Dear Friends,
Years ago, I read a book by Parker Palmer entitled, The Promise of Paradox. The book offered spiritual
reflections on ministry and the challenges of living as a disciple of Jesus. Mr. Palmer had gotten the ideas for the
book from Fr. Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk. The idea of paradox was central to Merton’s spiritual and
intellectual life. Merton reflected deeply on the apparent contradictions in our lives. He taught how important it
is to look at life not through the lens of either-or but through the paradoxical lens of both-and. As the Nobel
Prize winning physicist, Neil Bohr, said, “The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the
opposite of a profound truth may be another profound truth.”
Living with two profound truths that may contradict each other means that we are on the path to
maturity. Living with deep sorrow and darkness does not mean that the light of Christ is not with you. It is
possible to be strong disciple of Jesus and still say that our lives are filled with both shadow and light. We are
both sinners and saved. We strive to follow Jesus with the greatest of intentions and every day we fail and turn
away from God.
Paradoxical thinking can keep us from having a version of Christianity that is overly strict and limiting.
Thomas Merton once wrote, “The Cross is the sign of contradiction – destroying the seriousness of the law, of
the empire, of the armies…but the magicians keep turning the cross to their own purposes. Yes, it is for them
too a sign of contradiction: the awful blasphemy of the religious magician who makes the cross contradict
mercy! This is of course the ultimate temptation of Christianity! To say that Christ has locked the doors, has
given the one answer, settled everything and departed, leaving all life enclosed in the frightful consistency of a
system outside of which there is seriousness and damnation, inside of which there is the intolerable flippancy of
the saved – while nowhere is there any place left for the mystery of the freedom of divine mercy which alone is
truly serious and worthy of being taken seriously.”
In another of Merton’s meditations he writes about the “hidden wholeness” that the spiritual eye can
discern beneath the broken surface of things, “There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed
light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. This mysterious unity and integrity is wisdom, the mother of
all.” If we can see things with this spiritual eye then it may be possible to see that some defeats are actually
victories and some victories may be a spiritual defeat. We need to see what God is doing in the midst of the
messiness of our lives. In this paradoxical world of ours, Merton taught, “do not depend on the hope of results…
you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not
perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate
not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.”
In the midst of the cold darkness of winter, it is good to recall these profound truths of our lives. When
all looks bleak, God may be acting most deeply on your soul. When nothing seems to be happening because it is
simply too cold to do anything, God is still present and is making progress with you. Do not look for worldly
success, but look for the inner truth that may lie in a profound paradox. The cross appears to be a defeat, but it is
victory. Death seems to be the end, but it is a beginning. When all seems to be lost, all is found.
Peace,
Fr. Damian