The widening gyre

Peregrine falcon flying over Niagara Falls
(Falcon Family Photos)

Distance is not what it used to be at the start of the last world war. The time-space ratio seems to have shrunk. Things happen more quickly and we hear of them in the moment, because there always seems to be someone at the scene of the latest atrocity or disaster who can film it on their phone and then beam it back to us via the news channels. The news is almost always bad, even though small fillips of good news get inserted at the end of the hour by certain channels. If I am cynical, I would say that they do this in order to make sure we don’t switch off for good. But this is unlikely especially if, like me, you are addicted to a combination of Channel 4 and CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.

The two can just about be combined if you are prepared to forego the first half hour or so of Channel 4. Why can’t they work together and be sequential? I often wonder. We need those different voices to broaden our perspective. Different voices, and the different perspectives which they bring, create a kind of gear change which enables the engine of the mind to pause for a few seconds and re-engage with the source which feeds it. I am no mechanic, but I can’t help feeling that cars do this when we change gear. They pause in order to move forward with greater impetus – or to slow down and be better prepared for hazards.

There is another kind of gear change which affects the way we deal with the realities around us. If we are to make sense of what is going on in our world, we need to pause long enough to change gear, and then move forward with serenity and purpose – or slow down. This brief inward pause allows us to draw on the source which nurtures intelligence.

In his poem, ‘The Second Coming’, W.B. Yeats reflects on the world’s emotional climate immediately before and during the first world war. ‘Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold’. He likens this cosmic fragmentation to ‘the widening gyre’ where a falcon no longer hears the falconer’s voice and so becomes disorientated. Something like this is happening in our world today. We have become disorientated as a result of our being disconnected from the great Falconer, the Holy Spirit which is the Wisdom proceeding from God.  We need to listen inwardly for the deeper voice of that Wisdom.

Listening inwardly is a little like swimming underwater. You see things in a different light, things which you would not see if you were on the surface, and you hear different sounds, sounds which would not be audible in any other environment. Those of us who are not directly caught up in the cross-fire and cross-currents of politics and world conflict could take time to pause and connect with this wordless wisdom, the call of the great Falconer to a fearful world.

Hearing the call of the Falconer is not a matter of being particularly ‘religious’. It is more about being willing to face into the reality of the embodiment of evil in the forces at work in human nature. Facing into this reality is not an easy undertaking, because it obliges us to confront fear with the best of our selves. We confront fear with our capacity to receive the love of God even when faced with the evil done in his name. This is what it means to hear the call of the Falconer.

Evil is personified in those who murder and terrorise in God’s name. It is also personified in our refusal to be accountable before God for his creation, the planet we live on. Hearing the call of the Falconer means being willing to take responsibility for violence and selfish short-termism. Both pertain to human nature and both are worked into the world through the agency of persons just like us.

The evils of religious extremism correspond, in a way, to those of the destruction of the planet. There is a common language of violence, indifference and greed which has created a kind of moral and spiritual free-fall, a coasting out of gear into a destructive vortex, the ‘widening gyre’ in which all that is good in human nature is obscured in the confusion and cacophony generated by fear. Those who represent us at the climate conference in Paris, and our own parliament, as it votes on whether or not to take military action in Syria, bear the immediate responsibility for confronting these evils and the fear which they generate. They need to hear the Falconer’s voice, the quiet voice of Wisdom speaking into the widening gyre of their confusion and doubt about how to act in the face of evil. They will hear it through the agency of those of us who are prepared to pause with them and listen.