The Beauty of Paradox

Recently I listened to an episode of On Being on NPR radio.  The program was an interview with physicist Frank Wilczek and was entitled, Why Is the World So Beautiful?  The conversation began with an exploration of truth but turned to beauty which lies beneath the surface of things.  This is not surprizing given the traditional connection between beauty and truth. 

The interviewer Krista Tippett quotes Wilczek back to him, “you say is that “In ordinary reality and ordinary time and space, the opposite of a truth is a falsehood.” But, you say, “Deep propositions have a meaning that goes beyond their surface.” This is so interesting. “You can recognize a deep truth by the feature that its opposite is also a deep truth.”  

Here we are dealing with paradox which is, for me, is a hallmark of truth.  THE technical definition of paradox is, “a statement or proposition that seems self-contradictory or absurd but, in reality, expresses a possible truth.” Wilczek uses the classic example in quantum physics of light being both a particle and a wave.  Both ways of looking at it are correct.  Sometimes under observation it behaves as a particle and sometimes is behaves as a wave. 

Paradox is central to the Christian story.  We worship a God who humbled himself and became human.  That fact for us is the strength of what on the surface is a really crazy act.  We worship and are followers not a God of power but one who gave up his power to become a creature; one who gave up immortality to become mortal; a God who was powerless on the cross.  And yet the God was born again to immortality and is returning to rule this world.Wilczek notes, “Deep propositions have a meaning that goes beyond their surface. You can recognize a deep truth by the feature that its opposite is also a deep truth.”

I believe that much of the problems that develop in religious doctrine come about by the belief that there is only one way of looking at things.  I have the truth and you don’t or my way of understanding this event of passage is the correct and only way.  It may very well be correct but there may be a different way which is also correct even though it seems contradictory.  There is beneath both a deeper truth which is reflected in part in the truth of both or many ways of looking at it.

The idea of paradox is an insult to our rational minds.  We want to believe desperately that our understanding of the world can only be either/or.  It must be either black or white.  We do accept that their may be shades in between but basically, they are one way or the other.  Things cannot be both.  That is why the Newtonian Universe is still the way that we understand the universe.  Quantum Physics turned that on it head but has not sunk into the foundation of our existence.  We look at the light and see only the object illuminated but not the shadow that is behind the object. 

We Christian do not truly believe that God could have chosen to become human and be born as a helpless baby in a lowly stable.  It fits into the romantic ideal of Christmas but we do not truly believe in the consequences of that action.  We do not truly believe that Jesus did not go to the cross without an internal struggle.  We do not truly accept the truly radical nature of a God willingly dying on the cross.  We cannot truly accept the implication of the paradox of the cross.  We do not believe that there is true power in the weakness of Jesus surrender to the will of Father and the submission to the cruelty of the cross.  That perhaps is the ultimate paradox of where true power lies.  If we Christians truly believed that the Christian Church would be very different.

Blessings on the journey and try and embrace the paradox.

Social Justice and the Religion

Today I am tackling the last of a series of questions that were posed to me by one of my readers.  First, I want to express my appreciation for those questions.  They certainly have provided me with some very interesting material for me to write about.  More importantly they have made me engage with some rather difficult and challenging issues such as the Trinity.  Here are the questions which have been exploring in the past weeks:

Can you explain to me your grounding belief in the Trinity? I can’t explain internally the need for formal religion and rules and commitment. 

I agree that when you drill down to the bottom of all... be good treat people as you want to be treated...  try to correct wrongs when you can etc. 

Does it come down to blind faith? What drives you to continue?  Do you ever feel that your energy would better placed in just straight up social justice?

As I noted, today I am engaging with the last question, “Do you ever feel that your energy would better placed in just straight up social justice?”  My initial response to this was that these are not mutually exclusive positions.  There have been great traditions of people who engage in social justice from both religious and non-religious perspectives. You can bring a religious perspective and base your social action in religious  principles and practices.  You can also come to social action from a secular perspective.   Currently we have people such as Elizabeth May, the leader of the Green Party of Canada and ecologist and journalist Dr. David Suzuki who do not bring an openly religious component to their work.  I am not aware if their perspectives have perhaps been influenced by religious beliefs or practices but they are not the basis of their public positions.

In the modern era you have the great tradition of the Social Gospel in Canada which informed and motivated many of the leaders of the early modern movement for social justice.  It is the tradition I was raised in as my father was a United Church minister who was grounded in the Social Gospel and process theology.  This certainly informed both my political understanding and my theology.  However, I have, of course, gone a somewhat different but not entirely incompatible path since my beginnings.     

The Social Gospel Movement in Canada had leaders such as J.S. Woodsworth the founder of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) political party which was the precursor of the New Democratic Party of Canada (NDP).  Woodsworth was a Methodist minister who preached the social gospel.  This was followed by such notables as T.C. Douglas the father of universal health care in Canada.  Douglas was a Baptist minister and deeply influenced by the Social Gospel tradition.  Douglas was the first leader of the NDP which was formed out of the socialist CCF.  Also of note was Stanley Knowles, a leader in the NDP, who was a United Church of Canada minister was who was also greatly influenced by the Social Gospel movement. 

This is just a few of the examples that could be cited. They were prime examples of people who attempted and in some cases were successful in bringing social programs to Canada based on their understanding of the Christian Gospel, which is the Good News of Jesus Christ.  Going a bit further back in history you have people such as William Wilberforce, who was instrumental in the elimination of slavery in England.  Although not an ordained minister Wilberforce was greatly influenced by his Christian beliefs, “his political views were informed by his faith and by his desire to promote Christianity and Christian ethics in private and public life.” 

Given this, I believe that the question arises, is their any difference in coming to social action from a religious versus a non-religious perspective or influence? I have given this a great deal of thought over the years due to my early influences and I believe that the challenge of social justice is to base your action on being for something rather than against it.  If you are against what you see as the evils of the world you may be successful in defeating the enemy but the question that arises is, what do you replace it with.  The alternative is guiding you needs to be what you are for?  The foundation of the Christian is (or should be) Jesus Christ who commanded us to love our enemies.  We need therefore to base our actions on love and not hate.  There is no guarantee that Christians will do this.  There are perhaps endless examples of Christians doing very unchristian things.  However, at least we have the example and the hope of Jesus Christ to be our guide and our guard against the hatred which seems to easy for people to embrace. 

I recently came across a quote by Thomas Merton which addresses this:

What is the relation of [contemplation] to action? Simply this. He [or she] who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening his own self-understanding, freedom, integrity and capacity to love will not have anything to give others. He will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of his own obsessions, his aggressiveness, his ego-centered ambitions, his delusions about ends and means, his doctrinaire prejudices and ideas. There is nothing more tragic in the modern world than the misuse of power and action. . . . —Thomas Merton [1]

As difficult and seemingly impossible it is to follow the commandment to love our enemies it is what we need to guide us on our journey.

What Drives Me To Continue

The last few additions have been dedicated to responding to questions which were posed to me by a reader.  Here are the questions for your reference and consideration:

Can you explain to me your grounding belief in the Trinity? I can’t explain internally the need for formal religion and rules and commitment. 

I agree that when you drill down to the bottom of all... be good treat people as you want to be treated..  try to correct wrongs when you can etc. 

Does it come down to blind faith? What drives you to continue?  Do you ever feel that your energy would better placed in just straight up social justice?

Today I will respond to the question: “What drives you to continue?”   That is a very personal question which I am not sure I have a complete answer for as it is a work in process.   The first thing that I ask myself is, what is it that I continue?   Is it my life long involvement with the church?  Following on with that thought, is it my decision to seek ordination as a priest which I continue to be and continue to serve, albeit in a different and less active role in retirement.  Is it someone who believes that dreams are one of the many ways, indeed one of the important ways, a way that God speaks to us and who works with others in discerning their meaning?   It is as a Spiritual Director which I have come to more recently?  Is it my attempts to be a husband and father to my spouse and children as flawed as they are?

Or is it more basic than all that.  Is it to continue to explore and discover how I can be the person I believe I should be and by extension become the person that I believe God created me to be? All of those things are connected and the idea of discovering and making incomplete and flawed and halting efforts in all those ways are what drives.  It is what I come back to no matter how I try to avoid it or rationalize not following that path which apparently God has laid out for me.

Let me give one example which I am most clear about.  I first felt the call to ordained ministry in my thirties.  I had been and continue to be actively involved in the church all my life.  At that point it was in the United Church of Canada.  I entered into the discernment process and followed that for some time until circumstances convinced me it wasn’t the time to pursue that path, I told myself that it really wasn’t for me ̶ perhaps a case of sour grapes.  In any case, my journey continued in fits and starts and sometimes what seemed to involve many disastrous wrong turns and dead ends.  

After some searching I ended up in the Anglican Church as my church home.  I continued on with life and was approaching retirement from my first career as a civil servant.  I began to be drawn to take courses in theology at Huron College, out of interest of course and never with the intention that it might lead to where it eventually did.  I continued on taking courses part time categorized as a ‘Special Student” which always tickled me as I secretly thought I was special.  I retired and after a short, brilliant (just kidding) career as a “consultant” still taking courses as a Special Student, I began to fell the pull to explore the possibility of ordination on the Anglican Church.  As I have said at other times I was hoping for a “Road to Damascus Experience” to get a clear massage that this was a call I should answer.  That never came, at least not that clearly as St. Paul received his (thank God).  It was more a case of God continuing to nag me which, I have concluded is often the way God works.

In any case I decided the only way to discern if God was actually calling me to this path was begin to follow it.   This is what I did and continue to this day.  One of the signposts along the way which I like to recount (as am therefore going to here) was a case of synchronicity (a Jungian term for significant coincidence).   I applied to be a full-time student in the MDiv program (apparently no longer ‘special’) and had an interview with the Dean of Theology.  After what was a very positive interview I was driving home and had my radio tuned to CBC as usual (radio 1 for those who listen to CBC).  There was a program in which three clergy were being interviewed about their experience of being called to ministry as mature adults (at least chronologically).  I took this as a sign I as on the right path. 

A big part of what drives me to continue is to keep trying to discern where God is calling me in my life.  I try do this in as many ways as possible.  I believe that God speaks to us in many different ways.  We are all more open to some ways than other but it is for us to try and discern the voice of God however we can.

Blessings on you journey and keep your eyes and ears and all your senses attuned to the voice of God.  

Is Faith Blind

The last three entries of this blog I have been attempting to answer, as best I can, questions that were posed to me:

Can you explain to me your grounding belief in the Trinity? I can’t explain internally the need for formal religion and rules and commitment. 

I agree that when you drill down to the bottom of all... be good treat people as you want to be treated..  try to correct wrongs when you can etc. 

Does it come down to blind faith? What drives you to continue?  Do you ever feel that your energy would better placed in just straight up social justice?

Initially, I ventured into the landmine of the Trinity.  This was followed by a discussion of why I participate in formal religion, and thirdly, the question behind the statement that at bottom the issue is be good, treat people as you want to be treated; in effect, the Golden Rule. 

This week I will respond to the question, “does it come down to blind faith?”  The term ‘blind faith’ can have a rather pejorative connotation.  I sure that it was not meant that way knowing the person who posed the question.  However, often it is used by many people judgmentally implying, how can anyone be so stupid to live their life based on blind faith when it flies in the face of the evidence facing them in that face.  What comes to mind for me when I consider the type of blind faith that will illicit this type of question is people who belong to the flat earth society or that believe that the ̶̶moon landing was staged or that dinosaurs (at least baby ones) were present on the Ark.  I do believe that blind faith in that sense can lead us to places that God doesn’t intent us to be. 

Faith can be more positive if it is not used it in that way.  I recently listened to an episode of Tapestry on CBC radio in which the wonderful host Mary Hynes interviewed physicist David Deutsch.  He revealed in the interview that he has no doubt that science will come up with the answer to the mystery of human consciousness and be able to replicate it in Artificial General Intelligence i.e. robots.  That is absolutely a faith which is based on a belief in the science rather than belief in a divine being.  However, it is positive in that it has led Mr. Deutsch to strive to explore the mysteries of life through the scientific method. 

Human beings are endowed with reason and intellect and I cannot believe that God did not intend us to inquire about God’s creation and, as a result, to develop an understanding of God’s intention for us and all of creation.  That is one of the aspects of Anglicanism that attracts me.  The three pillars of Anglicanism are scripture, tradition and reason.  Following this, I believe that scripture in inspired, but not dictated, by God.  Tradition allows us to follow the time-tested practice of the church but also allows us to consider and develop new traditions.  Finally, reason allows us to use our intelligence, and hopefully our wisdom, to question and perhaps even find answers, to some of the questions which arise regarding how we can live lives that are faithful to God in a world which is changing and often challenges our religious beliefs and practices.

That is the what and the where of it for me and faith.   I know (have faith) that all there is, the earth, the stars and the moons and other dimensions we don’t know about are created by God.  I am a creature of God’s creating and I owe all that I am to God.  I have a duty to try and live my life in an effort to become who I continue to discover God created me to be.  I try and know that I will never fully succeed but I know that is okay with God. 

While I was writing this, I was listening to music on my computer as I have a wont to do.  The song that came up was “You’ve Got me Singing” by Leonard Cohen ̶ St. Lennie as he is in my mind as he is the Lord of song.  The song captures the meaning of faith in my life far better than I can: 

You got me singing

Even tho’ the news is bad

You got me singing

The only song I ever had

You got me singing

Ever since the river died

You got me thinking

Of the places we could hide

You got me singing

Even though the world is gone

You got me thinking

I’d like to carry on

You got me singing

Even tho’ it all looks grim

You got me singing

The Hallelujah hymn

You got me singing

Like a prisoner in a jail

You got me singing

Like my pardon’s in the mail

You got me wishing

Our little love would last

You got me thinking

Like those people of the past

You got me singing

Even though the world is gone

You got me thinking

I’d like to carry on

You got me singing

Even tho’ it all went wrong

You got me singing

The Hallelujah song

I hope that you will keep on singing on your journey,