Third grade marked a major change in my elementary school education. St. Patrick School in Sedalia closed after my second grade. My brothers and I transferred to Sacred Heart School, only seven blocks west, but belonging to a different parish. Sr. Marsha was my teacher and that year she celebrated 50 years of religious profession as a Precious Blood sister. I remember learning to read and write cursive during that year, beginning my times tables, and that my soccer team was sponsored by Third National Bank.

What I most remember about that year was the Spring semester when Maureen Hogan, a student teacher, came in twice a week to teach science. I learned that Dots gummy candies make great stand-ins for the elements when you use them with toothpicks to represent molecules. I learned that you can make your own butter by shaking a carton of cream very well, especially if every student gets a 30 second turn to shake the carton. And I learned that the sun does not rise every morning. Instead, it’s the Earth that turns on its axis and the night side gets exposed to the Sun.
 
Ms. Hogan did a masterful job of getting most of the class involved in representing the orbits of the planets around the sun by holding different sized balls. We went to the gym to spread out to fit all the planets. I got to hold the globe that represented the earth and had to keep the Earth spinning as I slowly walked around the Sun, which was a big beach ball held by the biggest kid in the class. The gym was dark and the only light was a big lamp without a shade underneath the sun.
 
That view of the solar system and the movement of the planets pretty much stuck with me for a long time, until last year when it finally dawned on me that my model of the motion of the planets didn’t take into account the movement of the Sun on its own through the empty space of the Milky Way. Sure, I knew that everything was in motion in space. Even in third grade I learned that the Milky Way was just one of many, many galaxies in our local cluster of galaxies, that in turn made up a supercluster of galaxies, which in turn made up another aggregation of galaxies. In my mind, the solar system was just a series of slight ellipses rotating around the Sun.
What changed my paradigm was seeing a complex computer animation of the relative motions of the Moon, the Earth, and the other planets all in motion around the Sun, but then the Sun is also moving through space so the orbits left behind don’t trace the ellipses of their orbits. The motion of the Earth is best seen as a lazy, looping spiral, that in turn is part of more loops and spirals, that all loop and spiral in a seemingly directionless spin with no true center of reference.
 
W. B Yeats speaks of this cosmology shortly after Einstein’s theories of relativity took from us the absolutes of time and space, after the first World War, as Ireland was beginning its war of independence and the great flu pandemic almost took his pregnant wife. Here are the opening lines of The Second Coming: 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.

Written just a little over a hundred years ago, The Second Coming offers a bleak commentary on the state of world affairs. Yeats believes that the Christian world view no longer holds. Or, at the very least, Christians have failed to live according to the values of the Gospel. Anarchy ensues. Reading the signs, surely the Second Coming must be at hand. However, Yeats, while steeped in the imagery and culture of Christianity, no longer believed. This poem is not Christian. Whatever god may come out of this chaos, it is not the God of Hope.

Loss of perspective. This is the theme that unites a bewildering cosmology with post-modern culture. There is no center. There is no point of reference. All viewpoints are equally valid. All viewpoints are equally false.

The parallels or coincidences of our times with Yeats’ times are fairly obvious. A world war is fought in countless skirmishes in many lands. The tail end of a global pandemic flails about. Deep division within our country threatens our stability. And so much of what we hold as sacred and true is quickly tossed aside in the chase for the next fleeting moment of pleasure. In fact, Yeats’ Second Coming has been consistently  invoked by prophets of doom who see the dissolution of the world around them. It’s become part of pop culture. I expect that for the next hundred years, it will continue thus.

Yeats’ poem was and is tragically true. But no more nor less than the scroll of woe that is your basic news ticker. I don’t really think it has anything really new than found in Job. Read Lamentations. Read the Book of Revelation. It’s all there. The difference is that the person with faith knows that the things of this world truly do not have a center without God. That is why God sent His Son to be born of a woman. Creation is subject to futility and no has no meaning in and of itself. But the Word became flesh in Jesus Christ. The promise of Creation is fulfilled in the birth of Jesus who is God-with-Us.

Today we begin the New Year. What makes it different from any other moment? As a cosmological metric, it really has no significance. Our faith understands this. While it receives some liturgical mention, January 1^st doesn’t really figure in at all in the scope of the great mysteries of our faith. Instead, it is the 8^th day of the Octave of Christmas. It is the Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God.

We begin our new secular year by capping off a week of glorious joy in the Incarnation. We can begin this new year confidently because we know that God is the God of Life. That our God is the God of new birth, of new beginnings, of eternal hope. 
We know what is at stake. We know there is darkness. We know of the immense suffering that washes over the world in waves of sorrow. But we also know the joy from the sound of a newly born baby. And that is the joy that the Christian brings to those who are tempted to despair. At each of our baptisms, a candle is given to us as the minister says, “Receive the Light of Christ.” The light of faith has been entrusted to us to be kept burning brightly. What we have received from Christ, we must share with others.