Forrest Church

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

Approaching the height of his powers, William Butler Yeats wrote this poem, "The Second Coming," during the final days of World War I.

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.

This is our poem now. On Christmas Eve this year, we too must ask,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Bethlehem is closed for Christmas this year. There is room at the inns, plenty of room. In fact, the inns are almost empty. And the streets are dark. Nativity Street is lined with a gutted five-story hotel, piles of rubble from shops knocked down by bulldozers and buildings with bullet-pocked facades. And what worship there will be, it too is riven by conflict. Business as usual for this, the second Christmas of the third millennium.

This invitation to despair does not end, but frames our task. The year he died, right before the outbreak of World War II, Yeats defined the poet’s job in these words.

Bring the soul of man to God,

Make him fill the cradles right.

Tonight, I invite you to be poets. Bring your souls to God. Fill the cradles right. In the Unitarian spirit, you represent a priesthood and prophethood of all believers. No authority outshines your own experience of life and death. No despair, however eloquent, can undermine the jewel of your own hope. It is all up to you. You are God’s handmaidens.

"The best lack all conviction," Yeats said. "The worst are full of passionate intensity." I’ll tell you something else that separates the best from the worst. The worst have mastered their self-doubts. Terrorists for truth and God march in lock step toward the only light they see, mindless of the shadow it casts as they approach it. Conversely, the best know that they have the worst within them. Starkly aware of their own ignorance, weakness, and selfishness, the best are prey to something that would never occur to the worst. They are prone to the sin of "sophisticated resignation." They mourn the state of the world, yet so intimately do they know the intrinsic ambiguities of human history, that they are tempted to succumb to the role of observer, cultivating their own gardens while they may, muting their conscience lest it haunt their sleep.

Tonight, we are summoned to awaken, bidden to answer what Abraham Lincoln (at a time of even greater trial) called "the better angels of our nature." We are invited to look up upon a Star that casts no shadow, calling us to brace our lives with conviction and to do so with passionate intensity. We are beckoned to walk with Yeats’s Magi:

Their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,

Being by Calvary’s turbulence unsatisfied,

The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

We are charged to labor with Yeats’s Mary, to witness "wings beating about the room," even to bear "the Heavens in [our] womb."

Listen to the angel: "Behold I bring you glad tidings of a great joy that shall be to all people, for unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior." Born not to save us for another day. Or to spare us trouble. Or to liberate us from danger. Not, certainly, to exempt us from inconvenience. Born, instead, to save us from the myriad temptations of oblivion. Born to liberate our hearts from hardness. To save us from ourselves. And to save us for others. Born to bring our souls to God that we may fill the cradles right.

How did Mary fill her cradle? With a question that, half answering itself, answered her heart’s need.

What is this flesh I purchased with my pains,

This fallen star my milk sustains,

This love that makes my heart’s blood stop

Or strikes a sudden chill into my bones

And bids my hair stand up?

Love. Heart-stopping, hair-raising love: that’s what Christmas is all about. The star. The Magi. The mother. The child. The labor. The pain. The mystery. The beauty. The tragedy. The joy. Mark the miracle. The one and only miracle, ours to celebrate right here and now. It is the present– our Christmas present, our gift tonight.

Measuring his own life for miracles, Yeats knew the challenge he faced.

My soul had found

All happiness in its own cause or ground.

Godhead on Godhead in sexual spasm begot

Godhead. Some shadow fell. My soul forgot

Those amorous cries that out of quiet come

And must the common round of day resume.

Tomorrow we too must resume the common round of day. But tonight, tonight we travel through eternity to Bethlehem to be re-born, to receive the gift of life not as we first did and too often have done since–unconsciously, leadenly, even begrudgingly–but with starlight in our eyes. Our souls remember and we receive the gift of being with unconditional gratitude. We rediscover, as if for the first time, that the world doesn’t owe us a living. We owe the world a living: our very own. We will never hold a purchase on life’s meaning, but tonight we catch a glimmer of its purpose: to live in such a way that our lives will prove worth dying for.

How grateful I am to be with you here. What a gift this community has been to me, and to so many of us, these past, hard months. Life, with its panoply of pain and joy, comes to us unbidden. Yet, as long as it is ours, it is ours to cherish and redeem. And so it is, with Yeats, I pray:

O sages standing in God’s holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, . . .

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Listen with me now. Listen to the music and find your heart’s song. Become the music while the music lasts. And make the music last. Live in love. Die in love. It’s that simple. And that difficult.

Amen. Merry Christmas. I love you. May God bless us all.

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