tribune. She "shows", through meticulous calculations how yesterday's date was discovered hidden in the Bible. She then adds this:

Theo Gill, senior editor at the World Council of Churches, says: You can see why people look for hidden messages in the Bible: The stuff that appears on the surface - like "Love one another", "Let justice roll down like a river" and "My peace I give you" - is so clearly outlandish.
Yes and Amen!!

Actually the Second Coming may have happened before this, or so thought poet 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 Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the 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?

According to Wikipedia:
"The Second Coming" is a poem composed by Irish poet William Butler Yeats in 1919 and first printed in The Dial (November 1920) and afterwards included in his 1921 collection of verses titled Michael Robartes and the Dancer. The poem uses Christian imagery regarding the Apocalypse and second coming as allegory to describe the atmosphere in post-war Europe.

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