I just want to say at the start that we have a Sunday every spring when the cherry blossoms are out on those two trees out front and it's one of my favorite Sundays of the year at All Souls Church and I'm glad that we can all share it here together.

A man walks the beach along the north California coast. On one side of him are the cliffs leading up to the old fishing village of Mendocino; on the other side is the Pacific Ocean. As he strolls, the man looks west and watches the sun set, spreading a swath of pink across the sky. Gulls soar and dive on the light evening breeze. He listens to the steady rhythm of the tide pulled gently by the moon that is now just visible in the darkening sky. The boats are in for the day; the ocean is calm and the man is possessed by a sense of peace and beauty, a sense that all is right in the world. If you have ever watched the sun set over the Pacific Ocean, you know that feeling too.

As the man walks along the shore, his reverie is interrupted by a sign that is posted up on the rocks ahead. The sign says "Never turn your back on the ocean." Upon reading it, the man feels a chill down his spine for he is reminded that at any time the now-placid ocean could surge and roar and dash him against the rocky cliff, its undertow dragging him out to sea. "Never turn your back on the ocean." The sign wouldn't be there, he realizes, if other unsuspecting wanderers hadn't already succumbed.

Well, you know how sunset strolls get you to pondering. This man begins to ponder his situation, begins to wonder how it is that the ocean can be at the same time both beautiful and terrible. And this pondering leads him to another thought, a realization of sorts that he, too, is capable of both beauty and destruction. He wonders again how both of these things can be true at the same time. And then it's as if a veil is lifted from his eyes, revealing the many contradictions, the many paradoxes that pattern his life, contradictions he has lived with for years but only now fully appreciates, contradictions that can make a walk along the California coast, not to mention life, an alluring yet risky proposition.

Friends, I want to talk about contradiction and paradox this morning. I believe that contradiction and paradox are fundamental to the structure of our existence. We can literally say that in the beginning, in the beginning was a paradox. For when we are born, we are born to live, yet we are fated to die. And from that paradox flows others. I know that within me I possess a spark of the divine and I know that I willfully disregard the conscience that calls within me. I know that I am a generous person, and I know that I am selfish. I believe in justice and accountability and I believe in mercy and compassion. I want so much to love and to be loved, and I want to be protected from the pain of love, because those who I love bring me the most joy and cause me the most pain.

These are the contradictions that structure our lives. What are the contradictions and the paradoxes that pattern your own lives? To live in the midst of contradiction is to experience the pull of opposing forces, the tug of competing demands and values. When we feel those forces pulling our hearts and souls we say - and we say this all the time - "I feel torn." The phrase has become so commonplace that we no longer realize the pain that that phrase reveals. Our souls are torn by the contradictions. Our hearts are broken by the contradictions. And as a result, our lives take on an uncertain quality. Life seems more ambiguous as we're caught in these contradictions. There seem to be fewer and fewer unqualified "goods" in the world.

The uncertainty and the ambiguity can make us feel one of the things that we human beings hate to feel the most, which is anxiety, the kind of anxiety that keeps us up at night, the kind that drives us to distraction, the kind that paralyzes us with fear. Friends, I believe that how we cope with the uncertainty and the ambiguity and the anxiety caused by all the contradictions and paradoxes of modern life is perhaps the defining spiritual challenge of our lives. How do we take in all the complexity, all the competing demands, and still find a way to love and to live with purpose and beauty and justice? That's the question.

Now it's really the Zen Buddhists who get this idea of paradox. I thought maybe a story from the Zen tradition might be illuminating here. The story is about a monk who goes to a renowned Zen master and asks, "Master, share with me your greatest teaching." And the Zen master replies, "Son, the greatest teaching is this: Buddha is in your own mind." Impressed by the profundity of this idea, the monk decides to leave his monastery and retreat deep into the wilderness where he can be alone with himself and his thoughts, and for twenty years the monk lives as a hermit, probing the master's greatest teaching: "Buddha is in your own mind."

One day, the monk's self-imposed solitude is interrupted by another monk passing through that same forest. The two introduce themselves and learn that, coincidentally, they had studied with the same Zen master. And so the hermit monk asks the traveler, "Please, brother, tell me, what do you know of the master's greatest teaching?" And the traveler's eyes light up. "Ah yes," he says, "the master has been very clear about this. On many occasions he has told me that his greatest teaching is this: Buddha is not in your own mind." [Laughter]

And that's the end of the story. [Laughter] Which is typical of Zen stories; they always leave you hanging like that. I don't know where else you find stories like these in the Zen tradition, stories that present us with two apparently contradictory statements and that don't provide us with any kind of resolution. I don't know where else you find these stories, except in our own lives.

But I'm interested in people's reactions to these stories and how they cope with these stories of contradiction and ambiguity. There is actually a professor who has been studying people's reactions to the Zen stories and he's posted a website that includes the stories and then some readers' responses to the stories. I thought I might share a couple of them with you so you can get a sense of how we sometimes react to paradox and ambiguity. The responses fall into three categories. The first category is characterized by frustration. One person writes, "I'd be real ticked off if I was the hermit. It just goes to show you how ambiguous people can be." Another person complains, "How can you have any coherence in your teaching if you keep changing your mind all the time?" My favorite grouchy response was this one: "The Zen master needs to get a real job, and Buddha is just a marketing idea which changes to suit the consumers." [Laughter]

Well, I think some of us can identify with this response because this is the response of those who are uncomfortable with ambiguity and with contradiction. This is the response of those who can't stand that the story ends with this pregnant pause, with this question dangling in the air, unanswered. It gives them pain that that question is unanswered. And so they get angry and they suspect that the ambiguity comes from the person telling the story, or the teacher, rather than the fact that ambiguity is structured into life itself. They chalk up the ambiguity to weakness of thought or to some ulterior motive, like profit or marketing.

We would all do well to recognize the ways in which this response creeps up in us, our intolerance for contradiction and ambiguity, the ways we try to shut it out of our eyes. This is a form of violence. To deny and to obliterate the contradictions and the ambiguity of our lives is a form of violence. It's the kind of violence that eventually manifests itself in terrorists flying planes into towers. It's the kind of violence that manifests itself in nations reacting out of anxiety and lashing out at other nations. So we would do well to notice this reaction in ourselves.

There's a second category of reaction that I noticed in the responses to the story. These are people who are equally uncomfortable with that pregnant pause at the end of the story; they just can't stand the contradiction that's hanging there at the end, but rather than getting upset, they try to make it all nice. They try to neatly tie up the story with their own understanding of how there really isn't a contradiction; we just don't quite understand how the contradiction is resolved. So one person, for instance, said, "Well the story just means that we are all individuals who find different paths to enlightenment." So it's okay that the master said one thing to one person and one thing to the other person.

This is a response that Unitarians have to watch out for. [Laughter] We can too easily erase the very real differences that exist between peoples and between beliefs. We want to build a diverse religious community. We believe that that community can lead to greater truth, but we do our own subtle form of violence when we obliterate the differences of many faith traditions by saying that they are really all the same in the end. It's a subtler form of violence, but it is indeed a form of violence. We do the same thing when we try to build a diverse religious community and we say to many different people who come to our church, "Well, we're all really just the same in the end," which is another way of disappearing the very real differences that people have. This is another subtle form of violence.

There was a third response to the story that I found on the professor's website. These folks didn't try to answer the story, or tie up the contradiction. One respondent said this after reading the story; he wrote: "This story is much like something I was once taught in freshman physics. The question was 'is light a particle or a wave?' The answer was 'yes.'" [Laughter] Another person was reminded of something a high school teacher had once said: "Everything is black or white. Nothing is black or white." And one disarmingly honest respondent confessed after reading the story, "I found this story confusing. I guess the truth is confusing."

Friends, the truth is confusing. The truth is filled with contradiction and with paradox. And what this story is really trying to do is to bring us to the limits of our logic and our reason, to bring our reason to its knees and make us realize that there is no way to neatly tie up those contradictions and that the way forward past contradictions isn't by reason, isn't by logic, isn't by figuring everything out, that the way forward lies in a spiritual response to contradiction, a spiritual response to paradox and to ambiguity. And I want to say a little bit about what I think that spiritual response to paradox and contradiction and ambiguity looks like. What are the steps we must take to live with grace and with ease in the midst of contradiction and paradox?

The first thing we must do is recognize and respect that contradiction is fundamental to the structure of existence. We must not try to pretend that it's not there. We can't ignore it. We can't paper it over. For those are all forms of violence. We must recognize the contradiction that exists. Second, and these get progressively more difficult, we've got to create a little space inside ourselves, a little spaciousness and suppleness to our souls so that as they get torn apart in different directions from all these contradictions, that rather than tearing or breaking or cracking, that they stretch with us a little bit, that they're supple and that they grow. We need to create a spaciousness to our souls to welcome the contradictions of the world, to be hospitable to all of the world.

Third, and this, I think, gets to the heart of Unitarian faith. Third is that we need to trust the complexity and the contradiction of the world. We must have faith in it and have faith that in the midst of that contradiction something greater can emerge. I want to tell you something that I've learned recently that comes out of my study of artists and the creative process. Federico Garcia Lorca, the Spanish poet, used to talk about a concept called "duende." It's a Spanish word, duende. Duende, Lorca believes, was the creative power that was the source of inspiration for all artists. Lorca would call upon the duende when he wanted to seek inspiration. But duende was an interesting thing. For Lorca, duende was both an angel and a demon. And it was an angel and a demon because he believed that creative inspiration came from precisely the tension between the angels and the demon, the tension between the good and the evil, the tension between the yin and the yang, that creativity and inspiration and new insight and new creation came out of that tension, out of that creative tension, that moment.

This is a Unitarian faith, I believe, friends. You didn't become Unitarians, I hope, because you thought this faith would be easy. You didn't become Unitarians, I know, because you thought that here you would be given neat and tidy answers. I know for a fact that some of you became Unitarians because you asked too many questions growing up in Sunday school and people said "You should go to the Unitarian church." [Laughter] You became Unitarians because you weren't satisfied with the tidy answers. You became Unitarians because, either by circumstance or by choice, you decided to throw your lot in with the complexity and the contradiction of our diverse world, trusting that a richer truth could come from that complexity. You joined All Souls Church because you had faith that out of the messiness of a diverse religious community, that some larger, more creative vision of the human family might emerge. This is the path we have chosen as Unitarians. Emerson said "With consistency, a soul has nothing to do." And along with him, we've decided to give our souls a workout in the complexity and contradiction of our modern world.

We will never reconcile the fact that our souls are caught between our divinity and our demons, but together we can create spiritual lives that help us heed the call of justice more often than not. We can never reconcile the world's terror and the world's beauty, but we can, as we have since September 11, build a community that seeks to save us from the world's terror and savor the world's beauty. And finally, we will never reconcile the fact that we are alive, yet fated to die. That last contradiction will hang in the air like an awkward, unanswered question, and cause us no end of anxiety. But we can understand that it is precisely in our creative response to life's finite gift that we can build lives of beauty and meaning. That is our Unitarian faith. May we live it, and may it be so.

Amen.