Opposites
I love the passage from Sirach in today’s Office of Readings: ‘All things go in pairs, by opposites, and he has made nothing defective; the one consolidates the excellence of the other’ (42.25f.). We are offered a hermeneutic for inhabiting the world. We also get a much-needed key to self-understanding. It involves an acceptance of tension. On the one hand, I am asked to believe I have been given all I need to reach a personal, unique perfection. On the other hand, I am told I cannot reach this perfection alone. It will come to me through relationships with others, my ‘opposites’, whose differences are not in principle a threat, but a contrast needed to reveal my possibilities and potential. This perspective offers a serenely helpful corrective to an assumption present in much contemporary, secular discourse, which takes it for granted that I am defective and must repair this perceived deficiency self-sufficiently. Taken to extremes, it is an outlook that generates terrible solitude. The Biblical way of seeing meanwhile draws me into encounters and discoveries, into grateful communion.
