Slouching Towards Bethlehem

I first came across the phrase “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” as the title of an episode in a TV show called “Angel”. This spin-off of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” tells the tale of a vampire with a soul seeking redemption for himself and others by “helping the helpless” and saving those who have lost their way. I slowly rolled the phrase “slouching towards Bethlehem” around in my mind. The title intrigued me – what does it mean to “slouch” towards Bethlehem?

In my mind I pictured a group of star-gazing travellers wearily making their way across a dry and thirsty land, longing for hope and light and peace and rest in a place where God made a way. A pilgrimage, where one abandons all else for a journey that is only conquered as one foot is dragged in front of the other – in short, a difficult journey, but one ending with the promise of the Bethlehem of Christmas, lit aflame by a brilliant guiding star, and all that it symbolizes.

But I was wrong, dead wrong. Wrong about the meaning, wrong about the image, wrong about the beauty of Bethlehem waiting at the end of the journey.

Upon doing some research, I found that the phrase “slouching towards Bethlehem” came from a poem by W. B. Yeat’s entitled “The Second Coming”. The following is the poem in its entirety.

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,
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;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

When I first read this poem, the last two lines struck at my heart.

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

This poem is not about some lovely pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but of a dreadful beast rising up just when you think things can’t get any worse. An article in “The Paris Review” describes the slouching beast. “Yeats’s beast, it must be said, isn’t deteriorating or dying in its slouching, as the many references to the phrase would have you believe; rather, it slouches in steady, dedicated progress toward a goal. It’s actually a terrifying sight: the poem’s narrator intuits that the beast is coming to wreak some untold havoc.” http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/04/07/no-slouch/

This puts a whole new spin on my ideas and turns them towards a less than idyllic ending.

The internet, a faithful friend of information, told me that I was not alone in wondering about this phrase.

Research again from “The Paris Review” revealed that, “Yeats began writing the poem in January 1919, in the wake of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and political turmoil in his native Ireland. But the first stanza captures more than just political unrest and violence. Its anxiety concerns the social ills of modernity: the rupture of traditional family and societal structures; the loss of collective religious faith, and with it, the collective sense of purpose; the feeling that the old rules no longer apply and there’s nothing to replace them…. (Sounds a lot like 2015 doesn’t it?)

Of course, twentieth-century history did turn more horrific after 1919, as the poem forebodes. The narrator suggests something like the Christian notion of a “second coming” is about to occur, but rather than earthly peace, it will bring terror. As for the slouching beast, the best explanation is that it’s not a particular political regime, or even fascism itself, but a broader historical force, comprising the technological, the ideological, and the political. A century later, we can see the beast in the atomic bomb, the Holocaust, the regimes of Stalin and Mao, and all manner of systematized atrocity.” http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/04/07/no-slouch/

(…and I would add, terrorism.)

“The poem would have appeared to most observers to be a dark time of terrifying, even cataclysmic changes.”

In the episode of “Angel” with the title “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”, one of the character’s declares,“I have this horrible feeling that something bad is going to happen.” She is right. The show takes a turn towards betrayal, confusion, and “at the time humanity’s faithful anticipates their salvation, they meet with palpable doom” http://www.criticallytouched.com/angel/4x04_slouching_towards_bethlehem.php

So, what has happened to my nice little picture of journeying, Magi-like, towards Bethlehem, and the star, and the tiny baby in a manger? This image has been twisted into a nightmare of beasts crawling up from hell seeking whatever they can devour.

Interestingly enough, it is the image of this dark beast and the ensuing battle that draws me closer to the real light of Bethlehem. I am interested in W.B. Yeats and his stark poem – writing in a world as hurting and disillusioned as ours – a world where real beasts crawled and pillaged and ravaged the world. I am interested in vampires with souls and their battle cry for redemption of the world, even if they doubt redemption for themselves. I am interested in writers who describe themselves as atheists, agnostics at best, who have no place for God and yet cannot help but be compelled to write stories about good and evil and redemption and hope and light.

Perhaps this is where the “slouching towards Bethlehem” phrase has eventually led me. Bethlehem is indeed a place of light, but it is also a battleground where God chose to break through time and space and place his naked, vulnerable self in a manger. Perhaps seeing the beast slouch towards Bethlehem isn’t primarily about despair, but points to a light fighting against the darkness. Perhaps trying to explain planes crashing into towers, concentration camps, tsunamis, earthquakes, famine, ISIS, suicide bombers, Ebola, fleeing refugees, and cancer was never intended to be part of the school curriculum. But living in a world that hurts at every turn, also means that we have a world that can be helped and healed. Seeing a beast rise up means that we can also envision a Saviour.

So perhaps the phrase “slouching towards Bethlehem”, meant to be a cry of darkness and despair, begins to unfold and reveal itself to me as a journey towards light. In my exploration of “slouching towards Bethlehem” I have indeed come full circle, back to the Bethlehem full of stars and wonder and delight and redemption and Christmas spirit and Christ. Back to a Bethlehem that is worth the journey, no matter how dangerous the terrain or brutal the monsters.

I am reminded of a quote by C.S. Lewis that reads, “Since it is so likely that children will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage.”

There are real beasts attempting to devour – we only have to examine our own hearts to find the beast “slouching towards Bethlehem” within – but in our redemption there is bravery and courage and faith – and the imagination to lean into the light of Bethlehem.

This Christmas, as I sing songs like “O Little Town of Bethlehem”, there will be a new meaning. A call to remember that Bethlehem was God’s battlefield – where He broke through and revealed himself in veiled glory amidst shepherds and angels and a bewildered young couple. But also a call to remember that Bethlehem is the battleground for our own hearts where we must seek the light within the muck and mire and manure of a stable. So let us be heroic knights and take courage. Let us continue to “slouch” towards the light for as John 1:5 powerfully proclaims, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”