MacGougan at Large

Notes on Paradoxes - 7

Paradox as a Starting Point

I have a friend who’s a retired Episcopal priest. As a paradox-related side note, retired priests are still priests. In fact, a surprising number of retired priests are still working as priests. Call me old-fashioned, but that doesn’t seem very retired to me.

Anyway, this friend used to teach an inquirers’ class - that is, a class for people interested in learning about the church’s teachings. You would think that such a class would start with key points of dogma, but his approach was to start with paradoxes. 

There are some paradoxes that are specific to Christianity, but there are others that are simply useful for getting people engaged in thinking about the meaning of life. 

Example One: People are both very good and very bad. Specific individual people can be more wonderful than you can imagine or more terrible than you can imagine. What do we make of that? 

Example Two: The universe can look and feel like a huge, soulless machine, and yet many - maybe most - people feel that love is real and that there is a purpose to doing good for others. What’s going on with that?

Such paradoxes can be equally challenging to people of faith and to pure rational materialists. The world is a mysterious place.

I think this approach is worth trying across political lines. If you sit down to decide who are the good guys and who are the bad guys, then what was intended to be a political discussion is likely to devolve into a food fight. On the other hand, suppose you start by considering a paradox. Say, for example, the fact that every year advancing technology supposedly saves us more and more time and effort, yet year after year many of us experience increased demands and decreased downtime. 

If you’re looking to initiate a conversation about anything deeper or more controversial than how to fix a vacuum cleaner, start with a paradox or two. A paradox is an invitation to a discussion. You and I are less likely to be taking shots at one another if we both start off holding in our heads two ideas that seem to be directly contradictory.