Living with Contradictions

'Living with Contradiction' by Esther de Waal

From chapter 1 'A Way of Healing'

We all stand in need of healing. We are all seeking wholeness. For most of us it is the most urgent and ever-present reality in our lives, one we may perhaps try to bury or neglect but which, if we are honest with ourselves, we find we cannot ignore. We all know also that unless we attend to our inner conflicts and contradictions, not only will we find ourselves torn apart by our inner divisions but also we shall very likely inflict wounds on those around us.

Our God, the God of love, does not want a broken and divided self. He created us for fulness of life. He created each of us to be a free son or daughter, that son or daughter whom in our deepest being each of us longs to be, to become. And we all know in our heart of hearts (even if we are unwilling to admit it) that this healing of our divisions, this search for wholeness, must be an ongoing process. There is no once and for all moment when we can say that at last we are whole, the past is buried and over, the hurts forgotten, the wounds healed. Instead we find that it is to be a search that we must expect to continue throughout our lives.

Jean Vanier writes:

In our times there is a danger of thinking that everyone may become perfectly healed and find perfect unity in themselves and with others. This type of idealism is rampant everywhere. New therapies engender more and better illusions. And each day new techniques are born which will bring about this long-awaited healing. Personally I am more and more convinced that there is no perfect healing. Each human being carries their own wounds, their own difficulties of relationships and their own anguishes. It is a question of learning to live day after day with this reality and not in a state of illusion...

From chapter 5 'Living with Others'

For letting go is at the heart of loving.
Loving is about freeing.

Selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in letting go.

Baron von Hugel, who was Evelyn Underhill's spiritual director, once said: "The best thing we can do for those we love is to help them to escape from us." If I have the courage to let go of the person I love I believe that we shall find one another again on a level we could never have imagined. For loving and letting go is at the heart of God's love for the world. We must hold on to this as an expression of love at its fullest and truest. It is here clearly expressed by John Austin Baker:

The way to find fulfillment of the personality is not to escape from pain by refusing to love (which is suicide) or to love and posses what we love (which is self-centredness) but to love passionately with mind, heart and soul and then to endure the pain of letting go.

Since I know what a hard thing is being asked of me here I am tempted to think that only a hard God could ask it of me. But then I reflect how much it tells me about love. The fact that I am held in such a love and that I am free to accept or reject this pattern means that I am the recipient of that freedom of a God who loves me so much that he can let me go - this very same God who also loved and let go the very image and heart of his own selfhood in Christ - which is an expression of loving to the uttermost and letting go.

And from Chapter 7 'Together and Apart', some words from Henri Nouwen:

Without solitude there can be no real people. The more you discover what a person is, and experience what a human relationship requires in order to remain profound, fruitful and a source of growth and development, the more you discover that you are alone, and thus the measure of your solitude is the measure of your capacity for communion.