The Promise of Paradox

"Few of us are so spiritually advanced that we can accept the crosses we are given in simple obedience, as a spiritual discipline. We usually all resist the cross at first. We become so worn down, so flattened out, so drained of energy and emptied of fight that the only thing left is to accept.

The cross is, above all, a place of powerlessness. Here is the final proof that our feeble powers can no more alter life's trajectory than a magnet can pull down the moon. Here is the death of the ego, of the self that insists on being in charge, the self that continually tries to impose its own idea or order and righteousness on the world.

But once again, the cross is a place of contradiction. For the powerlessness of the cross, if fully embraced, takes us to a place of power. This is THE GREAT MYSTERY at the heart of Christian faith. . .THE MYSTERY OF THE POWER OF POWERLESSNESS. Or is it such a mystery after all? As long as I am preoccupied with the marshalling of my own feeble powers, there will be no way for God's power to flow through me. As long as I am getting in my own way, I cannot live
in the power of God's way.

Here is how Paul speaks of this moment of acceptance in Jesus' crucufixion and our own: 'In your minds you must be the same as Christ Jesus: his state was divine, and yet he did not cling to His equality with God but emptied Himself to assume the condition of a slave, and became as we are; and being as all men are He was humbler yet, even to ACCEPTING death, death on a cross.' Phili 2:5-7."


- The Promise of Paradox by Parker J Palmer