Part 11: Participating in the Paradox
It’s so much easier to embrace absolutes than to suffer reality.
— Anne Lemott
Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.
— Charles Péguy
The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.
— Carl Jung
I laugh when I hear that the fish in the water is thirsty. You don’t grasp the fact that what is most alive of all is inside your own house; and so you walk from one holy city to the next with a confused look! Kabir will tell you the truth: go wherever you like, to Calcutta or Tibet; if you can’t find where your soul is hidden, for you the world will never be real!
— Kabir
Within the contemplative and mystical tradition of Christianity, paradox is viewed as sacred.
So much so that whether or not a doctrine has a dimension of paradox to it is an indiction for many saints and mystics within the Christian tradition that it is, in fact, true.
Carl Jung, the famous 20th-century psychologist, shared a lot with the mystics of centuries past in that he also held paradox in high esteem. He wrote:
The paradox is one of our most valued spiritual possessions. Only the paradox comes near to comprehending the fullness of life. [1]
When I think about my journey, I am confronted with (at a minimum) three paradoxes. I feel these paradoxes are important for us to reflect on.
Paradox 1: Whatever is most personal is most universal.
While I hesitated to share my story for a while (indeed, I waited nearly two years), this first paradox is the one that compelled me the most to do so.
Carl Rogers, the esteemed 20th-century humanistic psychologist, once articulated this paradox, saying:
I have almost invariably found that the very feeling which has seemed to me most private, most personal, and hence most incomprehensible by others, has turned out to be an expression for which there is a resonance in many other people. It has led me to believe that what is most personal and unique in each one of us is probably the very element which would, if it were shared or expressed, speak most deeply to others.[2]
In view of this, I have been confronted with the possibility that perhaps Nouwen’s journey (and my own) is, in fact, something much more essentially related to our being human than it ever was related to our being homosexual.
I suspect this to be true because the nature of one’s “inherent permissibility” is a sacred conversation all of us participate in - whether we are conscious of it or not. My (and Henri’s) entry point into that conversation was most notably our sexuality — being queer in homophobic environments — but everyone has their own entry point.
Whether regarding sexuality, gender, race, nationality, bodies and beauty standards, mental health, socioeconomic status, ability, and disability, it seems the world has never been more replete with competing worldviews and ideologies, each with its own dualistic moral criteria for the conditions of human permissibility. All of these, it seems, do more to materialize a frightful universe built upon the scarcity of love and conditional human belonging than anything else.
Within this universe, one’s permission to exist (and belong) is determined by the manner in which one is, rather than the fact that they simply are. If one does not exist in the manner in which religion, society, or culture has deemed “good,” then to be permissible and to belong requires an individual to be estranged from their true human condition, to exist as something other than what they are - a cruel and impossible requirement for anyone to fulfill.
Nevertheless, in the pursuit of psychological and spiritual wholeness, all of us, all human beings, must wrestle with our own inherent permissibility, that is, to discover our unconditional dignity and work to achieve our own self-integration despite the forces of dis-integration around (and within) us.
No matter how we arrive at it, we share the same basic task: integration.
This is THE spiritual work.
The singular spiritual task - “to let ourselves be loved” as Henri coined it.
Henri wrote of this universal integrative task in the last book he published during his life and he referred to it in terms of “Drinking the Cup” of one’s life. He wrote:
Drinking the cup of life is fully appropriating and internalizing our own unique existence, with all its sorrows and joys. It is not easy to do this. For a long time we might not feel capable of accepting our own life; we might keep fighting for a better or at least a different life. Often a deep protest against our "fate" rises in us. We didn't choose our country, our parents, the color of our skin, our sexual orientation. We didn't even choose our character, intelligence, physical appearance, or mannerisms. Sometimes we want to do every possible thing to change the circumstances of our life. We wish we were in another body, lived in another time, or had another mind! A cry can come out of our depths: "Why do I have to be this person? I didn't ask for it, and I don't want it.” But as we gradually come to befriend our own reality, to look with compassion at our own sorrows and joys, and as we are able to discover the unique potential of our way of being in the world - we can move beyond our protest, put the cup of our life to our lips and drink it, slowly, carefully, but fully…. Drinking our cup is not simply adapting ourselves to a bad situation and trying to use it as well as we can. Drinking our cup is a hopeful, courageous, and self-confident way of living. It is standing in the world with head erect, solidly rooted in the knowledge of who we are, facing the reality that surrounds us, and responding to it from our hearts. [3]
It is here, then, that the aim of my writing endeavor finds its ultimate purpose: not to have you think about my life and my journey but to get you to think about your own.
To ask you plainly: Have you drunk the cup of your life?
I invite you to such self-reflection because, to me, there has never been a greater need for people who can live from their hearts and respond to the world around them.
The reality is: we need integrated people in order to create an integrated world.
When I look around, I see that we live in a world with a frightening and dangerous level of alienation and dis-integration. It’s dangerous precisely because where there is alienation, there is always violence (and vice versa).
Evidenced best by the news cycle, which seems to endlessly loop through new stories of war, genocide, injustice, and crime – violence is the easiest thing to rationalize when we are committed to seeing the people we harm (ourselves included) as alien or “other.”
Nothing is clearer to me now on the other side of my journey: to the extent that we somehow believe our inherent permissibility, whether individual or collective, is conditional on our way of being, on our particular human condition - then alienation, estrangement, dis-integration and the violence and suffering they cause will be our individual and our collective fate.
In the midst of this realization, I am confronted with another paradox: In the effort to undertake our shared task of integration, religion can either be the greatest assistance or the greatest hindrance.
Paradox 2: Religion is not neutral - it either helps or hinders our integrative task.
The well-known researcher on prejudice, Dr. Gordon Allport, wrote about this notion in his critically acclaimed book on prejudice. He wrote
The role of religion is paradoxical. It makes prejudice and it unmakes prejudice…. religion tends both to increase and to decrease prejudice, depending entirely upon how the individual conceives religion.[4]
We need not search long or hard for evidence of this paradox in our world.
Just within the timeframe of me writing my story here, a news headline from February 2024, one that is as tiresome as it is familiar, came into my newsfeed. The headline reads: “State Senator Tom Woods calls LGBTQ+ members ‘filth.’”
Citing his “Christian faith” and “Christian morals” as the grounds for his view, he proceeds to alienate the very queer people in his state for whom he legislates — claiming that such “filth” is not welcome in the “Christian state” of Oklahoma.
To quote him exactly, he said:
I represent a constituency that doesn’t want that filth in Oklahoma. We are a religious state, and we are going to fight it to keep that filth out of the state of Oklahoma because we are a Christian state - we are a moral state.[5]
Take a moment to consider the contrast.
Both Tom and Henri unequivocally invoke Christianity and a conception of Christian faith, but notice how they have two radically different outcomes. One leads to integration, the other to dis-integration, and thus, the paradox of religious practice in the pursuit of spiritual wholeness reveals itself: it is not neutral; it either helps or hinders.
The thing is, while I certainly feel compassion for the LGBTQIA+ people within Oklahoma for whom Tom holds legislative power over, I actually feel just as much compassion for Tom himself because, I know from experience, that he suffers under his moralistic monopoly, too.
In my first semester at Biola, I wrote a paper that espoused Tom Wood’s precise viewpoint.
Titled: “The Toll of Tolerance in the Christian worldview,” I wrote a zealous and impassioned paper, a kind of quasi-fundamentalist-manifesto, about the need for Christians to be “intolerant about disputes of truth and morality in the name of love.”
I had convinced myself that such intolerance was the epitome of "love" for my (un-believing) neighbor.
To quote myself, I wrote:
In recent years, the concept of tolerance has been gaining greater prevalence and popularity in many social spheres…. Perhaps one of the greatest examples of such was the Supreme Court ruling that set Obergefell v. Hodges into law, which granted same-sex couples the right to marriage…. In culture, tolerance is perceived to be a virtue, a way of living in harmony with one another however Christians must be careful not to be duped into believing that the popular concept of tolerance is beneficial to society. This is of serious importance to the Christian when considering not only the protection and spiritual growth of the Christ-follower but also the fulfillment of the great commission, which is dependent upon eliminating tolerance and speaking the truth in love.
Yikes, that did not age well.
I may have used more words than Tom (not to mention a lot of poor writing), but I essentially said the same thing as him: intolerance in the name of “Christian morality” is the most loving thing I can offer the world.
The problem my young, zealous self didn't realize was that my moralistic dogma about God did far more to estrange myself and others from God and his love than facilitate an actual transformative encounter with it.
The problem my young misguided self didn’t realize was that the moralistic means I was employing were nullifying the end result of the spiritual transformation I had hoped to achieve and was instead merely propagating spiritual coercion and violence.
The problem was that I was perpetuating the very same harm that was simultaneously inflicting my own wounding: namely estranging me from myself and thereby estranging me from the possiblity of any kind of authentic love and belonging.
This leads me to the third paradox.
Paradox 3: How we relate to others is a direct reflection of how we relate to ourselves (and vice versa).
If you have spent any time in therapy or know anything about attachment theory, then you likely already know this one to be true.
Paulo Coelho expressed it well when he said
“The way we treat others is a reflection of the way we feel about ourselves.”[6]
This is why I know Tom suffers under his moralistic monopoly too.
His lack of compassion for the LGBT people is actually a direct representation of the lack of compassion he has for himself.
His moralistic determination on the presence of LGBT people is merely an expression of his moralistic determination of himself - namely that there are some things within himself (and thereby others) that, if true, are so wholly unacceptable and “filthy” that they are plainly unworthy of love.
Some things that, if true, are so shameful and reprehensible that they do not deign even the smallest amount of understanding or empathy or compassion.
Some things that, if true, merely pose an enduring threat to his capacity to belong rather than an opportunity for solidarity or community.
Thus, the very violence his words perpetuate onto others is violence he has, in fact, done to himself first.
I know this to be true because I once stood in the exact same shoes as him.
No wonder the 4th century Desert Fathers and Mothers once said: "Judging others is a heavy burden,” as it is always just as much a judgment on ourselves as it is the one we aim to judge.
Therefore, I say: Show me who (doesn’t) have a seat at your table, and I’ll show you the parts of yourself you’ve orphaned.
This is to say, “Be careful of what you hate, fear, or avoid,” as Richard Rohr instructs, “it has a message for you.”
So many of us Christians claim to act in the name of “God’s unconditional love,” yet we secretly disown or hide or contort parts of ourselves we are convinced are unlovable.
It’s important that we see this for what is: untenable, inauthentic, and profoundly sinister.
It compromises the very efficacy and integrity of our faith.
How can we welcome others home if we don’t somehow trust in our own belonging?
How can we provide to others that which we refuse to claim for ourselves?
How can we preach unconditional love yet simultaneously disown the parts of ourselves we deem unworthy of love?
Thich Naht Hahn said it well when he wrote:
As long as we reject ourselves and continue to harm our own body and mind, there’s no point in talking about loving and accepting others.[7]
This highlights the absolute necessity of confronting ourselves and our true human conditions — to do our own individual work of integration, to “drink the cup” of our lives — for without a willingness to do so, we undermine our ability to act from a place of love in the world.
Within our own immediate spheres of influence, the biggest threat to the desecration of human dignity is linked with our willingness to confront our shadows, to witness our own wounds, and to integrate our own particularities and pain. Unless we are willing to risk the confrontation with our truest selves and integrate our totality - whether we intend to or not - we will continue to be a danger to ourselves and others as we will be doomed to continue to project our own shadows, repressed fears and wounds, and self-violence onto those around us. As the saying goes, “pain that is not transformed is transmitted.”
Drinking the cup of our life, knowing our truth, integrating our own totality, and “believing our belovedness,” as Henri phrased it, requires the harrowing work of inner excavation and authentic presentation in the world. It requires the vulnerability of claiming the good, the bad, and the ugly of our truest and deepest selves and having the courage to vulnerably make those selves available for love. If you’re Christian, it requires the faith to take God at his word and to trust that we are worthy of belonging and connection and community not despite who we are but because of it. That somehow our wounds, our dents, our differences don’t disqualify us from belonging but are, in fact, our greatest assets for such as those are places where solidarity, connection, and community are not only merely possible but also the most transformative and meaningful.
Such inner work is always the birthplace of compassion and solidarity because in coming to see our own unconditional dignity rooted in a realistic and wholistic self-understanding, we more readily witness the unconditional dignity of everyone we encounter.
Henri wrote:
In the solitude of the heart we can truly listen to the pains of the world because there we can recognize them not as strange and unfamiliar pains, but as pains that are indeed our own. There we can see that what is most universal is most personal and that indeed nothing human is strange to us.[8]
This brings us back to the first paradox.
This is why true spiritual awakening, healing, and personal transformation is never solely about the self; it always contains a universal dimension to uncover. Genuine spiritual transformation transcends the personal, inevitably spilling over into the social realm, enabling us to stand in solidarity with the broader human experience.
In this way, by doing our own “inner work” we create the conditions to collectively confront, interrogate, dismantle, and reimagine systems, ideologies, and worldviews that insist on “othering” particular populations and thereby perpetuate cylces of violence and suffering.
Thus, it could be said, that the true measure of one’s spiritual transformation or faith lies in its social impact: namely its capacity to address and alleviate the suffering of others, freeing them from the oppressive bondage of conditional belonging, just as we ourselves have been freed.
Be not mistaken then - our personal healing and transformation are inseparably linked to the healing and transformation of the world around us. And so, given the nature of these paradoxes then, the degree to which we neglect our own work of personal integration is the degree to which we, therefore, remain complicit in the dis-integrative suffering and violence in the world, both our own and our neighbor’s.
Do we really somehow think we can address the conflicts in our world if we cannot first address the conflicts within ourselves?
Do we really think we can somehow bring peace into the world if we cannot first make peace with our truest and deepest selves?
It seems to me that the world simply cannot afford the violence of our own self-dissociation any longer. For without our personal efforts to integrate, our gospel becomes bad news, our “morality” becomes violent (and thereby immoral), and our “love” becomes hate and violent bigotry, evidenced best by Tom Wood and my younger fundamentalist self.
What Alice Miller, the well-known psychologist and psychoanalyst, wrote in 1979 still rings true today then:
Individuals who do not want to know their own truth collude in denial with society as a whole, looking for a common “enemy” on whom to act out their repressed rage. But as the inhabitants of this shrinking planet near the end of the twentieth century, the danger inherent in self-deception is growing exponentially—and we can afford it less than ever.[9]
The future of humanity, the efficacy and integrity of our ethics, and the fruitfulness of our faith depend upon our willingness to do this harrowing work: to truly know ourselves as unconditionally beloved and to embody this truth in the world – to act from a place of love.
The mystical meaning of our inner conflicts then lies in the wisdom that they pose a threat only inasmuch as we avoid them. That they are not problems to be solved or realities to be changed, but somehow invitations for inquiry, midwives for compassion, doorways to solidarity, gifts of our mysterious giveness, and portals to return home to ourselves and thereby to each other. From the wisdom that – whether personal or collective – moralistic rejection, condemnation and judgment do not incite change or catalyze transformation - only acceptance and integration do.
And so here we arrive again at the ultimate aim of my writing endeavor: not to get you to think about me and my life — but to get you to think about your own.
Dear reader, I do not need your praise or your pity.
What I need from you is the courage to consider your position in relation to these paradoxes.
They are just as true for you as they are for me.
As such, you are already participating in these paradoxes; the only question is: in what capacity?
In a manner that helps or hinders our shared task of living integrated lives?
In a manner that helps or hinders our collective work to realize a more integrated world?
What I can tell you now on the other side of this part of my integrative journey (this is a lifelong journey afterall) is that while I have certainly lost a lot in the process, please know that I’ve also rediscovered everything.
And this rediscovery has been the greatest gift of all.
As Daria Halprin, the dancer and expressive arts therapist, wrote:
Our thirst for soul will not be quenched by traveling abroad, but by traveling inward, and, when we find ourselves, we will rediscover the world.[10]
It is my hope, then, in pondering these paradoxes, that you’ll join me in rediscovering the world and rebuilding it into a place where everyone belongs and where all people get to be human.
Jung, C. G. (1980). Psychology and Alchemy (G. Adler & R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed. edition). Princeton University Press. ↩︎
Rogers, C. R. (1995). On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy. Houghton Mifflin. ↩︎
Nouwen, H. J. M. (2006). Can You Drink the Cup? (10th anniversary ed). Ave Maria Press. ↩︎
Allport, G. W. (1979). The Nature of Prejudice (Unabridged, 25th anniversary ed). Addison-Wesley Pub. Co. ↩︎
Republican state lawmaker refers to LGBTQ+ community as ‘filth’ | CNN. (2024, February 26). [Video recording]. https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2024/02/26/oklahoma-state-senator-lgbtq-comment-vpx.cnn ↩︎
Coelho, P., & Costa, M. J. (2009). The Winner Stands Alone (1st ed). HarperCollins Publishers. ↩︎
Thích Nhất Hạnh. (2014). No Mud, No lotus: The art of transforming suffering. Parallax. ↩︎
Nouwen, H. J. M. (1975). Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life (1st ed). Doubleday. ↩︎
Miller, A. (2007). The Drama of the Gifted Child: The search for the true self (Completely rev. and updated). BasicBooks. ↩︎
Halprin, D. (2003). The Expressive Body in Life, Art, and Therapy: Working with movement, metaphor, and meaning. Jessica Kingsley Publishers. ↩︎
This Post's Song: Holding the Contradiction, by The Brilliance
If you are finding this story insightful, engaging, or helpful, consider sharing it. You can also find Yielding to Yes on Instagram.
Read the next part:
Tim Jurgensen
