As any reader will see, this fourth and final offering on this topic ends with a Postlude, so  perhaps it’s appropriate that it begins with a brief Prelude.  As my dear wife often reminds me, I am truly guilty of “overthinking” almost any-or-everything, especially what I write. I confess to that in this instance, but doing so turned out to be the right thing, the truly important thing, to do, because it led me back to—Yes—my dear wife! My only mentions of her in my discussion of the importance of love were including her in a list of people that had brought love into my life—i.e. so vibrantly . . . my wife of now 39 years—and in the last paragraph of that lengthy discussion of the importance of love, was this: love can be a broad term, from its strongest and most intense experience—e.g parents, spouse . . . . . And that was it! And so, now, I must point out the unique place that is occupied by my relationship of almost 45 years with the woman who became my wife just over 39 years ago. I use the word “unique” because she is the only person in my life who started out as an acquaintance in a work relationship, moved over a period of two or three years through the several stages of friendship, until that became such a strong, trusting, and bonding relationship that it occurred to both of us that “something more” was going on. We truly loved one another! And in our married life that love has strengthened and deepened over these almost four decades into a loving relationship that we both cherish and has brought meaning into my life at a level that knows no equal!

Now, the next to last—did I hear applause?—experience that brought meaning to my life was the opportunity that opened up to help provide, in one way or another, service to those sectors of our population who are needy. My wife and I had always donated as much money as we could afford to organizations that served the needy and over the years had donated more boxes of clothing than I could count through ABCCM—an Asheville nonprofit addressing poverty, hunger, homelessness, & health care access—but I was to blame for not actively seeking ways I could volunteer to give my time and effort, not just our money or clothing we no longer used! Ironically, when my children and their families came to our house for Christmas, the blessing I offered every year gave thanks for our warm clothing while many suffered from the cold, for our sheltering houses while many were homeless, for the food we were about to eat while many were hungry. The prayer always closed with these words: “where our hearts go in care and compassion, may our hands and feet go in practical helpfulness.” It was hypocritical, because I was not doing what I prayerfully advocated!

In time, I began to look for some way that my experience with voice-overs might meet someone’s need and I discovered a non-profit organization called MARRS—the Mountain Area Radio Readers Service—which provided via radio the reading of a number of publications for the blind and sight impaired. I recorded for this organization for several years, was eventually asked to serve on its Board of Directors and, in time, was asked to Chair the Board, which I did while continuing to read and record on a regular basis. We later had to disband the organization because so many other venues had begun to offer these services on a variety of sites that had become available. It was sad on the one hand, but celebratory on the other, that we had originated a path for helpfulness that others had creatively followed.

Very soon after MARRS had disbanded, as fate would have it—or more accurately, as “a stroke of good fortune” would have it—I discovered that an exceptionally bright former student of mine, a Religious Studies major on whose thesis committee I had served, was now living in Asheville. I contacted her, suggested that we meet and “catch up” over a cup of coffee, and I learned that she was employed as the director of a non-profit organization named—are you ready for it?—Hands and Feet of Asheville. Sponsored by the Presbyterian Church USA, its main purpose was to place usually four young adult volunteers in several organizations that address hunger, homelessness, and discrimination in the AVL area.  I then learned that the current Philosophy Professor—who as an adjunct had taught some philosophy courses when I began my move into administration—was the Chair of the Board of Directors of HFA! And so began a relationship that led to my appointment to the Board, where I served for several years, until the PCUSA, with its own financial difficulties, announced that it would have to withdraw much of its support. HFA would then have to raise funds on its own and since fund-raising had never been a part of my duties in teaching or administration, I regretfully resigned from the Board to make way for someone more suited to HFA’s needs. While I have been grateful for these opportunities to be helpful to those in our community who need it, I am also unhappily aware that most of my “service” has been one step removed from my “hands and feet!” Regrets aside, I hope it’s clear that these experiences—directly serving the needs of one population in our community and making it possible for others to do so for a much wider range of persons and their needs—has brought significant meaning into my life.

And finally—really!—this: Over the years I’ve become aware that at a certain stage of life for most of us, some ideas and controlling metaphors begin to “settle in.” One of those themes that keeps popping up in my life is the notion of paradox: the concept that apparently opposite or contradictory ideas can, together, provide a profound glimpse into the truth of things. My original blog on this topic was posted on December 1, 2018—almost five and a half years ago—but even before that I wrote of its importance to me on the “Home” page of my blog and pointed out that it was the reason I chose to use the term “Boundaries” in the title of my blog site, and the reason paradoxes were embedded in each of my first four posts.

This notion is something I first learned from Harry Emerson Fosdick—whose book, Riverside Sermons, I read in 1964—who spoke of mature Christian living as learning to “live under the ceaseless tension of opposites.” The idea has resurfaced for me many times: in Ronald Hepburn’s book, Christianity and Paradox; in readings on the developmental stages of life by Sheehy, Erickson, Kohlberg, Gilligan; a host of readings in philosophy, ethics, and theology—and perhaps most poignantly in an address by my friend, the late John Claypool, who argued that the “challenge of maturity” is learning to live with paradox—learning not to absolutize one side of a matter at the expense of all others.

And so, for most of my adult life, I have been a “both-and” kind of guy in an increasingly “either-or” world, with the tendency to see opposites and then try to find some way to hold them together. I am not discounting the reality that we are sometimes confronted with forced choices. Nevertheless, all those either/ors that we do need to hold together in the delicate balance of the paradoxical—teaching and learning, theory and practice, self and other, personal and public, intellect and feeling, reason and intuition, and you can grow the list yourself—have been part of my thinking for close to sixty years.

When in 1981, and again in 1999, I was chosen for the role of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, I was confronted and fascinated by this character’s frequent reflections on his life and family dilemmas embraced by the phrases “on the one hand” and “on the other hand,” as he struggled with how to find a “middle ground” that did not require choosing “either/or”—the classic quandary of the paradoxical “on the stage.”

It was a concept which “popped up” on the stage again when I auditioned for and was given the role of Niels Bohr in Michael Frayn’s play, Copenhagen, which re-imagines the historic, mysterious meeting in 1941 between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. It was a reminder of the way these old friends had revolutionized atomic physics in the 1920s with their work together on quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle, which challenged our understanding of the physical universe at its most fundamental level. As Eric Rust, my major professor in graduate school, used to say, “We treat matter like a particle on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, like a wave on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, and on Sunday we go to church and pray about it.” So if even at the heart of material reality, we must embrace the paradoxical joining of apparent opposites, why should we be surprised that at the macro-level of our lives, we must do the same?

My fascination with this intriguing notion of paradox is further exemplified by its appearance in many of the topics I have written about over time in this space. Whether I simply “discovered” it or “searched” for it remains, even for me, a mystery! Here are brief examples from just two of those topics.

From late January through May, 2022, I enjoyed and learned from several months of a study of “World Religions” with Kimberly and Jim, my two dear friends, and I offer these examples from 6 posts:

• Buddhism’s four “dichotomies” between self and other, finite and infinite, acceptance and rejection, and even between life and death, are “transcended” in Zen—i.e. the opposite realities remain, and it’s the “dichotomies” that disappear. It’s hard to imagine stronger engagements of paradox.
• Taoism embraces the “identity of opposites” through the yin/yang symbol” e.g. active/passive, positive/negative,  male/female, even good and evil and life and death, which are examples of yin/yang in the Tao’s rhythm. Paradox is alive and well in Taoism.
• In Christianity, consider the Trinity—God is One/God is Three; or the doctrine of the Incarnation—Christ was simultaneously both fully God and fully man. Thus, the paradox which Christianity embraces: “a bridge must touch both banks, and Christ was the bridge that joined humanity to God.

In “Authenticity and Diplomacy”—a single blog, posted just a year ago, I proposed the topic as reflections on “a paradox:”— authentically “speaking the truth as I understand it,” while at the same time diplomatically “showing  compassionate consideration for another person.”  Holding these two commitments together is the issue and therein lies the paradox.

To bring this over-extended rambling to an overdue conclusion, Parker Palmer, in his book, The Courage to Teach, argues that our tendency to “see everything as this or that, plus or minus, on or off, black or white, causes us to fragment reality into an endless series of either-ors.  While we tend to “think the world apart,” he urges us to imagine what it would be like to “think the world together,” And here he quotes Niels Bohr: “The opposite of a true statement is a false statement, but the opposite of a profound truth can be another profound truth.” Here is the concept of paradox. It’s the reason I’ve long been intrigued with the notion of boundaries and why I chose to post my blog site as “Reflections at the Boundaries of Things That Matter: the lines that separate and define distinct spaces and entities while, at the same time, forming the borders that allow them to touch, engage, connect. It’s about learning to live creatively in the ceaseless tension of opposites, and it’s been a major influence on meaning in my life!

With gratitude to any who have managed to persevere, thus endeth this example of my lack of the gift of brevity. I hope you have managed to take away something of meaning to you!

P.S.  As a Postlude to this final offering on meaning in my life, I need to define “final” and its relationship to yet another slippery term.  So, to be as clear as I can, this is not just the final post on this topic; it could be the final post on any topic at all—perhaps “forever,” which is clear enough—but at least for “a while,” which might mean a few days, a few weeks, a few months . . . .. well, you get the idea. I don’t know whether I just have a temporary Writer’s Block or my brain is not functioning as creatively as it has been for most of the time since I started this series of blogs—until recently, usually every two weeks—almost six years ago, on August 31^st, 2018. In either case, I must offer my thanks to the core of my faithful readers, for whom my gratitude is boundless, as well as my sincere appreciation to all who, from time to time, have found something of interest in my meanderings! Whether, hopefully, for a hiatus of indefinite time or, sadly, a permanent end to my exploring “the boundaries,” I wish, to one and all, grace and peace! Amen.