Thank you choir.

“You are in us and we are in you. …
You are the tree…the seed…the cell… (each and all of those things)
you are the limit and the limitless.”

The text of the choir’s anthem is from the Indian poet Kabir, who lived in a religious world inhabited by the Hindu, the Muslim and the Sikh spirituality. He knew something about religious pluralism…and about discovering what is true…in the midst of contrary teachings.

You are in us and we are in you…

One the one hand, you…whoever you are…are in us…but on the other hand, we are in you…

Our rationale minds struggle with those two seemingly contradictory ideas…how do they fit together?…can they both be true? Can truth be both…and?

Kabir speaks of knowledge that calls us out of a linear space and into the world of paradox where reason alone cannot go.

Reason is central to our faith…reason in religion was one of the original claims the early Unitarians made as they rejected the miracle stories in the Bible.

And, as life long learners… even if we don’t have a slew of advanced degrees that is what we are…as life long learners we have cultivated our rational minds We can even operate as if we could think our way into heaven…if we thought there was a heaven.

If we could just find the right argument, present the right evidence…have that reasoned conversation… we could end racism. Replace patriarchy. Reverse climate change. Right?

Well, if your experience is at all like mine, rational argument is rarely what opens the possibility of real change. Sometimes. But not often.

Our rationale minds struggle…looking for simple clarity and order… but many of us, most perhaps, have at least some intimation…some hint…of truth that is only complete when contradictions are held, when normal expectations are upended…when new understanding can break through…into our lives.

You must give…in order to receive.

You must conquer desire…to get what you want.

You must surrender…to discover the strength within.

You have to lose yourself…in order to find yourself.

Welcome to the world of paradox, our spiritual theme this month.

Paradox. The word comes to us from Greek and originally meant simply “contrary opinion,” a different point of view. But the concept has come to represent those truths that refuse to be contained in a single point of view, seen through a single lens, heard from a single voice…truths complex and contradictory enough that they must be held in tension…

Truths contrary enough to shock us into new ways of seeing and…so the mystics say…into new ways of being. We’ll get back to those transformations that can come in a few minutes.

I want to stay with the contradictions first.

Paradox.

Take Eshu…the trickster…wearing that hat…black on one side…red on the other…seeming to be both heading into town and out of town…at the same time.

Its as if he intended for the two friends to disagree, to fight even…because they saw different “sides” of Eshu…pointing in different directions.

There are many versions of this Yoruba story in the African diaspora. In most, the friends not only argue but they come to blows. Old hurts, never completely forgiven, come to the fore.

Here is one version:

“Eshu’s new hat is as black as the night. You must not have been paying attention.

I know what I saw. The hat was red. The sun must have been in your eyes.

Are you calling me a liar?

Are you calling me a fool?

Ten years ago, you paid me less for my goats than we agreed. Maybe you are a liar.

If you expected full price for those sickly litle runts, maybe you are a fool.”

Punches started to fly and soon the two friends were wrestling on the roadway. They kept it up until Eshu reappeared and interupted them by tipping his hat so that they could see the red on one side and the black on the other.

The friends saw that both of them had been right and were able to embrace once again.”

The trickster. It is as if he intended to get the friends fighting. As if he found joy in it.

But then, the friends did finally forgive one another for that incident about the goats so long ago, that hurt they had both been harboring for so long.

There are tricksters in many cultures…Coyote is the figure among the native nations of the America southwest. The Raven here in the Northwest.

Loki in Scandanavia. Hanuman, the monkey god, in South Asia.

There are tricksters in almost every…I was going to say every pre-Christian culture…but even Yahweh could act like a trickster.

What else would you call a God who created a perfect garden for his first children but included a snake to tempt them? He was a trickster too.

The snake…btw…is another image of the trickster.

The stories from the various cultures are all somewhat different but the tricksters share some important traits. They live in the world of paradox and what they do, what they bring is disruption…that burst of the unexpected…they violate the norm and offer that contrary message that shakes things up.

They are disrupters.

They often seem to disrupt things…almost for the fun of it. But sometimes…sometimes… that disruption allows past hurts to be healed and new dreams to be deamed.

Tricksters provide a kind of subversive creativity…that invites renewal but also calls for the undoing of the normal, the usual, the accepted.

Out in the world these days there are plenty of examples of contradiction, examples of what on the surface may appear as paradox.

I think of the “religious liberty laws” that try to turn the concept of religious freedom…which we value…into a weapon to justify discrimination. Christian faith, so their argument goes, condemns queer folks…so, they say, we are not going to sell same sex couples wedding cakes…even though our business is to sell wedding cakes and we don’t question other couples about their Christian values. How are they doing with that “love thy neighbor” command, for example? I’m just sayin’.

The separation of church and state was intended to prevent discrimination based on religious belief. It came from the pen of UnitarianThomas Jefferson. As religious liberals we know something about this.

But we know as well that slave owning Jefferson also penned those famous words: “All men are created equal, that they are endowed by the creator…

Writing those words while owning slaves…that’s paradox. Jefferson simply failed to act on the opening for transformation that paradox provided. It was a moral failure. That is another characteristic of paradox…there is no guarantee that we will learn from it…and accept the invitation to change.

The religious liberty laws are most certainly contradictions, but they do not reflect the essence of paradox. They are simply mean spirited and crass uses of treasured pieces of language to justify exclusion. They operate to take us back…and to hold us back… rather than opening us and deepening us on the path toward Beloved Community.

I could give you the same kind of analysis of the current debate about socialism…and we need to be prepared to hear this one until the next national election. The contradiction is that the givernment services that are most universally applauded…social security and medicare…are socialist in their essence. These arguments about socialism are contradictions…but paradox is not involved.

Paradox has within it the possibility of transformation, of breaking through…the ability to free us from the limits of old ways and ideas that have ceased to serve.

Tricksters provide a kind of subversive creativity…that invites renewal but also the undoing of the normal, the usual, the accepted.

Sometimes, things have to be broken for us to be healed.

Rev.David Blanchard tells a story of a friend who had been sharing an apartment with a roommate for several years. The roommate had many exquisite belongings: oriental rugs, imported procelain,beautiful glassware… most of which had been acquired when the roommate was sharing his life with a former lover who eventually left him. In a way, the apartment had become a memorial to that failed relationship.

One night, David’s friend bought beautiful large lillies on the way home from work and, once home, looked around for something to put them in. He spied the perfect vase, a tell, elegant vase that had been one of the last gifts of his roommate’s former lover. He carefully arranged the lillies in the vase, put them on the mantle and went about making dinner.

Do you know that with warmth, lillies open? In the house, more and more of the lillies opened…shifting the weight in the vase. The friend was in the kitchen when he heard the vase hit the stone hearth below the mantle.

When the roommate got home, was told the story and received the abject apology, there were no fireworks, no tears. Just a quiet, calm acceptance of what had happened—a kind of forgiveness, a letting go. The next day, the roommate called an antique dealer and sold most of the furniture he had preserved from that broken past, gave away other items to friends who had admired them.

And thanked the friend for choosing that particular vase to hold the lillies.

Blanchard writes: “The disaster was really a blessing. From an unwanted event came an invitation to [liberation]. …It doesn’t always happen this way, but it is possible for disappointment to open doors we have been afraid to enter.”

Both the paradox and the hope is that we can…sometimes…be broken open and discover new possibilities, new freedom…that new life is possible.

Sometimes, we need to be broken to be healed.

I am not arguing that loss isalways necessary to move forward. Nor that suffering is necessary for salvation.

I am certainly not arguing that reason has no place…far from it. We need the science of climate change to be solid and the alternatives to be rigorously…rationally…evaluated…

But we know that reason alone has not provided the opening for transformation that we need.

We need the truth of racism and the genocide on which this nation was founded to be known, but more and more deeply we are coming to understand that that history alone is not sufficient to break through to hope. The truth and reasoned arguments are necessary but they are not sufficient.

Necessary but not sufficient. Another paradox perhaps.

Rev. Tom Owen-Towle writes:

“Riding paradoxes is apparently our peculiar niche as liberal religionists. Who really wants existence tidily wrapped up? Who covets convictions set in stone? (Who covets convictions set in stone?)…Plenty of people to be sure, but not Unitarian Universalists.

We seem to pitch our tents between mysticism and humanism, theism and natiuralism, belief and doubt, devotion and skepticism. We are a reasonable religion with mystical sensibilities.”

A reasonable religion with mystical sensibilities.

Or as one ministerial colleague put it: “The humanist and the theist live in me, each sometimes puzzled by the presence of the other, but willing to keep talking…”

What I believe is that we need ways to break through…to break through the logjam in our politics and the logjam in our own hearts. We may rail against a wall on our southern border, but there are too many walls within us that are holding us back as well.

Paradox riders? Is Tom Owen-Towle right? Is that what we need to be?

Perhaps.

Or at least paradox welcomers.

We need to love the world as the gift it is, but also love the world as we know it could become.

We need to love ourselves just as we are, but also love the ways we may yet discover to move in the world toward justice, equity and compassion.

We need to stretch our hearts to hold both the what is and the what could be.

Our hope and our love are no less real because they have not been fully realized.

We should be at least paradox welcomers, it seems to me.

When we say revelation is not sealed, that is what we mean…that we are willing to live in gratitude for the wisdom of our living tradition, in celebration of the past movements toward justice and equity that benefit us today…while also yearning to move with clarity and purpose toward a Beloved Community that remains a work in process…

Open to even the hard learnings…those hard learnings that point the way toward hope.

May we ride well. May that be so.

Prayer

Will you pray with me now?

Spirit of Life and of Love. Great mystery at the heart of things. Dear God.

Be with us on these days when spring strives to break open our winter hearts and allow new life to emerge.

Be with us on these days when new life pushes up even within us

Even as the din of divisiveness deepens around us,

Be with us to welcome new voices sounding chords of hope.

Be with us today as we bend our minds and our hearts toward justice.

Be with us as we move through the paradox of life…the sorrow and the joy…the loss and the love…the disappointment and the hope…

We are in you and you are in us.

Be with us, as… together… we live in hope.

So may it be. Amen. Amin. Ashe.

Topics: Paradox