Things fall apart by Desiree Snyman 29th March 2026
Things fall apart
There is a hum beneath the routines of daily life. Not panic exactly, but a quiet anticipatory grief. It feels like unmooring. The future is no longer something we move toward, but something we brace against. The maps still exist, but they no longer explain where we are. Institutions, civilisations, and the systems we trusted feel thin. We keep calm and carry on, but underneath there is fatigue, vigilance, and a quiet question: what is holding all of this together?
It is disorienting because multiple crises overlap: war, climate anxiety, economic instability, institutional distrust. There is no single narrative to organise this experience, and so the psyche cannot settle. We move between urgency and numbness, outrage and exhaustion, longing for stability and being suspicious of it.
W. B. Yeats captures this atmosphere with unsettling clarity:
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: somewhere in sands of the desert
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
Reel 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?
The poem names what many feel: the world we trusted is breaking apart, and what is coming next is not yet known, and may not be what we hoped for.
Things fall apart in the Gospel of Matthew
Matthew wrote into a world like this. After the destruction of the Temple, identity, leadership, and stability have collapsed. In that context, Matthew offered not blame or despair, but an invitation to move forward with Christ into uncertainty. Darkness is not the end. It is the beginning of something new. God works through disruption, not around it.
This is already embedded in the story of Matthew. The genealogy in Matthew 1 is filled with flawed and unexpected people, reminding us that God’s purposes unfold through broken histories rather than moral perfection. The path forward is not control, but surrender.
In the Passion, collapse becomes visible. The disciples scatter. Peter denies. Judas unravels. Institutions fail. Truth is drowned in accusation and noise. This is what it looks like when the centre cannot hold. The good falter. Those who know better hesitate or withdraw. Meanwhile, the crowd grows louder, the authorities press harder, and momentum replaces discernment.
In this sense, the crucifixion is the drowning of innocence. Jesus stands silent before false accusation. He is mocked, stripped, and struck. Even the sacred becomes theatre: robe, crown, kneeling, all turned into parody. The world has lost its moral centre.
Here is the crucial difference. Where Yeats ends in dread, imagining something monstrous emerging from collapse, Matthew reveals something else. The darkness at the crucifixion is real, but it is not empty. At the moment of death, the curtain tears, the earth shakes, the tombs open, and even a Roman centurion begins to see clearly: “Truly this was the Son of God.” These are not solutions. They are ruptures. Signs that the world is not simply breaking down, but breaking open. The centre we thought was holding was never the true centre. When it collapses, something deeper is revealed. Not certainty. Not control. But the presence of God in the very heart of the darkness.
Things fall apart for us
What do we do with our own sense of disarray? Where do we take our fears about world politics, economic pressure, and the recognition that the normalcy of civilisation is often fragile, even violent?
The words “Truly this is the Son of God” begin to point a way forward. Just as divinity is at the heart of who Christ is, so too is this same divine life our truest ground. Contemplation begins here, not as something we construct, but as something we fall into. It is an unknowing we do not choose, but must inhabit. We relinquish control and begin to trust a deeper, hidden life within. The things that fall apart fall apart because they are finite not infinite. Since the ground of our being is one with God, only that which is infinite can hold us, we will be dissatisfied with anything less than infinite.
Meister Eckhart, as interpreted by Jim Finley, reminds us that the ground of God is already given as the ground of our own being. We are not separate from God at the deepest level, yet we live as if we are. Our ordinary consciousness, our thinking, remembering, and desiring, operates as though exiled from this ground. This is why we cling to outcomes, relationships, identity, success, control. This clinging produces restlessness, because nothing finite can satisfy the depth of who we are.
The path forward is detachment. Detachment is not withdrawal or coldness, but a disciplined, loving practice. We learn not to let joy or sorrow define us, not to give outcomes authority over our identity, to notice reactivity and gently release it, and to return, again and again, to the deeper ground, the divine with us, the Ground of our Being. This is what it looks like in practice: we may notice a sensation of fear when things fall apart and what we thought was the centre collapses. We notice the feelings and thoughts, but we realise that they are finite, and do not have the final say on who we are, so we release them and let them go. Only the ground of God which is already given as the ground of our own being can define who we are because this Ground of God is Infinite, Infinite Love. Detachment is fidelity to love. It is the quiet work of letting go of whatever pulls us away from what is most true. Over time, this becomes a way of life. In ordinary moments, in relationships and work, in suffering and joy, we are gradually stabilised in a deeper centre, a hidden ground that suffering cannot destroy and success cannot inflate. The journey is not about attaining God, but about being freed from what obscures a union already given, and learning to live from that union in the midst of everyday life.
The invitation
The invitation of Holy Week is not to cling to what is falling apart, nor to collapse into fear, but to step forward into this unknowing. It is a call to trust that even here, especially here, God is at work bringing new life into being.
We are called to wait and to witness. To remain present to grief, doubt, and disorientation. To allow them to teach us. We are called to hold to God as the Infinite Ground of Love beneath all finite things that may obscure our true home in God. Uncertainty and collapse are invitations to release the less real for the really Real. As someone once said, there is a deep well within us. In it dwells God. Sometimes, we find ourselves there too.