Dr. Freeman

I am a paradox, the creative tension between opposing forces… I am held in the gravitational pull of an absolute Secret that sits in the core of my being while these opposing tensions trace concentric circles around the unsearchable Mystery that goes by many names…

I have been pierced to the heart by something precious, beautiful, deep and enigmatic that leaves me reeling… I know that the doctors are not telling me everything, that the wound will not heal - that I am not going to recover. I have suffered a blow that has destroyed my equilibrium; I have been shaken by a provocation, by something that leaves me breathless… I am pursued by questions that I cannot silence…

I have been visited by some affliction that results in tremors, but it also has this other oddity about it – the disorder induces an affection for my affliction, so that I have no wish to be healed, to close this wound over, to arrest these tremors… For I live and breath in the tremulousness of this life, exposed to the questionability of things, made vulnerable to love’s wounds, visited in the night by questions of elemental power, shaken to the core by voices that will not be stilled…

This endless questionability of things opens up the strangest sorts of wounds and the deepest sorts of cuts, wounds that cut us loose from the vanities of the superficial life and bring us face to face with the complexity and perplexity of human existence… That perplexity reaches its highest pitch in this uncompromising passion for paradox, which is precisely what gives life its beauty and depth and vitality and power - even while it decenters us, knocks us off our pins, robs us of the ease with which we negotiate the rapids of everyday life, divesting us of the sense that we have everything in control…

For we lovers of paradox, life is like a star that shines all the more brightly the darker the night. It is the darkness that gives things their depth, and we are prepared to give the darkness its due, not because we like to be obscure but because we love the brightness of the stars. The dark ring of ambiguity around life is a crucial ingredient to its richness… the opposite of all this, the result of turning our backs on the enigma of our lives and embracing unqualified and unambiguous clarity, is the superficial life, a life made artificially easy by facile answers and too easy acquisitions… (Excerpts from Jack Caputo’s “Philosophy AND Theology”, 2007)

You can E-mail Cameron at: free0042@gmail.com