Our pastor (Rev. Dr. Chris Page) asked me to write a 500-word column for
the church bulletin on each of the next four Sundays. Here’s the first
(and here’s the second):

Dear EDBC (East Doncaster Baptist Church) friends,

Chris has asked me to write these columns while he’s away (there’s faith
for you!). Today I thought we’d look at the notion of The Promise of
Paradox, provoked by my reading of Parker Palmer’s book by that title.
Palmer, as many of you know, is a Quaker mystic/educator. Usually a
genial/gentle soul who tries to find language to ‘build bridges and not
walls’, this time in his introduction to the 2008 edition writes
caustically about those Christians who send to eternal damnation others
who do not use the same words as they do to describe who God is for
them. Parker writes out of two key ‘realities’ – the ‘paradox’ of living
in community, and his healing from three bouts of severe clinical
depression. His mentor was Thomas Merton, from whom he learned that
‘where there’s truth the Holy Spirit is there’ as the ancient truism
wisely puts it…

When Facebook asked me for my key life-changing quotes I offered two: ‘I
wouldn’t give a fig for simplicity this side of complexity, but would
give my life for simplicity the other side of complexity’ (Oliver
Wendall Holmes); and ‘Pharisees – ancient and modern – preach repentance
before acceptance; with Jesus it was the other way around’ (John
Claypool). Both quotes, if you think about them, are saying the same thing.

A journey into the mystery we call God, begins humbly: ‘My thoughts are
not your thoughts and your ways are not my ways, declares Yahweh. For
the heavens are as high above earth as my ways are above your ways, my
thoughts above your thoughts’ (Isaiah 55:8). Or, with Paul: ‘We know
only imperfectly… When I was a child, I used to talk like a child, and
see things as a child does, and think like a child; but now that I have
become an adult, I have finished with childish ways. Now we see only
reflections in a mirror, mere riddles… Now I can know only imperfectly’
(1 Corinthians 13:11-12).

Christianity, says Kierkegaard, is ‘precisely the paradoxical’
(‘Paradox’ – from the Greek para and doxa, ‘against opinion’). I believe
the opposite of paradox is a volatile mix of prejudice and idolatry: the
worship of my – or my group’s – ideas, even ideas of God. If I know all
the answers I would be God, and ‘playing God’ is the essence of
idolatry. One of my greatest dangers is to relax my vigilance against
the possibility of prejudice in my own life, or to suffer from the
delusion that I can ever be really free from it. We human beings are
more rationalizing than rational. Thomas Merton said somewhere ‘No one
is so wrong as the one who knows all the answers’. Alfred North
Whitehead writes ‘Religions commit suicide when they find their
inspiration in their dogmas.’ ‘If you understand everything, you must be
misinformed’, runs a Japanese proverb. People who are always right are
always wrong.

Think about it!

(If your appetite is whetted, here’s more on these themes –
http://jmm.aaa.net.au/articles/11378.htm and
http://jmm.aaa.net.au/articles/13113.htm )

Shalom!/Salaam!/Pax!

Rowland Croucher

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