Weakness

It is not untrue that the Apostle Paul said of himself, “When I am weak, then I am strong.” I confess I have always been under the uncanny persuasion that somewhat approximates the idea that ‘when I am strong, then I am strong’. I don’t think Paul was seeking to subvert and thereby invert conventional logic and establish the first unofficial “Opposite Day” for the Corinthian church in this very bold, and indeed, bizarre statement, and say that weakness is strength, just like cold is hot, and up is down…If you really think about, you can’t play ‘opposite day’ for very long at all; for example, in the morning when you wake up (and really you shouldn’t wake up, since it’s ‘opposite day’) do you get out of bed on the opposite side of the bed that you typically do, or do you not get out of bed at all? Which ‘opposite’ do you obey? No, I don’t think Paul was playing a semantics game, though he probably was playing on people’s assumptions. Most people, in their regular moments of lucidity and coherence, which tend to get less frequent and lengthy as the brain ages and becomes less plastic, are like me and assume ‘hot’ is ‘hot’, ‘cold’ is ‘cold’, and ‘lukewarm’ is ‘lukewarm’ until it becomes as hot as hell. These are not wrong assumptions, but rather very safe and even correct assumptions, based on the nature of reality and even the nature of logic. “A = A”, or the principle of identity, is foundational to all logical arguments. If “A = duck”, we are going to have a very hard time communicating with one another in any coherent fashion, maybe other than to quack at each other; this would be quite a spectacle, after all, but I don’t foresee any remarkable books being written in this format, any marvelous compositions or operas being performed, or any bridges being built with grandiose architecture if we’re simply quacking at each other; though I can’t help but recall that in Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf,” the duck was identified by the oboe, so maybe there’s something there. Nonetheless, we ought not go around proclaiming something means the opposite of what it is conventionally understood to mean, unless there is a spiritual principle to be learned through wisdom there. That is more what I think Paul was proclaiming in insisting his weakness was his strength. Paul was not ultimately delighting in his weakness; not as an end in and of itself. In fact, he was delighting in a much deeper, truer strength than in his own, and one which could only be realized and embraced in embracing his own weakness. He was delighting in strength itself, or more properly, strength himself.