Awakening to Wholeness is a series of prompts, reflections, and teachings about how holding the tension of opposites can help us to heal division and experience wholeness. If you feel moved to share your own reflections, we invite you to email us with the subject line “Wisdom of Opposites.”
What better way is there to come to know “cold” than by having experienced something “hot”? This insight deduced from daily life experience is particularly apt for the wisdom work of tending to opposites. We tend to opposites in wisdom work because opposites point toward the totality of wholeness. Human knowing is mostly marked by partiality. Not having the full benefit of the lens of divinity, in our humanness, we tend to see through partiality, incompleteness, and fragments.
The lens of contemplation helps us to see what is obscured. If the vision is wholeness and the contemplative lens lifts partiality, then we come back to the benefit of tending to opposites. If I have only known freezing cold, then the heat, even of fire, would feel like an enlivening oasis. If I have only known the hot of fire, then freezing cold might feel like a soothing refreshment.
Opposites stretch us, inviting to step out from the familiar and known and into the discomfort of unknowing. Opposites invite us into paradox, into mystery. How is it possible that freezing cold could feel like soothing refreshment? Perhaps only in the paradoxical juxtaposition with burning heat.
Seeing reality through the lens of contemplation invites us to fully engage the heights, depths, and breadths of reality. Tending to the tensions of opposites, as the practical and participatory work of wisdom, points us toward totality and the fullness of wholeness.
Contemplative Questions
We offer the following questions as prompts to help you reflect on the presence of opposites in your spiritual practice and your life.
- What pairs of opposites do you regularly experience in your daily life (like hot and cold, light and dark)?
- How do these opposites help you understand each other more fully?
- How do they help you understand the heights, depths, and breadths of reality more fully?
Join the conversation! If you feel moved to share your reflections, we invite you to email us with the subject line “Wisdom of Opposites.”
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Christine Luna Munger
Christine Luna Munger, PhD currently serves as the director of the Episcopal House of Prayer. She previously served as Coordinator of the Spiritual Direction Certificate and Professor of Theology at St. Catherine University. She regularly writes, teaches, and leads group prayer sits at EHoP.
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