The Second Coming

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Tradition vs. Change is thematically central to the Downton Abbey series we’re watching for the second time in our house. The superb acting of Maggie Smith carries the load for arguing the absolute importance of tradition and the stability it provides while her granddaughter, Sybil Crawley, speaks and acts for the embracing of the inevitable change by becoming a nurse to wounded WWI soldiers, and then marrying the chauffeur, no less.

               This isn’t a review of Downton Abbey. Rather, I’m thinking here about the times in history when sea changes were forced upon peoples that had developed stable views, hierarchies, and protocols over time, and were thereby required to live in a newness they hadn’t asked for and didn’t desire. Mennonites, Gypsies, Jews, Kurds and other minorities that were a threat to traditions of the majority wherever they settled, have historically been oppressed and/or driven out accordingly. For my people—the Mennonites of Eigenheim—the event forcing the changes that saw many resettling in the Saskatchewan Valley was the waning of tolerance in Europe and, finally, the Russian Revolution.

               We shouldn’t fail to consider the COVID-10 Epidemic as a current event of enough magnitude to challenge traditions we assumed were forever. Sunday church with worship, a sermon, Sunday School and an old and honoured hymnody, even the shape and functions of our meeting places, all these traditional trappings are subject to change in a time when the people may have become habituated to “not going to church” on Sunday mornings. The cathedrals now are empty, have been changed into tourist sites or been torn down, we recall.

               W.B. Yeats wondered as we do what takes their place when traditions are overcome by change. In “The Second Coming,” he worries that as Christ came to bring newness to the human spirit (spiritus mundi), something new is growing and like the falcon that circles so far from the falconer that he can no longer hear his voice, the human spirit can no longer hear its master’s voice. Meanwhile, a massive, sphinxlike creature is “slouching toward Bethlehem” to be born, displacing the falconer in the human spirit. A sinister “second coming.”

               Yeats wrote this around 1920 when WWI was still fresh in memory and the Russian Revolution was hacking away at traditions, thousands dying in these violent upheavals.

               I’ve had enough support from readers who appreciated hearing the poetry being read aloud to simply reading it, so I’ve videoed “The Second Coming” for them.

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