Memorial of Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, Religious
Today’s gospel reminded me of William Butler Yeats’ poem, The Second Coming. As I read through this climatic part of the Sermon on the Mount, I was reminded of the lines, “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/ the falcon cannot hear the falconer” (The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th Ed. Vol. 2, 2036). This image fits perfectly into the warning that Christ is giving us and to illustrate this I want to present three parallels.
First, Yeats wrote his poem in the wake of the First World War. That was an apt time to reflect on the brokenness of humanity and the wanton destruction of which we are capable. In Matthew, Christ delivers the Sermon on the Mount after several thousand years of human infidelity to God, brutality toward one another, and manipulation of God’s Law in order to serve themselves. Both of these perspectives capture the devastation that can come from incorrect priorities and the lie that we can serve both God and mammon (Matt 7:24). Now mammon comes from “An Aramaic word meaning ‘wealth’ or ‘property’” (The Ignatius Catholic Study Bible: The New Testament, 18), but I think it would be unwise to restrict this to just monetary prosperity. We can serve a number of different things in the same way that Christ speaks of Mammon.
The second parallel is the falcon’s inability to hear the falconer. Christ’s teaching isn’t a call to irresponsibility. Rather, He counsels us to not be like Yeats’ falcon. Just as the falconer seeks obedience from the falcon and will take care of its concerns, so to God seeks our obedience. He will take care of our needs, because He knows what we need (Matt 7:32). We may not know when or how God will provide, but He will. But when we allow our concerns to consume us we lose sight of His Kingdom.
he final parallel is the loss of our center. Yeats tells us that the falcon is turning in an ever widening gyre, it is moving further and further from its center. We are no different. As we become consumed with material, earthly things that ultimately can’t satisfy us we are drawn further from the Lord. Fr. Robert Barron offers a similar image in the words, “When we try to satisfy the hunger for God with something less than God, we will naturally be frustrated… we will convince ourselves that we need more of that finite Good… only to find ourselves, necessarily, dissatisfied… and we can find ourselves turning obsessively around this creaturely good that can never in principle make us happy” (Catholicism, 43). When we fail to seek first the Kingdom of God, we seek instead that which can never truly satisfy us. We turn in a widening gyre until we collide with another and thus emerges jealousy, animosity, violence, greed, hatred, lust, etc. But when we seek first the Kingdom of God, we are bound together by His righteousness. We all share a common center and a common dignity. The provider of that same center and dignity knows what we need and in His Kingdom those needs are provided for.
This past week, how was our fallen humanity on display in a way that we could have been Yeats’ falcon? What did we seek before the Kingdom? Going into this next week how can we allow God to be our center again? How can we come to trust the Lord more to prevent us from spiraling out of control?
We ask the Lord to watch over us as the falconer cares for his falcon. To give us the grace to soar high for His glory, to never forget our center, and to always seek first His Kingdom. St. Aloysius Gonzaga, pray for us.
-Spencer Hargadon