Tension and Maturity

The more spir­i­tu­ally mature the per­son, the more ten­sion he or she can endure. Get­ting older with style means hav­ing taken the forks in the road that allow for the greater mys­ter­ies of life. Mys­ter­ies are embraced but not solved. They carry a ten­sion level that keeps one search­ing. Imma­tu­rity looks for sim­plis­tic ways of avoid­ing or elim­i­nat­ing the com­plex processes of life. “Either/or” is cho­sen over “both/and” by most peo­ple. The mys­tic embraces the whole pic­ture and holds onto the diverse and seem­ingly con­tra­dic­tory cre­ative forces. Oth­ers opt for the imma­ture extremes that make ene­mies and vic­tims of oth­ers that have cho­sen the oppo­site extremes (thus the polit­i­cal cli­mate of our times).

Chris­tian­ity is a reli­gion of para­doxes. Jesus was both and God. He could not be (by the com­mon reasoning) — but he was. That ten­sion led to all sorts of extremes put forth to “solve” the appar­ent con­tra­dic­tion. Attempts have been made to reduce him to just a man or some sort of ghostly fig­ure. Lately it has been trendy to write him off as some lit­er­ary fig­ure. Few of us are left to still embrace the mys­tery of the God-become-man whose end was an empty tomb and sub­se­quent ascen­sion. This belief flies in the face of the nat­u­ral­ists (no mir­a­cles allowed), and a whole range of other shal­low reduc­tion­ism attempts.

Yes, the angel/animal (human) writ­ing this does so in faith. To the hor­ror of the dull mate­ri­al­ists, he claims that the sum is greater than the parts. His mind can­not set­tle for the less mys­te­ri­ous — nor can his soul. Call him a fool. Cast all the pseudo-academic stones avail­able and watch him con­tinue to smile with more con­fi­dence than Voltaire’s grin of rea­son alone. He has found that life in the increas­ing ten­sion is the Water or Life — not the steam of shal­low hys­te­ria nor the ice of the avoidant.