Parker Palmer is an American Quaker mystic/educator. Usually a genial/gentle soul who tries to find language to ‘build bridges and not walls’, this time in the introduction to the 2008 edition of his first book he 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.
****
A little excursis on the theme of paradox: 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 Wendell 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.
****
But is there something we *can* practise and believe? Yes, back to Parker Palmer who is quite orthodox theologically:
1. In terms of practice, in an excellent chapter on wealth and scarcity Palmer writes about the paradox of those ‘seeking life’ losing it, and those who lose life finding it. ‘True abundance comes not to those set on securing wealth but to those who are willing to share apparent scarcity in a way that creates more than enough’ (p. 104).
2. And belief: At the end of his book Palmer affirms ‘God’s incarnation in Jesus… God’s word become flesh. If the incarnation – the mystery of being both human and divine – means anything, it means that the “mind of Christ” is a mind that mortals can take on. The scandal of the Christian profession is that God took on mortality in order that mortals could take on God’s life’ (p. 134).
A book worth discussing in adult study groups!
Two articles I’ve written on themes of paradox/ambiguity, and Pharisaism:
http://jmm.org.au/articles/11378.htm and
Shalom!/Salaam!/Pax!
Rowland Croucher
July 2010
Discussion
Comments are disallowed for this post.
Comments are closed.