The Tension of Opposites

20 years ago, I completed seminary and moved to England to serve as a pastor in the British Methodist Church. While living in England, I become friends with a man from Cork, Ireland. I had met him on a trip to Wales and we kept in touch by phone for several months. He was a thoughtful, creative, and smart guy, but as he spoke about the political and religious divide in his country, I experienced an anger in him that was unfamiliar to me. My Irish friend who was Catholic, shared with me his resentment towards the Irish Protestants, which felt ironic to me considering I was a Protestant minister serving England. But even though his political and religious anger felt new to me 20 years ago, it doesn’t anymore.
 
Currently, our own divide in the US hearkens me back to the resentful feelings I identified in my Irish friend. It was hard for me to hear him rant in a way that did not acknowledge the image of God in his Protestant neighbors, just as it is challenging now to accept the polarization and anger in this country.

10 years ago I wrote the following poem to work through feelings of grief about a long-term friendship that did not feel as close as it once had.

I feel your absence and miss your calls. Have I done something to deserve this at all?

Some say that sin is the root of all evil, but I think disconnection is the cause of upheaval.

Why can’t you see divine light in me? This is the only path that will set us free.

We all desire love and we all seek grace, and one day our mortal beings will see face to face.

This fracture has set a dark shadow over my soul. Will you let go of contempt, so we can both be made whole?

The irony of the poem above is that my friend and I are still close, and she just happened to be knee deep in the process of raising toddlers, at the time I wrote this. Now with a toddler of my own I can appreciate how her time and availability was not what it once had been.

As I look back at this poetry that I penned ten years ago, I recognize my younger self’s need to be seen and liked by others in this poem. My desire to be liked is something I struggled with more readily when I wrote the poem, and yet it is still a shadow side within me that I continue to work on. On the other hand, I admire the core value of love in the poem, and I recognize love is something I continue to strive to offer others, but compassion is also a value desperately needed in this world.

I believe a hallmark characteristic of an emotionally intelligent person is the proclivity to see yourself and see others. An ability to do so does not just mean we see the beauty in ourselves and others, but it also requires accepting the shadow side in ourselves and others.

Recently, given the media reports of the possibility of nuclear war between Russia and the Ukraine, we are hearkened back to the cold war era days and the possibility of nuclear war. The famous psychoanalyst, Carl Jung, was once asked in 1954 whether he thought the United States, or the Soviet Union would use nuclear arms against one another. His answer to this question is one we need to be reminded of in these troubled times. Jung said:

I think it depends on how many people can stand the tension of the opposites in themselves. If enough can do so, I think the situation will just hold, and we shall be able to creep around innumerable threats and thus avoid the worst catastrophe of all: the final clash of opposites in an atomic war. But if there are not enough and such a war should break out, I am afraid it would inevitably mean the end of our civilization as so many civilizations have ended in the past but on a smaller scale.

What does Carl Jung mean by “the tension of the opposites?” Carl Jung was inviting us to see that inside each one of us is the capacity for great good and great evil. Until we can come to terms with the strengths and shortcomings inside of ourselves, we will not embrace this in one or another.

When we do our inner work and accept the opposites inside of us, we can accept these polarities in the world. Today people are reacting to political and religious differences by constantly being hot around the collar. Instead of clinging to dogmatic opinions can we have empathetic imagination about why someone might have religious or political opinions that differ from our own? Carl Jung reminded his students the inability to think independently from the mass mind happens when we do not know our ourselves.

I believe we will start to find healing individually and as a nation when we learn to accept the light and shadow in ourselves and when we also strive to see and accept others. It also is important to find safe people in our life who can see us, while also realizing and accepting that some people will never see us.

In my 20s, I was upset when my Irish friend failed to see people who shared different religious and political beliefs. In my 30s, I was disappointed when I wrongly perceived my friend didn’t see me. Now in my 40s, I am diligently trying to worry less about what other people think of me or others, and instead I am trying to see the light and darkness within me and to accept the light and darkness in others. Carl Jung famously said, “Everything that irritates us about others, can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” Perhaps my own irritation at my Irish friend in my 20s and towards my friend I wrote the poem about who I felt ghosted by in my 30s, was an opportunity to be reminded about how the worldview of love is integral to who I am, but something I struggle to fully give. The more we wrestle with our own light and darkness, the more we will accept the “tension of the opposites” in one another. And hopefully accepting the “tension of opposites” in ourselves and one another will be the saving grace for all of us.

A version of this article was originally published in the http://mountainmirror.com