If we are to fully make sense of what seems to be an utterly confusing reality, we must learn to think in terms of paradox.  We must learn to embrace things that do not seem to fit together, things that do not appear to align cleanly, but things which, if we are sufficiently wise and honest with ourselves, we admit that, even if we do not wish to, we must nonetheless accept.  As Blaise Pascal noted long ago, we must accept the limits of our reason.  We must accede to conclusions which may explain in part, but not in full, conclusions which, as the theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg puts it, are “contrary to experience by exceeding its capacity” (italics mine).  Again, this reflects the demands and constructs of our humanness:  we will never understand everything as it actually is (a fact which Immanuel Kant pointed out as well).  Logic, as Cardinal John Henry Newman argued toward the close of the nineteenth century, has its limits.
     For finite creatures living in a finite reality and searching for meaning, real and genuine meaning in that finite reality, paradox is inevitable.
     Consider the Greek word αρχη.  Aρχη denotes a beginning which never really began, a beginning which required nothing to be, for it has always been.  Yet αρχη is a beginning which, if we hope to develop a credible picture of global origins, we cannot do without.  We need an αρχη to make sense of our origins.  As odd as it seems, we need a causeless beginning to explain our own “caused” beginning.  Can we who have a beginning really explain why we are here?  We need a beginning which nothing else can claim it began, a beginning without cause and beyond effect, a beginning which never really began.
     Clearly, this is a paradox.  But it is also inevitable.  We are creatures of finitude who inhabit three and four dimensions in a universe with, according to cosmologists, at least ten more.  We have limits.  We have boundaries.  We simply cannot grasp everything, to borrow a term from the legal profession, prima facie.
     We must learn to live with what we do not fully understand, we must learn to live with things that are beyond our ken but things whose factuality we must admit to being present, if not always available.  We must learn to live with paradox.