Paradox
One of the challenges of the spiritual life is that our natural tendencies often don’t seem to help us navigate the journey. This is often most visible in our typical patterns of thinking. We grow up in the world learning to think dualistically, leading us to categorize the things and situations around us as “either/or”. The car is either red or blue. The answer is either right or wrong. My friend is either tall or short. We embrace these categories because we know what “red” is and what “blue” is. We rest in the fact that something is either “wrong” or “right”. “Tall” and “short” are words that we can pin down and understand. This way of viewing the world serves us well, enabling us to navigate the complexities of life by providing a structure that helps us to feel grounded.
The problem is that when we come to the spiritual life we don’t grasp the fullness of all the concepts. We think we understand ideas like”grace” or “forgiveness” or even “sacrifice” or “love” but when we are forced to be honest, we admit our limited grasp of the fullness of these words. Because of that it’s hard to pin them down to an either/or framework. We are forced into living with paradox and its mind bending shift to both/and. In our dualistic frame we seek to avoid contradictions. We know that something can’t be what it is and what it isn’t at the same time. It is either/or. The car can’t be blue and red at the same time. But a paradox is different than a contradiction. A paradox is defined “…as a seemingly absurd or self-contradictory statement or proposition that when investigated or explained may prove to be well founded or true.” (dictionary.com) It moves us to entertaining the idea that two things can be both/and. Pain can be both good and bad. Because our understanding of the spiritual life is limited we have to acknowledge repeatedly throughout our journey that things we thought didn’t make sense at one moment often become clearer further down the path.
Perhaps my favourite take on this comes from Neils Bohr, the Nobel Prize winning physicist. This was a man who knew how to work dualistic thinking to the max. Utilizing the scientific method he helped us to understand atomic structure and quantum theory better than anyone had prior. His life and lab were filled with either/or as he did his life’s work. Yet he realized that there was more to perception and understanding than just defining and eliminating contradictions in his lab. He wrote,
“The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”
In this he acknowledges that some things in life are understood in terms of either/or, but other things require a both/and approach. A life with Jesus is filled with paradox. There are so many things that require holding two profound truths in tension if I am going to be faithful to the way of Jesus. There are lots of these I could highlight, but just to prove the point take the example known as the problem of evil.
Profound truth that we hold to - God is good.
Second profound truth that we hold to - God is all powerful.
Third profound truth that we’d like to avoid but can’t - there is evil in the world that causes suffering and pain.
If we are holding to the teachings of Jesus and the Bible we can’t deny any of these truths. Yet they do not sit well together. We have to hold them in tension and let that tension do its work on us. That’s part of the journey, and one of the things we will miss if we have to force everything in the world to fit the dualistic either/or approach.
Why this topic today? It’s a fascinating subject, but I’m finding it is extremely relevant to the world we live in, especially in regards to the way we see ourselves and others. Our world of COVID and systemic racism and political division forces us to look with dualistic glasses. People either have the infection or they don’t. People either listen to authorities recommendations or they don’t. People are either racist or they aren’t. People are either conservatives or liberals. Ideas and people are either good or bad.
This way of seeing the world only helps to increase the divisions. We need to be willing to entertain some paradox. We have to stop categorizing human beings and start listening to them. It starts with the realization that the nature of a person is complex. People are products of their environment and their DNA. Each has been created uniquely, but also in the image of God. Situations like the racial tensions we are dealing with cannot be simplified into either/or categories. We want to move difficult and paradoxical situations into these stream-lined places so that they are easier to deal with. When I see a Black Lives Matter sign I can automatically infer information about the person carrying it. When I see a Democrat or a Republican (or in Canada a Liberal or a Green or a Conservative or an NDP or Bloc) I can lump them all together in an either/or framework which doesn’t force me to listen to them and to think about the complexities of what they may be saying. I think we all know that this is a futile way of understanding the world, but we are so exhausted by all we see on the news that often we feel it is the only way we can retreat to our own safe categories and sleep at night. How do we even start to live with paradox in a world like ours?
The good news is I think I have an idea. Like all my best ideas I’ve stolen this one from someone else. I need to start embracing paradox by acknowledging it in my very own life - I need to see that I am complex. I am more both/and than I am either/or. It sounds a bit terrifying, but it’s an incredibly beautiful place to start. I was reminded (here’s the stolen part) of this by a quote from Tim Keller in his book, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God. He writes,
“The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.”
That’s paradox. We are both sinful/broken and loved/accepted. Living in this paradox helps me to be honest about my own sin and brokenness because the safest place to do that is living embedded in the love and acceptance of God. This is a humbling process and leads us to the place that John the Baptist went when he said, “A man can receive only what is given him from heaven.” (Jn 3:27). This humility should enable us to see others from the same perspective. They are more sinful and broken than they ever dared believe, yet at the same time more loved and accepted by Jesus than they ever dared hope.
Imagine this. What if when you turned on the news you were so conditioned by the truth of both your own brokenness and your love and acceptance by God, that you could stop seeing people only as republicans or democrats or racists or rednecks or rich or poor or Christian or non-Christian. What if you could accept the brokenness of those who think differently than you do because the God who loves and accepts you as you are loves and accepts them too? What if instead of getting angry and fired up at the latest news story you were able to extend to others the same grace that has been extended to you? What if the power of the paradox that resides in you began to shape your interactions, both face to face and online, in a way that brought hope and healing to a divided world? What if you spent your emotional energy less on hiding your brokenness as a way of self-protection and more on showing the other broken people in the world the love and acceptance of Jesus?
What if?
