The Beauty of Paradox

Recently, I revisited 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 surprising given the traditional connection between beauty and truth. 

The interviewer Krista Tippett quotes Wilczek back to him, “you say 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, 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 it 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 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. God was born again to immortality and will return 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 there 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 its 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 often behave as if we 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.