For our Taizé service on the labyrinth back in Advent, Mother Maddie selected a poem by the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats entitled "Second Coming."1 In the tradition of truly great poetry, it requires slow and careful reading. This isn't a simple poem to be quickly read, but a thing to be patiently pondered and even prayed. Which may be why I've come back to it several times since Advent, and in particular, to its first three lines.

Penned over a century ago, these verses remain timeless. The world seems to spin faster and faster, a whirl of noise and motion. The speed of life seems only to accelerate, and there are too few voices in the crowd asking to tap the brakes. And so we struggle to hear our true master, the one on whose arm we are safe to land. Instead, we become tethered to things that cannot hold us, to things that ought not be at the center of our "gyre." We attach ourselves to them, hoping they can anchor us in all the sound and fury, but they are not capable. Such centers cannot hold, particularly when things begin to fall apart.

 

This is what we're talking about this Lent – all the things we are tempted to put at the center of our lives, things that in the "widening gyre" cannot hold. We've been using the language of "false idols," which is to say, things that try to occupy God's place in our lives. Now the typical stand-ins for false idols are things like money, sex, and intoxication – things our world seems obsessed with that desire our attention and devotion.

 

This Lent, we're expanding the list beyond the usual suspects to include things that seem, at least on the surface, to be noble and good, because as I preached last week at the outset of Lent, sometimes wrong can hide behind a disguise of right. So we've considered how things like security and comfort can become false idols. In coming weeks, we'll consider how busyness (all our moving and making), technology (proponents of AI are unabashed about making it sound divine), and politics (certainly the god of too many Americans) can all become false idols. We'll even consider how our families, and especially our children, can take over the centering place in our lives that is intended for God alone.

 

These are each things we are tempted to put at the center of our spinning lives, but when things fall apart, as they always eventually do, such centers cannot hold. Not because they are bad in themselves, but because they are not intended to be the anchor to which we should be tethered. They are incapable of holding us in all our "turning and turning." They are not the falconer upon whom we ought to land.

 

As Brian Zahnd, who will visit us later in Lent to talk about the idol of politics, has preached, "if you place anything in the center, in the temple of your soul where God belongs, it becomes an idol, and that which could have been a good thing becomes an unhealthy thing."

 

It is unlikely that the gyre will stop widening any time soon, which means we need to remain tethered to the center that can hold. In the midst of so much sound and fury, we must stay close enough to hear the voice of our falconer. In a world where everything eventually falls apart, we must hold fast to the one who will not.

 

1 https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming

2 Brian Zahnd, "Things Fall Apart," sermon preached at Word of Life Church, St. Joseph, MO, March 19, 2017.