Every human experience can be expressed in terms of paradox. The electric plug in the wall has two prongs, access to a positive and negative electrical charge. From this opposition comes the usefulness of the electric current. Day is comprehensible only in contrast to night. Masculinity has relevance only in contrast to femininity. Activity has meaning only in relation to rest.
Contradiction is barren and destructive, yet paradox is creative. It is a powerful embracing of reality. All religious experience in its historical form is expressed in paradox; observe the Christian creeds that have been formulated in such paradoxical language. While contradiction is static and unproductive, paradox makes room for grace and mystery.
For some incomprehensible reason we often refuse this paradoxical nature of reality and, in an idiot moment, think we can function outside it. The very moment we do this, we translate paradox into opposition. When leisure is torn loose from work, both are spoiled. Personal suffering begins when we are crucified between these opposites. If we try to embrace one without paying tribute to the other, we degrade paradox into contradiction. Yet both pairs of opposites must be equally honored. To suffer one’s confusion is the first step in healing.* Then the pain of contradiction is transformed into the mystery of paradox.
The quickest way I know to break a person is to give him or her two sets of contradicting values—which is exactly what we do, in modern culture, with our Sunday and Monday moralities. We are taught by Christianity to follow a set of values that are almost entirely disregarded in everyday business life. How is a person to cope?
The religious faculty is the art of taking the opposites and binding them back together again, surmounting the split that has been causing so much suffering. It helps us move from contradiction—that painful condition where things oppose each other—to the realm of paradox, where we are able to entertain simultaneously two contradictory notions and give them equal dignity. Then, and only then, is there the possibility of grace, the spiritual experience of contradictions brought into a coherent whole—giving us a unity greater than either one of them.
If one has progressed past the duality of life, one has come to the absolute certainty that one is doing the will of God.
It is good to win; it is also good to lose. It is good to have; it is also good to give to the poor. Freedom is good; so is the acceptance of authority. To view the elements of our life in this paradoxical manner is to open up a whole new series of possibilities. Let us not say that the opposites are antithetical but that they make up a divine reality that is accessible to us in our human condition. It is wrong to say that one of a pair is secular and the other religious. We must retrain ourselves to think that each represents a divine truth. It is only our inability to see the hidden unity that is problematic.
Power without love becomes brutal; love without power is insipid and weak.
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