Holy Paradox


I did indeed spend much of yesterday “dreaming awake” and “keeping watch asleep” realizing all too well that we “live while dying”. These phrases from Threatened with Resurrection which was in yesterday’s post helped me locate myself in another space and time, to get outside my ego self and touch or even spend a moment with my true self. 
One of the interesting things which happened was a crystalization of some of the paradoxes which seem to float through the poem, and through Scripture, and through life. It began with the paradox of threaten and resurrection.
In this time of pandemic when fear and anxiety seem to try to rule each thought, each hour and each day, there is an antidote or paradox partner close by it seems.
So it caused me to begin to simply list a few: love and fear, kindness and wound, gentleness and vulnerability. Even the very word compassion is a combination of gathered community and wild passion. Jesus taught us to be ok with ambiguity and paradox. They cause us to look more closely and to learn. In fact his teachings of first as last and death into life inspire Esquivel’s  poem not to mention the ways of living into this strange time. To be a Christian and to follow Jesus often means to shake the kaleidoscope when it becomes settled and to gaze again at a new configuration. Patience has moved but is still bright blue; Devotion has shifted but is constantly glowing orange. 
Now many think my love of words and how they are used, a bit weird (love and weird) and I come no where close to being as precise with language as I might like. But it occurs to me that language itself is being transformed, or reformed, in this era of COVID19 when uncertainty and risk make even everyday words like work and food and sleep evasive. And CHURCH! well it is also called to dream awake and get outside its walls to the places of needed resurrection.
In this “marathon of Hope”, in this Easter season of awakenings and rebirth, may we love the paradoxes in such a way as to hold them, massage the truth within them and consecrate them with the help of the Holy Spirit. Holy living and Holy dying and Holy fear and Holy exasperation and Holy memory and Holy rest, just to name a few....
In the end what we have in the King and I sense is a puzzlement but a living and even life-giving one. What we have is holy oxymoron!

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