The Center
A poet's lament.
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.
. . .
The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats
Yeats saw a world coming apart, much like many see it in our day. The first stanza of his The Second Coming describes well the path society is going down. The center cannot hold, he says, and so things must come apart.
What he doesn't tell us in the first stanza is why the center couldn't hold, or even what the center was. Yeats describes the result of a center that doesn't hold things together; things fall apart.
After the Great War many people began to despair, as the poet did in that time, that the influence of Christendom that had put an end to the Roman empire, toppled the mystery religions, put the spark of divinity in men's hearts, and built the modern world of the West had lost its grip - the centre cannot hold. But as so often happens when one inherits a successful business and proceeds to destroy it by ignoring what the business was built upon, the inheritance of Christendom by the West soon started unraveling. Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Lincoln, and others warned the West and the world what would happen, things falling apart, if the moral center they were building on came to be ignored.
Man finds his center in his religion. It is the anchor that holds him to what he believes. His life orbits around it, and as the orbit, the poem’s gyre, widens or gets farther from the center, Yeats says the center cannot hold. This is true of false religions. We have seen throughout history that they fall apart. The reason is they have a false center, and deny the true center of everything.
The True Center
For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him: And he is before all things, and by him all things consist. Colossians 1:16-17
Everything makes sense when you hold to a center that is true center. You can judge what is true by how it relates to the center. The politician’s lies (his lips are moving) are revealed as they cross his lips because they don’t square with the center. His center is not the real center, and it won’t hold.
The Mind of Christ: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty
Beauty is revealed by how it connects to the center. That overwhelming fragrance that stopped me in my tracks last spring as I walked toward our massive blossoming magnolia tree was beauty. For a moment I was in what ancient and modern Celts and Christians call a thin place, where the veil between this world and another, Heaven and Earth for instance, is thin. The beautiful fragrance from the magnolia blossoms that day stopped me in my tracks and made me think, “Heaven is here." The Earth is God’s creation. He said it was good. Good because it came from the mind of God. What was in His mind was manifested in His creation. Real beauty that we behold on Earth is beauty because it is God’s mind manifested in our reality.
How do we find beauty? Think on beautiful things. Look to the center. If your center isn’t holding beauty, or has some spot in it that that isn’t beautiful, it isn’t a center that will hold.
Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. Philippians 4:8
Goodness, or justice, is manifested when it is shown to agree with the center. That which is just holds true to the center. For that reason it can do no harm to real beauty or truth. The same center holds them all together.
Truth is whatever agrees with the mind, will, and character of God. Any religion, creed, worldview, or empire that isn't centered on it cannot hold and will ultimately fail. In the end these failures are witness to the truth, because their failure has shown they did not have a true center which could hold them.
. . .
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?
The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats