Light in Darkness

Here we are, early in the 21st century and on the brink, some say, of a new dark age. Global warming, depleting resources, the American Empire under the Bush Administration doing its best—and worst—to make the world safe for corporate business. The rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. The disintegration of family and community. Religious and/or political fanaticism fostering hate and murder. And Yeats’s words still resonating after sixty some years: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

And yet, we push on. Life remains good. Or, as D. H. Lawrence put it so beautifully when he was dying of tuberculosis: "For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos."