Gloomy thoughts of an autumn Monday night

If there is no God, then everything is permitted. --Tolstoy

Hulu rocks.

My current life situation is such that my TV viewing is limited to broadcast viewing only. While the additional channels available now that American broadcasting has gone from analog to digital are welcome, my antenna isn't the best- and besides, my building (like many I've lived in these past few years) seems to be rather hard on incoming signals; not only am I having to fuss with my antenna to avoid the dreaded "WEAK SIGNAL" or "NO PROGRAM" message on various of my stations at any given time, but I have a remarkably hard time maintaining a cell phone signal at home as well.

But I digress. Hulu has become my method of choice for viewing TV. I simply watch on the computer here at church the night after a show is broadcast. It saves all the hassle of trying to deal with the various problems of digital transmission.

You know. The ones we didn't have to worry about before Congress decided that watching digital TV would be better for us, for some reason.

One of the things Hulu has allowed me to enjoy of late is the reliving of my beloved Babylon 5, a series which has always seemed to me to be superior to Star Trek in any of its incarnations that the question doesn't even bear discussing. But that's another rant for another night.

I watch two or three episodes of B5 every day. Last night, I watched an episode from early in the second season in which G'Kar mentions having come across a poem that makes him think that "maybe the humans are wiser than we've given them credit for."

The poem is one I well remember from high school English: William Butler Yeats' The Second Coming. As I listened to G'Kar read it to Na'Toth, it struck me- and not for the first time- how aptly it describes the world we live in today:

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,
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 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?

Yeats, of course, wrote the poem in 1920. The horror of the First World War was still vivid in people's minds back then, and Western culture was going through a period of ethical drift similar to- if not quite as drastic and long lasting as- what it experienced in the Sixties, and from which, in a very real sense, we have never really emerged.

It's a comforting thought to remember that Yeats wrote the poem when my mother was a teenager. After all, we've survived since then. It's comforting, too- and for the same reason- to read jeremiads by the ancient Romans who bewailed the passing of the republican virtues that made Rome great. Rome lasted for quite a while after it largely lost touch with those virtues, and even reached the height of its power and influence when they were largely a memory.

They never really passed away, of course. There were always some who kept the flame burning, just as there are many even now who have not given in to the intellectual and moral nihilism which characterizes the Western world in our time. But who, in Yeats' day, would ever have foreseen a day when a third of all American births would be out of wedlock; when genital herpes- an affliction most people back then had probably never even heard of- would infect fully twenty percent of the American people, and fully a quarter of the adult population of New York City; when so few people would be shocked and outraged at the notion of living human embryos being cannibalized for spare parts; when abortion would be so widely seen and even be recognized by the law not as a tragic, desperate expedient, done in dark corners and only whispered about even in extreme circumstances under which essentially decent women might, with horrified reluctance, resort to it, but rather celebrated as nothing less than constitutional right under any circumstances at all, ethically neutral at worst, and nothing to be embarrassed about?

I am something I never thought I would ever be: divorced. And yes, that is something to be ashamed of- even when, as in my case, one is the unwilling party in a divorce not sanctioned by Scripture. No matter the circumstances, no matter who did or said what to whom, or when, or how many times. No matter how common it may be. There are no innocent parties in divorce, and it is wrong that so many people in my situation are not ashamed to be, no matter what the facts of their individual case. I certainly am ashamed. The very concept of "no fault divorce" is obscene. All divorces are always, to some extent, the fault of both parties.

Yeats never watched television, of course. But if he had, I doubt whether he would have foreseen

the day when a vulgar term for sexual intercourse would become acceptable on prime time TV, and used by the man on the street in casual conversation with no particular inking of how vulgar it was. We've gone through many periods of extreme cultural and political polarization before- the Civil War comes to mind- but when before have both Left and Right alike (admittedly under different circumstances) so casually regarded incivility as a matter of free speech, to be engaged in freely and even celebrated, with nary a thought that just because one may say something without having to fear legal consequences does not mean that one ought to do so?

When, in human history, has the notion of marriage between people of the same gender been taken as seriously by as many people as it is today, or the very concept of marriage as such taken seriously by as few? In what previous age could the events of the recent ELCA Churchwide Assembly have been thinkable among Christians- among alleged Lutherans?

Some for whom eschatology seems to rival justification and the Incarnation for pride of place among the articles of the Christian faith see all this as evidence that the Second Coming is indeed at hand. Others, like me- who take more seriously Christ's warning that no one knows the day or the hour of that Coming- are inclined to scoff, and to point out that it seems to every generation as if the wheels are coming off human civilization as it hurtles heedlessly downhill toward the infernal regions, as if "surely the Second Coming is at hand."

We keep surviving, we humans. And after all, isn't it an essential point of Christian eschatology that things will be at their very darkest before the dawn? Perhaps there's even a strange kind of hopefulness all mixed together in the gloomy kind of thinking I find myself disposed toward tonight. And as I mentioned before, we always seem to survive when curmudgeons like Yeats and yours truly are moved to grump and glower by the world in which we find ourselves living.

Time, I think, to reflect that our times are still in God's hands, even at an hour in which fewer and fewer of us take Him seriously.

God is- and that fact is subject neither to passing mores, nor to majority vote.

Christ has died, risen, and is ascended- and that will always remain grounds not only for hope, but for confidence.