Paradox
by Kenneth Barnes
Readings.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by a way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And what you are is where you are not.
* * * *
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning,
The end is where we start from
* * * *
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time
T.S. Eliot Four Quartets
What is a paradox? In a school audience of wide age range there will be certainly many who do not know. Animal, vegetable or mineral - or abstract? Most younger boys and girls will plump for animal, and it is in fact abstract. A paradox is a statement in which truth seems to be turned upside down or to run counter to common sense, or a statement in which there seems to be a contradiction.
There are some people who think that truth can be arrived at only by an unimaginative process of logical reasoning. They think that everything is either black or white or intermediate shades of grey. They are dumbfounded if anyone tells them that black is white. So perhaps are you. Yet many of the most important truths that have ever been stated have been put in that form. Sometimes it is the only way in which they can be put, and sometimes, and sometimes they are put in this startling and contradictory form in order to shock people out of their habitual ways of thinking. Most of the things that people believe and say from day to day are what they call common sense, but many paradoxes are the opposite to what “common sense” accepts as true.
Common sense tells us that big things are big and small things are small. But listen to William Blake:-
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of you hand
And eternity in an hour.
There are four paradoxes here all expressing the way a sensitive vision can find an infinitely great experience in the smallest of things.
Now Tennyson:-
Flower in the crannied wall
I pluck you out of the crannies
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand.
Little flower - but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all
I should know what God and man is.
As we go about from day to day we all too easily take it for granted that the bigger a thing is the more important it is, the more truth or significance it holds - a bigger car, a bigger ship, a bigger plane. Even if we care about flowers we are often apt to pass by an exquisite little wild flower among the grass in our hurry to admire a flamboyant gladiolus or a tall spike of delphinium. But Tennyson feels that if he could understand the secret of life and beauty of a tiny plant living precariously in a rock crevice he could reach the heart of all knowledge. The infinitely great is fully expressed in the infinitely small.
The scientist does not disagree with the poet, for he, opening the tiny door of the atom, has found himself in a world of infinite interest and great complexity, with an order and beauty about it that cannot fail to impress a sensitive mind. If we are to trace our own history back to the day nine months before we were born when we were conceived, we shall find another instance of the great being wrapped up in the small. The egg and the sperm cell - hard enough to see even under a microscope - when they fused together had in them all that determined the colour and [texture] of our hair, the shape of our nose and our big toe, and much of what has gone to make our temperament and personality.
Most great moral leaders have used paradox because they have found it necessary to show people that what is really good is very often the opposite of what is generally thought to be good. So their audiences found that many of the things they said sounded to be the opposite of common sense. Jesus was a master of paradox.
Blessed are the poor…..the people who don’t depend on having property and power. The whole Kingdom of Heaven shall be theirs.
Blessed are the meek…..those who have humility, who do not make great claims for themselves, who do not grasp greedily at the world. They will have the whole world given to them.
You have enemies? Enemies almost by definition, are people whom you hate. But I say to you, love your enemies.
If any man desire to be first, their name shall be last of all, and servant of all.
Whosever will save his life shall lose it, but whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall save it.
This last paradox is true not only in its immediate sense - of those who are prepared to lose their lives in the same cause as that for which Jesus died. It applies also to all our careful planning for security. If we set out to make our lives safe and secure, if we avoid everything that might endanger our bodies or menace our peace of mind, if we start worrying when we are young about the pension we hope to retire on when we reach 60, then certainly the life in us will dry up and there will not be much left at 60 to enjoy the remaining years.
Perhaps the most paradoxical experiences are those of freedom and love. We have all no doubt heard that hymn in which there is the line:
Make me a captive Lord, and then I shall be free.
How can this be? That we should become free by entering into captivity? This is one of the deepest paradoxes of all; and it is universally true; it applies to every real freedom. The same thought is expressed in the collect:-
Oh God, who art the author of peace and the lover of concord,
in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life, whose service
Is perfect freedom…
I wonder whether you understand this challenging paradox, this idea that to know what freedom is you must give yourself to a sort of bondage. We can consider it at a more elementary level perhaps and consider what we think it would be like to be perfectly free. You might think this would mean being able to do must (sic) as you like, when you like. In a sense this is true of freedom at its greatest, but the trouble is that we find in ourselves so many conflicting desires. Think of a boy doing just as he likes. Someone has given him an aero-modelling kit. He gets it out and has a glance at the instructions. But these are rather long and detailed. Surely there is no need to read right through. So he sets to work; but soon he is in trouble. The dope gets all over his fingers, and he gives himself a nasty cut with the razor blade he is using. Oh bother it, what is the use a making a silly aeroplane, lets try reading. So he gets out a book. But there are several words he can’t understand There is no one near to ask and the dictionary’s upstairs. He puts the book down, and follows his next impulse, to drift out into the field where some boys are playing cricket. They offer him the bat. But when he swipes at the ball it always seems to be somewhere else - in fact on its way to the middle stump. He gives it up and drifts back home. He would like an ice-cream and perhaps the surest way of getting one would be to steal the money out of his mother’s purse. So he goes through the day with taking a swipe at his little sister and being sent to bed in disgrace.
To a boy in this condition doing just what he likes may be just unbearable. Those of you who make aeroplanes, read books, or play cricket, and do these well, will know that you had to accept a discipline. You had to be extremely accurate with your knife, you had to find the meanings of words or you had to go through a difficult and often discouraging struggle at the nets to discover how to use your bat for a particular sort of ball. Those of you who do good work in the workshops know that you had to become in a sense the slave of a very exacting discipline in order to be free to do a lovely and satisfying piace (sic) of work.
This school is nearly thirteen years old. There have been more often recently times when I could sit back and look at the school and the boys and girls in it and see that it is good. This feeling of having achieved something good is, in the most genuine sense, a feeling of freedom! But when I look back upon the struggles of the past I realise what a bondage we had imposed upon ourselves when we set out to build up a school under such difficult conditions and with so little resources.
But I must be careful not to over-emphasise this idea of a captivity or bondage. The disciplines we have to go through can themselves be enjoyable long before the end is achieved, if we accept them in the right spirit. In fact they hardly seem like disciplines then. This discipline and service that Jesus demanded of men must have seemed to many the most severe of all possible demands, and it cost him intense suffering and death. Yet he could say in another paradox: My yoke is easy and my burden is light.
What I have said of freedom is also true of love. Love is, in a sense, a form of freedom. We cannot have freedom by snatching at it; just so, if we grasp at love it eludes us. We long for love more than anything, but if we reach out to take it our hands come back empty. If you imagine yourself to be a fine character - worthy of another person’s love, you will in fact become unlovable, but if you have enough humility to think yourself unworthy, then you will become worthy of love. We cannot help wanting love but it may be that it will come to us unexpectedly when we are not grasping for it.
William Blake was of all poets, the most addicted to the use of paradox. Here is one of his:
He who binds to himself a joy,
Doth the winged life destroy.
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.
This is a criticism of those who are possessive. If you are possessive about the one whom you love, and you try to hold him lest should escape, again you will find your hands empty. You will have driven him away and joy will be dead. Love flourishes and deepens its roots only when it is free.
Further, within the complete experience of love itself there are curious paradoxes. People who love each other long and deeply find that they grow together. They become so much one that they hardly know where the one leaves off and the other begins. Yet each becomes more clear and distinct. In romantic love, which may be but is often not, the prelude to real love, the loved one is surrounded by a mist, and as love deepens that mist dissolves leaving the personality clear both in its virtues and its faults. This love makes two people more one and more other at the same time.
Another paradox is true of love - that it makes people both stronger and more vulnerable. People who love each other become more sensitive. A man who has a family has more to lose than one who has not. He has more dangers to meet, and is more easily wounded. Yet those who love are stronger, better able to bear pain and wounds. If they have more to lose they also have more to give life significance and meaning.
I have perhaps said enough to show that the greatest things in life are paradoxical. The truth about them cannot be stated in the cold words of reason, but only in the warm, living words of poetry and paradox. The greatest truths are paradoxical because they are the reverse of nearly everything that casual thought takes for granted. Big things are not greater than little things. Those who struggle to become important become in the end very unimportant. Those who seek freedom only for themselves become slaves. Those who try to grasp and hold love find it dead in their arms.
In the deepest things of life we must not be afraid of apparent contradications (sic). Most of us have reacted against the old-fashioned idea of a God up and away beyond us. We have turned our attention to God within us, the God-in-man, God immanent. I can make myself understood to nearly everyone when I talk of the God-within. There are very few who would not admit that somewhere within them there is a sensitive spot - or a still small voice - that gives them a knowledge of what is good and what is evil. Even if they do not often give that inner voice their attention, they know it is there. Even if they do not call it the voice of God, they know it exists and that if we were without it the human race would be poverty stricken indeed. But is God-within enough? If the God that I listen to does not extend beyond me, if the God that you listen to does not extend beyond you, how can they be the same God? Why should your inner voice lead you in the same direction as mine leads me? Why shouldn’t your evil be my good and my evil be your good? But we know this is nonsense. If the recognition of God or an inner voice is to be of any value at all it must unite us, help us - after however much searching and striving - to find truths that enable us to live in harmony and enjoy life together. Moreover if the God-within is no greater than I am, why should I ever become any better than I am by giving him my attention, why should I ever grow up and become a mature man? So, inevitably, the thought of a God-within becomes the thought of a God-beyond. We cannot have God immanent without God transcendent. The more we attend to the voice of the God within us and the more we reach down into the depths of our own personality, the more we find ourselves taken out and beyond, to recognise how it is God who gives sense and majesty to the universe.
Document referende; PP KCB 3/7/2 document 10
Document referende