Sometimes things seem one way, but also another too. We don't have to have the details figured out yet, we don't need to prove one right and the other wrong. I believe we are called to hold the tension in a creative waiting period. Then, through our holding, while we in faith hold both sides of the seeming paradox, we are changed. Our minds are broadened, our souls open. The dual mind seeks to make judgements about everything, to put things into this category or that. The contemplative mind holds all, and invites grace to be the instructor rather than a linear mind. I need not be quick on the draw, I can be patient. Sometimes the story doesn't unfold overnight, sometimes we wish the answers would appear quicker. But it is precisely through the faithful waiting, that we are ripened (much without us even know this has happened). I feel that knowledge can say that something is either this or that, but wisdom lets both sides of something affect us.
Paradox is woven into our very existence. Remember, Jesus became flesh, so that he was fully God and fully man. And somehow, our flesh is affected by the spiritual, and the spiritual affected by our flesh. Thinking on such things can get us out of linear, dual or either/or thinking. It can deepen our grasp of reality, deepen our participation in truth. Then, we don't need to have something fully figured out before we can partake in it. We simply let it wash over us, simply let it be as it is. I feel that so much of our time can be in the pursuit of knowledge, or the pursuit of some form of control or security, whereas what we need more is to recede control, to participate in reality rather than have it controlled.
Maybe the answer isn't found in one extreme or the other, maybe there is a creativity holding all together that I can let affect me more and more. In this way, I'm less reactive, less defensive of my corner. I read recently a description of God as One whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere. Therefore God is involved on both sides of the issue, inviting extremes to lay down arms and meet in the middle.
God grant me the capacity for paradox.
