Discovering the paradox: The Transforming nature of the Supernatural

Canon Beaumont Stevenson

St. Edward's Church, Cambridge 11 February 2007

At the very heart of our Christian faith is paradox. What is paradox? A paradox is a point of unity contained within an apparent contradiction-where both sides are simultaneously true in different ways. Paradox is the hallmark of Jesus' Gospel and marks the presence of the transforming nature of the spiritual and supernatural It is the pattern of the way spirituality works.

We know we are on the supernatural level when contradiction becomes two sides of the same truth. The way it works is very much the image of a rock in a steam. If the rock blocks the stream, you can chip away at it, usually without success. However if you deepen the stream (spiritually) the rock is still there, but it does not become an obstacle because you can sail over it easily because you have increased the depth of the channel.

When one ventures out of the logical into the spiritual dimension, we find that opposites are in fact identical. By way of example, Robin Skynner, who founded the Institute of Family Therapy, maintained that paradoxically people seek divorce for exactly the same reason they got married in the first place.

The partner does not change; he or she keeps the same quality. What changes is that in the first stage of the relationship the partner idealises the quality. Then later, because of familiarity, then resents that same quality as "typical" of what I have to endure.

As an example, Think of the person YOU love the most. Think of the particular quality you most APPRECIATE about them. Now keeping that same quality, reflect: "The thing I most RESENT about the person closest to me is ." (And substitute the same word you put in for appreciate.) Does it fit?

If she marries him because he is stable and reliable then later, because of familiarity, she will want to divorce the boring old son, because he never does anything different. If he marries her because she is vivacious and interest, always doing something different, then later he will want to divorce the gadfly because she is never home more than two nights in a row! Therefore in pre-marital interviews, I try to vaccinate against divorce, by asking the couple to work out ahead of time, how they will handle the other when the feeling about their favourite quality changes from positive to negative.

The same is true in monasteries. How perfect it all sounds before you enter that the same people will be there for you for the rest of your life and will ever let you down by deserting you. How horrible in practice that the person sitting next to you in offices, Eucharist, and at the dinner table has that irritating habit of coughing up phlegm just when you are feeling highly spiritual or about to eat your dessert. You know you will only have to endure it until one of you dies! A spiritual visitor to a monastery complimented them on their great spirituality.

"How do you know we are spiritual?" asked one of the monks.
"Because no one has killed anyone yet," came the reply.

Psychological research has also shown that our secret fantasy life is arranged around re-writing what we in fact most fear. Essentially what we most fear is what we also most desire. Now there is a paradox!

For instance, if the fear is "Someone might kidnap me and take me away from those I love, and I'll never see them again." We probably might re-write that as a fantasy such as: "I find life so boring; I wish some knight in shining armour would come along and take me away from all this!" The same thing. Fear and desire live together.

Sometimes it is possible to discover what one desires by what they fear the most. We may enjoy acting, or playing football, and yet just before we go on stage or onto the field we feel the most nervous and fearful, and think of calling in sick. The same is true about weddings. The best man and maid of honour are there to help us overcome the butterflies and carry out what we desire, otherwise everyone might be tempted to head for the hills on the morning of the wedding.

The church at the moment is plagued, as it perhaps always has been, with controversy. The controversy is using up energy to try to avoid seeing that that very thing we fear, is exactly that which we may desire. The pattern of scripture, which Jesus gives us, actually gives us a clue as to how to transcend these contradictions in order to see the unifying paradox.

Jesus does this by presenting BOTH sides of a paradox. If someone says, "Jesus always says this" we know that is a half-truth. If we look in scripture for some words of Jesus, which endorse what we feel is true, then it is important to keep looking for the part, which also seems to contradict what we desire, because that will certainly be there as well.

The best metaphor to explain this principle is the method by which the pilot of an airplane lads us safely, when we fly. Is it not interesting, how the pilot can come in and put the plane down just at the beginning of the runway and not halfway down, or just before the end. How does he/she manage to do this? They use what is known as VASI lights.

VASI lights are located on both sides of the beginning of every runway. The pilot needs to come down at just the fight angle, (3 degrees) in order to land just at the beginning of the runway. The lights on both sides of the end of the runway are angled with shutters. If the approaching pilot sees two red lights on top of each other, he is too low, and will land short of the runway. If he sees two white ones, he is too high and will either overshoot the runway or land too far down the runway to be able to stop safely before the runway stops. He has to come in at such an angle as to see a white light above a red light: then he is on course. Sometimes it is a leisurely glide down, sometimes not. As a passenger, I once was watching the end of the runway as a pilot and co-pilot were trying to land in a brief clearing between two violent storms. Watching the VASI lights they went between two reds to two whites every few seconds. The wind then blew up one wing, and then it was two whites on one side and two reds on the other. The pilots were struggling; I was praying like mad. Finally seconds before we landed I saw white over red just as we touched down.

The skill of course is for the pilot to keep both lights simultaneously in view. Jesus gives us both sets of lights by presenting truths as paradox.

He says: Do you want to save your life? - Then be prepared to lose it.
Do you wish to be rich? - Then give away all your possessions.

For instance, the Church has long endorsed the importance of the family in the Christian way of life.

The family is important; however, it can become idolatry - when it is believed that family takes precedence over everything else at all times and in all places. In idolatry, what is a useful part of the whole performs a coup and like cancer, takes over everything else. We should honour the family, yet not worship it. As an example, Jesus as well as supporting the family, gives anti-family traditions to indicate that family life may also have some negative sides, which need to be taken into consideration.

He says: "For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and ones foes will be members of one's own household. Whoever love father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me." (Matthew 10:35-37)

The Beatitudes are where Jesus literally puts the opposites right next to each other.

"Blessed are the poor in Spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven."

To see the truth of Christianity we have to see both the red and the white lights simultaneously. If we paint anything in scripture as TWO RED LIGHTS and as all wrong, we will know that we are wrong. The best way to see what we actually DESIRE is to observe what we allow ourselves to do in groups, which we would find difficult to do by ourselves or in pairs. Groups are by definition, permission-giving to individuals. "Everyone does it" somehow is always a real permission-granter.

Remember dancing classes? They are often taught when we are young and shy. We would like to approach the one we love, but are afraid to do so. We are too shy to do what we desire. Dancing classes provide the answer. As everyone has to do it, all the boys on one side go across together and find a partner with all the girls on the other side. What we fear to do individually, we can do in a permission-giving group.

I had an extraordinary experience in seeing permission-giving happening in a group, which quite took me by surprise. The parents of one of my godchildren invited me to go to his school to see him play in a rugby match. I said I would be delighted to go, because as an American, I had never seen a game of rugby in my life before, and would like to see how it was played. I knew about soccer and American football, but not rugby. As I watched this game for the first time, not only did I get the giggles, but completely "lost it." I was laughing so hard, I was gasping for breath. Embarrassed, my friends asked what I was laughing about, wanting to know what was so funny.

It was sometime before I could regain control. I apologised for embarrassing them, but said, as this was the first rugby game I had seen, I was seeing it with fresh eyes. I asked them to look at the scrum, then happening on the field. I asked them to notice that each person standing in the circle and bending over, had their hand placed under the shorts on top of the bare thighs of the person next to them, some touching the private parts of those next to them. I asked what would happen, if with a television camera you could film any two of them standing together, freeze frame it, and then project it into the cubicle of a public loo and have them discovered in exactly that position by a policeman.

They replied, "Why they would be arrested for indecency, they would be expelled from school, possibly be sent to a psychiatrist for their deviant behaviour." "And if they said their gym instructor required them to do it?" I asked They said, "then he would be arrested, sent to prison and put on the sex offenders register." However by doing it as a group, it makes homo-erotic behaviour acceptable between predominately heterosexual people." My hosts then said: "What you won't see, is that after the game, they will all strip naked, jump in a common bath together, put their arms around each other and sing bawdy songs."

"Right," I replied, "Let's reduce that from the group to two. So if a wife came home and heard a noise from upstairs, and went up to find her husband in the bath, naked with his arm around another man, and he said; "It's alright dear, We are just playing rugby; the communal bath was crowded, so we came here for cleaner water. We'll just sing a few bawdy songs together and be down for tea later. Do you think she would accept that?" "Hardly," came the frosty reply.

So if you practice some aspects of rugby semi-privately, you can go to prison. However, if your name is Johnny Wilkinson, and you do it in front of the TV cameras with millions watching, you will be declared a national hero and be honoured by the Queen with an OBE.

There has also been a lot of controversy about civil partnerships. WE have already performed civil partnerships IN GROUPS for many centuries in monasteries and convents, where people of the same gender "marry" same gender partners collectively. They take vows in front of a Bishop, no less, put on a wedding ring, change their name, cut a wedding cake, leave their family of origin and become a new family of choice to each other. The new family legally inherits all ones possessions at death. This is a collective and highly honoured legal civil partnership, but like rugby, done in a group.

The surprise however is Jesus did it individually. From the cross, Jesus names John, the disciple he loved, his next of kin, rather than James (his brother) who was his legal next of kin. In giving John responsibility for his mother, he disinherits James. According to Jewish Law, James, as his next of kin should have been responsible for the care of his Mother. He pronounced Mary and John as now Mother and Son. According to Jewish tradition, Mary should have been taken to her son James the night of the crucifixion. The Gospel of John seems surprised and said that "from that time on, the disciple took her into his home."

Perhaps Jesus did this to repay the debt of honour, which his ancestor David had toward Jonathan. Jonathan gave to David his own right to be the next King of Israel because of his love for him, which exceeded that of women. Jesus repays the House of David's debt by doing the same to John, the disciple he loved. The Church has never seen this naming by Jesus of someone he loved as his next of kin on an individual basis as a threat to the family in scripture.

What we do in groups often shows what we desire to do as individuals; if it did not, we would not participate in it.

Finally, discovering the points of paradox within an argument is a particularly good way of resolving disputes on a spiritual level, because it bypasses and transforms the logical level into something more encompassing.

For instance in a parish frequently there are many heated disputes. By discovering the point of paradox, one might say, "You would not be fighting if both sides did not love the Church so much. What is it that you each love about the church and would like to ring-fence, so that it is not lost? It may not be the same thing, which you are arguing about." When both sides identify that unifying point, often it is a very moving experience as they recognise the common bond of unity behind their disagreement.

If we as the Anglican Communion see any issue as TWO RED LIGHTS or TWO WHITE LIGHTS (over-idealised family verses the supposed sin of same gender love) then we will crash the Communion.

Family life is not heaven on earth, and the physical expression of same gender loving is not only alive and well on the rugby pitch, for all to see, but elsewhere as well in sacramental sexual relationships. We need to find the common point, which both sides love, which is also reflected in scripture.

Both sides are there. Collectively, we need to see that that which we desire for the Church lies hidden within the very thing we fear the most.

There was once a question, which a Zen master asked his disciples: He said how do we know when it is dawn? One answered, when the sun comes up, Another said when you know the time of sunrise."It is when, you can see the face of your brother or sister in whatever person is standing next to you." Was the reply. When paradoxically we can see no stranger, then we shall have seen through the vision of the spiritual dimension.

In a moment of reflection: Think of something you particularly are wrestling with just now.

What is the fear? Now what may be the desire contained within it?

Bringing both together, can we discover with God's grace our very own point of paradox and unity?