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What is that word known to all men?

In today's Gospel St. Luke describes Jesus anticipating a disaster which for the Jews of Jerusalem would amount to the end of their world, as they had known it for five hundred years. And sure enough, St. Luke lived to see that disaster happen when in 70 A.D. - after three years of a war waged against Jewish insurgents - the Roman legions leveled the Holy City - Temple and all. "All that you see here - the days will come when there will not be left one stone upon another that will not be thrown down."

How applicable have those words been to all human edifices and institutions down through all the centuries since Jerusalem's destruction! I think of the collapse of the Twin Towers but three years ago. And how applicable have his words been down to our own times regarding wars and insurrections, about nation rising against nation and awesome sights appearing in the sky! Like perhaps those clouds of planes we have known that devastated places like London, Dresden, Tokyo and Pearl Harbor to mention but a few? And how forever applicable have his words been regarding party spirit, the dissension and denunciations stressful times breed even among kinfolk and neighbors! And the ultimate outcome of it all? Always a heritage of smoldering hatred guaranteed to bequeath more cycles of violence to children yet unborn?

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / 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 . . . . / Surely some revelation is at hand;

Thus wrote the Irish poet William Butler Yeats back in 1935. He grew up within the stable times of Queen Victoria and the promising Age of Reason - an era that still moved at the pace of a horse and carriage and when the sun never set on the British Empire. And then came the global war of 1914 -1918 followed by an Irish civil war and although he was to die in 1939 Yeats could see in that poem I've quoted the approach of a Second World War destined to consume millions of the boys born during the First - born to die violently like their fathers! Of course it's not just wars and insurgencies that topple the complacency of nations. There's the rapid pace of technological change which replaced my typewriter and mimeograph machine and stencils with a computer, increasing my productivity to the breaking point - and the turmoil that has taken place in the marketplace of ideas which makes a true believer feel like a relic from the Dark Ages.

And so what are we to do in such apocalyptic times? Today's Gospel provides a simple answer. Jesus says all such upheaval should lead to our giving testimony. Whenever the world seems to be regressing back into the nothingness whence God once called it forth, we ourselves are to become God's creative word, to be his persistent voice calling it forth once more toward values of life, honesty, faith and hope. We are to be in speech and behavior conveyors of that ultimate word which Stephen Dedalus longed to hear in Joyce's novel Ulysses: "that word known to all men." And what is that word? Joyce's Christlike character Leopold Bloom utters it during a tense argument with a bigoted nationalist in an Irish pub:

But it's no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life.
What? says Alf.
Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.

-- Geoff Wood