“Through Him the Whole Structure Is Held Together” by Melanie Rigney
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| By Anonymous, Greece [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons |
Through him the whole structure is held together and grows into a temple sacred in the Lord; in him you also are being built together into a dwelling place of God in the Spirit. (Ephesians 2:21-22)
Go out to all the world and tell the Good News. (Mark 16:15)
Jesus said to (Thomas), “Have you come to believe because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.” (John 20:29)
Piety
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 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?
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 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?
(“The Second Coming,” W.B. Yeats, 1919)
Study
Just as we all have our personal moments of Annunciation, so do we all have glimpses of a second coming.
For Thomas, who had walked and talked and prayed and eaten with Jesus, the second coming occurred a few days after the others saw the risen Lord. We remember that he doubted their accounts. We tend to buzz past his reaction when he saw Jesus: “My Lord and my God!”
The Catechism of the Catholic Church says baptism “symbolizes the catechumen’s burial into Christ’s death, from which he rises up by resurrection with him, as a ‘new creature.’” That’s a mighty powerful formal first coming of the Lord into our lives.
And what of second comings? They occur in joy, when we marry, give birth, and do His work in so many other ways. But they occur in despair, when the relationship ends when we get that diagnosis when we’re out of money and hope, and in pain, when the physical or mental or emotional burden is overpowering.
In short, He comes to us all the time, but so often, at those moments in life when we have spent all we have and have nowhere else to go. It is in those moments or their aftermaths that we realize, as Paul writes, “the whole structure is held together.” In Him and in Him alone, the center holds.
Action
Find an image—a personal photo, painting, prayer card, icon, whatever you like—that speaks to you and where you are spiritually today. Find Jesus in it and in you.
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