Paradox.................................................

     

 I am very much like the philosopher who was asked by a student, "Professor, it is said you believe that paradox is at the core of all truth.  Is that correct?"
     "Well,"  the professor answered, "yes and no."
      If you think you have discovered a great truth, and it is not a paradox, then I suspect you may be deceiving yourself.

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      While Zen was my first spiritual home, after fifteen years I became restless.  Stumbling along, to my amazement I gradually discovered in Christianity a world of paradox that had been lying quietly in wait for me.  Take the doctrine that Jesus is both human and divine - not 50 percent one and 50 percent the other, but "fully human and fully divine."  What could be more paradoxical than that?  Or that God resides both inside of us in Her still, small voice and simultaneously outside of us in all of His transcendent otherness?   Or that salvation is the result of a mysterious mixture of both grace and works for which we will never have a mathematical formula?  The there were the words of Jesus himself:  "Whoever will find his life shall lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it."  Or:  "You must be as wise as serpents and innocent as doves."

-M. Scott Peck, as excerpted from Golf and The Spirit:  Lessons for the Journey