{"id":1305,"date":"2017-10-03T15:52:48","date_gmt":"2017-10-03T19:52:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/?p=1305"},"modified":"2026-07-02T06:34:28","modified_gmt":"2026-07-02T10:34:28","slug":"is-anarchy-loosed-upon-the-world-fall-of-rome-anyone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/?p=1305","title":{"rendered":"Is Anarchy Loosed Upon the World? Fall of Rome, anyone?"},"content":{"rendered":"
Watching the news about the Las Vegas shooter I actually wondered if he’d been demon possessed or inspired by Satan. I wonder that also when ISIL-inspired freaks commit mass murder. I can hear my grandmother’s voice, “It’s the Devil’s work”.\u00c2\u00a0 But maybe it’s more mundane — gambling debts and a psychotic personality.<\/div>\n
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Then today I received an email invitation to a Damned Ball about “enlightened darkness”. Truly makes me ask, as generation after generation has in the past,\u00c2\u00a0 “What is the world coming to?” Tiberius wasn’t even this depraved with his orgies. Or maybe he was. I don’t know.<\/div>\n
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The news often feels like the Fall of Rome or the Book of Revelation.<\/div>\n
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One of our seminarians<\/a> mentioned Yeats’ hundred-year-old poem, The Second Coming. Sure seems to fit, especially lines 5 thru 8.\u00c2\u00a0 The final 2 lines have always been scary to me…\u00c2\u00a0 (see below). Last century, everyone thought how uncanny that Yeats seemed to predict Hitler’s rise and the holocaust — “burnt offering” — the great genocide in Europe. Now his apocalyptic poem could mean something altogether more horrible coming down the pike — or should I say, “slouching” down the pike!<\/div>\n
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William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
\nTHE SECOND COMING<\/div>\n

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
\nThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;
\nThings fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
\nMere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
\nThe blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
\nThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;
\nThe best lack all conviction, while the worst
\nAre full of passionate intensity.<\/p>\n

Surely some revelation is at hand;
\nSurely the Second Coming is at hand.
\nThe Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
\nWhen a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
\nTroubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
\nA shape with lion body and the head of a man,
\nA gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
\nIs moving its slow thighs, while all about it
\nWind shadows of the indignant desert birds.<\/p>\n

The darkness drops again but now I know
\nThat twenty centuries of stony sleep
\nWere vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
\nAnd what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
\nSlouches towards Bethlehem to be born?<\/p>\n

\"The
How small but valiant is the light standing up against the Beast<\/figcaption><\/figure>