The Paradox of Breathing
Breathing readily illustrates the nature of paradox in our relationship with God. Breathing is the climax of God’s creation of humans in Genesis 2 and it is Jesus’ means of commissioning his disciples in John 20. Breathing is the most basic act of life and it would be hard to find a less controversial topic than breathing. But God slipped a paradox into creation to give us a reminder of how our relationship with God is maintained. Breathing is actually two acts, inhaling and exhaling, separate and contradictory. (Perhaps, to avoid charges of syncretism in today’s polarized climate, The Living Pulpit should publish separate issues; one on breathing in and another on breathing out.) Of course, living creatures cannot either inhale or exhale without doing both and it would be folly to question if such contradictory activities can exist in the same body. Yet, God’s people have a history of being troubled by contradictions.
God built the necessity of paradox into the most basic function of life. Breathing is fundamental. It precedes even eating and drinking in our lives and ties us to our environment more completely than anything else we do. (Having a preference for what we eat or drink might have some effect on what we actually put in our mouths. A preference for what we breathe – less so.) Our bodies were created to sustain themselves through the basic, paradoxical process of breathing. For anyone who believes that God created people (regardless of how God did the creating) biological questions are theological questions.
“Then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.” (Gen. 2:7) Breathing is the foundational experience of human relationship with God. It is more than necessary to sustain life, it is the gift of life. Inhaling and exhaling, two separate and contradictory acts, are what we have received from God to live as God’s creatures. To describe a relationship with God, the writer of Genesis tells us that the first human took the life (Hebrew chai) of God and lived life back out again. The history of God’s relationship with people is the story of love given and love received. People take God’s love and use the divine love for others. When God made the covenant with Abraham, the covenant that made the Chosen People chosen, the conversation began with God’s promise, “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.” (Gen. 12:2) Blessings are not only to be inhaled; they must be exhaled as well.
Reciprocal love, by definition, must go both ways. Although God is known primarily as the dispenser of love, people of God must maintain the relationship and express love toward God. The commandment to love God precedes the other nine. God and people are held together in love given and love received – the paradox of two opposite acts that cannot exist separately.
Unfortunately, respiratory disorders are no less common among God’s people than they are elsewhere. In a desire for consistency, God’s people often find themselves either unwilling to inhale or unwilling to exhale. It couldn’t have been too long after the newly-breathing creatures of God started making their way in the hostile world outside of the garden that some of them cast off God’s lesson of wholeness that is taught by the process of breathing. Some identified themselves as fundamentalist “exhalers” and set about correcting others. They still walk among us, exhaling certainty, and instructions, and embracing the role of judge. They are suspicious of any breath that might be heading in the wrong direction, trying to get into their lungs and contaminate their security. Others are fundamentalist inhalers; they are still with us, also. They value people only for those people’s willingness to sustain them. They value creation only as a commodity to be used. Ego-centric fundamentalist inhalers comparison-shop to find the most congenial aspects of their faith and they have trouble distinguishing between the terms “That is irrelevant” and “That is difficult.”
We were created to bless the world with the love we have first received. Simple, straightforward practices of faith, upon closer examination, will reveal inherent paradoxes. The incarnation asserts that Jesus is both human and divine. People of God are described in the Reformation Era phrase simil justus et peccator (at the same time righteous and sinner). We know God’s word as a dialogue between Law and Gospel. We turn to our faith for freedom and security. Our worship is a mixture of celebration and meditation. We bow before mystery even as we seek clarity. We celebrate these venerable tenants of our faith, but we are often hesitant to acknowledge that they are contradictory aspects of the same things; they are like breathing.
A heresy is a good and faithful idea that is taken to an extreme and will not recognize the other good and faithful idea that contradicts it. A heresy idolizes consistency and, like a petulant child holding his breath, refuses to participate in the live-giving paradoxes of faith.
Paradox fell out of fashion with The Enlightenment of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Enlightenment thinkers recognized the shortcomings of superstition and not being able to tell the difference between useful traditions and bad habits. The Enlightenment has given us a number of useful things like a refined definition of truth, which led to the scientific method, which led to microchips, which led to the ability to download classic works of fiction for free. On the other hand, The Enlightenment has left us with an unhealthy trust of conclusive answers – despite “conclusive answers” spotty reputation for holding up over the long haul. Enlightenment thinkers doted on their conclusions while they treated their unruly paradoxes as underachieving unfortunates who would have to be supported by the respectable members of the family. Today, we have inherited a reluctance to cherish paradox. This reluctance puts us at a disadvantage in embracing God’s creation.
God continues to call us to our true nature with every breath we take. Linguistically, people of faith have always used the words “breath” and “spirit” almost interchangeably.
In some circles, the Holy Spirit has a flashy reputation. Spectacular, miraculous, and infrequent happenings are reported as the work of the Holy Spirit and workshops are devoted to the process of conjuring up the Spirit for special circumstances. In the face of such an understanding, it would be well to remember that the New Testament word “spirit” (pneumatos) shares its origins with the word “breathing”. Contrary to the notion of an exotic phenomenon that can only be called up on special occasions by experts with mysterious skills, the Holy Spirit is identified with the most basic activity shared by all of God’s creatures. Once again, scripture conveys the holiness of the ordinary.
The Apostles Creed is organized into three articles relating to the three persons of the Trinity. The Third Article begins with the words “I believe in the Holy Spirit.” then follows with a list of things that people of faith have been involved in for centuries: the church, forgiveness, and the communion of the saints. This is not a catch-all article where our fore-bearers threw everything that they wanted to mention before the creed ran out. This is a list of how the Holy Spirit lives in our lives. These are the routine activities of grace that God’s people have been inhaling and exhaling since the second chapter of Genesis.
Paradox is the nature of our relationship with God. The Holy Spirit lives in the billions of breaths that are exchanging air every moment of the day – every soul living on the paradox of inhaling and exhaling.
The Hebrew Scriptures give us the word ruah to convey both “spirit” and “breathing”. The Greek of the New Testament does much the same with the word pneuma. When Jerome gave us The Vulgate, he imported the idea with the Latin word spiritus; it also means “breathing”. The Latin word is the one our translators borrowed when they wanted to identify the “spirit” in English Bibles, but we have lessened its meaning. We use the word to clearly identify an expression of God, but ignore that it is also a reference to God’s endorsement of the paradox of breathing. Clarity sometimes limits the possibilities of our understanding. Perhaps the people of God can reclaim their gift. May this writer humbly suggest a liturgical innovation? To alert worshipers to the gifts that God offers to a church which embraces paradox, I propose that we occasionally begin worship with the following invocation: In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of Holy Breathing.
