The love of contradiction: The power of paradox

Last week I spent some time in London. It was wonderful to get away and visit a few sights and sounds. It was a time of contrast, you might even say contradiction. On the Tuesday Sue and I set off to the Victoria and Albert Museum of Art and Design, the aim was to see the Frida Kahlo exhibit “Making Herself Up”. We travelled through the hustle and bustle of the city as people went about the business. As we got off the tube we noticed a couple of women who were obviously going to the exhibit, they looked and dressed just like Kahlo. It was a beautiful exhibit using her work and her unique style of dress to tell her moving and remarkable life story. In many ways her whole persona was a work of art, making the most of who she was and her struggles both physical and, emotional, identity and political. A life of contrast and in some ways contradiction. I found it deeply moving. Beautiful actually.

After leaving the exhibition we spent some time enjoying some of the beautiful gardens in and around the V and A, particularly Kensington Gardens. Sue taught me about the different flowers and how well they go together. We also observed the rich variety of people going about their lives. We had a lot of fun just goofing around before heading towards Highbury to watch Lukas Nelson in concert. Another wonderful night. Lukas is the son of country music legend Willie Nelson and his music was a mixture of so many styles. You could hear an eclectic mix of influence in his music. It made me think of the all the great artists he must have met growing up as the son of Willie Nelson.

It contrasted beautifully with the Kahlo exhibition and yet at the same time complimented it. They were both influenced by their upbringing, Kahlo had a German father and Mexican mother and was influenced by the communist revolution of her time, she rejected her Catholic faith and yet her art and her life were obviously influenced the deep spirituality of her ethnically Mexican roots and of course the physical difficulties she struggled with all her life. Nelson’s joy and abandon in his music was just a beautiful spiritual experience. I particularly loved a new song of his in which he suggested that we turn off the news and stop getting wrapped up in the negative aspects of life and go plant a garden or create a family and bring some love and beauty into the world. A sentiment that rang in my ears over the next few days as I became overly absorbed in the troubles of Brexit and the insane visit of Donald Trump both here and all over Europe. I cannot change the world I cannot stop the pain of life, whether personal or global, but I can do something positive and loving in this world. I can create some love and beauty. Something we can all do.

I learnt once again last week that if I want to know life’s beauty all I have to do is be involved in creating it. By merely creating beauty I know beauty I come a part of life’s beauty.

My word what a week of contrast…and contradiction…

Barry Lopez said in “The Big Questions” by Lama Surya Das

“One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once, life would collapse. There are simply no definitive answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.”

I do love people, even when they irritate me. The thing I love the most is perhaps how contradictory we can all be. People constantly surprise me in loves and dislikes, none can ever be put perfectly in a box. It is the same with life really, it is full of contrast and contradiction.

Now the area where life’s contradictory nature is clearer than anything is in the spiritual aspects of life and living. At the core I have discovered is contrast, contradiction and paradox. Religion and spirituality is not common sense, it is by contrast uncommon sense. You cannot put it in a box and seal it, it is unbound, but then so is life. Our lives, like Frida Kahlo’s, if we are going to truly live spiritually alive ought to be works of art. We are here to create love and beauty, to plant a garden, to make a family, to create Beloved Community.

The world’s religious and spiritual traditions are no stranger to paradox. Taoism is full, or do I mean empty, of them. Here is one example:

Fullness and emptiness give birth to each other.
Difficult and easy complete each other.
Long and short shape each other.
Tones and voice harmonize with each other.
Front and back follow each other.
Therefore wherever the sage is, he dwells among affairs by not doing.
He teaches without words.
The ten-thousand things arise, but he doesn’t impel them.
He gives birth, but he doesn’t possess.
He acts, but he doesn’t rely on what he has done.
He has successes, but he doesn’t claim credit.
So by not claiming credit, he is never empty.

The teachings of Jesus are firmly grounded in paradox. He said “the first shall be last”; “empty yourself and be filled”; “lose yourself and be found” The epistle Paul wrote “As dying, and, behold, we live”; he said of his fellow Christians “As sorrowful, yet always rejoicing, as poor, yet making many rich, as having nothing, and yet possessing all things.”; and he said of himself “When I am weak, then I am strong”

Aristotle saw this as absolute twaddle of course. He is the great grandfather of scientific methodology, of all who pride themselves on their critical faculties and all who claim rationality. He talked of the law of the excluded middle. Put simply something cannot be both hot and cold at the same time. How can anyone argue with such logic? We cannot be rich if we are poor; we cannot be first if we are last; we cannot experience joy if our lives are full of sorrow.

Is he correct? Well he sounds like he is making sense.

Yet the religious sages seem to disagree. They speak an uncommon sense it seems.

How on earth can we receive when we are giving? It does not seem to make sense, when we think logically. Life though is not pure logic, we are more than the sum of our parts. Just look at a garden. It is made up of many and varied flowers, each uniquely beautiful but who come alive as they blend together, they are far more than the sum of their parts. It is the same with our lives that are made up moments but that are made beautiful by the meaning that emerges from these moments, good and bad and oh so beautiful.

Of course a paradox does not make sense in a purely logical sense, it is in its essence uncommon sense, but to expect it to do so is to fail to understand its purpose. It is the tool that broadens the framework in which we see reality. It stretches the boundaries of truth. Through our imaginations we push truth past its seeming limits. Without imagination, without foresight we would probably never have come down from the trees, or out of the caves. A paradox cannot be solved by conventional truths, it requires unconventional truths. It stretches common sense to the point where it becomes uncommon sense and thus moves our experiences of life forward. It challenges the status quo and the understanding of any given time. This is of course what the great religious sages did, they brought new understanding to their time and place.

Here’s a little wisdom on the paradoxical nature of spiritual living by the Sufi mystic Kabir. It is taken from “Songs of Kabir: A Fifteenth Century Sufi Literary Classic” by Rabindranath Tagore

"I am neither pious nor ungodly,
I live neither by law nor by sense,
I am neither a speaker nor hearer,
I am neither a servant nor master,
I am neither bond nor free,
I am neither detached nor attached.
I am far from none: I am near to none.
I shall go neither to hell nor to heaven.
I do all works; yet I am apart from all works.
Few comprehend my meaning: he who
can comprehend it, he sits unmoved.
Kabir seeks neither to establish nor to destroy.”

Our lives are riddled with paradoxes. How often have we heard the following statements? “I am surrounded by people and yet I am lonely” “My life is so full of choices, that I can’t make a decision about anything” or on the more optimistic end of the scale “I am skint and yet I am happy” or “I have so much, because I have so little”

The wisdom of paradox challenges our desire for certainty and perfection. The only thing that I know for certain is that my body will not last forever. We humans though do not like to believe this we like to think that we are all powerful and all knowable. We are mortal we are not God. The book “The Spirituality of Imperfection” by Ernest Kurtz & Katherine Ketcham, which was based around the authors work with alcoholics recognises that our attempts to achieve perfection have been our most tragic mistake. It highlights that one of the central theme of the spiritual traditions is the insistence that honesty, particularly honesty with self about self, is an essential requirement for any religious quest; that the greatest and most insidious dishonesty is to deny or refuse to accept our mixed human nature. We are not saints, nor are we sinners. We possess qualities of great goodness as well as the capacity to do great evil within us. We are beautiful balls of contradiction, made up of all kinds of thoughts and emotions and yet somehow far more than the sum of our beautiful parts.

So what I am trying to say is that we need to learn to not only accept but glory in life’s messiness. Let’s not get bogged down in worries and concerns, well not too much. I’m not saying we merely passive accept things, no not at all. Let us instead make something beautiful from life’s contradictions and paradoxes, let’s become artists of our lives. Let’s form something beautiful from our hearts, grow a garden, a family or a community, let’s live by this beautiful and sadly a little too uncommon sense.