It’s easy to take a piece of ancient literature and find things that separate ourselves from earlier civilizations. However, if we look closer at that same piece of literature and take a good hard look at ourselves, we can find a lot of similarities as well. What do you think of when you read these quotes: “the Devil has led this nation too far astray for many years, and there has been little loyalty among men”,  “the laws of the people have deteriorated all too much”, “Rather it seems this nation has become thoroughly corrupted through manifold sins and  many misdeeds: through acts of murder and evil, through avarice and greed, through theft and thievery, through slavery and pagan abuses, through treachery and trickery, through the breach of law and order”(Wulfstan)? If you thought of complaints that you have heard about our modern times and country, then you thought of the same things as I did while reading much of Wulfstan’s Sermo Lupi ad Anglos homily.

            Wulfstan’s writing in Sermo Lupi ad Anglos was rather dark and depressing. In the very opening line of his homily, he states that the world, “draws near its end” and goes on to call for the people to change their ways in order to prevent that from happening. When I look at the news and media in today’s world, or even in conversations I have or overhear, I pick up a lot of similarities in both tone and language. Who hasn’t heard someone say that, “people have no respect for each other these days” or that our country doesn’t stand for and represent what it once did in its early days? We all know that our country has a dark past in slavery, are well aware of the presence of Capitalistic greed in our country, and know that murder and thievery are issues that are still very much alive. When we tune our ears into the global conversation that is being held on the subject global warming it’s inevitable that we hear people’s fears that the end of the world is near, or that the end of life as we know it is inevitable unless we change our ways, similar to Wulfstan’s tone in his homily.

            How are we supposed to feel once we realized that we haven’t overcame issues that were present over 1,000 years ago when Wulfstan wrote this homily? There are many things we can take away from this. Maybe Wulfstan was right all along about the end of the world and it’s all going to be over very soon, he just didn’t have the timing right and its now all boiling down to this. We can look at this text, see the similarities between us and them and think, “the human race is just inherently flawed and we will never fully eradicate the problems we have faced for centuries now”. Or we can look at Wulfstan’s concern and realize that every civilization from the beginning of time has had its fair share of very real problems and that the future of humanity has always been on the brink of a very drastic change. I personally find comfort in the fact that people have always had these concerns that the end of the world is near, but the Earth has still continued to rotate and the human race has continued to grow and thrive despite these fears. Now that is not to say that I don’t think we have issues that we as the human race have to work out, because it’s very obvious that we do. I just think we have to remember that the tides of change are very slow and that many of these problems have a much deeper rooted history than we often remember, therefore we shouldn’t beat ourselves down with too much negativity when we’re looking for the solutions to various problems we face today.