In a culture where destruction and violence are so deeply fuelled by the clash of opinion and ideology, we need to respond to our differences from a deeper and more merciful space, says theologian Dr Sarah Bachelard*. She reflects on Australian poet James McAuley’s invocation ‘to raise up contemplatives among us … to set pools of silence in this thirsty land’.
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.
Although these words seem uncannily resonant with our contemporary experience, they were in fact written in 1919, in the aftermath of the First World War and at the beginning of the Irish War of Independence. They come from W.B. Yeat’s much quoted poem, ‘The Second Coming’ – a poem which ends by seeming to despair of the age now dawning upon the earth. The Christian era was coming to an end, Yeats thought, and fearfully (in the poem’s final lines) he wonders what is now to come: ‘what rough beast, its hour come round at last/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?’
Just over thirty years later, Australian poet James McAuley likewise expressed his despair at the state of what he called ‘this vacant sly/Neurotic modern world’. For McAuley writing in the 1950s, the immediate circumstances were less obviously bloody than Yeats’, but he too felt acutely the collapse of a ‘centre’ that could hold, and he connected this collapse to the loss of traditional faith. In a long, almost bitter poem, called ‘A Letter to John Dryden’, McAuley took aim at pretty much every contemporary belief system and political party, ‘maintaining the pace’, as one critic put it, ‘for hundreds of lines’, ridiculing communists, ‘mediocre democrats’, McCarthyists, secularists, relativists, liberals, progressive Christians and Protestants [McAuley was a Catholic convert], and other religious traditions. There are some brilliantly cutting lines. He complains of progressive Christians, for example, that:
The puzzled sects have let their doctrines sag,
Or melt to one like lollies in a bag,
Until the Christian faith has seemed to mean
Only: "Be good, be kind, God save the Queen."
But even Les Murray, himself a trenchant Catholic critic of modernity as well as of floppy Christian sentiment, found this poem ‘unsatisfying’. It is marked, he said, by ‘that slightly peevish tone that has so bedevilled much Catholic and conservative writing in the last century, that defiant making of brilliant points to a public one knows deep down is not listening’.[1]
And yet, it’s this rather unpromising text which also contains the following soaring lines with their beautiful depiction of the contemplative vocation:
Incarnate Word,
in whom all nature lives,
cast flame upon the earth:
raise up contemplatives among us,
Those who walk within the fire
of ceaseless prayer,
Impetuous desire.
Set pools of silence in this thirsty land.
And I wonder what we can learn about this vocation – our vocation – by seeing how it rises from the midst of McAuley’s impatient, opinionated, almost hopeless lament for the state of the world? For McAuley himself, it seemed to come into view about a hundred lines from the end of the poem when, after pages of unrelenting critique, something suddenly shifts:
But now, by some new prompting, I can see
A ray of light in my perplexity.
Involved in literature, I tend to think
Too much of arguments of pen and ink;
Which have their place, and in their place are good,
And sometimes may convince, if understood;
But what of arguments of flesh and blood?
Men do not trust their reason? Very well,
Perhaps the heart has something left to tell.
Could it be that beyond the clash of ideologies, endless argument and warring factions, a deeper truth of being is available at the level of the heart?
This ‘new prompting’ leads McAuley to speak again of Christ. But whereas earlier in the poem, his appeal to Catholic Christianity had seemed intolerant, polemical, just another ideological claim, now he seems to glimpse the possibility of Christ himself breaking through to give life to the whole. He addresses Christ directly, letting go of argument and expressing simply his own profound thirst for life sourced in God.
At last it’s as if McAuley realises that what will renew a fractious, thirsty world is not winning the argument, not the triumph of my faction over yours, but the upwelling in our midst of God’s own mercy and love, through prayer and in lives shaped by prayer. He writes: ‘Prayer has an influence we cannot mark,/ It works unseen like radium in the dark’./And next to prayer, the outward works of grace:/ Humility that takes the lower place,/ Serene content that does not ask for more,/ And simple joy, the treasure of the poor,/ And active charity that knocks on any door’. McAuley knows that his own life may not fully reflect the truth he now proclaims: ‘It's easy said—I wish my words might chime,/ With fitting deeds as easily as they rhyme./ Yet somehow, between prayer and common sense,/ Hearts may be touched, and lives have influence’.
In other words, at the end of his long peevish poem, what McAuley seems to realise is that the truth that will make a difference, the truth that might truly touch and heal the world, isn’t one more strident opinion or system of righteousness. Rather, it’s the truth which reflects and participates in the mercy and love of God. For McAuley, this insight didn’t mean giving up on doctrine or the life of the mind. But he realises that it’s only by living God’s truth, learning to inhabit it bodily, that we can ever really know its meaning: ‘And when the heart is once disposed to see,/Then reason can unlock faith's treasury’.
In a very different time, the prophet Isaiah witnessed to the same realisation. Don’t think that God is primarily interested in your beliefs, your ritual observances, your virtue signalling. What use is that when still you quarrel and fight and strike with a wicked fist? ‘Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord?’ No, God tells Isaiah. ‘Is this not the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free?’ To share bread with the hungry, to bring homeless poor into your house, to cover the naked, to ‘remove the … pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil’ (Isaiah 58. 1-11).
At one level, these injunctions to live the truth, and not just talk about it, are well known – almost a cliché. We all know that what matters, in the end, is the state of our heart and not just what we say with our lips. And yet, in a culture where destruction and violence are so deeply fuelled by the clash of opinion and ideology, where so much effort is expended on bludgeoning each other with argument, rhetoric, polemic, these texts are also a profound reminder of the call to respond to our differences from a deeper and more merciful space. This doesn’t mean there’s no place for engaging critically with false reasoning or with language which generates hate and division. But if our engagement only ever happens at the level of debate, satire, virtue signalling, then we’re refusing our deepest work. For the only truth that really can reconcile and free us is the merciful reality in which all nature lives. Which means that the real work of truth is to come to know this reality for ourselves, and so to make it visible, to inspire others to seek and inhabit it too.
Which brings us to the contemplative vocation at such a time as this. ‘Raise up contemplatives among us’, McAuley prayed, ‘men and women of ceaseless prayer’. We may not feel ourselves to be a satisfactory answer to this prayer, aware as we are of our own limits and anxieties, our own struggle to know, to inhabit and so to communicate the centre that holds. And yet, week after week, in our meditation and our worship, in our commitment to love one another, and to live humbly, justly and open to the needs of the world, we offer ourselves to be a place where God’s faithful and generous life may be glimpsed. It is a joy to live out this contemplative vocation with other contemplatives. Let us pray that, by God’s grace, we may truly be for others like a watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail.
*Dr Sarah Bachelard is a theologian, retreat leader and founding director of Benedictus Contemplative Church in Canberra, Australia. This article is based on a sermon she gave there on 7 February 2026. See: https://benedictus.com.au/
Her books include Experiencing God in a Time of Crisis, Poetica Divina: Poems to Redeem a Prose World and Pools of Grace: The Gift and Call of Contemplative Worship (forthcoming).
References:
[1] Dan Hitchens, ‘McAuley Beyond Despair’ in First Things, February 1, 2018, https://firstthings.com/mcauley-beyond-despair/