Day: June 1, 2025

“The end of all things is at hand”

It seems so dark and threatening, a complement perhaps to our current world of very real uncertainties and anxieties. This is the fearfulness of a culture that is no longer sure of itself and its future yet all the while clinging to the assumptions of the ideology of endless material and technological progress that belong to that uncertainty. There is at once all of the uber-hype of the techno-utopianism of AI, and all of the sense of foreboding and the fear of things falling apart, at the same time. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” as William Butler Yeats famously put it. That was in 1919.

Isn’t this really about ourselves? We have forgotten the centre and have willed ourselves to an endless emptiness. We can’t say what the Good is. This is an ethical dilemma. It is not exactly new. Plato saw the necessity of turning to philosophy and ethical thinking in the face of the self-destruction of the Greek city-states; such is his ‘Republic’ that examines justice as an ethical principle that belongs to the knowledge of the Good.. Augustine’s ‘City of God’ and Boethius’s ‘Consolation of Philosophy’ speak to the devastations of their world in the collapse of the Roman Empire, recalling us to the infinite goodness of God which alone transcends our divided loves and the divisions that result, culturally and individually. “Disdain to be discouraged” is Gregory the Great’s wonderful advice that, in some sense, derives from both. In short there is always the need to return to thought and prayer.

“Take with you words and return to the Lord,” Hosea the prophet tells us, pointing out the problem of putting our trust in the works of our own hands, the idols of our minds, and in defaulting to worldly matters of political expediency. Assyria, he tells us, will not save us. Nor is salvation to be found in the technologies of war in any given age. “Whoever is wise, let him understand these things.” At issue, is our lack of attention to the spiritual and intellectual principles which shape our understanding and guide our actions. Our idolatry of the practical and of the technocratic – the techno-utopianism that assumes that technology will save us – is really a kind of anti-intellectualism at once anti-life and ethically bankrupt. What is it that is right to do turns on the greater question of what is it that is good to be. “To be is to be understood,” Gadamer says about Heidegger, but that requires an understanding of ourselves in relation to God. We are known and loved in his knowing and loving of all things.

The Sunday After Ascension Day speaks to these necessities in the face of our uncertainties. It offers us a way of thinking about our world and about ourselves, about how we are understood by God. It recalls the dynamic of God’s redemption of our humanity and our world. The Ascension is the return of all things to their end in God, the “lift[ing] up our hearts” is the lifting up of the world to God, and so connects with the credal doctrine of the Session of Christ, his “sitting at the right hand of the Father.” It speaks to us about the homeland of the spirit, our home with God, not just by-and-by, later on, but here and now in prayer and praise. In short, we find our place with God because God has placed us with him through his Son. “I go to prepare a place for you,” Jesus tells us, words that speak to the blessed conjunction of his divinity with our humanity. We are partakers of his divinity only through his partaking of our humanity.

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