The Widening Gyre

It has been a little over a hundred years since the great Irish poet W.B. Yeats opened his “The Second Coming” with the line, “Turning and turning in the widening gyre… things fall apart, the center cannot hold.”

The poem, if the title and opening line didn’t clue you in, is about the end of the world. It was written in 1919, at the end of World War One, back before we could actually call it “World War One,” and it paints a grim picture, complete with political and social unrest, a great plague spreading across the lands and people living in fear of the unknown.

It was published in 1920… but it could very easily have been 2020, because it is not unlike the world we live in, which is pretty depressing actually. I don’t mean to be all doomy and gloomy, but every day it seems that we, too, are churning around in the widening gyre. If you are unfamiliar with the word (I had to look it up), it’s a whirling vortex of chaos. If you ask me, that’s the last two-plus years in a nutshell.

Yeats was a devoutly religious man and he saw the end of the world as a time to rejoice rather than mourn. I doubt he even thought the world would still be waiting for the Second Coming he wrote about a century ago. He died in 1939, just before the start of what would be World War II. Now here we are, with the idea that there could very well be a World War III brewing as international tensions run high, particularly with the United States and Russia.

If those are our options, I, for one hope Jesus is on his way here…