Upon today's green pastures
Christians. Who are we? At the start of his 1960s popular TV-series Civilization, a personal view, Kenneth Clark reflected on just that, the fact of us being part of a much broader order based on certain rules, yes, a so-called Western civilization in essence and general, and he made the observation that great nations in the past have always handed down their life-story in three manuscripts: the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.
It’s all out there for us to notice, to read and to see, he told us and the TV-series did exactly that. However, he also mentioned what he thought had destroyed those past civilizations, such as Ancient Rome for one. No, nothing like with bombs, but in his own opinion by a simple lack of confidence caused by cynicism and disillusionment.
Looking around in the world today there are indeed still signs of being tired of what we can still call, for the lack of a better term, the influence of the West. Poor Western world, for its history has now been for decades understood or taught as a real burden. This lack of confidence in ourselves as a group, one notices more and more nowadays with that particular feeling that nearly everyone has, that of actually only looking now as mere spectators how our leaders fail one after the other so that we can confidently remain in our own cynicism, saying to ourselves “Well, I told you that they’re all useless”.
Right at the end of his series, Clark quotes a famous poem by W. B. Yeats that contains a line which, that I now still find extremely haunting: “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold”.Be warned, the poem is a gloomy one. It’s called ‘The Second Coming’, but it’s not about the second coming of Christ which would be a cause indeed for hope and confidence. There’s no joy to the world from Bethlehem nor hope of Jesus Christ’s return in glory in this poem. Yeats writes:
“Things fall apart; The centre cannot hold –
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.”
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” If one reads ‘full of passionate intensity’ as ‘fanatic’, it’s indeed an easy charge to make against the other. That last word one can be easily filled with a much more emotive meaning like: looney liberal lefty, far right winger, or even fanatic Islamist.
Like any human being, one forgets too easily to ask the same question of oneself, first and foremost. Are you with the best of what you can be? Think about that question. Are you with the best of what you can be? A lot of today’s discourse, or what passes for discourse, happens on social media, where popularity is valued more than truth, and appearances more than virtue. Many of us lack therefore conviction because we all naturally seek out popularity, whereas the worst, the real fanatics, are full of passionate intensity.
From my own memory, however, Clark wasn’t quite that pessimistic. Looking back he reflected upon the two previous centuries that have been “filled with great works of genius, in architecture, sculpture and painting, in philosophy, poetry and music, in science and engineering.” “There they are”, he said, “you can’t dismiss them.”No-one can’t just dismiss our civilization that readily nor easily.
Furthermore, Clark adds after the marvel in each episode of Civilization, “it’s only a fraction of what Western man has achieved in the last 1000 years, often after setbacks and deviations at least as destructive as those of our own time”. “Western civilization”, he explains further, “has been a series of rebirths. Surely this should give us confidence in ourselves?”
Again, that’s the voice of someone who lived through two world wars, and perhaps his choice of words like Western man or Western civilization may even sound a bit foreign to us now, are those observations still valid today? I think so, if only you look at what’s been happening to us these past decades. Our temples of worship may not all have been destroyed, there are plenty of them that have been turned into flats or into something even worse, and yet amongst these cultural ruins there are still signs of hope when one start to realize that the blueprint for all that represents love in our civilization has Jesus Christ as its cornerstone.
How much are we still attuned to our great Christian heritage, the gospel, the traditions, the rituals, and practices that define us as being a people? None of us, mere individual parts of a bigger whole which we call people, lives entirely without an identity. If we lose the source of our previous identity, something or someone else will rebrand it for sure, and I do use the word ‘brand’ here intentionally.
Yes, sadly, this identity is certainly no longer formed from hearing the message of the Gospel that tell us who we are and how we are called to live. No, live-streaming events, social media, pop culture, newly released movies, the youngest of celebrities and the secular culture behind it all, will tell us who we are and all we can be, if only we’ll buy the right stuff.
For one, AI (artificial intelligence) has become the key to provide us with the answers to all our questions, but it will always prompt you to a different question as you’re typing yours. No longer content with providing answers, it’s now providing questions too. As GK Chesterton said, “It is often supposed that when people stop believing in God, they believe in nothing. Alas, it is worse than that. When they stop believing in God, they believe in anything.”
There are indeed people who would mock our belief, and won’t think twice about going into a shop and buying crystals for their healing powers or tarot cards in order to know the future. Nothing wrong with the latter, but combined with the former its indeed the purest hypocrisy. Personally, I was urged recently to place a book on Stonehenge in the library not under Prehistoric history but under so-called Esotericism, what actually doesn’t mean The Occult but rather a ‘secret knowledge for a small group of people’. That smacks surely more of closing one’s mind to others than anything else.
The understanding that science can brings us, is nowadays forced into a tunnel and the beam of light of wanting to understand stemming from the Enlightenment gets narrower and narrower. However, Clark did say we should have confidence in ourselves. The majority amongst us isn’t sure about that any more. From the late 19th century onwards, despite periods of immense strain like during the Second World War, it’s always been a time of increasing trust in only ourselves and in the almost total abandonment of God, and the fruits of that haven’t been that positive.The stench still stinks to high heavens, and one only needs to think back to Anne Frank and all the other children who died in the Holocaust.
Achievements there are though also, like Lincoln’s proposal of 13th Amendment to end bounded slavery in the United States for good. So much so that kindness is now indeed part of our shared morality. Well, here I dare to mention that Christ’s message was not only the primary source for this, but also for the confidence that still remains in our battered civilization. If we remember Jesus Christ as He’s been written down in the Gospel, we’ll retain our confidence, because only He is perfect love and perfect love casts out all fear that is truly the great enemy of confidence and the ultimate source for all cynicism and disillusionment.
In the end one needs to conclude that it’s indeed self-harming for our civilization to describe the Christian heritage as mere unwanted baggage. On the contrary, I would argue, it’s far better to keep celebrating it whilst also being aware of its many faults and failures. One crazed sheep that has been grazing amongst us doesn’t mean that we need to abandon the green pastures
It’s all out there for us to notice, to read and to see, he told us and the TV-series did exactly that. However, he also mentioned what he thought had destroyed those past civilizations, such as Ancient Rome for one. No, nothing like with bombs, but in his own opinion by a simple lack of confidence caused by cynicism and disillusionment.
Looking around in the world today there are indeed still signs of being tired of what we can still call, for the lack of a better term, the influence of the West. Poor Western world, for its history has now been for decades understood or taught as a real burden. This lack of confidence in ourselves as a group, one notices more and more nowadays with that particular feeling that nearly everyone has, that of actually only looking now as mere spectators how our leaders fail one after the other so that we can confidently remain in our own cynicism, saying to ourselves “Well, I told you that they’re all useless”.
Right at the end of his series, Clark quotes a famous poem by W. B. Yeats that contains a line which, that I now still find extremely haunting: “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold”.Be warned, the poem is a gloomy one. It’s called ‘The Second Coming’, but it’s not about the second coming of Christ which would be a cause indeed for hope and confidence. There’s no joy to the world from Bethlehem nor hope of Jesus Christ’s return in glory in this poem. Yeats writes:
“Things fall apart; The centre cannot hold –
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.”
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” If one reads ‘full of passionate intensity’ as ‘fanatic’, it’s indeed an easy charge to make against the other. That last word one can be easily filled with a much more emotive meaning like: looney liberal lefty, far right winger, or even fanatic Islamist.
Like any human being, one forgets too easily to ask the same question of oneself, first and foremost. Are you with the best of what you can be? Think about that question. Are you with the best of what you can be? A lot of today’s discourse, or what passes for discourse, happens on social media, where popularity is valued more than truth, and appearances more than virtue. Many of us lack therefore conviction because we all naturally seek out popularity, whereas the worst, the real fanatics, are full of passionate intensity.
From my own memory, however, Clark wasn’t quite that pessimistic. Looking back he reflected upon the two previous centuries that have been “filled with great works of genius, in architecture, sculpture and painting, in philosophy, poetry and music, in science and engineering.” “There they are”, he said, “you can’t dismiss them.”No-one can’t just dismiss our civilization that readily nor easily.
Furthermore, Clark adds after the marvel in each episode of Civilization, “it’s only a fraction of what Western man has achieved in the last 1000 years, often after setbacks and deviations at least as destructive as those of our own time”. “Western civilization”, he explains further, “has been a series of rebirths. Surely this should give us confidence in ourselves?”
Again, that’s the voice of someone who lived through two world wars, and perhaps his choice of words like Western man or Western civilization may even sound a bit foreign to us now, are those observations still valid today? I think so, if only you look at what’s been happening to us these past decades. Our temples of worship may not all have been destroyed, there are plenty of them that have been turned into flats or into something even worse, and yet amongst these cultural ruins there are still signs of hope when one start to realize that the blueprint for all that represents love in our civilization has Jesus Christ as its cornerstone.
How much are we still attuned to our great Christian heritage, the gospel, the traditions, the rituals, and practices that define us as being a people? None of us, mere individual parts of a bigger whole which we call people, lives entirely without an identity. If we lose the source of our previous identity, something or someone else will rebrand it for sure, and I do use the word ‘brand’ here intentionally.
Yes, sadly, this identity is certainly no longer formed from hearing the message of the Gospel that tell us who we are and how we are called to live. No, live-streaming events, social media, pop culture, newly released movies, the youngest of celebrities and the secular culture behind it all, will tell us who we are and all we can be, if only we’ll buy the right stuff.
For one, AI (artificial intelligence) has become the key to provide us with the answers to all our questions, but it will always prompt you to a different question as you’re typing yours. No longer content with providing answers, it’s now providing questions too. As GK Chesterton said, “It is often supposed that when people stop believing in God, they believe in nothing. Alas, it is worse than that. When they stop believing in God, they believe in anything.”
There are indeed people who would mock our belief, and won’t think twice about going into a shop and buying crystals for their healing powers or tarot cards in order to know the future. Nothing wrong with the latter, but combined with the former its indeed the purest hypocrisy. Personally, I was urged recently to place a book on Stonehenge in the library not under Prehistoric history but under so-called Esotericism, what actually doesn’t mean The Occult but rather a ‘secret knowledge for a small group of people’. That smacks surely more of closing one’s mind to others than anything else.
The understanding that science can brings us, is nowadays forced into a tunnel and the beam of light of wanting to understand stemming from the Enlightenment gets narrower and narrower. However, Clark did say we should have confidence in ourselves. The majority amongst us isn’t sure about that any more. From the late 19th century onwards, despite periods of immense strain like during the Second World War, it’s always been a time of increasing trust in only ourselves and in the almost total abandonment of God, and the fruits of that haven’t been that positive.The stench still stinks to high heavens, and one only needs to think back to Anne Frank and all the other children who died in the Holocaust.
Achievements there are though also, like Lincoln’s proposal of 13th Amendment to end bounded slavery in the United States for good. So much so that kindness is now indeed part of our shared morality. Well, here I dare to mention that Christ’s message was not only the primary source for this, but also for the confidence that still remains in our battered civilization. If we remember Jesus Christ as He’s been written down in the Gospel, we’ll retain our confidence, because only He is perfect love and perfect love casts out all fear that is truly the great enemy of confidence and the ultimate source for all cynicism and disillusionment.
In the end one needs to conclude that it’s indeed self-harming for our civilization to describe the Christian heritage as mere unwanted baggage. On the contrary, I would argue, it’s far better to keep celebrating it whilst also being aware of its many faults and failures. One crazed sheep that has been grazing amongst us doesn’t mean that we need to abandon the green pastures
