Will The Center Hold?
“In him all things consist and hold
together.” Colossians 1:17
William Butler Yeats was Ireland’s foremost poet. In 1923 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. And one reason for his prize was his famous poem, “The Second Coming”.
It goes like this:
"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer:
Things fall apart; the center 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.”
Yeats wrote that poem in 1919 just after the end of World War I. He saw the devastation, the slaughter, the maiming, the “blood dimmed tide”. It seemed anarchy was loosed upon the world. Things seemed to be falling apart, and the best were without conviction. Yeats rightly wondered if the center could hold.
If Yeats could be so despairing in 1919 after World War I, we wonder what he might have written in our time. Since 1919, we have had the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean Conflict, the Viet Nam War, the Recession of the late 80’s, the Persian Gulf War, the burst of the hi-tech bubble in 2000, the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Towers and Pentagon, the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, the economic collapse of 2008 and the present day instability of the world economy.
Things do seem to be falling apart. The best lack central conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity in the form of Islamist extremism and terrorism. Every time we go through airport security stripped bare with our hands held high in the x-ray machines. I am reminded of a New Yorker cartoon where a man at airport security strips naked and lies down on the conveyer belt to go through the scanner. It is as if Al Qaeda is personally succeeding in their threat of terror. The anarchy of terror seems loosed everywhere. Can the center hold?
But there are other terrors. Ours is a peculiar age. It is peculiar because never before has there been such an abundance of knowledge so widely disseminated. Through books, magazines, libraries, computers, the internet, TV, movies, newspapers, satellite communications, eyewitness news and now the omnipresent, almost omniscient I-phone, information is nearly instantly and universally available.
Never before has there been a people so much “in the know”. And yet, paradoxically, we are not quite sure what we know. Ours often is information without insight, knowledge without wisdom. Our vast information may be more of a maze than a road map.
It is an age of anxiety. Though satisfied with an abundance of good things, there is a growing hunger at the center of our beings. Though better educated, we are not quite sure we know the one thing essential.
As Dickens put it of his time, so of ours, we might say it is the best of times, it is the worst of times. Old patterns and values have given way, but nothing has quite replaced them. The more certain voice of God of yesteryear seems vague and remote. The best seem to lack conviction. And so we wonder, will the center hold?
In about 56 A.D. when Paul wrote this letter to the Colossians, many of them were anxious about values, philosophies and religions. But they were anxious about the cosmos itself, about the universe. Were they, the Colossians wondered, controlled by the semi-divine and sometimes demonic powers of the planet and stars? They wondered if the center of the physical universe could hold.
In answer to that anxiety, Paul introduced a familiar, but profound philosophic concept. He introduced the logos and identified it with the risen and exalted Christ.
I.
The center will hold says Paul the Apostle in his letter to the Christians of Colossae in Asia Minor. It will hold because the Logos of God holds everything together.
Some years ago in my church in Edina, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis, a member of our church headed up the Federal Government’s Geographic Bureau for the Western United States. They watched over all the mines and minerals west of the Mississippi.
One day he asked me if I would like to see his laboratories. I said yes enthusiastically. I was fascinated as he sliced a rock extremely thin, put it under a microscope to elucidate the various minerals in that single slice. I was surprised, since minerals did not seem chemically bonded, but were pressed up against each other, side by side.
“What holds the minerals together?”, I asked. With a twinkle in his eye he said, “they each have little hooks.” And then he added, “No one knows. Intense pressure I guess.” What holds all things, including atoms and molecules together, is indeed a mystery.
The Jewish philosopher, Philo, was born in Alexandria, Egypt, about 20 B.C.E. Alexandria was founded by Alexander the Great and by the time of Philo had become a great center for learning, especially for Greek philosophy. The library had over 400,000 books and scrolls. Many Jews had settled there and eventually it became a center of Christian learning and thought.
Philo was more or less a contemporary of Paul the Apostle. Although we have no evidence Paul used Philo directly, we do know they drew similar ideas from the Stoic philosophers and from the great philosopher, Plato.
If the question was asked, “where did the world come from?”, the Stoic philosopher would reply, “from the Logos of God”, the reason or word or organizing, structuring, principle of God. The universe was seen as a manifestation of the mind and will of God. Indeed, in his Timaeus, Plato refers to the universe as a son of God. Later philosophers sometimes thought of the universe as the body of God held together by God’s Logos or reason.
To explain, Philo used the apt metaphor of the architect. Said Philo, the building exists in architect’s mind before it exists on paper. And then it begins to take shape in wood, bricks, steel, concrete, stone and mortar. So if you ask Philo or Plato what holds the building together, they would answer that ultimately the reason or mind or ideas of the architect hold the building together. The building exists because the organizing mind, the logos, of the architect brought together the materials of the building to exist in beauty and order.
In just such a way is the universe held together says Paul. Christ, the Logos or Word or Reason of God, is God’s divine organizing mind for bringing the universe together in an orderly and beautiful way. As Paul put it, “He (Christ, the Logos) is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” (Colossians 1:17)
Loren Eiseley, naturalist and anthropologist, makes a similar affirmation from his scientific point of view. Eiseley says, “Even to grasp the physio-chemical organization of the simplest cell is far beyond our capacity”, as he quotes a German biologist. (The Immense Journey, P. 206)
Eiseley marvels at the organization of all life, from molecules to amoeba, to the human brain. “Nature is not as natural as it looks” says Eiseley quoting a Scotch theologian. He then concludes his book, The Immense Journey, by affirming that all living things seem to be “but one mask of many worn by the Great Face behind.” ( P. 210) British astronomer, Sir James Jeans, writes that the universe looks more and more like a great thought than a machine.
Paul would agree. The Mind of God, organized in his Logos, has brought the universe into being. It is the mind of Christ, the Logos, that holds everything together. In him everything has coherence, order and meaning. Because of him we can be confident the center will hold and have meaning.
II.
If Christ, the Logos or Word of God, gives us confidence the center will hold on the physical level, even more he gives us confidence the center will hold on the spiritual level.
In his poem, “The Second Coming”, William Yeats goes on eventually to call to mind the Sphinx of Egypt. He writes:
“The Second Coming! Hardly are
those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus
Mundi (the world’s soul)
Troubles my sight: somewhere in
the sands of the desert
A shape with a 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……”
In his vision Yeats sees the Egyptian Sphinx and wonders if it is an adequate spiritual center for human beings. After all, the Pharaohs of Egypt were said to be gods or images of God. Ptolemy was thought to be the image of Zeus. And the now famous King Tut, or Tutankhamen, was the image of the god Amen. Tutankhamen means “image of Amen”. But Yeats moves on to a rocking cradle in Bethlehem.
Yeats follows Paul the Apostle in that regard. In our text Paul asserts that Christ is the icon of God, the image of God. Christ was a mirror image of God, he writes in II Corinthians 9:4. In Christ we are confronted with the divine power behind the universe. In Christ, God completely focused on the human situation. Christ became the embodiment of true humanity, the ideal in whom all ideals and aspirations are fulfilled, says a Biblical scholar.
In his important and popular book titled, Love and Will, psychoanalyst Rollo May has described our schizoid world, a world divided and separated with a loss of inward, coherent meaning. We are a people, many of us, who have lost our way, says Dr. May.
Many of us, says the psychoanalyst, are devoid of an inner sense of will and of meaning.
Consequently, we often become frantic,” says Dr. May, “searching for some kind of salvation in sex or success, drugs or materialism.” And says Dr. May, “It is an old and ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way….” (Love and Will, P. 15)
The Christians in Colossae were in danger of losing their way running after various philosophies, religions and cults. The Sphinxes and Pharaohs were not an adequate center for life, says Paul. Nor were the mystery religions and astrologies and the dualism of Gnosticism.
Christ is the true icon or image of God around whom we should center our spiritual lives. With him the center of the self will hold. The self will be integrated not disintegrated.
I know a man in another city for whom the corporation had become a kind of God. Determined to climb the corporate ladder, he gave his all to the corporation. He lived, breathed, ate and drank the corporation. He soon was made completely in the corporate image.
One day in church, confronted by the image of Christ in a new way, he realized he had sold his soul to a temporal power. And then, by the power of Christ, he was liberated from the terrible grip of the corporate god. Made anew in the image of Christ, he became a new man, with a new sense of self, and ironically, was able to help the corporation more as a leader than as a slave. He had a new center.
A student of my acquaintance went off to the university. Shunning his upper middle class background and religious values, he was determined to march to the beat of more distant drums. Thinking life had passed him by, he gave himself to the age-old gods of the world.
There were lust and greed, avarice, sloth, malice and a gluttony for drugs and booze. One could see in his countenance and life style the images of the gods he was serving.
One day, seeing that he was nearly wasted and then confronted by a sincere Christian, he was as it were, born anew. He altered his course. He began to use his intellect in a new way, strove hard to succeed and eventually became a successful doctor.
By the good news of Christ, he was released from the power of the idols he had been serving. The demonic compulsions which had driven him to a near collapse of health were exorcised and he became fully human, in the image of Christ, for the first time.
As a doctor, he listened to his patients and touched them, used responsibly his medical expertise, and in small ways let them know he was “fleshing out” the image of Christ, the Good Physician. He had a new center and it was holding him in balance and integration.
Yeats was right. Things do fall apart. Often the best do lack conviction and the worst are full of destructive, passionate intensity.
But here in worship a revelation is always at hand to restore our confidence. The universe is in the hands of God’s Logos, his Christ.
And if we choose, we can continue to be in the hands of Christ, the Logos of God, to be balanced and integrated, to be whole and radiant with God’s grace. The center will hold in the physical and spiritual worlds. And we are here to affirm again that center.
Amen
By Rev. Maurice A Fetty
Park Congregational Church
July 28, 2013
