Saturday Poetry

Second Coming by W B Yeats

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.

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?

Imagine my delight when I saw the last two lines quoted in an essay discussing recent Episcopalian events.

In another bit of synchronicity, it is the favourite poem of an old gamer chum of mine.

But like all good poetry, it applies on any number of occasions.

Show me the money

BabyBlue has posted a letter from Bishop Howe of Florida to his diocese. The money quote is: "Some of the Bishops who are also lawyers argued that the case law of Pennsylvania would make it more difficult for The Episcopal Church to press its case if we delayed our action until after Pittsburgh's Diocesan Convention."

It really is all about the money. It was inconvenient to wait, to allow for due process to proceed canonically. Since there was no possibility of a check to the House of Bishops' decision, they acted knowing they couldn't be reversed and went for the property.

I guess when you don't believe in God, do not believe in Truth or Justice, when all you have is the here and now, when everything is relative, when sin is socially defined, well then all that is left is the material.

Is this the new anthem of the Episcopal Church?

Dancing Libertarians?

It has a good beat and I can dance to it. I give it a nine.



"The Rainmakers" Government Cheese, from more than 20 years ago.

In Honour of the Holiday

And because I love my sister, it's techno!


For the more traditional:

Are Kangaroos Christians?

They hold courts and they apparently go to church. Some of them even run dioceses. But are they Christians?

Once you abandon due process for expediency, then you have abandoned any claim to represent justice, much less mercy. I commend Matthew 7:3 to my church's leadership the next time they presume to raise the subject of justice.

The Political History of the West Explained

Warning: naughty language. Read it here. Note the many comparisons to a certain trendy contemporary tv show.

Safeguarding your money