When I was young and still possessed of intellectual docility a French Jesuit introduced me to the role of paradox in faith. Paradox, rather than invalidating its tenets, leads us to a deeper understanding of faith. Examples abound: the servant/Savior; God/man; first will be last; the cross as a symbol of defeat and triumph, the ‘already/not yet’ of the Kingdom of God. One is inclined to accept that unless a belief is paradoxical it does not mirror Truth.
Last week, during the Mass celebrating the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul, the homilist used a phrase suggesting another paradox: ‘blinding clarity’. On the road to Damascus where he was to apprehend followers of the Way to return them to Jerusalem for litigation by the Jewish authorities, the zealous Pharisee, Saul of Tarsus, was knocked to the ground by a blinding eruption of light. While he lost his sight of his temporary surroundings, he gained a different sight, a clear vision of the eternal Lord.
Consequently, he experienced a radical shift in his focus, a conversion so great his very identity was changed from Saul to Paul. Though he had eventually regained the power of normal sight, it would forever be with the eyes of his heart – fixed as they were clearly on eternal Truth – that he would see the world around him.
In speaking of the Kingdom of God Jesus addressed this life changing perspective. Consider the parables in Matthew’s Gospel. In one, a man finds a treasure hidden in a field and sells all he has to purchase the field. In another a merchant comes across a pearl of great price and sells his entire inventory to buy it. In both cases the men were stunned by their discoveries. They did not lose sight of the world they inhabited, but – like Paul – they saw it with only a peripheral vision for their focus was on the one thing that matters to them.
Clarity is Truth. The clarity of Truth is blinding. Not so much because it deprives us of sight but because it redirects our sight with a radical adjustment of our perspective. Hence the paradox. As we direct our gaze on God, the eternal source of light, other attractions for us fall into the penumbra of lesser importance.
A kind of reverse paradox occurs in the story of Adam and Eve. In a state of complete preternatural grace they enjoyed an unadulterated vision of God, a privilege which depended only on their acceptance of the prohibition against eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Theirs were light and clarity in their purest form. But, they succumbed to the pernicious seduction of the jealous serpent and were blinded by false pride. Paradoxically, by acquiring the knowledge of good and evil, they lost their intimacy with their Creator. Consequenlty, they forfeited their paradisial existence with its vision of God. Their sight, their focus, was limited to the toilsome demands of life and death in a fallen world, a world into which, ‘by the envy of the devil’ death had entered.
The oxymoronic phrase ‘blinding clarity’ is a paradox also as it relates to philanthropy. It may as well be written ‘blinding charity’. Just as it knocked Saul to the ground, the ‘Light of Charity’ strikes these committed philantrropic individuals and adjusts their perspective so that they have a heightened awareness of the needs of others and a diminished regard for their own needs and wants.
This is the light that illuminates the advance of the Kingdom.