The Sustaining Power of Paradox: Integrating Action & Contemplation
Matt Brandon, photographer; used with permission
In this blog I review a portion of Parker Palmer’s book The Active Life: A Spirituality of Work, Creativity and Caring.
Before I do, I want to share something personal. Perhaps this will explain why I find Palmer’s book compelling.
I first read his book years ago when my husband Rick was traveling worldwide in his role as International Director of our organization. I am not sure why I read this book because the world of action, the idea of being an activator, did not appeal to me. Maybe that’s true for you too. This high-paced life lived in front of thousands with their expectations of who Rick should be and what he should do deposited many successes into our significance-account, and just as rapidly, took withdrawals from our well-being account.
Perhaps I read it to understand and value the activism of my husband and others. I am sure I read it to find myself in the book’s pages. Not in the “work” part of Palmer’s description of action, but in the “creativity and caring” parts. Those two things I could identify with. Would understanding that help me value my contemplative self as someone who had a place in God’s work, even if it may not have looked like that to our organization?
This year I picked up Palmer’s book again. And I cried a lot. Not just because of what Palmer says but because of how he says it, through eloquent sentences, ancient stories, humor and poetry.
Palmer wrote this book to help activists discover a spirituality that encompasses more than “work.” Equally, I think, it has much to say to those who have chosen the path of contemplation, so that, as Palmer says, we live a life of contemplation-in-action.
A Short Review: “A breakthrough into paradox”
How does an activist integrate action and contemplation, two seemingly contradictory ways of how we show up in the world? And how can we be sustained by the power of this paradox, as Palmer says in the chart below?
Based on Palmer’s book, I came up with this chart, capturing the flow of how this happens.
To illustrate the Separate-Alternate-Integrate movement, Palmer describes a time in his life when he thought his spiritual journey require he move away from being an activist to being a monk, a “journey as I saw it then away from the world of action into the comforts of being” (p. 3).
After three years of living monkishly, Palmer concluded he was not a monk. “I thrive,” he says, “on the vitality of the active life” (p. 4).
Yet he recognized the deeper quest was to know “the rapture of being alive, and to allow that knowledge to transform us into celebrants, advocates, defenders of life wherever we find it” (p. 8; italics mine).
His years pursuing the contemplative taught him that to be truly alive, thereby to discover his “true self” as he calls it, he needed to integrate into his activism the stability of the contemplative.
Not to keep them separate, not to alternate between the two, but to integrate them.
He admits that these two ways of being in the world are paradoxes, and his choice was to live in the creative tension of experiencing and expressing both of them, a way of living that he refers to as contemplation-in-action.
“Our drive to aliveness expresses itself in two elemental and inseparable ways: action and contemplation. We may think of the two as contrary modes, but they are one at the source, and they seek the same end — to celebrate the gift of life. Rather than speak of contemplation and action, we might speak of contemplation-in-action” (p. 15).
How can we who are in mission and are activists integrate contemplation and action, and not just separate them and alternate between them? How can we, as Palmer says, know the “rapture of being alive” and “celebrate the gift of life?”
I want to focus on only one idea among so many helpful ones Palmer mentions.
Here it is:
Activists integrate contemplative moments when they create the habit of noticing what moves them to another way of acting.
These “pay attention moments” as Parker calls them, do not pull the activists away from their actions as much as move them towards a different type of action: that of noticing, which in essence, is what contemplative practices, ones of slowing and reflection, are about. The activist still engages, yet inwardly.
The beauty for activists is the fact that contemplation can be done simultaneously with work. It takes effort to do this, yet yields good rewards.
Noticing pain is a pay attention moment
He notes three types of pain. Most likely these are familiar to you.
disillusionment: when we discover ourselves (and others, even God) to be less than we thought. The contemplation of the real confronts our illusions.
dislocation: when we are forced by circumstances to “occupy a very different standpoint from our normal one, and our angle of vision suddenly changes to reveal a strange and threatening landscape” (p. 27).
unbidden solitude: perhaps this is the most painful of the three …. I have experienced this and I know some of you have as well …. This is what happens when our community is no longer able to support us on a journey we see as necessary and they don’t.
Principle: Integrate rather than alternate
Pain, Palmer notes accurately, has power to shake our complacency into contemplation. Don’t wait for a sabbatical or for a retreat day to notice these pains. Gracefully surrender in the moment of your activity to hold it, and you will experience contemplation-in-action. Even it if is for a few seconds, even if you cannot fix it, honor it. Doing so is part of our soul-work.
“Whatever our action,” says Palmer, “it can express and help shape our souls and our world” (p. 18).
For those in 2HC, has your time in our Month 6 station of “Seasons of Life and Grieving Losses” continued to shape your soul and your world?
Noticing what brings life is a pay attention moment
This is not a revolutionary thought for any of us. But it can be for activists who largely subsume their activity into ONE category: that of work. “Working for the Lord.” Being a “cross cultural worker.” “Sabbath is a rest from work.”
Instead, Palmer suggests, allow your work to be measured just as much by creativity and caring as you do by product, output, goals met, hard targets or numbers of hours doing this or that activity.
What works will you consider as creative and which as caring? And would this lighten your load?
Principle: Integrate rather than alternate
Can we go to bed tonight, thanking God for our actions of the day and be totally thrilled that today we “worked” when we played with our children and collaborated with colleagues (creativity), and baked cookies for our neighbor and sipped tea with an aging elder (caring)?
Dare we even include these in letters to supporters and reports to supervisors?
Yes, it is about perspective. It is about re-framing. But let’s face it, our “work” notions have outgrown our small frames.
So, let’s build bigger frames.