Very few Christians have been taught how to live both law and freedom at the same time. Our western dualistic minds do not process paradoxes very well. Without a contemplative mind, we do not know how to hold creative tensions. WE are better at rushing to judgment and demanding a complete resolution to things before we have learned what they have to teach us. This is the not the way of wisdom.
Primitive and native societies might well have held this tension better than we do today. I have seen this myself among indigenous and “undeveloped” people in India, the Philippines, and Latin America. They often seem much less neurotic and anxious than we are, and can deal with failure or loss far, far more easily than we can.
In the western world, it seems we cannot build prisons fast enough or have enough recovery groups, therapists, or reparenting classes for all the walking wounded in this very educated, religious, and sophisticated society -- which has little respect for limitations and a huge sense of entitlement.
-- Richard Rohr, Falling Upward
